51–60 of 66 posts
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.
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 suppo…
One of the nice properties of sortition is it combines well with many other forms of selection. However, this seems to ruin the point:
>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).
A big plus of sortition is it does not maximally select for the people most interested in political power. Having to be elected or self-selected in such a fashion would mar this.
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
To take a realistic example, let a panel of laypeople read 20 studies, half saying that smoking does cause cancer, and half saying that it doesn't. Then, let the experts of both sides speak to them (not needed to say that the ones defending it doesn't cause cancer are much more confident and charming than the others).
I don't think those people would have reached the correct conclusion.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It'll never happen, of course.
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...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 suppo…
I think standardized tests are vastly underrated. One of the nice properties of sortition is it combines well with many other forms of selection. However, this seems to ruin the point: >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). A big plus of sortition is it d…
For example, if we want to exclude congress(wo)men who are powermad egomaniacs, we start by asking knowledgable sources to rank candidates by lust, greed, and vanity, then exclude from random selection all those who fall below a certain threshold. Voila, no more psychos (golddiggers) joining the the Washington Elite.
The lovely part of Sortition is that with a large number of fair & knowledgable 'rankers' (or 'standardized tests') it's basically impossible to game the system.
So I vote 'yea' for Sortition.
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…
Pn Pan >> Pm Pam
If we assume we can't do better than random screening for malicious, we have a fixed Pn, Pm. So the crucial thing is to find incentives so that non-malicious actors are the least likely to take the job.
A good pre-screening (if possible) would have to raise the RHS or lower the RHS. For example, if the major incentive for malice is monetary, sampling from wealthy citizens could lower Pm, but it might also sightly lower Pan, so you may have to spend more resources to guarantee Pan=Pam=1.
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.
Gotta love recursion.