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> Juries, widely trusted to impartially deliver justice, are the most familiar instance.

Trusted by those that have not looked into whether this is actually the case. The first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was famously against trial by jury, because of how easily lawyers can abuse biases in multiracial societies, based on his first-hand experience [1].

A UK study found his experience is the norm, not the exception - Black and minority ethnic (BME) jurors vote guilty 73% of the time against White defendants, but only 24% of the time against BME defendants [2]. (White jurors vote 39% and 32% for convicting White and BME defendants, respectively. You read that correctly - Whites are also biased against other Whites, but to a much lesser degree)

Edit: To answer what is the alternative to juries: Not all countries use juries, in some the decision is up to the judge, and in some, like France, they use a mixed system of judges and jurors on a panel [3]. The French system would be my personal preference, with the classic jury system coming in second, despite my jury-critical post. Like democracy, it's perhaps the least bad system that we have, but we shouldn't be under any illusions about how impartial and perceptive a group of 12 people selected at random is.

[1] https://postcolonialweb.org/singapore/government/leekuanyew/...

[2] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/judicial-institute/sites/judicial-inst... - page 165 (182 by pdf reader numbering), figure 6.4

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury

That statistic could also be the result of excessive prosecution against black/minorities and not necessarily just jury bias. (Which would also explain the white bias against whites)

A universal counterargument that works on any data. But unlikely to be true, given that the UK sentenced a BME perpetrator to a short 2 years for one-punch-killing an 82-year-old veteran [1], while "threatening gestures" at police and chanting "who the f- is Allah" earn the White perpetrator 18 months in prison [2], and merely being present at a protest, while not engaging in any violence, earns 32 months in prison [3].

We also have to ask - if the biases in that study were flipped, if White jurors were far more likely to convict BME defendants, and pardon White defendants, and BME jurors were the more even-handed ones, would this not be trumpeted as conclusive evidence of racism?

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-derbyshire-66959198

[2] https://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/24515551.london-disord...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/08/pens...

The sentence isn’t relevant to the jury bias discussion (unless the jury is involved in sentencing in the UK?)

> We also have to ask - if the biases in that study were flipped, if White jurors were far more likely to convict BME defendants, and pardon White defendants, and BME jurors were the more even-handed ones, would this not be trumpeted as conclusive evidence of racism?

Yes, but why is this relevant? That’s not the case in the statistics you cited.

My comment was pointing out that there are multiple possible (probably simultaneous) causes for the jury statistics.

> The sentence isn’t relevant to the jury bias discussion

It's relevant as an indicator of the bias, or lack thereof, of the system as a whole.

The very study you cited states in their initial summary of findings that "The study provides the first evidence to support a widely held belief: that racially mixed juries do not discriminate against defendants based on the defendant’s ethnic background. While the assumption has been that racially mixed juries will not discriminate against ethnic minority defendants, this study showed that racially mixed juries also did not discriminate against White defendants.[0]"

[0]https://www.ucl.ac.uk/judicial-institute/sites/judicial-inst... - page iv

Because the bias was diluted by the other jurors - from the passage on page iii, I assume the juries in the study were only 10-33% BME. The study follows your quote with:

Even though the defendant’s ethnicity did not have an impact on jury verdicts, the research found that in certain cases ethnicity did have a significant impact on the individual votes of some jurors who sat on these juries. Statistical analysis of the individual votes of all 319 jurors who took part in the case simulation showed that in certain cases BME jurors were significantly less likely to vote to convict a BME defendant than a White defendant. [..]

The report concludes that this highlights the benefits of permitting majority verdicts and of having 12 member juries. The fact that 12 jurors must jointly try to reach a decision and that majority verdicts are possible meant that more verdicts were achieved and individual biases did not dictate the decision-making of these racially mixed juries. If juries were smaller or if unanimous verdicts were required, then individual juror bias might potentially have a greater impact on jury verdicts.

> My comment was pointing out that there are multiple possible (probably simultaneous) causes for the jury statistics.

Sure, but this is a non-statement without qualifying anything behind it. You can defeat any argument by claiming its "multi-faceted". Just like how I am doing to you right now, but instead forcing you into the position where you lack evidence to dismiss.

I’m curious, had any legislatures tried blinded trials, where judges and/or juries don’t see the litigants, don’t know their names or location details, and otherwise only have access to the information on a need-to-know basis?

Sort of like how removing names, ages and photos from resumes removes demographic biases and makes one focus on the actual skillset.

(I’m not sure if this is a good idea, merely wondering if it was tried.)

Wouldn't that be kind of tough since one of juries main function is evaluation of witnesses. Without seeing the witnesses face or hearing their voice, how could one do that?

The idea is to filter out bias-introducing information with low relevance (like gender, appearance, or accent) and focus on the actual events that took place.

Otherwise the court starts to include elements of theatrics and objective truth starts to give way to how one presents their case, such as what sort of appearance litigants make. E.g., whenever they're speaking confidently or, say, stuttering nervously. While this can be relevant information (e.g. if someone refuses to look in the eyes it could be a sign one's lying), there are multitude of ways it can be deceiving (e.g. if someone refuses to look in the eyes it could be that they find eye contact generally uncomfortable, for example folks with anxiety disorders do that).

Presenting both litigants through a Vtuber-like interface that re-synthesizes voices, adjusts some patterns of speech (like replacing names with placeholders, or making language gender-neutral), reduces non-verbal signalling, and provides neutral appearances to both parties, feels like something that can make litigants, judge and juries all focus on the abstract ideas of what took place, potentially allowing for a more clear and neutral judgement.

But - of course - it's also perfectly possible that it would fail in some way I fail to foresee.

The whole point is that they would be evaluating the witnesses' testimony, not their mannerisms and appearance (read: how culturally and racially similar they are to the jury, or to the "high class" ideal of their society).

> A universal counterargument that works on any data.

Well, yeah, that’s why data itself doesn’t “show” anything on its own. You first need competing explanations of reality, and then data might help you choose one explanation over another.

> A universal counterargument that works on any data

How? My statement could not be correct if the data was instead: BME jurors vote guilty 73% of the time against White defendants, but only 24% of the time against BME defendants; and White jurors vote guilty 39% of the time against White defendants and 52% (instead of the cited 32%) against BME defendants.

> and merely being present at a protest, while not engaging in any violence, earns 32 months in prison [3].

> [3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/08/pens...

From the article: William Nelson Morgan, 69, was sentenced to 32 months in prison, having previously admitted violent disorder and carrying a cosh during a riot on County Road in Liverpool on Saturday.

Sounds like he engaged in violence and was carrying a weapon.

> Sounds like he engaged in violence

Seems that you didn’t read the article you have linked or your definition of engaging in violence is rather obtuse.

Surely you would not equate standing still when a policeman orders you to move and then resisting when they to forcibly move you to murdering a random person for no particular reason? Nor would you agree that the second violent offense deserves a significantly more lenient punishment than the first?

If you're curious about this topic, I'd recommend you look up interviews with the jurors in the OJ Simpson trial. Many were black and by their own admission made their decision about OJ's guilt-based entirely on a feeling of racial justice. They considered it “payback.”

https://youtu.be/BUJCLdmNzAA?feature=shared

OJ Simpson is was such a famous case that I'd be inclined to treat it as an outlier in many ways, not the norm.

But I would argue that jury mentality is universal.

Any juror who knows about the concept of jury nullification is more likely to use it when the defendant reminds them of themselves or when the prosecution has so vastly disproportionate resources over the defendant that the trial can’t possibly be fair.

>I would argue that jury mentality is universal

Then argue it, because that's a pretty large thing to say unsupported

Agreed. Outliers are a thing. As is cherry-picking data to try and prove a point.

Sucks, as this level of cherry-picking heavily biases me against the premise. If someone has a good data set, they don't need to drive anecdotes from the outliers. And if they are, is it an attempt to hide that the overall data paints a different picture?

And the LAPD seems to have decided OJ was guilty based largely on a feeling of racial prejudice. The fact that he actually did it was coincidental. I've often seen that trial described as the LAPD framing a guilty man. The prosecution did a terrible job and I'm not at all convinced the acquittal wasn't the correct verdict, even if it's pretty clearly contrary to the facts of what happened.

It seems safe to assume that the LAPD also did/does this to less famous people of color, in which case a higher rate of voting to acquit would not indicate bias by the jury.

I would argue OJ would have been arrested far earlier for DV (long before the murder) if the LAPD didn’t have such a hard-on for the celebrity.

I don't think one of the most high-profile and racially charged cases in history can serve as a reasonable benchmark for how the bulk of cases are handled.

Edit: Not sure why I am being downvoted, I tried to say the same thing dmonitor said.

What quantitatively separates "excessive prosecution" from "prosecution"?

Anything that is statistically visible?

I’m not making a value judgement; I was just pointing out other explanations of the statistics.

So, like the excessive prosecution of men, who receive sentences about twice as long as women for committing the exact same crimes, on average? Men are prosecuted at far higher rates than women, too.

In case I'm not the only ignorant one:

BME = black and minority ethnic

That's not evidence of jury bias on its own. You have to control for prosecution rates and rates of actual guilt.

And what is the other option? Just led the judge alone decide?

One possibility would be to use juries to just decide facts, then a panel of judges applies the law to those facts.

If there are many factual disputes in a case maybe use multiple juries with each jury only deciding on a subset of the facts, chosen so that no jury sees the entire case. They are less likely to be biased if they don't see the entire case.

Yes I trust judges more than I trust juries.

And it usually isn't a single judge. There is a panel of judges or en banc.

And juries aren't universal either. Lots of other countries don't have juries but they have a fair and equitable justice system. Look up civil law vs common law.

I trust an individual judge's opinion on almost any topic to be more intelligent than that of an individual jury member.

But there's huge selection bias in who becomes a judge, and so we end up with a pool of people who are mostly former prosecutors, which is another pool with a huge selection bias.

All of the judges I know personally (though not all I've been around) are well-meaning, fair-minded people, but with maybe one exception they're all true believers in the fairness of the system, and all tend to give tremendous unearned deference to prosecutors. We should absolutely not make them the finders of fact in criminal cases.

Lay judges are also an option and might offer a reasonable balance.

I want the judge to keep the lawyers in check so they cannot. Judges are trustable because the jury limits their power. If I am a lawyer I know whothe judges are and it is to my advantage to figure out their bias (including judge shopping if there is more than one in the area), looking for embaressing things or blackmail material, what bribes they will accept (often in form of donation to a family charity) and so one.

which is to say the reason I trust judges is the jury keeps them in check by ensuring there isn't value in the above corruption.

Judge shopping is also a thing, if the judge was the only person in power to make the decision we'd be completely screwed.

Not only that but today you have all kind of analytics for courts, and judges that you can use in your favour.

What is the reasoning, judges are above racial bias?

They are more likely than juries to be above racial bias. Not 100% but I trust them more due to the training and education needed to become a judge.

Why not a jury of 12 judges for the best of both worlds?

It would be very expensive but yes seems like a good option. Of course a problem in some places and systems is that judges are often political appointees which has its own implications

Norway has a tradition of using panels of judges that uses a mix of professional judges and lay judges drawn from the jury pool. I don't recall the specifics on when this systems used vs. a regular jury. They deliberate with the professional judge, has the majority, but can be overridden if their reasoning is blatantly contrary to the law.

This is known as a "bench trial" and is a legal concept.

Bench trial and civil law are actually the most used legal systems worldwide, not jury trial and common law.

Jury trials are not unique to common law systems, though. Many civil law systems either have lay judges or allow jury trials under certain circumstances.

Of course you are not entitled to a jury trial in e.g. France unless you are accused of something very serious.

> (White jurors vote 39% and 32% for convicting White and BME defendants, respectively. You read that correctly - Whites are also biased against other Whites, but to a much lesser degree)

This assumes that Whites and BMEs going to trial are equally likely to be guilty.

Shouldn't we assume there would be some hidden delta?

There is an interesting example of random selection of leadership from the Bible when the apostles replaced Judas. The criteria were agreed upon and then lots drawn.

Acts 1:21-26 Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.” So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. Then they prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs.” Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.

Can you imagine this practice replacing the Papal conclave? Or, pastor selection at your favorite Protestant group?

Interesting point! One interpretation of this passage suggests Peter is actually rushing this appointment. In typical Peter fashion, he makes choices before fulling thinking them through (this seems to change post Pentecost). Matthias is never mentioned again in the Bible; we aren't sure what becomes of him. Canonically, he is the 12th but traditionally, it is Paul who is sometimes considered the true 12th disciple (you can find this depicted in EO iconography).

So, the random selection mentioned here may have actually been a fault of Peter's and not something the Bible is endorsing as a means to choose leadership; possibly quite the opposite in this case.

That's an interesting interpretation but a quick search didn't turn up the first version of that until 1861, so it seem rather late to have influenced EO iconography. Perhaps you are familiar with earlier examples of that interpretation?

Impetuous or not, Peter was likely influenced by the many decisions made by lots in the Hebrew Scriptures. e.g., picking a scapegoat (Leviticus 16:7-10), assigning priestly duties (1 Chronicles 24), dividing land (1 Chronicles 6:54), etc. Furthermore, Proverbs 16:33 & 18:18 indicates the outcome of lots is from God and reduces conflict.

Anyway, ascribing random processes to the divine for decision making, particularly political situations seems to have strong textual support within the Judeo-Christian tradition. I'm curious about parallels in Islam and other offshoots.

Honestly, going off of something I heard Fr. Stephen De Young mention in one of his podcasts. If I remember right, he says when you see the 12 in certain icons, Paul is often present instead of Matthias.

He did not speak of casting lots as being something never endorsed in the Bible, more just for this particular passage, it might not be the takeaway Luke is aiming for. Agree with all your points on 'chance' often being used in scripture.

Don’t forget the Roman soldiers at the crucifixion who cast lots to see who would get Jesus’s seamless robe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamless_robe_of_Jesus

You see paul because paul was a great letter writter and Luke followed Paul for some years (likely converted in Pauls misson). however read between the lines and Paul was rarely in the consoles. Even Peter doesn't seem to have been a leader - the sent him away to some visibal missons not kept him with the leaders.

My partner, who was raised conservative Mennonite, tells me this is exactly how pastors are chosen today. About three men are nominated, then they draw lots.

seems quite meritocratic with a pinch of (Lord's) randomness. The merit is "been with [Jesus] since baptism to taken"

"Lottery, past a reasonable post," is highly underrated. The randomness is there to account for the uncertainty of the objective criteria chosen ("Is it the right criteria?" "Did we measure correctly?"). Work in an escape clause in case things go horribly wrong with the ultimate "choice".

I strongly believe that this is how you solve elections, admissions, and recruitment (or, at least, get closer to an ideal solution).

And also grant funding!

https://www.volkswagenstiftung.de/en/originality-and-quality...

Which I absolutely love, having wasted months of my life applying for 'regularly' chosen grants and having quasi-random outcomes, without a lottery.

It's hard to game random, is what I like about it.

I guess randomness reduces a little bit of the feelings of entitlement and the feeling of grandeur. “You were not selected because you were the best, but because of chance”. “It is not necessary that everyone should have to pick you for you to get selected.”

See also the Selection of the Doge (of Venice):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_of_Venice#Selection_of_th...

> New regulations for the elections of the doge introduced in 1268 remained in force until the end of the republic in 1797. Their intention was to minimize the influence of individual great families, and this was effected by a complex electoral machinery. Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge.

These families must have known how to game probabilities immensely for them to put in so many layers of chance.

"Drats... OK, best 3 of 5 then?... Drats... Best 4 of 7?"

Isn't Florence at this time famous for choosing their leader randomly by lot, but for some reason it always ended up one of the early Medici's that kept being chosen?

Hobbes talks about this a little in Chapter 36 of Leviathan, mentioning not only Matthias, but a couple of Old Testament instances.

> Can you imagine this practice replacing the Papal conclave

The Copts still pick their pope by lot. Of course only from three preselected candidates but still.

The technical term is sortition. And it is my pet unorthodox political position. The legislature should be replaced with an assembly of citizens picked by lottery.

Ireland has a Citizens Assembly, which is selected by sortition. Ordinary citizens take time out of their lives to participate when assemblies are formed to examine issues of the day. The assembly receives expert and political testimony and evidence, and then votes and makes recommendations that often lead to country-wide referendums.

The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment. The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere. Ireland also has relatively little money in politics, limits on donations, a standards in public office commission, independent constituency boundary commissions, a multi-seat proportional representation system, limits on media ownership, and the highest percentage of University educated citizens of any country. All in all it's helped Ireland come a long way from the 80s and 90s, when Ireland was much worse on corruption indexes.

"Ireland also has relatively little money in politics, limits on donations..."

There are a crazy amount of NGOs in Ireland, 1 for every 155 people, many pushing forward their own political policies and views.

https://unherd.com/newsroom/in-ireland-its-progressives-who-...

> Ireland has a Citizens Assembly, which is selected by sortition.

Ireland occasionally has a Citizen’s Assembly when the elected politicians feel it is best to do so. The members are supposed to be selected by sortition but this has not always been adhered to. “ Seven replacements joining in January 2018 were removed the following month when it emerged they were recruited via acquaintances of a Red C employee, who was then suspended, rather than via random selection.”

> The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment.

You have to give the secretariat their due. They were excellent at getting the right facilitators, who would ensure the Assembly came to the conclusion the government wanted them to. Eventually they messed up and pushed so hard against public opinion that they got the Assembly to vote in favour of deleting mothers from the constitution and in favour of a meaningless expression of respect for carers. Both were then roundly defeated but the Assembly has been great as a way for governments to build consensus by putting their thumb on the scales.

> The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere.

Contemptible. If politicians don’t want to deal with socially divisive topics they should be doing something else with their lives.

>> The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere.

> Contemptible. If politicians don’t want to deal with socially divisive topics they should be doing something else with their lives.

That is debatable. Too much concentration on divisive topics can distract from actual governance. We are now so deeply immersed in the social media world that we tend to consider "constantly raging culture war" to be the norm and the expected pivotal point of all politics, but it is more of a disease of the system.

There is no hard principle that politics should be exclusively performed by elected politicians. Even in the US, plenty of states have ballot initiatives, thus outsourcing decisions about some problems to the citizens themselves.

If the Irish system works similarly and reduces the systemic "inflammation", so to say, by outsourcing it to sortition-based bodies, then I would argue that it might be more efficient at governance than the "rip their throats out over scissor statements" standard that now rules the US and many other places in the world.

Apart from being caught up in all the corporate tax swindels.

If you mean all the European branches of US companies in Ireland, these are only bad for people outside of Ireland. The highly democratic Switzerland has a similar "corruption to the detriment of other countries" thing going on.

This may show that I'm biased, but the idea of a randomized group of citizens making the law of the land scares the heck out of me. There is a non-trivial amount of nuance and compromise that goes in lawmaking.

Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind.

> There is a non-trivial amount of nuance and compromise that goes in lawmaking.

We just passed that "big beautiful bill" and it was quite clear nobody knew or cared what was in it, beyond it being "trump's bill he wants". I'm guessing staffers and lobbyists had a far more detailed understanding of their portions than any elected official did.

It's a reasonable guess that 100 randos would actually write a better bill.

For what it is worth they probably wouldn't write the bill, just vote on it.

If they wouldn't write or read the bill, they'd be like modern day politicians. Or I guess politicians in general.

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” Mark Twain

But the status quo is considered anomalous by most of the world, so I would not use it as a benchmark.

I'm all in for some continuous improvement experiments for democracy:

- modest proposal: yes, have X random people in government, but have a Y-month paid training period before they serve for Z years; ALSO ensure their families want for nothing (read, a decent non-luxurious lifestyle), but prohibit receiving money from lobbyists, PACs, gifts, etc... AND, ensure they get reintegrated into society in a nonpolitical field (with some exceptions) by also offering Y-month long paid training in different fields.

