[Spivak]

It's why I think the lottocracy people might have a point. Rocketing people from zero to power keeps you from experiencing the traumas associated with attaining or being given success and keeps your ego to a minimum because you know you literally did nothing to deserve it.

[marssaxman]

Is this a new word for "sortition" or does it have additional implications?

[Spivak]

Lottocracy is a kind of Sortition. Specifically one which explicitly doesn't try to prune the pool of candidates.

[kiba]

Jury duty. You get selected randomly for jury. Why not get randomly selected for urban planning and other duties?

[astrange]

We actually have that, called "civil grand juries", but they don't do very much. It'd work a lot better than the current urban planning system, which is hearings where only retirees with a lot of free time who are opposed to the project shows up.

[kiba]

Yes, I was talking about jury duty and sortition.

[Aaargh20318]

I think the fundamental problem with the current political systems is that they combine two completely different things into one office that should really be separate. Namely what a politician promises to achieve and how they intent to achieve it.

This can cause the actual result of policies to be wildly different from the claimed intended outcome. We’ve seen plenty of examples of this in the past, e.g. claim that you want to make sure everyone will be better off by lowering taxes for the rich (trickle down economics), which of course had the exact opposite effect.

This can be completely malicious, i.e. claim that your proposed policy will have outcome X while knowing it will have outcome Y. It can also be due to flawed ideology, i.e. your policy is based on your idea how the world should work instead of how it actually does work. Or it can be sheer incompetence.

What I would like to see is a system where the goal and the method of achieving it are separated from each other: a democratic technocracy. In this system politicians would only set the intended outcomes, and their relative priorities (in cases where policies would affect different intended outcomes in opposite directions). Then, government workers would decide the policies that would result in the desired outcomes (based on science, evidence based methods, etc.) They would be normal unelected workers subject to performance reviews (did their policies result in the intended outcome) and positions should be completely merit-based.

That way politicians have to be honest about what they want to achieve, people have a clearer idea what they are actually voting for and there is a system in place that will try to achieve those outcomes based on what actually works.

[belfalas]

First time I had heard of lottocracy - interesting concept but I don't think I would like to be alive for it.

[whoopdedo]

> because you know you literally did nothing to deserve it.

This greatly underestimates the level of vanity. Look only at the number of people who inherited their wealth, or received substantial financial support, yet still consider themselves self-made. I would also expect this to concentrate deistic thinking as people with a religious mindset will see being chosen as God's will and use the gained power to reinforce that.

I don't think I'd want to live in a country governed by the Dunning-Kruger effect. (Or maybe I already do?)

[astrange]

It also defeats Goodhart's law. A little anti-meritocracy might be a good thing; the word was invented for a book about why it's a bad idea to do it.