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by viscousviolin 137 days ago
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.
2 comments
idiotsecant 137 days ago
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

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dragonwriter 137 days ago
> 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.)

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tekne 137 days ago
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.

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viscousviolin 137 days ago
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 :)
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opo 137 days ago
>...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-...

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