The corruption costs reduction would significantly outweigh any increase in payroll and training.

"Simple" remedies for American democracy:

  * Campaign Finance Reform
  * End Citizens United
  * Ranked choice voting (or a variant of same).

We could also increase the membership of the house beyond 435 members. This number was capped in 1911 when the population was much smaller.

Also

* Expand the Supreme Court

I'd add:

* Expand the House (and make provisions that keep it updated with each census).

* Statehood for US territories.

The systemic problems with our democracy seem pretty clear, really.

> Expand the House (and make provisions that keep it updated with each census).

Interesting. Looking in from a country with a smaller lower house, I think members in the US are already so numerous they seem to fade to the background and their survival becomes mostly about party politics not making a good impression on their district. It's not like most of them could make a good speech while most members are present and listening. Only senators seem individually important enough to make a name for themselves (with the exception of the speaker etc).

But I've never lived and voted in the US so maybe I'm missing something important here.

I absolutely agree. You are just moving the lack of representation to the next level if you increase the size of the house. House members need to know each others and works with each others to be effective. And this is where math says things turn ugly, the size of the graph connecting all house members grows exponentially, until at a certain size (which I believe we have already reached) it is simply unmanageable. the solution might be to add yet another layer in the system. Naively, it seems that democracy is hard to scale (this does not mean that we should no try though). But last time I tried to bring up that concern on HN it did not go well...

I do wonder if we could have some sort of deterministic/coordinated ⌈n⌉-level rotating hierarchy (think a rotating program cycle with period ⌈n⌉) such that n^n ≈ population. The aim would be to have ⌈n⌉-generation stewardship [0], without immediate-issue-deprioritization [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_generation_sustainabilit...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longtermism#Deprioritization_o...

Members of the House of Representatives’ first obligation to my view is knowing their constituents. Knowing each other may not help as much as you may think unless you’re on a committee. As the population increases, members of the House were meant to increase. This increasing size has been arrested.

They do get to vote on any bill regardless of committee membership though. Maybe we should just abolish the general vote, allow for the number of reps to keep up with the population increase and only have (larger) committees that have final decisions on the bills that fall under their purview.

That is a hack which would be last in line. First and foremost, there should be no "legal bribery" of any justice -- up the salaries and fluff up the goodies (housing, etc), but otherwise zero outside income, with a blind trust for all assets.

One very thorny issue is the fact that our system of government is built on respect for the law and the institutions, but the current regime has learned they can just do whatever they want with virtual impunity. They brought tanks, drones and nukes to a knife fight, and the other side is completely unarmed and trying to talk them out of the fight.

We are so fucked.

> End Citizens United

So no more union political contributions?

Well, it's our benchmark, because it's our status quo. That is, you measure any proposed change for here against the way it currently works here, not the way it works in country X.

It is anomalous in the historical context of the same country.

Otoh, the degradation of democracy into oligarchy and then tyranny was called by Socrates...

Anomalies cause extinction events.

Actually, "right wing government gets elected and gets a huge omnibus bill passed that the parliament didn't even read" has been a worldwide trend for some years now. Closest example that comes to mind is probably Argentina, which managed to pass its own controversial right-wing omnibus bill in June last year [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Bases_and_Starting_Poin...

There are many proposed models for how to incorporate sortition into governance. Some examples:

- A randomly selected lower house with an elected upper house (or the reverse)

- policy juries which deliberate only on one specific piece of legislation, which then must be approved by a separate oversight jury before taking effect

- election by jury, where candidates are chosen by "elector juries" who interview and vet the candidates before selecting one

- multi-layer representative selection based on the Venetian model where randomly selected bodies elect representatives, of whom a random subset are chosen to then appoint officials

Right now the lottocratic/sortition-based bodies that exist are purely advisory, though in some places like Paris and Belgium they have gained a good amount of soft power.

It wouldn't be that hard to implement a conservative version of one of these in certain US states though. For example, add "elect by jury" to the ballot, where if it wins the plurality, a grand jury is convened to select the winner (counties in Georgia already use grand juries to appoint their boards of equalization, so there is precedent).

> Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind.

Since the linked article is to a substack called “Assemble America” I feel I should point out that if the apportionment House of Representatives had not been capped at 435 reps, the House would indeed be several thousand strong by now.

Was hubris and greed that set that limit. Can't be self-important if you're one amongst many.

That's what bicameral legislatures[1] were meant to address.

Ideally, the lower house are representatives elected from the common people, and the upper house are the career politicians that understand how the government works.

In the U.S., the 17th amendment[2] changed that, for better or worse (probably both).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...

Ideally, the upper house is gradually stripped of its powers, as it's undemocratic by design.

IIRC it's actually somewhat rare to have a bicameral legislature where both houses have roughly symmetrical powers.

"Undemocratic by design" applies to the whole Constitution, since everything in it requires supermajorities to change. A legislature is undemocratic in that it restricts voting to representatives. Due process is another constraint on democracy. This is to say that "undemocratic" is not necessarily a bug, since pure democracy is rule by the whim of the mob.

Is that ideal for a bicameral legislature's ability to mitigate the risk of populist takeover? Or a step on the way to the ideal of direct democracy?

> the idea of a randomized group of citizens making the law of the land scares the heck out of me.

Here in the US, we use randomized groups of citizens to determine who gets locked away potentially for life or executed. Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?

> Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?

Honestly, yes. In the case of criminal culpability, it just happens to be the least scary of the available options of who gets to send someone to jail.

For lawmaking, this isn't the case: the work for lawmakers is much more detailed and gameable than a binary question of guilt.

> Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?

Those are screened.

Someone like https://youtu.be/00q5cax96yU?t=60 could be selected without some additional constraints than plain sortition. Ofc then those constraints are politicized.

okay, well that guy won an election so clearly it's possible even without sortition. If people are picked at random then the likelihood of getting some wacko is lower rather than higher, because wackos are more highly motivated to try to act on their wackadoo policies and because of the way voting is implemented, that wouldn't really be a problem for them because it no longer appears to be disqualification for a politician to be crazy, and the crazy ones are the ones who run. On the flip side, the actual rate of totally crazy people across the entire population is likely to be smaller than you expect and random selection would represent the underlying rate of wackos in the public. If it turns out that the rate of wackos is so high that like, 51 percent of your legislature is hearing voices in their head and living like Diogenes, then representative democracy isn't going to help you either.

Regardless of how the average person may feel about it on a surface level, I think it's absolutely critical that congress has so many lawyers elected. These people write laws, we need people who actually understand the way law works doing that job.

Elected representatives do not write laws. Their legislative aides write the laws. While some state governments have highly professionalized legislative aides, in the federal government, such positions are typically poorly paid stepping stone jobs filled by people in their late 20s/early 30s who have little domain expertise.

Not true.

The majority of the bills are written by lobbyists. Most of the bills introduced are so called "copycat" bills.

USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.

Special interests sometimes work to create the illusion of expert endorsements, public consensus or grassroots support. One man testified as an expert in 13 states to support a bill that makes it more difficult to sue for asbestos exposure. In several states, lawmakers weren’t told that he was a member of the organization that wrote the model legislation on behalf of the asbestos industry, the American Legislative Exchange Council.

https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...

That is good for the form, OTOH the content (objet of the law, which is almost more important, one can argue) is more often that not, not related to the field where lawyers are experts (from sociology to engineering, through economics and medicine) that is typically handled by expert’s consultants, comities, etc.

So bottom line, I’m not so sure is so important that representatives are laywers. Maybe a good mix should be ok?

Maybe it is time to change how laws work if you need trained experts to understand them. Seems extremely harmful to everyone else who is not lawyer.

Any adversarial system that exists for a long time has such issues. Go pull up the rulebook for any professional sport.

Ambiguities get adjudicated and then built into the next version of the rulebook and so it goes with laws. Terms are given specific meaning over time by court decision and are used as boilerplate.

In practice it creates a very strong incentive to write laws in a way that reinforces the "rule of lawyers", creating an exclusionary positive feedback loop.

Given that legalese is still commonly prone to interpretation. I‘d rather have more Mathematics and Computer science people to ensure proper logic in the texts ;-)

might as well throw in some "red team" types to propose potential loopholes/grey areas.

Aren't most of those lawyers the select few that can afford to go into politics?

Our elected reps neither write nor even read the laws that are passed. Laws are written by lobbyists and aides, if we're lucky with direction from the representatives.

Have you ever really paid attention to the members of the US House of Representatives?

There are some strong outliers but most are way below the bar of random selection. Do-nothing political nepo babies who are nothing but loud and in a gerrymandered district.

That's due to politics being a team sport, and everyone, including the voters, understanding that it's a team sport.

Getting your team control of a branch of government is way more important than having a 'good' rep in your district, because if you don't, they won't have any ability to do anything for it anyways.

If you couldn't get someone you wanted in the primaries, you just have to hold your nose, close your eyes, lie back, and vote for whomever made it through.

Whether this results in long term problems is a bit of an academic question, given that every election in the past decade is one where you either get to vote for the status quo, or an insane cult of personality.

Alberta has been struggling with this lately, the province on the whole keeps voting in 90% or more Conservative MPs, but Canada on the whole puts the Liberal party in charge. And so Albertans get frustrated that they don't feel like they've got any voice in things.

Little do they realize that a more proportional system that would have them elect reps from the "bad" party in order to get them reps in the ruling party to advocate internally for Alberta does have benefits...

1. Canadian elections outside of Alberta have a different dynamic because they are a three/four horse race - and in certain election cycles, they have a lot of strategic voting (this last one was a good example of it).

2. Canadian Liberals aren't US MAGA, when they win an election they don't spend six months in caucus to figure out how they can do their best to punish the provinces and people that didn't vote for them.

There's a lot of far-right propaganda in Alberta that implies #2 is happening, but it's not actually factual. Its oil & gas sector has reached record output under the Trudeau government, and Carney is not exactly looking to kill it, either.

Transfer payments are really the only legitimate grievance Alberta should have with the federal government. All of its other problems are either imagined, self-inflicted, are caused by other provinces, or are caused by the US.

> All of its other problems are... caused by other provinces

I'm going to gently push back on that one a bit. Partially, yes, but also in part due to the federal government deferring to provinces in cases where it actually has the constitutional authority to override them.

>> because if you don't, they won't have any ability to do anything for it anyways.

Well seems even the "home team" cant do anything either, so why not go for better candidates.

When I was in 4th grade, we struggled with public education, healthcare, etc. Now I have 4th graders of my own and they struggle with the same issues. No progress in a generation.

I think it could work well if you added two things:

1. A filtering mechanism after the selection process. E.g., basic civics questions like how many states are there, a background check, and so on. To make sure you don't pick anyone that's compromised or incapable of serving.

2. A training program that acclimates new members to the system. If terms are say, six years long, then the first year can be entirely devoted to training.

> A training program that acclimates new members to the system. If terms are say, six years long, then the first year can be entirely devoted to training.

A more organic version of this would be to select at random from people who already served at a lower level. Pick random citizens for city council, then for state you pick from the pool of people who have been city councillors in the past, then for country you pick from people who have already served at the state level. You could, in addition, add past picks to a "veteran pool" to ensure a small percentage of the legislature has been there before and can suffuse their experience.

> 1. A filtering mechanism after the selection process. E.g., basic civics questions like how many states are there, a background check, and so on. To make sure you don't pick anyone that's compromised or incapable of serving.

This is a famously bad idea for U.S. politics.

Like, if you started a grass roots organization with this as your #1 idea, you'd have to eventually dismantle the entire edifice as 100% of your time would be spent answering questions about how this is different than tactics of the Jim Crow era. You'd also make yourself radioactive to any future grassroots efforts: e.g., "Citizens for an Educated Congress: wait a sec, is this that Jim Crow Guy again?" :)

I don’t see any need for that. There are enough weirdos in politics today that the weirdo rate might even go down when selecting people at random.

This training thingy sounds sensible. But who controls the contents of the training? That body will have quite some power.

Could just make it as a public-based majority referendum type thing, and keep it extremely simple. I don't think it would need to be very complicated. You just want to filter out the truly insane people.

The actually dangerous people are not the obviously insane, but the machiavellian dark triad types. Those will pass your test.

I think the current political system probably selects more for that type of person than my proposed randomized one, in which they are far less likely to be chosen vs. an average well-adjusted person.

The idea in this that appeals to me is that the institutions cannot afford to have poorly-educated citizens.

But I don't see how this fixes the problem currently plaguing US politics which is that elected representatives are passing bulls designed by lobbyists that the representatives don't understand well.

Yep, I can get behind sortition between qualified candidates.

I disagree with your example, but things like deciding supreme court justices over the population of judges or department heads over the population of professors seem quite ok.

For lawmaking in particular, it looks like a bad idea. There will be lots of people trying to con the uninformed representatives into behaving badly.

They don’t make law. It’s purely advisory. The two main purposes are for politicians to try to avoid responsibility for making decisions and consensus laundering. The secretariat has been really great at picking facilitators that will get the right recommendations through though they put their thumb on the scales too hard with the last referendums to amend the constitution and two proposals were defeated.

I've long been in favor of sortition, but with (as suggested in the article) a set of qualifying criteria.

Not selecting absolute random people, but people who have established their ability to intelligently handle responsibility, and avoid breaking the law. E.g., once you have achieved a certain level of educational attainment (3.0+ at well-ranked college, managerial-level at established biz, certain mil leadership rank, etc.), pass security clearance, pass citizenship test, etc., you are in the qualified pool, and may be called upon to serve in a legislature. The always-a-newbie problem could be solved by allowing legislators to serve 2nd or maybe 3rd terms by re-election/confidence vote. Same for POTUS, possibly selected by sortition out of the existing legislators who pass a confidence vote.

There is no way a reasonably and responsibly selected random group of achieving responsible people would do worse than a corrupt or craven group, especially worse than the selected-for-corruption — i.e., selected for loyalty-to-leader — currently seated.

What you're proposing would be swiftly corrupted by the people in power deciding what qualifies as "educated enough" or "security clearance".

Accept anyone from Jebus University with its miraculous 100% graduation rate, exclude anyone with a record of "Disrespecting an Officer", and the pool is quickly skewed, a reinforcing feedback-loop in favor of the groups doing the skewing.

True, you cannot start sortition as a good means of re-distributing power in an already centralized system.

It is a method to help maintain a balanced distributon of power, not created it when already gone awry.

In democracies, the branches of govt, legislative, executive, & judicial, and the institutions of society including the press, academia, industry, finance, sport, religion, etc. are all independent and serve to distribute and balance power. In autocracies, all of those are corrupted and/or coerced to serve the whims of the executive.

So, of course, an already-powerful centralized executive would be able to corrupt it as you describe.

But it seems much more difficult to make it happen in a well-balanced system, particularly when some have the responsibility to ensure ongoing fairness.

Do you have a better solution?

I feel that adding qualifying criteria is an attempt to solve a problem that hasn't been demonstrated to exist, in a way that hasn't been demonstrated to work. The main threat to a well-functioning society are people acting in bad faith. We will never be able to test effectively for those, and they will try to game any criteria we set up. Besides, uneducated people may not be very effective in coming up with solutions, but their presence is important to remind educated people of their existence.

If we want to be very careful about a reform like this, we should test it at a smaller scale, such as a city for instance. We can start without any criteria and see if that works well enough. If it does, no need to overcomplicate things.

>>adding qualifying criteria

It is not merely adding qualifying criteria, it is setting qualifications AND sortition to select legislators and executives.

>>solve a problem that hasn't been demonstrated to exist ...The main threat to a well-functioning society are people acting in bad faith.

Your second sentence there is entirely correct, and specifically disproves the first. We have a problem

>>we should test it at a smaller scale, such as a city for instance

100% agree, we should test and adjust any changes before scaling up

>>start without any criteria and see if that works well enough

We've pretty much demonstrated that it doesn't

>>uneducated people may not be very effective in coming up with solutions, but their presence is important to remind educated people of their existence.

We do not need to hand uneducated people the keys to power to be reminded of their existence, any more than we should give loaded handguns to toddlers to be reminded of their existence. Intelligent people suitable for leadership can remember the existence of both just fine, thank you. Moreover, with qualified sortition, the selection is random so it is highly likely that qualified, educated, accomplished people who are adjacent to people with issues will be p[ut in power and able to do something for them

But you can't evaluate it in a vacuum. It needs to be compared to the current state of affairs, and to other realistic alternatives.

Our political system effectively selects for sociopathic con men. So would you prefer your laws to be written by those people vs a random group?

Two relevant quotes from writers who could not be more different:

“I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” - William F Buckley Jr

“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” - Douglas Adams

The US system is biased towards rural areas and swing states because of the electoral college. Randomness would average out to the will of the people. Like unbiased path tracing, you know?

I saw someone on HN suggest the Supreme Court should just be randomly selected sets of federal judges on a case by case basis. Less opportunity for bribery and political games.

It's an interesting idea, I've kicked something similar around with politically-minded friends for years. I don't know that a completely random group is the answer, but a hybrid approach might solve some critical problems:

- A largely unrecognized problem with our legislature here in the US is vote inflation: the number of representatives in Congress has fallen way behind the population growth, so that one rep is shared by a much larger group of constituents, devaluing the individual vote of each constituent and making it less likely that a given voter has a personal connection with their legislator.

- The increasing partisanship has reduced the number moderate and independent voices in the legislature.

We could increase the number of representatives in Congress by tripling the number of reps from each district, which would bring the rep-to-voter ratio back more in line with where it was when it was essentially frozen in 1929. Then one of those new reps would be chosen at random from a pool. Since the distribution of moderates in the general population is much higher than in Congress, this should have the effect of moderating partisanship.

I would argue that sortition is Democracy. From a purely technical point of view to be anti-sortition is to be anti-democracy, which is fine I guess but begs a lot of questions.

From a practical point of view the selection process is a bit of a red herring though. The current controls break down because the feedback loop is simply way too long to meaningfully affect the process.

While I personally subscribe to the idea that sortition is a superior way of electing representatives I don't see people considering it seriously. However what everyone can understand is using the same process but with sampling with a higher frequency.

In politics, sure. The way the headline is framed you can draw a similar parallel to genetic competition as well though. There are elements of both biodiversity and randomness required for successful genetic evolution

This could realistically incur the same issue as term limits, where you end up moving power and know how away from visible (no matter how flawed) and (somewhat) accountable elected official to the staff and interest groups that are not subject to such limits

I do like sortition for certain scenarios (definitely favour that over a referendum for instance), but I think it'd work better as something that either has to veto some piece of law or can offer amendments or the likes

> The legislature should be replaced with an assembly of citizens picked by lottery.

that sounds like jury duty selection, in the US anyway, and juries are famously dysfunctional at times, with a single member ignoring the rules and trial and just voting politically.

That would be less of a problem in a legislature, where you don't need unanimity and there aren't any comparable rules about how you are supposed to vote.

good point!

Do members have right to vote according to their conscience?

If yes - why is that a problem? They stick to the overarching rule, and you should argue the rules must be amended.

If not - that's a huge problem IMO and can be summarised with "why pretend jury has any say If they must not stray from the way the case is presented and defended (knowing very well how awful public defense is and how dishonest sometimes police and prosecution can be)" and not replace it with just a judge?

My pet unorthodox position is also sortition, with an added (possibly transitionary) twist: hold elections and do it for non-voters, for a non-voter share of seats.

You can decide to vote, in which case you're removed from the sortition candidate pool. If you don't vote you're in the pool. A common representative body is formed at respective percentages.

This basically makes it so politicians have to race against "some random schmuck". If they can convince people they can do better, nice. Otherwise... too bad.

Of course some people will vote just to get out of the pool, but I think that's fine too.

Compulsory voting kinda solves some of these problems.

Haha, mine too.

It would probably make sense to start with a new new "house" or something.

Might even make sense to have some quotas (at least 50% women etc.), so the whole things doesn't have to get to Chinese government size to reflect the populus.

That or pepple would have to be replaced with high frequency

If it's truly random, it should already be 50-52% female.

If it comes out 10% female every sortition cohort, you know some funny business is going on.

If the sample size is low, it could come out at 10% purely at random, but that is still likely to undermine confidence in the system (in the immediate). Pragmatically, I think it makes sense to have quotas for a few protected classes, to maximize perception of fairness.

Isn't this a question of how many people you select?

Sure.

My point is that so is the percentage of males in any sortition cohort.

Therefore, a consistent female census of 10% or less in all sortition cohorts, would be as unlikely as a consistent male census of 10% or less in all sortition cohorts.

In other words, having one sortition cohort result in 10% males would not be suspicious. Having every sortition cohort result in 10% males would be suspicious in the extreme. So much so that we should start looking for whoever is "putting their finger on the scale" so to speak.

I think in practice this would just lead to a class of staffers who actually ran everything.

Yikes, no! Just look at the initiatives that get on the ballot. Most have serious failings of understanding how the system works.

Ballot propositions have a number of shortcomings that sortition-based legislatures won't necessarily fall into:

   - Most people filling out their ballots aren't spending very much time on each prop -- they'll typically either vote based on their gut reaction to the title of the prop,  follow a voter guide from an advocacy group they want to align with, or just vote based on whose advertising campaign was most influential.
   - Ballot props, at least in CA, are pretty much directly pay-to-play. There's a price tag for getting a prop onto the ballot, because signature gathering companies charge per signature. (Though at least in SF, conservative ballot props cost more per signature because there aren't as many conservatives to sign. This implies there's _some_ correlation between the cost and the popularity of a particular proposition.)
   - Ballot props are both high-latency and low-bandwidth. Coupled with the fact that they often cannot be overridden except by another ballot prop, and we're basically stuck with any flaw in the bill that passes (unless it's egregious enough that someone's willing to foot the bill for another round of signature gathering and advertising, which will cost about as much as it did for the original bill.)
   - Ballot props don't go through several rounds of amendment before being passed, nor do they really have any debate; there's just a single round of "should this be on the ballot" followed by a single round of "should this be law". This means flawed bills are more likely to end up on the ballot. Because of the high latency mentioned above, voters are often stuck with a choice between a bad solution and no solution to whatever problem the ballot prop is trying to solve.

And this says nothing about the amount of thought that goes into writing a ballot measure.

Maybe more people would have understanding of how the system works in such a system.

Though "participatory democracy" sounds like "direct democracy", they are distinct.

]Further, by eliding deliberation, the initiative process is the worst kind of direct democracy. Except for mob rule, of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_democracy

The OP narrowly focuses on the calculus (?) of how randomly choosing reps actually promotes meritocracy.

This wiki article is a good overview of the whole burrito.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens'_assembly

I’m worried that sort of thing ends up like Jury Duty where anyone actually qualified to think deeply about the case is doing everything in their power specifically to not be selected and waste their time. The pay is shockingly low and it can be a huge disrupter if you run your own small business.

IMO you'd want this to pay pretty well, like 95th percentile income, to help ensure that most people would actually _want_ to serve.

Just give it the same income as current congress representatives. That's already a 90th percentile income.

95th%ile income, given to people with randomly distributed incomes? first law they pass: "we get to keep this job, we need to get rid of sortition, it'll never work!"

This is a strawman. Since this body would be organized by the constitution, it can trivially eliminate that risk by just setting a duration of their term, which they would not be able to overturn.

same type of strawman as inequitable distribution of wealth being a problem, or highest achieving members of society especially those born with advantages do not make good stewards of government

Sortion is the term for selecting people for office randomly, Demarchy is the term for a system of government in which people are selected that way.

i've always thought a jury should be used instead of a supreme court. if the law people had their chance and couldn't settle an issue, kick it to the people.

So no elections?

That's the question, right?

Citizens' assembly makes policy. But then who implements it?

I (currently) believe that we'd still need executives, still need some kind of balance of powers.

So I'm okay w/ electing mayors, sheriffs, governors, etc. Perhaps even multi-seat roles; something between a council and a mayor.

Assuming, of course, we use approval voting for execs, PR for councils.

As long as they can pass some basic education and civics tests, sure.

I agree, but I’m not convinced that 100% of current Reps could pass a civics test.

sortition is a more general concept.

Not fully replaced, but some percentage should be reserved for sortition. This can increase efficiency and break deadlocks, like two party rule.

With a little back-of-the-envelope math, this would mean that congress would contain:

> 9 members with IQs under 70 (i.e. mentally handicapped) > 52 members with IQs under 85 > 217 members at or under an IQ of 100 > 370 members with an IQ below the (presumptive) current congressional average of ~115

Congress is terrible, but it's hard to imagine it could be improved by making it less intelligent.

If you could incorporate the OP's point about limited eligibility and "directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool", then a "random" process would likely be superior to elections.

If you have fifty bright and highly competent people, I'm skeptical that adding fifty idiots is going to make much of a difference. Most idiots will accept meritocratic authority if they can be convinced that their needs are taken into account (which they should). Some will obstruct, but probably not enough to significantly derail anything, and the good-faith idiots will bring information and perspectives that wouldn't be considered if they weren't there, so they aren't exactly useless.

In fact, I would argue that idiots in elected bodies are a lot more likely to do damage than random idiots, because they are more likely to be narcissists, and being elected boosts their sense of self-worth. And of course, the most damage is often caused by the most intelligent of them, because the main problem is acting in bad faith, not a lack of wits.

[flagged]

The ditch? You're alive in the greatest year in the entirety of human history to be alive.

> Yet for whatever reason, when one's immediate personal interests are abstracted away, it becomes more difficult to be honest about such things.

I think you have major issues with relating to other people if you’re throwing around words like idiot while expecting us to take you seriously. You’re being honest right now, and it makes me think your views are un-American, and it makes me think that you don’t understand the Constitution at all. It makes me feel that we do not have shared values or common cause. I don’t know why you think that this kind of thinking is what the US needs more of, especially to get “back on track” whatever that might mean.

> When we're ready to have this discussion about the franchise in general, we might actually begin the process of pulling our civilization out of the ditch and getting it back on track!

I will not allow you to limit my franchise or that of any other citizen, so help me. Your comment is bad and you should feel bad.

Scary stuff.

As I got older, I've leaned more and more into meritocracy.

If we did something like this in the US, we'd have quite a religious/irrational group of leaders. Whereas with a meritocracy, you have at least some filter. The status quo requires politicians to have a bit of an understanding of human nature. Its not flawless, I've seen inferior people beat superiors by using biases, but these were relatively equal races. I've also seen idiots run for office and never catch steam.

We can also look at history and see that society's that did anything with such equal democratic distribution were less efficient than those who had some sort of merit.

This one specifically is amusing because in my opinion you do have quite a religious/irrational group of leaders in the US.

But that's not to say that wouldn't also be the case otherwise.

The fundamental problem with any purportedly meritocratic arrangement is that you need someone to define the evaluation criteria for what "merit" is, and then someone else to administer the examination. Both are vulnerabilities in the system that lead to formation of a "merit caste" (which sets and enforces standards that favor its members) in the long run, as evidenced by historical examples of states that tried explicit meritocracy.

you need someone to define the evaluation criteria for what "merit" is

simple: let voters decide. that is, eliminate the concept of pre-selected candidates and let voters select candidates from the entire population. if you need 10 people, give everyone 10 votes. everyone has a different idea what merrit is, but by giving everyone multiple votes the people for which the most voters think they have merrit will emerge as the winners of the election.

I don't think the result would be functionally very different from what we have at the moment. You'd still end up with a slate of candidates that have enough money (or are provided enough money by interest groups) to have the largest megaphone, and the competition would then be among them.

In any case, that's just a more chaotic form of representative democracy. It's most certainly not meritocratic in any sense.

Then you just reinvented the democracy we already have, with the problems we're trying to solve.

Voters thought Donald Trump and Joe Biden had merit. Clearly the voters are not a trustworthy source of discernment.

That is not because voters are stupid. It is because they are rationally ignorant. Why spend hours researching the issues and candidates for a 1 in 10 million chance of having an impact? It makes no sense. However, if we instead convened "elector juries" of a couple hundred randomly selected citizens and gave them the resources to carefully research and vet the candidates before deliberating on who is best, I think they would do a pretty good job.

> Voters thought Donald Trump and Joe Biden had merit. Clearly the voters are not a trustworthy source of discernment.

It isn't about being discerning. If you are going to vote and you are a swing/politically agnostic voter in a two party system (like the US/UK) you have the following three choices really:

* Vote for the least bad candidate / lesser of two evils.

* Protest Vote. In the US this would be probably the Libertarian Party / Green Party. In England this would be Reform / Liberal Democrats / Greens etc.

* Spoil the Ballet / Abstain from voting.

Red/Blue Team diehards aren't worth talking about as they don't decide elections. It is the swing voters.

> Why spend hours researching the issues and candidates for a 1 in 10 million chance of having an impact? It makes no sense.

It makes no sense because you have two actual choices (Red Team / Blue Team) or effectively to choose to not participate.

Additionally most politically agnostic that are over the age of 30 have worked out that you get shafted whoever you vote for.

I mean, that's just a popularity contest. People with the greatest media presence will get the most votes, because they are known by the most people. Even if I had a very precise idea of what merit was to me, I have no idea who in the world would best fit my criterion and I wouldn't be able to vote for them.

But the current metric of merit is "ability to win elections". That gives us representatives who are not there to make things better, but to set themselves up to win the next election. This sometimes means, for example, prolonging the problem that they got elected to solve, because they can use that problem to win the next election.

"As I got older, I've leaned more and more into meritocracy"

Sad thing is, that it's impossible.

Typically we settle in moneytocracy…

We do have the persistent cultural myth that money = merit[1][2], so it's not entirely different.

1. Acres of Diamonds. Russell Conwell. 1900. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rconwellacresofdia...

2. The Gospel of Wealth. Andrew Carnegie. 1889. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gospel_of_Wealth

MHO: the myth is broader: that everybody gets more or less what he deserves. I have heard many times, justification of why person X is poor, pointing he is lazy, wastes money in alcohol, etc. but I have seen poor people, and is (typically) not the case. The problem is, when people is poor, there are no pleasures, often only alcohol is a way out. Only people who were there or had vey near people in that situation understand what is like to be poor…

OTOH, people think that rich people made it by hard working.

I’m not saying there is no correlation whatsoever. But there is much less than most think, and great amounts of luck playing a bigger role, including, but not limited to, where you were born, family, contacts, etc.

The belief in a just world is a collective coping mechanism that protects us from the ugly truth of cosmic injustice and the reality that the only justice we have in the world is that which we make.

Often the people who benefit from injustice are the very ones we've tasked with creating justice. It's easier to believe justice will appear on its own than to face the mess of making it ourselves.

Any discussion of sortition in politics needs at least a mention of Harrison Bergeron.

This perspective under-appreciates the role of a leader's charisma when it comes to attracting staff that will actually execute the ideas of that leader.

Anyone who has worked in a presidential administration (or a congressional office) can tell you that a leader is effective if and only if they have staff that believes in their message and agenda, and that is willing and able to execute on that agenda.

The practical reality here is that charisma isn't just a way of gaming the "getting elected" part of the job, it's also a requirement to be effective at the job.

I think you didn't get to the part of how it would work in practice. It's not that the leader is selected randomly, it is that the people that select positions are randomly chosen. Also, your criticism only is valid if everyone through that being able to sell an idea is critical for the leader. The leader role is to manage the resources to accomplish the goal of the team, what the goal of the team is, is up to the team to decide.

Yes, especially as prime minister or president, you need to be the face of the country. For everyone: not just your party. And while listening to the public is an important part of the job, sometimes you also need to explain things to the public. Same with ministers, to a slightly lesser degree.

I feel one downside of a district-based system like in the US is that it's harder to build up a healthy mix of representatives, where some are more on the charismatic side and others more on the technical "policy wonk" side. Everyone needs to win their own elections, so it's biased too much towards the charismatic side.

Article suffers a bit from the common hackernews intellectual bias.

Besides the curious absence of the word 'sortition'. Their historical examples are mostly totally wrong or missing key bits of nuance. Their example of picking the Doge of Venice misses that the convoluted process of "randomly" picking the doge isn't that random. They randomly choose electors only from the great families and randomly choose candidates from the great families and then choose. This is like if we chose the President my randomly choosing electors amongst the Senate, Governor, and the House, who would then choose candidates from amongst that same group, then randomly choose electors to decide amongst the candidates. Their example of hereditary monarchy assumes that murder and killing off competitors was common, however in European history that was pretty rare (instead putting them in the church was the way to thin the herd). If anything switch from gavelkind (all sons get a claim and split the lands between them) and going to a pure primogeniture succession greatly reduced said murdering and warring by reducing claimants.

My experience with KPIs also doesn't match the poster. KPIs are mostly ignored and it ends up going back to relationships and who has a better "deck" of accomplishments each year.

I think they're trying to keep it readable to people who don't know the terms.

I can say "sortition" and "ranked choice voting" and "LVT" and you'd understand what I mean, but to get a broad audience it pays to break it down into concrete ideas like "Random elections" and "More than two political parties" and "Why are we paying landlords to speculate on empty lots?"

> Besides the curious absence of the word 'sortition'.

Do you mean in common use? Wikipedia has a nice page on that [1]. There are also many papers on that [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sort...

The person just never says the word sortition. Its ends up feeling strange because it means either the person is trying to make this concept seem more their own, or they are that unaware.

* Campbell's Law (a variant of Goodhart's Law) states that the more a metric is used for social decision-making, the more it will be subject to corruption which distorts and corrupts not only the metric itself, but the very social processes it was meant to measure *

I just had a friend complain to me about LeetCode, saying that it's meaningless since everyone just mindlessly grinds the problem sets.

I pointed out to him that it's called studying for the test.

that's true, but are you trying to measure people's ability to study for the test?

You can't really avoid that, but you can try to align it with the set of knowledge and skills that you actually want.

I did k-12 in the NYC Board of Education system (public school.) Some higher-end public high schools schools did randomized entry, which was a positive in my mind. The only selection was self selection into the lottery, where like-minded and ambitious students/families applied.

Unfortunately even that gets abused. I dont know how my process went, but I sure know how my kids' experience was. The school wont give you an application, or send you to the head office to apply (even though you can also apply in-school), or they will do the residency screening the last Friday of the application period (too bad if you happen not to be home on the day they visit.) They will sometimes ask you for original deeds or birth certificates (but your friends will tell you they werent asked for it.)

The randomness can be theatre to show public fairness, but in reality it is anything but random.

Maybe.

I was going to write more here but I think that actually sums it up well.

Success in anything (sports, politics, startups) has a luck element to it. By that I mean there were N other people who were just as capable or qualified as you and it was luck that selected you above them.

Luck of being born in the Bay Area and going to high school with people in the startup community.

Luck of not being hit by a bus and spending your critical early career years in physical therapy recovering.

Luck in meeting the right people while volunteering in your local political party event.

Luck in going to a different restaurant and so not getting a cold from a patron at your normal restaurant so you performed your best when a scout was at game three days later.

It doesn't surprise me that a bit of randomness from a qualified pool would pay off.

I recommend people read the book Good To Great by Jim Collins. The most admired leaders were the people who positioned themselves to receive admiration, but they also tended to be the least effective. Likewise the most effective leaders, according to various metrics, tended to be people who humbly avoided the media and self-promotion.

My take away from this is that uniformed people will believe exactly what you tell them to believe. The tremendous effort that goes into that distracts from the responsibilities or running an organization. So, don't let the unexperienced dictate the criteria for success. I see this a lot in software, people without experience attempting to artificially dictate the terms of success.

The first time I read "Solar Lottery" by P. K. Dick I thought "there's no way this lottery system could work for selecting authorities."

But as I read on, the Minimax system sounded surprisingly similar to some real scientific concepts, so I investigated and realized it wasn't such a stupid idea - just one with no chance of being implemented.

Now I'm reading about it here, thank you for reminding me of that concept!

> In principle, good looks, oratory eloquence, a charming personality, well-connectedness, and personal wealth are not particularly useful to creating and executing government policy.

This ignores the fact that "getting people to agree to the policy" is, in fact, extremely important and highly dependent on charisma, eloquence, and the ability to identify and form influential connections. This position imagines human politics devoid of politics and humans.

You're conflating the creation and execution, and overstating the role of salesmanship in the latter. Which is actually a huge part of the issue with contemporary politics. Instead of coming up with policy that a majority agree on, there's quite an emphasis on finding the right Stepford Smiler to sell whatever those who have influential connections want. In what will likely become an evergreen case study, see the recent NYC mayoral primary (though, in this case, they could barely get Cuomo to smile).

Suffice it to say, I don't want my phone jockeys taking on engineering duties.

The underlying assumption here seems to be that there is no or even negative value in someone actively specializing their labor into politics, and I just don't think that's true. To the extent we have to "do politics" at all [1], it's probably best handled by the people who have dedicated their lives to becoming politicians, the same way that getting your house wired is probably best done by someone who spent their life becoming an electrician.

In fact, if anything, this system seems like it would be even easier to game compared to the status quo. If you select truly at random from the population you're going to pull a lot of people with not a lot in the way of resources, making for a very easy to bribe block, even if you have to repeat the bribes every few years as people shuffle through. If you don't - if you select randomly from, say, only the group of people who got perfect scores on the SATs, or from white land owning males - you're practically begging for tacit collusion as they realize they have essentially the same power that HOAs do when it comes to what we'll do next. Democratically elected politicians at least have enough sense to understand they have to balance their short run desires with their long run interests in continuing to be democratically elected politicians.

[1]: Which I don't admit we should in the first place, cf https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm for one reason why.

> best handled by the people who have dedicated their lives to becoming politicians, the same way that getting your house wired is probably best done by someone who spent their life becoming an electrician

Being an electrician makes you good at wiring houses in ways that work, that pass code inspections, and that don't burn down. The feedback loop isn't perfect (you're likely to succeed for a while if you produce flawed work fast that looks good enough to your boss), but it's at least feeding back in the right direction.

Being a politician makes you good at different things - fundraising, advertising, speeches, getting your name in the news - which are totally unrelated or even opposed to creating and executing legislation that is good for society. Sortition says that this relationship is so bad that the outcome under a lottery (the 50th percentile, eliminating the 49% of the population who would be better than average at the job) results in better outcomes than career politicians.

This is an incredibly limited understanding of what "politics" entails and also seems to be primarily informed by the outcome of the US political system.

Most politicians outside the narrow world of US national (or otherwise high-profile) politics have very little contact with fundraising or advertising and few will ever give a speech to more than a handful of people. I.e. most parliamentarian democracies are chuck full of politicians that even most of their direct constituents couldn't name with a gun to their heads, even at the national level.

In these kind of systems, actual expertise is really important and political parties will cultivate subject-matter experts and provide them with secure seats or list positions without necessarily putting them into front-row politics. It's just the smart thing to do, if you actually want to have any effect after winning an election.

> If you select truly at random from the population you're going to pull a lot of people with not a lot in the way of resources, making for a very easy to bribe block, even if you have to repeat the bribes every few years as people shuffle through.

This is incorrect: elected politicians are much easier to bribe, because bribery of them is totally legal via campaign contributions. It's both expected and indeed necessary for politicians to ask for and take large amounts of money from others for their job.

