Sortition • Hacker News Board

Re: Sortition

#21

Post by imgabe » Thu, Nov 12, 2015, 5:19 PM UTC

I've also wondered lately if we shouldn't add some random element to the way we fund scientific research. Right now, as I understand it, researchers write grant proposals and funding institutions evaluate them and pick the best ones to fund.

Presumably then, the researchers who get the most funding would be the ones who are the best at writing grant proposals, and they may or may not be doing the best research or researching the most important things. In theory, there could be brilliant researchers working on important things who don't get any money because they lack the ability to persuade people to give it to them.

One of my "if I had a billion dollars" dreams is to set up a foundation that would randomly award research grants to field of qualified applicants.

I think it's the same problem with elections. Governing and campaigning are two different skills. Elections elect people who are good at campaigning, but may or may not be good at governing.

Re: Sortition

#22

Post by fela » Thu, Nov 12, 2015, 5:26 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #16

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…

Edit to say that your point is interesting and one I hadn't really thought about. This make elections a referendum on the most salient topics, which I guess makes sense. I still think that in elections there are a lot of other factors that influence decisions and given certain voting preferences there are a lot of arbitrary factors that influence the results, more so that in sortition, whose main drawback, as I see it is how little we know about how it would work in practice.

Original message: But even for salient issues there are a lot of random factors in elections. Suppose there is a issue so important that everybody cares and votes based only on that issue. Suppose there are only two candidate, and they have a clear and opposing position on this issue so that things are very simple for voters.

Suppose candidate A gets 50,999,897 votes Suppose candidate B gets 50,456,002 votes

B can still win, as happened with Bush, depending on the voting system. This is just an example and of course depends on the specific voting system. The real point being that for sortition you have simple statistical guarantees, always, independently from salience.

Re: Sortition

#23

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 12, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #21

I've also wondered lately if we shouldn't add some random element to the way we fund scientific research. Right now, as I understand it, researchers write grant proposals and funding institutions evaluate them and pick the best ones to fund. Presumably then, the researchers who get the most funding would be the ones who are the best at writing grant proposals, and they may or may not be doing the best research or res…

[deleted]

Re: Sortition

#24

Post by Moshe_Silnorin » Thu, Nov 12, 2015, 5:30 PM UTC

I've thought a bit about sortition. My favourite way of explaining it: Suppose a billionaire is looking for someone to marry. They want a partner who is interested in them for more than just a paycheque. Say gold-diggers represent just a very small fraction of the population but are extremely good at feigning fascination in pursuit of their goals and finding themselves in the company of billionaires. In fact they are so good at ingratiating themselves with billionaires that any potential partner this billionaire picks from the people he or she knows is likely to be a gold digger. What is a good but non-optimal solution? The billionaire should pick 1000 random people of the gender he/she prefers and make their selection from this pack. This cuts out the influence of the adverse selection effects the billionaire experiences just from being a billionaire. If all they’re looking for in a partner is someone in at most in the ~99th percentile of people this approach will work with little cost, as candidates can then be selected from this pool using conventional means. This would not work if gold-digging is a reaction to circumstance rather than an in-built characteristic - the same is true of corruption.

For politics, one approach would be sortition applied to those in the 99th percentile on a widely used standardized test like the SATs -it's important that this test be used outside politics, too. Sortition would then be applied to narrow down the pool from ~160000 (about the number of people with sufficient scores over a 10 year time-span) to say a few hundred, a few dozen, or less and then a conventional election from there. Though, you may need very attractive salaries to ensure those elected choose to serve as most don't have an interest in politics - perhaps a ridiculous pension for life after a few years of service.

Re: Sortition

#25

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 12, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

cousin_it wrote: post #20

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.

[deleted]

Re: Sortition

#26

Post by benjohnson » Thu, Nov 12, 2015, 5:32 PM UTC

amai wrote: post #6

"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)

It's a practice done by many Lutheran churches - each person writing who they'd like for leadership roles and writing it on a slip of paper, and then drawing one of those slips randomly.

From a theological point of view it allows for the Holy Spirit to act among us.

From a personal standpoint it works well as it allows candidates to put their names forward without the embarrassment of losing based on popularity.

Re: Sortition

#27

Post by caskance » Thu, Nov 12, 2015, 5:39 PM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #21

I've also wondered lately if we shouldn't add some random element to the way we fund scientific research. Right now, as I understand it, researchers write grant proposals and funding institutions evaluate them and pick the best ones to fund. Presumably then, the researchers who get the most funding would be the ones who are the best at writing grant proposals, and they may or may not be doing the best research or res…

Then you would be flooded with a deluge of low quality proposals. This kind of thing only works with people because it's not trivial to instantly create a large number of new ones simply to game the system.

Re: Sortition

#28

Post by imgabe » Thu, Nov 12, 2015, 5:42 PM UTC

caskance wrote: post #27

imgabe wrote: post #21

I've also wondered lately if we shouldn't add some random element to the way we fund scientific research. Right now, as I understand it, researchers write grant proposals and funding institutions evaluate them and pick the best ones to fund. Presumably then, the researchers who get the most funding would be the ones who are the best at writing grant proposals, and they may or may not be doing the best research or res…

Then you would be flooded with a deluge of low quality proposals. This kind of thing only works with people because it's not trivial to instantly create a large number of new ones simply to game the system.

It would involve a screening process to ensure that a real person wrote a coherent proposal before adding it to the selection pool.

Re: Sortition

#29

Post by caskance » Thu, Nov 12, 2015, 5:43 PM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #28

caskance wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you would be flooded with a deluge of low quality proposals. This kind of thing only works with people because it's not trivial to instantly create a large number of new ones simply to game the system.

It would involve a screening process to ensure that a real person wrote a coherent proposal before adding it to the selection pool.

Obviously there will be some kind of filter and spammers will adjust their techniques to slip through the filter since you've now given them incentive to do so. This is hardly a new phenomenon.

Re: Sortition

#30

Post by fela » Thu, Nov 12, 2015, 5:46 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #17

fela wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is true, but you could argue that the same is true with elections. What if everybody that wants to vote in a certain way is sick on election day? Not very likely, and of course in case of elections the number is larger and therefore the probability of (this specific type) of distortion is much smaller. But then one is again talking about probabilities. And in case of elections there are many other arbitrary factors that can influence the results.