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Sortition

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Re: Sortition

#31

Post by clock_tower »

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…

For a particularly dramatic example of this, read G.K. Chesterton's _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_.

In the book, England, late in a long and uneventful history, is governed by lot; a randomly-chosen individual is crowned King and given dictatorial powers. Eventually, the lot falls on a bored nihilist with a fondness for 16th-century uniforms, and within twenty years London is a patchwork of feuding principalities with antiquated weapons, beautiful heraldry, and a whole lot of innocent people dead.

This book confirms what you're saying: it's not very likely that a barking madman will be randomly chosen as dictator, but it only has to happen once.

(The strangest thing about it is that Chesterton saw the most troublesome belligerents, who at one point threaten to use a water tower as a sort of late-Victorian atomic bomb, as the good guys; their willingness to use violence brought beauty and dignity back to a pacific, indolent world. This book was written before Chesterton became Catholic, and its bored nihilism reflects his own feelings at the time; I strongly suspect that it had an influence on the development of fascism, given that Mussolini was a fan of Chesterton's.)

Re: Sortition

#32

Post by andrewflnr »

Zikes wrote: post #3
toastking wrote: post #2

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

I was expecting it to be a portmanteau of sort and partition.

A partition algorithm that actually has some stronger almost-sorted condition on its output than a regular partition.

Re: Sortition

#33

Post by imgabe »

caskance wrote: post #29
imgabe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spam filters are pretty effective these days, I don't think this is an insurmountable problem.

Maybe something like sending a verification email with a link to a captcha. Not too much of a nuisance to do for one application, but unsustainable for submitting a million applications.

Edit: Alternately, an even lazier idea: Randomly award the grant from the pool of applicants rejected by other institutions.

Re: Sortition

#34

Post by astigsen »

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…

> How do you separate expertise from decision power, while still being able to make proper use of the expertise?

The Danish model of Consensus Conferences (laypeople brought in to work with experts on decision making), might be a good model to follow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_conferences

Re: Sortition

#35

Post by devinhelton »

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…

"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."

All major media and academic outlets are, by definition, powerful. To have a megaphone, to have reach, to be able to have thousands or millions of people listen to your message, is the essence of power.

These media and academic outlets, along with political parties, major activist groups, lobbyists, NGO's etc, have evolved to be powerful within the current political framework. The feedback loop between their ability to send messages to the population, and then get votes in return, is what makes them powerful.

Thus, no powerful outlet has any interest in sortition. Sortition would threaten their power. It would be a great unknown, who knows what the political system would look like under such a dramatic change? Thus nobody really talks about it, and if someone does talk about it, nobody retweets them, or cites them, or gives grants to study it, or otherwise gets excited about the idea.

But at any rate, even if you could convince the powers-that-be to implement sortition, I think the idea is fatally flawed. There is a difference between power and authority. A lottery could give people authority - but exercising actual power requires much, much more. It requires real talent at dealing with people, real influence, real knowledge of how things get done.

Democracy, as in real rule by the people, does not exist, cannot exist, should not exist. The Iron Law of oligarchy always wins, and attempts to ignore the Iron Law of Oligarchy and implement "true" democracy simply result in corrupt and degenerate subversion of the on-paper electoral system.

Re: Sortition

#36

Post by mollmerx »

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.

Thanks for that - I'd never heard of the Igon Value Problem and love the concept.

Re: Sortition

#37

Post by macrael »

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…

The one missing part of your understanding: grants are generally reviewed by researcher-peers, not really "funding institutions". Your proposal is read by other researches, scores are given to the grant and then a cutoff score is determined. All grants above that score are funded, those below are not.

This doesn't really change your conclusion, that grant writing is an important skill for acquiring funding but it's not about impressing the funding institution, it's about impressing fellow scientists.

Re: Sortition

#38

Post by panglott »

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…

I meant could work, as in the place where it actually did work. I wouldn't yet argue that mass exclusion is necessary so that it can work.

Whether sortition can work in a large, inclusive, and diverse society is an interesting question. Democracy can only work in a high-trust environment where people don't expect their political rivals to say, have them murdered or nationalize major industries. The expansion of enfranchisement in the U.S. (at least) has also coincided with the marginalization of very extreme political movements, like Communism.

Say you have an electorate with a very radical far-left or far-right minority that is anathema to the rest of the citizenry? In an electoral democracy, the minority would be excluded in elections (in a first-past-the-post system) or by inclusion as a clear minority (in proportional representation). In a sortitive democracy, it seems like they would have to be excluded from citizenship, or the government would have to have to be large and diffuse enough that the damage of insane or dangerous people could be constrained by the rest of society.

When people are introduced to the idea of sortition, mostly they are shocked by the idea. Because what if you randomly choose a schizophrenic or Hitler to put in charge of the nuclear weapons? I think you have to encourage this tactic at a more familiar level—rather than a group of friends voting on a restaurant, allowing one person to pick after drawing straws. Which, surely, is not at all like giving them a professional military.

Re: Sortition

#39

Post by dragonwriter »

fela wrote: post #30
dragonwriter wrote: post #17

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. 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 fact…

> That is true, but you could argue that the same is true with elections.

Sure, but its still not an advantage that sortition has over elections.

Re: Sortition

#40

Post by panglott »

benjohnson wrote: post #26
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.

I suspect this sort of belief is what legitimated sortition in the classical world: the choice is made by unknown or supernatural powers. Sortition and "casting of lots" is better known today for divination.
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