Policing corruption of randomly selected citizens would be much easier, because the expectation is that none of them would be asking for money or accepting money for their jobs. With strict auditing, anything out of the ordinary would be pretty easy to spot. The problem with the current system is that vast transfers of money to legislators are perfectly ordinary.

Also, with random selection, the odds are higher of finding one or more inherently honest and ethical people who will blow the whistle if there's some kind of mass bribery scheme. But our current pay-to-play election system is a mass bribery scheme. Ask any politician how much time they spend fundraising: it's just a crazy % of their time. You may think politicians are lazy because they take so many breaks from legislating, but they're actually taking breaks to go out and fundraise.

Anyway, I think it's a misconception that poorer people are easier to bribe than richer people. It's also a misconception that richer people are "more successful". In my experience, richer people tend to be more obsessed with money. Many average people just want to be happy, have a family, have friends, enjoy life. They are satisfied with what they have. The only purpose of their job is to make it possible for them to go home from their job. Whereas people at the top never seem to be satisfied with what they have and always want more, more, more.

The French government and private interest groups alike attempted to manipulate the Citizens Convention for Climate back in 2019 and were not successful fwiw. When lobbyists tried to approach delegates outside the convention, they were quickly snitched on. Existing legal frameworks for preventing corruption among jurors and elected officials should suffice to protect assemblies from similar influence attempts.

Would you necessarily know if they were successful? Can you actually prove that not a single person in that convention accepted some kind of kickback for e.g. changing their vote?

Mechanisms that effectively prevent this do exist in the literature, to be clear, but I rarely hear of those ones actually getting implemented.

Well we mostly know what positions these groups were pushing for. It's possible that some influence went unnoticed.

That said, the US used to have quite a lot of juror bribery in the late 1800s and managed to successfully crack down on it with harsh penalties, sting operations, and other strategies. Attempting to bribe a juror can get you 15 years in federal prison in the US, it's not taken lightly.

What does it mean to be "good at doing politics", though?

In a representative democracy, because of the very nature of the selection process at hand, it means "getting elected at all costs". Which is not all the same - and in many cases directly counter to - the desired goal of "governing well".

I support the idea of sortition, which appears to be guiding idea behind "Assembling America". However, I'm not quite sure what this has to do with meritocracy.

From my perspective, the fundamental justification for sortition is that randomly selected citizens are more representative of the general public and, crucially, less corrupt and corruptible on average than elected representatives.

Why less corrupt? Because I think people who seek power are more corrupt and self-centered on average than those who have power thrust upon them. Why less corruptible? Because randomly selected citizens don't have to fundraise for political campaigns, and they are merely temporary occupants of their seats, not running for reelection and becoming career politicians. As far as I'm concerned, political campaign contributions are legalized bribery. It would be easier to police citizen legislator corruption, because we allow crap from elected officials—campaign contributions, gifted travel, post-legislator lobbying jobs—that we really should make totally illegally and jailable. A lot of "working class" politicians suddenly become super-wealthy after leaving office, and we all know it's quid pro quo. Just outright ban that crap and strictly audit former legislators.

> However, I'm not quite sure what this has to do with meritocracy.

Meritocracy is one of those nonsense words like "rationalism" or "objectivism" that means "just do the obviously right thing". Like "democratic" and "republic" it's more about the flavor and the mouthfeel than anything concrete.

So I think some US right-wingers have been using "meritocracy" as a fig leaf for hurting their usual victims - Poor people, old people, children, women, queer people, black people, brown people, etc. - While saying "Oh we just think that the most qualified people should be in charge" even though their qualification is like, being a billionaire white supremacist, and not actually going to law school or being a good person at all.

So then the online left wing response is somewhere between "What they're doing isn't really meritocracy, because they've appointed pathetically underqualified justices to the Supreme Court following an obvious agenda that they explicitly said they would follow" (True but too sophisticated to fit on a protest sign) and "Meritocracy is bad, actually" (Too deep in the words of Leftist Theory to gather an audience, but online leftists might agree with it)

So the article is saying "Doing a naive first-order meritocracy results in a system that is ripe for corruption and capture. If we add a lot of randomness, it will resist corruption, and then we'll get the meritocracy we actually want."

The ends justify the means. If it gets people to agree with my vision, I support any wording.

> Directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool. Set and maintain the eligibility standard (such as an exam) by randomly selected oversight board to keep it updated and prevent the standard from being manipulated or gamed.

We don't want to discourage people from improving once they've met the bar. Learning a skill is often logarithmically distributed: it costs just as much to learn the first 50% as the next 25% and so on. At a minimum, to keep people cost-agnostic, we need

    d/dx Pr(selected | didn't learn x%) ~ log(x%)

    selection weight = [x log x - x + 1] * C

The Complicated Business of Electing a Doge

https://www.theballotboy.com/electing-the-doge

I’ve long thought college admissions should be done randomly from a pool of eligible candidates.

There is just no evidence that like 50 point differences in admissions tests are predictive of anything.

I think the issue is that the (American) standardized tests don't differentiate well enough. About 10,000 American high school graduates earn a 36 on the ACT or 1580+ on the SAT each year. That's because the problems are much too easy—the very first round of MATHCOUNTS, a middle school math competition, is harder than the ACT or SAT math section. Rather than making the test harder, they make it trickier. It's like that exercise lots of us did in elementary school to learn to follow instructions, where they ask you to read through all the instructions first, ask you to do a bunch of random things, and then hidden in there somewhere is "ignore all the previous instructions and just write your name at the top of the paper". The test isn't hard, but you'll be prone to mess up if you haven't seen that style of testing before (for the SAT, it's 90sec/problem with problems that try to break your pattern recognition, e.g. what is 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10?).

An 800 on the math section is not enough to even predict if someone made it to the AIME, but it is enough to predict that they spent several weeks taking SAT math section practice tests. It's clearly failing to be predicative of anything the top universities should be looking for. It doesn't mean all standardized tests have to be. The AMC (and then the AIME + USAMO) are standardized tests that universities like MIT do accept scores from, and they actually get useful information from.

But why should it be harder? Why should the goal be to produce a fine gradation of ability?

Why not just evaluate a cut-off for “very likely to do well” and then make it random?

It’s not like the narrow set of skills measured by the test are all there is to doing well at university. They are never going to be fully predictive.

Well, your previous comment brought up the issue that 50 points on the SAT doesn't really predict anything universities care about. I was just trying to show how we could fix this problem by making the tests harder. I'm not claiming they're fully predictive, and that feels like moving the goalposts.

I'm very aware there are things a test can't measure. I feel like you should have been the one to bring up these things, but here are a few examples:

- Artistic creativity

- Maker ability

- Entrepeunership

- Political power

I think the issue is, since you didn't identify what a test is missing out on, you weren't sure how to take it into account with university admissions. I have a question for you: do you think someone who is just below the cutoff based on the test, but started a business worth $10m, just does not deserve to be entered into the lottery? That'd be propesterous. So, what is the solution? More holistic admissions that try to take into account these harder-to-put-a-number-on skills.

I was really just talking about evaluating students in their 3rd year of high school. There is really not all that much to go on in terms of drawing a really specific line with any precision. But they sure like to pretend.

Because it feels bad to know you didn't make the cut because you were unlucky since there's nothing you could have done better.

Sufficient preparation can mitigate low scores, they can't mitigate bad luck.

:s/preparation/wealth/g

I see that, but does it not feel equally bad to know you did not make the cut, despite being just as likely to succeed, because of wealth, race, religion, connections etc?

Yes, but generally speaking, those who lack wealth are not in positions of power, and therefore we can ignore them.

I believe that it worked somewhat fine in Athens (500th century BC): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion

Plus, you can't get much worse than the 2014 Committee for Science, Space and Technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPgZfhnCAdI

The obsession with meritocracy needs to be toned down a bit. In my opinion, the very idea of merit is fuzzy and lives right beside corruption and bias.

Merit is measured in imperfect ways, by other people, and fundamentally, we don't want a hierarchy of classes, even if we claim the higher rankings/elites have merited it.

Human dignity isn't contingent on outperforming others, and everyone would likely rather live somewhere that doesn't feel like constant competition is needed to enjoy leisure, food, shelter, pastimes, etc.

When it comes to who we should trust for critical work, taking decisions on our behalf, etc., we do want someone qualified. I find the idea of "qualification/qualified" much nicer than "merit". The latter seems to imply a deserved outsized reward, like it justifies not why you are given the responsibility of something important, but why you are allowed to be richer, higher ranking, etc., than others.

Meritocracy is simply a means of preventing elites from kicking the ladders down, nothing more, nothing less. Once the ladders are kicked down, which all elites will inevitablely try to do, society will start to stagnate, your country will start to fall behind the others, and your quality of life will start to rot.

The key here is that while meritocracy is championed as a means of finding the best, it in reality functions as a system to keep out the worst. You want harness the ambitions in people, even if not everyone's ambitions can actually be met, and you want to mitigate the harms of nepotism, even when eliminating it entirely is impossible.

So the difference between qualifications and merit evaluation are moot from my perspective, the question you need to ask is if whatever selection criteria you prefer is vulnerable to ladder kicking. If you preferred way is more vulnerable than the current system then you are putting the cart in front of the horse.

Also to make my position clear, I can't tell either way in regards to what you have suggested. As far as I was aware, we already select based on qualifications, so it's unclear to me what the exact change you are proposing is.

Yes, but the value system behind these matters to prevent the very thing you are talking about. What I am seeing is that the value system behind meritocracy is too close to my liking to self-appointed superiority. I am rich and powerful because I am the smartest, fastest, strongest, and worked the hardest. No one else deserves my position of power unless they too are rich, and if they are not rich, they are not smart and don't merit such position. The idea of merit I think can be subterfuged, old Egyptian leaders were thought to be Gods, so it was deemed they were the only ones that could merit to rule.

You get in a situation where no one questions the system that evaluated someone's merit, and that system becomes easy to control, so the criteria become that those that are already in power are the only ones that meets it.

