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Sortition

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Re: Sortition

#41

Post by macrael »

panglott wrote: post #38
dragonwriter wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 enfra…

Eh, it sounds like Athens had systems in place to deal with these problems. With cause you could remove people from office and there was some sort of test to determine if you were eligible for the office at all. Their tests for citizenship (which was the only test that mattered for putting yourself up for election) were bigoted, I don't see any reason to hold them up as useful.

Re: Sortition

#42

Post by jacquesm »

Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #24

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…

It would be nice to give the 1000 random people and the person picked a say in the process too.

Re: Sortition

#43

Post by devinhelton »

gherkin0 wrote: post #10

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…

Was it this article by Nick Szabo on Unpredictable Elections? He talks a bit about the Venetian method: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-elect...

Re: Sortition

#44

Post by mrob »

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…

Why not use both? Select a random sample of candidates and then hold an election. By adjusting the number of candidates you can have the process act more like pure sortition (low number) or pure election (high number).

Re: Sortition

#45

Post by ThrustVectoring »

The biggest risk of sortition is moving the balance of power from representatives to the appointed/hired bureaucracy. I suspect that non-politicians are much easier to "manage up" against - I fear having it wind up as political lottery winners getting "advised" into going a certain direction.

Re: Sortition

#46

Post by huherto »

The problem of randomly select citizens for office is that they are as vulnerable to be corrupted as the current elected officials.

But, I would like an approach where we randomly select "electors". They are sequestered, listen to the arguments of the candidates, hold several election rounds and finally come out with he elected officials. Like a jury. They would be dismissed after that.

Re: Sortition

#47

Post by dragonwriter »

panglott wrote: post #38
dragonwriter wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 enfra…

> I meant could work, as in the place where it actually did work.

You are still leaping without justification from the way it was implemented and what was necessary for it to work; this is a form of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Yes, it was implemented that way in Athens.

That doesn't establish that it had to be implemented that way to work, even in that environment.

Re: Sortition

#48

Post by maus42 »

Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #24

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…

I'd replace the SAT score with some small, fixed amount of people vouching for you so that you could enter the lottery. (After all, there might be someone capable who because of some good reasons didn't manage to take SAT, and the system should be just and fair for them, too.)

The amount should not be so large that you'd need the gigantic ad campaigns you need today to be elected, but large enough that you need support outside your immediate family. Maybe ~20. Gathering their 'votes' demonstrates that you're at least interested in the job, and the element of trust is still there (someone trusts you would do a good job, and not doing that would be a betrayal).

Re: Sortition

#50

Post by danieltillett »

macrael wrote: post #37
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 n…

The only problem is the scoring system is highly biased towards track record of the grant applicant not the actual grant content. On top of this once you get the grant you can in practice spend the money doing whatever you want.

More fundamentally the peer review process can't actually accurately sort good proposals from outstanding proposals, but we only have the money to fund a fraction of the outstanding proposals. Under these conditions just being honest and moving to a system where all good proposals are put into a lottery and funded by chance would be better approach.

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