[yboris]

Sortition may be what you're looking for: "sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random, i.e. by lottery, in order to obtain a representative sample". No one can amass power because it's short term and random.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

[dragonwriter]

People can amass power in a system with sortition, but those people don't amass it in the role of office holders (in those offices subject to sortition.) Of course, the office holders aren't the people amassing the most durable political power in the current system, either.

If you don't think officeholders that are randomly chosen amateurs in the field that are guaranteed to be out of it in short time aren't very often going to be extremely vulnerable to manipulation by people whose interests are stronger, more permanent, and durable, then you haven't thought things through very well, IMO.

[viscousviolin]

I heard about lottocracy/sortition for the first time not long ago and I quite like the idea. The last time was when I heard a professor talk about it, and I was recommended reading the book "Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections" by Guerrero [0].

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217981747-lottocracy

[abecode]

I just had a nice trip to Venice and I was curious about it's history. Supposedly, the Venice republic lasted almost 1000 years, basically from after the fall of Rome to Napoleon based on a weird lottery system for choosing the Doge.

[viscousviolin]

I've never read up on the republic of Venice, but after quickly scanning the Wikipedia article on its election procedure... that is a strangely large number of voting rounds and lotteries.

[DANmode]

They ate a good amount of vegetables, too.

All sorts of insane stuff.

[idiotsecant]

Before you get too excited about this just imagine the average line of people at the DMV or the Grocery store and now imagine that those people are in charge of the lives of hundreds of millions. If you think HOAs are bad, you aint seen nothing yet.

The current system of oligarch patronage is bad, but at least it keeps the train mostly on the rails.

[pavel_lishin]

But aren't most HOA horror stories based on people who'd been running them for years if not decades, and only end happily when someone replaces those entrenched in power with new people?

[idiotsecant]

There are equally many HOA horror stories where it functions reasonably for years and then new leadership shows up and turns it into a nightmare.

[anigbrowl]

But such groups are almost invariably coordinated. In a legislature based on sortition, there will be a percentage of busybodies/ assholes/ opportunists but they'll have a coordination problem, opponents, and term limits acting to restrain them.

[timschmidt]

Term limits incentivize a deep state exactly one layer removed from those to which the limits apply, as a repository of institutional knowledge about how things actually get done.

[viscousviolin]

It's a potentially big problem for sure. It reminds me of stories I've heard about the public education system in some of the Scandinavian countries. From what I remember off the top of my head, Finland has a system where private educational facilities do not exist. Meaning that, if rich or otherwise elite people want their kids to receive a good education, they need to support the public education facilities their own kid attends. I quite like this idea that everyone is nudged towards helping everyone else, even if they mostly care about their own family and friends.

Similarly in a lottocracy you'd want everyone to be a capable leader when their name is picked from the hat. As the professor I listened to put it, lottocracy makes you think what a democracy really values. Is it about everyone's voice being heard, or is there another goal we should care about more? Not an easy question to answer.

[idiotsecant]

Yes, I suppose there exists an egalitarian and well adjusted hypothetical society where we could find good leaders by random draw. I just don't think we live in anything resembling that society and I'm not sure whether such a society is possible once you reach a certain population size.

I think it's a nice idea, but I'm not sure how we get from here to there

[dragonwriter]

> Yes, I suppose there exists an egalitarian and well adjusted hypothetical society where we could find good leaders by random draw.

If you can find good leaders by random draw, that means the average citizen is a good leader, which would seem to suggest that the average citizen should be a reasonable an hard-to-dupe judge of good leaders, and therefore that elections also work well.

If elections don't work well to select leaders, that's a pretty good piece of evidence that sortition won't, either.

OTOH, the particular failures of sortition and elections may be different, and using a system where both are used for different veto points might be net less problematic than either alone. Consider a bicameral legislature with one house chosen by elections and the other by sortition, for instance.

(OTOH, there is plenty of solid evidence in comparative government of how to do electoral democracy better and people in the US don't seem too interested in that, which is probably a better focus for immediate reform than relatively untested, on a large scale, ideas about avoiding electoral democracy.)

[tekne]

Bit of a nerd-snipe, but I wonder about the idea of sortition of a set of candidates -- say 200 -- out of a larger voting pool, and then voting for one of the randomly selected candidates.

Then you get "at least approx. top 1%" -- but it's still not necessarily an entrenched elite.

[viscousviolin]

Agreed, I'm not sure if it can be made to work either. I have an inkling of a thought that instead of an egalitarian society being required for lottocracy to work, an egalitarian society can be created using lottocracy. But it's just a thought. Hopefully that book holds something close to an answer, but I'll see :)

[opo]

>...From what I remember off the top of my head, Finland has a system where private educational facilities do not exist.

