Sortition

I really thought this was going to be some obscure implementation of Quicksort.

Taleb talks about this (though he doesn't use the term Sortition) in Antifragile: "instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing—and it happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients—again, those ancients!—were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system."

"It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election." (Aristotle, Politics 4.1294be)

I've long been interested in the use of sortition in political decision making, and it always surprises me how little it has been seriously studied and considered compared to the potential it seems to have.

Much of the information there is is of pretty low quality. It might of course just be such a bad idea that everybody smart enough to give high quality contributions on the topic does not want to waste their time with the idea. But if this is the case it is totally non obvious to me, and most criticism I've read seem to be from people that do not have a clear understanding of the potential advantages sortition might have.

Very briefly, for the uninitiated, the main potential advantage of sortition is that it would make political decision making a lot more democratic. People representative of the population at large would actually discuss to make the decision, instead of the citizens making their choice by casting one vote every few years among a set of very similar parties (I know, this simplifies the debate a lot, but it is the main idea). This is very interesting if you are of the opinion (as I am) that lack of democracy is a big problem of our political systems. I believe that most time politicians go agains the will of people they do so for the wrong reasons and with the wrong goals, and way too often.

The law of large number makes sure the randomness in sortition is limited and predictable. Whereas with elections there is a big number of arbitrary factors that can greatly influence the results.

Of course sortition in practice might have a number of problem often brought up, but none seems unsolvable to the point where it's not even worth exploring the idea further.

How do you separate expertise from decision power, while still being able to make proper use of the expertise? How to implement sortition in practice? Would they ever let us? Would people be able to handle the pressure? Would they accept the position? And all criticism to democracy in general applies even more to sortition.

I think however that if you talked about elections to somebody who never heard about it, you could come up with just as a big number of potential problems. I don't know if sortition really is a better idea, but maybe it's an idea worth thinking about.

I recently read this article on sortition that appeared on the Atlantic which I think is really good: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/the-cas...

Another good starting point for further exploration is the blog Equality by Lot: https://equalitybylot.wordpress.com/

I can't find the link, but there was a good article about this recently (maybe in the last year) that spent quite a bit of time talking about the selection of the Doge of Venice. IIRC, they had a very complicated process that included sortition, nomination, election, and alternating large and small groups that allow them to select qualified officeholders while simultaneously limiting many of the problems with direct elections.

Does anyone have a link?