>I don't believe these two "extremes" are the only possible alternatives, and the problem with both of these seem to be that the people who have the most knowledge don't get to choose the best course of action.

Private ownership and dictatorship of capital or common ownership and the dictatorship of the working class are actually the two only options, unless total apocalyptic collapse of all of society happens. There quite literally are no possible other options, given how class society functions and develops.

>People make choices against their own interests all the time and the actual day to day interests of a cleaning lady are most likely contrary with the best possible outcome for everyone.

Care to give any concrete examples? I don't see how letting people have democratic control over their lives could possibly be worse than letting the demonstrably genocidal and ecocidal profit motive. If people elected their bosses, they would likely choose the guy who organized the place so that you could go home earlier with more money in your pocket.

Today, workers are forced to take the jobs that exist at market rates, with anywhere from 5 to 50% unemployment with desperate workers ready to undercut your meager income just do they can eat or sleep safe another day. The goal of socialism is to guarantee everyone gainful employment, until the day that labor has been automated to such a degree that nobody needs to work anymore.

Given the inevitable thought of automation, I implore you to do a thought experiment what the Bezoses, Musks, Kochs and Rockefellers of the world would do to the working class should their labor no longer be necessary for all development.

>Innovation requires more than just education; it requires sacrifices of the immediate desires.

I'm saying the foundation is education, and there is no reason to believe people would work less hard or less innovatively if you give them more power over their working lives, as well as direct control over what to produce and when.

We have subscription-based heating in cars now, and 5 or so mega-corpotations designing the same 10 phones with minor differences, developing the same technologies multiple times for absolutely no use or reason other than locking people in their brand ecosystems.

This is not to speak of the funding of fascism, endless wars of aggression and conquest, or coups against anyone who dares seek true sovereignty for their nation.

>My gripe with this democratic decision making with everything is that it is only desirable if all the actors would be experts on whatever they are deciding on.

Workers are literally experts at their jobs. If you've ever had a job I'm sure you're aware of shitty micro-managing bosses or company-wide rules that make absolutely no sense for your particular store, but still have to be mindlessly followed because corporate said so.

>I'm fairly confident that majority of people aren't able under any circumstances to make the best decisions for the good of the whole.

The alternative we're currently working with, we know none of the decisions are taken with anyone's except the owners best in mind. All that is taken into account is profit, whether millions of people die and large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable.

>I'll give a silly example off my head: Do you really believe that it would be desirable that the vote of the vain cleaning lady (who believes in energy healing) had the same weight as a doctor on what medical devices or new treatments the hospital should invest in?

What makes you think every person would be taking every decision? Wages are an obvious example where everyone should ideally get to vote, until money can be abolished. The cleaners should have more power over cleaning, the doctors and nurses etc over the actual medical care and so on. Today we treat those who can afford it and let those who can't suffer and die, because that's what the bottom-line calculator on some insurance schmuck's PC says.

>Many people are stupid and short-sighted on even their own simple life decisions, how could it possibly be desirable to let them have equal say in choices that have complex implications for everyone?

The profit incentive is simple. The economy has to grow or it implodes, and even when it does grow it implodes every 10 years, killing millions and throwing many many more into poverty. What we produce doesn't matter, no matter how bad for the people or the environment, so long as it produced a profit.

Planned obsolescence is also a real gift, where we could make virtually indestructible products but the markets have been cornered by a few monopolists and now they intentionally break their things early to sell more of them.

Then we have the fact that millions and millions of tonnes of food is simply thrown out and has bleach poured on it or it goes into containers with police protection, to stop people from eating and paying less for the maximally marked-up goods that remain for sale. These are the type of inherent contradictions of capitalism that waste billions of working hours, millions of tonnes of food and millions of lives every year.

>Isn't the whole thing a massive assumption? Shouldn't we ultimately favor the system that in reality produces most output and not because it is based on some holy tenets?

Which again and again has been proven in real life to be socialism. China was in a similar position to India in the 1900s and today their economy is 6 times larger in merely 80 years, having eradicated the worst poverty of which a couple hundred million Indians still suffer, not to mention the brutal oppression peasants suffer, as well as the highly patriarchal and socially debilitating caste system.

Even Cuba, suffering the worst economic sanctions in modern history, has higher life expectancy, literacy and access to healthcare compared to the US, let alone nations with similarly low levels of economic development.

Your questions are legitimate but get into the realm of speculation. It really depends on the form the socialist society takes. The USSR had a negative feedback loop of constantly lowering quotas as factories performed worse and worse. I think a magazine article I read talked about how restaurants in the USSR were bad on purpose so they received less business. It makes sense in a way, if the factory just fails to meet a quota, you don't want to push even more work on them. They'll just be in a constant state of never reaching the quota.

In a way, the questions you're raising are akin to a serf working the land of their lord and wondering how a system like capitalism would ever work. The reality is that we don't know. We can only examine the material conditions as they exist currently and advocate for better ones.

One solution is to break society down into smaller, self-sufficient communities as we can reasonably achieve. Shoe factory workers would be less inclined to shoddy workmanship if everyone they knew wore the terrible shoes they made and they received constant complaints.

I certainly do have some recommendations for reading! Understanding Marxism is incredibly difficult and can only be achieved by actively working towards it - like a college class. I've read numerous works for the better part of two years now and I just now feel like I'm getting my bearings.

Why Socialism? | Albert Einstein (I recommend this as the starting point for anyone interested in learning about socialism more broadly)

The Principles of Communism | Frederick Engles

Value, Price and Profit | Karl Marx

Wage-labour and Capital | Karl Marx

If you want something more advanced, you can also read the first chapter of Capital (Marx) volume 1. I'm in the middle of reading Capital myself at the moment and I have to admit it is extremely dry.