Not quite. Private education is not prohibited in Finland, but for-profit basic education is prohibited and private education is pretty rare.

https://www.aacrao.org/edge/emergent-news/private-education-...

[lykahb]

Before applying sortition to the civil service, it'd be wise to observe how it works on a smaller scale. Some corporations may attempt it. Though it's more radical than the flat structure or other organization alternatives.

[HaZeust]

I knew about the strategy for using randomness to control corruption, but didn't know it had a procedural name in governance. Thanks for this!

[kiba]

We really only practice it in one instance in modern democracy and that's jury duty, but that should be expanded into more roles and duties. That's one way to make society truly democratic.

In any case, you might be interested in Georgism, which is an anti-monopoly ideology most famously associated with very Strong Opinions on taxation of land and natural resources and untaxing production, along with taxation on pollution and negative externalities.

My impression is that sortition is very much in vogue within Georgist circles.

[jMyles]

> We really only practice it in one instance in modern democracy and that's jury duty,

...and even there, it's terribly corrupted. There are all kinds of bizarre ways that people are excluded from juries which bias the result. One commonly-cited example is that people who report moral objections to capital punishment are excluded from being empaneled on a federal jury, under the pretext that because capital punishment is legal under federal law, they'd be unable to carry out the gammut of their duties. Of course this has the convenient result of dramatically biasing juries in favor of the state.

There's also no commonly-implemented proof-of-randomness for selection. We're told that people are randomly selected and get a notice in the mail, but there's no public event where one can go and watch a number tumbler generate the entropy used to select names from the voter rolls, etc.

[Der_Einzige]

I just say "I believe in jury nullification and will use that power if necessary".

Easiest out from jury duty ever, and if the judge want's to be a bltch and force me on anyway, well, let's just say that if the law is immoral than the defendant is going to walk.

[opo]

> I just say "I believe in jury nullification and will use that power if necessary".

Have you actually said that during voir dire, or is this a hypothetical?

[mulmen]

The last time I was called for jury duty someone said this during jury selection and we were all immediately dismissed and a new pool of jurors brought in.

[mulmen]

You shouldn’t brag about shirking civic duty.

[Der_Einzige]

I unironically want to be on the jury. It's the judges fault for refusing to let principled believers in nullification on. I'm unironically not trying to shrink civic duty.

[ghaff]

Well, and for grand juries in particular, you're told that (more or less) this will be your life for six months. I certainly opted out as best I could.

[AndrewKemendo]

It’s only registered voters too in most states

[ghaff]

My understanding is that not registering to vote isn't automatically an opt-out but IANAL.

[AndrewKemendo]

Depends on the state

[PlatoIsADisease]

Do this but with technocracy.

Also best of luck being random... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_paradox_(probability) and The Problem of Priors.

[wtallis]

That link says the Bertrand paradox only applies when the domain of possibilities is infinite. That doesn't seem to cover tasks like randomly selecting people from a finite population.

[PlatoIsADisease]

Its not number of people, but number of ways to slice the situation.

In this case: Do we use IQ tests? Do we use random numbers and allow babies to win?

If you want to be traumatized about statistics, I like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy6xXEhbGa0

[HappMacDonald]

Man, that video was disappointing.

My factory produces squares, and every square is between 1ft and 3ft in side length.

Now what is the probability that the next square it outputs will be between 1ft and 2ft long?

The probability is zero percent, of course. Because my factory only produces squares with a side length of exactly 2.5ft (to within a micrometer tolerance, hooray!), day in and day out.

And as anyone can easily verify, every single one of those squares is between 1ft and 3ft in side length.

Notice how I didn't have to even begin to talk about areas?

The video's thesis is simply that "Talking out of your ass when you have insufficient information has the capability of backfiring sometimes: oh the horror" and I find the subject approximately as uninteresting as the fact that different interpolation methods (nearest neighbor, bicubic, "ask AI image gen to fill in the gaps", etc) are capable of inventing completely different false details into an image or dataset.

But I probably only find it equally uninteresting due to the claims being isomorphic.

When you don't have enough data, guessing at what is missing can be incorrect, and guessing in different ways can be incorrect in different ways, and you have to allow that to wash out as enough genuine data arrives (which means washing out the differences between potential methods of interpolation) and maintain your error bars correctly in the meantime instead of throwing them away.

So to loop back to the start: the probability that the next square will be between 1ft and 2ft is 50% plus or minus 50%, which is just an over-engineered way of saying "there is literally not enough information yet offered to make a guess of any trustworthiness at this point".