Comment by tpetricek

I think a useful reference here is the idea of "wicked problems", which is a kind of problem where the structure of the problem makes it hard to solve - because you cannot even know what a solution is until you make your problem statement more precise (but by that point, you have already determined a solution). This is not the case for all "large" problems, but it's definitely a case for organizing a liberal democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem