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Sortition

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Re: Sortition

#11

Post by dragonwriter »

fela wrote: post #9
panglott wrote: post #5

Athenian democracy is the model people point to, but the worm in the apple is Athenian citizenship rules. The reason selection by lot could work is that a large number of people were excluded from the pool. "Only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens. The percentage of the population that actually participated in the government was 10 to 20%…

Actually, one way to see sortition is as a way of scaling direct democracy to large populations.

Sortition and election are both ways of scaling democracy to populations too large to effectively use direct democracy alone; neither is any closer to direct democracy, and it seems to me that each can be viewed as mitigating the distortions imposed by the other (as our system -- in the US, but the same is true in most modern democracies -- tends to use election much more than sortition, it may be that it could be improved by increased use of sortition,)

Re: Sortition

#12

Post by dragonwriter »

panglott wrote: post #5

Athenian democracy is the model people point to, but the worm in the apple is Athenian citizenship rules. The reason selection by lot could work is that a large number of people were excluded from the pool. "Only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens. The percentage of the population that actually participated in the government was 10 to 20%…

> The reason selection by lot could work is that a large number of people were excluded from the pool.

Its clear that Athens excluded large numbers of people from the pool of sortition (just as most democracies before the 20th Century excluded lots of people from the pool of electors), but its not clear to me how you get from that to the conclusion that exclusion is necessary for sortition any more than it is necessary for election.

Re: Sortition

#13

Post by anon4 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #12
panglott wrote: post #5

Athenian democracy is the model people point to, but the worm in the apple is Athenian citizenship rules. The reason selection by lot could work is that a large number of people were excluded from the pool. "Only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens. The percentage of the population that actually participated in the government was 10 to 20%…

> The reason selection by lot could work is that a large number of people were excluded from the pool. Its clear that Athens excluded large numbers of people from the pool of sortition (just as most democracies before the 20th Century excluded lots of people from the pool of electors), but its not clear to me how you get from that to the conclusion that exclusion is necessary for sortition any more than it is necessa…

It may also be necessary for election. But you can't disregard the fact that only people who were qualified in some way were allowed to take part in running the country, and in that society it was that democracy was born.

Re: Sortition

#14

Post by fela »

dragonwriter wrote: post #11
fela wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, one way to see sortition is as a way of scaling direct democracy to large populations.

Sortition and election are both ways of scaling democracy to populations too large to effectively use direct democracy alone; neither is any closer to direct democracy, and it seems to me that each can be viewed as mitigating the distortions imposed by the other (as our system -- in the US, but the same is true in most modern democracies -- tends to use election much more than sortition, it may be that it could be im…

I feel like sortition is much closer to direct democracy because the distortion is limited by the law of large numbers and can be exactly calculated. Of course this excludes things like people feeling like participating, which happens in direct democracy but not in sortition.

Re: Sortition

#16

Post by dragonwriter »

fela wrote: post #8

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 w…

> 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 greatly can influence the results.

With elections, there are constraints which make deviations from the preference of the electorate less likely the greater the salience of the issue is. Sortition distributes the issues on which the decisionmakers deviate from the represented population randomly, which means that salience of the issue does not affect the likelihood of deviation between the decisionmakers and the represented population.

This is a significant weakness in sortition compared to elections, that needs to be weighed against whatever advantages are identified for it.

Re: Sortition

#17

Post by dragonwriter »

fela wrote: post #14
dragonwriter wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sortition and election are both ways of scaling democracy to populations too large to effectively use direct democracy alone; neither is any closer to direct democracy, and it seems to me that each can be viewed as mitigating the distortions imposed by the other (as our system -- in the US, but the same is true in most modern democracies -- tends to use election much more than sortition, it may be that it could be im…

I feel like sortition is much closer to direct democracy because the distortion is limited by the law of large numbers and can be exactly calculated. Of course this excludes things like people feeling like participating, which happens in direct democracy but not in sortition.

> I feel like sortition is much closer to direct democracy because the distortion is limited by the law of large numbers and can be exactly calculated.

No, it can't. The likelihood of a particular degree of distortion (sampling error) can be exactly calculated; the actual degree of distortion cannot.

Re: Sortition

#18

Post by fela »

osetinsky wrote: post #4

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 member…

Although I very much like the idea of sortition I found the paper by Pluchino et al. very flawed, the simulation they made captures none of the effects of sortition, and the effects they measure have no equivalent in the real world.

Just to get an idea, in their model politicians make many laws that help the population a little bit, instead the randomly selected citizen make make laws that help the population a lot, but they make only a few laws. And things have been defined in such a way that the optimal solution happens when mixing the two. They do a pretty good job at analyzing this simulation, the problem is that the simulation has little to do with the real world.

(I read the paper a few years ago so I hope I'm remembering things correctly).

Re: Sortition

#19

Post by dragonwriter »

nabla9 wrote: post #15

Also called random sample voting. http://cdd.stanford.edu/ http://rsvoting.org/ >Random-sample voting can be used locally, nationally, regionally, or even globally, with results that are more irrefutable than with current elections but at less than one-thousandth of the cost.

Random-sample voting, as proposed in those links, is a very specific application of sortition, it is not identical to the broader concept of sortition in the same way that the system currently used for electing the President of the United States is an example, but not identical to the broader concept, of election.

Re: Sortition

#20

Post by cousin_it »

osetinsky wrote: post #4

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 member…

I haven't read any Taleb, but an an analogy between sortition and simulated annealing sounds like an igon value moment to me.
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