> your country will start to fall behind the others, and your quality of life will start to rot

I think this idea also needs to be toned down, many countries have as good or better quality of life than the US and China, yet they are way down whatever competitive latter you want to look at, GDP, military power, land mass, etc. I think corruption as a metric correlates a lot more to QOL than any of those.

> I think corruption as a metric correlates a lot more to QOL than any of those

I see Meritocracy as a deterring force against corruption so I'm sensing some semantic discord here. A nation that starts to rot will be taken advantage of by external entities which will result in a drop on QoL. While GDP and such can somewhat approximate national power, they seem a bit tangential to the discussion imo, the point is rot invites parasites.

> What I am seeing is that the value system behind meritocracy is too close to my liking to self-appointed superiority. I am rich and powerful because I am the smartest, fastest, strongest, and worked the hardest. No one else deserves my position of power unless they too are rich, and if they are not rich, they are not smart and don't merit such position. The idea of merit I think can be subterfuged, old Egyptian leaders were thought to be Gods, so it was deemed they were the only ones that could merit to rule.

But that's the opposite of Meritocracy? Or rather, it's like you are confusing the cause and effort perhaps? It's an oppositional force to the default nepotistic hereditary nobility type systems, which will naturally emerge in every system that does not account for it, these are absolutes. Caveat being that the means of avoiding it are nuanced ofc.

The point is you design systems where positions of power are selected on (best effort) neutral criteria that at minimum narrows the candidate pool down in a way that the preserves a degree of instability, and through which helps prevent calcification of power structures. With a Meritocracy the criteria is via a demonstration of merit/qualifications/evidence you are the most capable for the position.

It does not give someone license to act as if their wealth justifies their position, that's just a simple narcissist. Meritocracy is just a good general principle to follow when designing the process of selection, it's not some complex ideology. Having power never implies you earned it, your merits do, and society is the judge of what exactly those merits are.

You also focus on wealth a lot so I'm wondering if you are primarily pushing back on the thought that having wealth qualifies as intellectual merit? Because if so I very much agree, but I also rarely see this from anyone but narcissists who don't even need a reason to think that in the first place, their conclusion came first. But maybe this is just a blind spot for me.

Money is power, and our modern economic system has made the liquidation of wealth into money easier than ever. It has helped shift power struggles from violent to competitive and allowed some innovative types of tax policy to become possible. But that doesn't make our economy a Meritocracy, what we have is closer to natural selection, where any snake can kill a lion and so on. The perks of capitalism are entirely from it's ability to parry these inevitable power struggles into something society can gain a net benefit from through the innovation that arises from healthy competition. It's impossible to eliminate the power struggles themselves though, those are human nature.

I can see how the concepts can be confused but fundamentally it's a brain (skills) vs brawn (power) thing. A meritocracy advocates for selecting for the most skilled not the most powerful. It's only practical to enforce on a institutional level though.

I'm talking about semantics yes, but also interpretation and the philosophy behind the term.

Merit is defined as:

> the quality of being particularly good or worthy, especially so as to deserve praise or reward

It doesn't accidentally emphasize the fact that it chooses those "worthy of praise and reward"

This is literally part of the term, and I see this ingrained as well often in the ideas and those behind it.

It can be used to justify why you're eating a thousand dollar steak you can't even finish, while someone else goes hungry. You are deserving of it, they are not.

This is what I think we collectively need to tone down: the part about being deserving of praise and reward. We should emphasize only the part about being particularly good.

Off course, the more you benefit others and society, the more it should benefit you. We need this reward mechanism to incentivize people to take risks, and put the work/effort, or be dedicated to certain endeavors that society needs. I'm not questioning that. But it's not because you are deserving that you can enjoy that steak, but because you've helped countless others in ways far beyond that of what you are taking by eating that steak. You've earned it.

I'll give another example... Consider term limits, we don't want to keep in place the same person for too long, even if they still rank number 1. Term limits are amazing at curbing what you talked about and preventing people from kicking the ladder down. It's an auto-eject for people at the top.

The reason is, it's simply unbelievable to think that 8 years later, there is no one else as qualified or even better than you at doing the job. We know assessing "merit" or even qualifications is fuzzy and imperfect. That the rules and criteria used to assess are put in place by those currently with high rankings, etc. It needs mechanisms against abuse like anything else.

And then, in the day to day, people want stability as well. Imagine each day at your job was a make it or get fired challenge. Each day they had someone new come in and perform your duties, than your boss would evaluate who did best and let go the other. This is not a desirable state. So you need a balance.

> and fundamentally, we don't want a hierarchy of classes, even if we claim the higher rankings/elites have merited it.

What do you mean by this? What creates a hierarchy of classes? Different social groups? Differing amounts of wealth? Different amounts of power to get stuff done? I think, in the end, it's got to come down to power, but I feel like it's good for society to distribute more power to people able to get better things done.

I agree with you that the term 'merit' now has a connotation of 'you deserve everything you can get'. It feels like a misappropriation of stewardship to take $100m to buy a yacht. If a government official did that, they would go straight to jail, but we somehow justify it under capitalism because maybe the CEO really wanted a yacht, and that's the only reason they started the business (in which case, I'm actually kind of fine with that $100m going to a yacht, as long as they were in the business of creating, not extracting, wealth). I don't think this is really a solvable problem, because to measure who's good at creating wealth, you kind of have to use wealth. Maybe we could have government-assigned stewards over pots of money, but that might have even bigger problems.

Very plainly put, you want a large middle class, and a rotating lower and upper class, with the various aggregate metrics from min to max, and everything in between to rise over time.

In that state, you want to enlarge the pool of people whose lifestyle affordances are more and more similar to one another, and since no one is poor for too long, or rich for too long, they don't enshrine themselves as some systemic class of people forming clicks, bad habits, group identity of them and the others, falling into self-selection and preservation, or some vicious cycle that entraps them there, etc.

While the idea — of shuffling a societal system a little bit to prevent it from going stale — sounds important, I'm not convinced. Random shuffling leads to good results only when it is combined with a good fitness estimate (see: natural selection). And establishing a fitness test for a societal order seems to be a much harder issue than than that of an organized randomization.

Speaking of random shuffling, I think it should be made much easier to conduct RCTs on citizens to try out systems of governance/social programs/etc. to see what works best. Basically test stuff instead of guessing and voting. I think citizens are equal enough if they have equal chance to get to the treatment group.

Much of the fitness test can be from self selection (you apply for a random spot.) Many people wont bother to apply.

Of course ability matters, but if it's always the same group in charge, the system can easily get stuck. Occasionally adding a bit of randomness among qualified people might bring in fresh perspectives and make things more flexible.

I have been thinking about this. With the advent of AI, this leads to 'congestion' at the top. And people solve it with biased decisions. More here: https://www.gojiberries.io/bias-as-a-congestion-fix-heuristi...

"It is considered democratic, for example, that state offices are filled by lot, and oligarchic that they are filled by election"

— Aristotle, Politics

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

I can also recommend the book "Against Elections: The Case for Democracy by David Van Reybrouck"

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/18/against-electi...

I feel like random selection devolves pretty quickly back into the problems it's trying to solve? The examples in the article, with some commentary:

> Place critical appointment/hiring processes into the hands of randomly selected oversight boards. These boards manage appointments, evaluations, and dismissals, mitigating biases and discouraging the formation of insular power groups.

This has the same issue elections have, just at a smaller scale. A better analog is juries, and charisma/storytelling definitely matters when you're talking to a jury.

> Directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool. Set and maintain the eligibility standard (such as an exam) by randomly selected oversight board to keep it updated and prevent the standard from being manipulated or gamed.

This is somewhat analogous to college admissions, and the gaming is alive and well there too. You get rid of politics, but you're back to optimizing for KPIs and things. I'm not sure why randomly picking from the top 5% of KPI optimizers is going to be better than picking the top one.

> Firms could randomly select employees or shareholders to serve on their boards. These members can significantly dilute insider collusion and introduce perspectives often overlooked by traditionally selected executives.

Same issue as juries, plus the random picks probably won't know the material well. Although I don't know much about traditional board selections, maybe that's true regardless. If you weight based on % ownership for shareholders, you're de facto giving the seats to big funds, if not, it can quickly become a lottery of like, any random person in the states.

> Use stratified sampling to select committees, ensuring diverse representation of viewpoints, backgrounds, and expertise, contributing to balanced decision-making.

This is the jury thing again? It seems like the solution "randomly pick oversight/approval boards" was listed three times.

> Create randomly composed auditing and oversight committees, deterring corrupt practices through constant unpredictability in oversight.

Constant unpredictability in oversight sounds terrible. The reason we have judges and case law and things in the legal system is that there are tons of edge cases, where reasonable minds will differ. You want to build up a consistent set of guidelines people can follow. A lot of people who are on the edge of rules aren't trying to be corrupt, they're just not sure what they are/aren't allowed to do.

From the Wikipedia § Criticisms page:

> In his 2019 book The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits poses that meritocracy is responsible for the exacerbation of social stratification, to the detriment of much of the general population. He introduces the idea of "snowball inequality", a perpetually widening gap between elite workers and members of the middle class. While the elite obtain exclusive positions thanks to their wealth of demonstrated merit, they occupy jobs and oust middle class workers from the core of economic events. The elites use their high earnings to secure the best education for their own children, so that they may enter the world of work with a competitive advantage over those who did not have the same opportunities. Thus, the cycle continues with each generation.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Books

> In his book The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?, the American political philosopher Michael Sandel argues that the meritocratic ideal has become a moral and political problem for contemporary Western societies. He contends that the meritocratic belief that personal success is solely based on individual merit and effort has led to a neglection of the common good, the erosion of solidarity, and the rise of inequality. Sandel's criticism concerns the widespread notion that those who achieve success deserve it because of their intelligence, talent and effort. Instead, he argues that this belief is flawed since it ignores the role of luck and external circumstances, such as social and external factors, which are beyond an individual's control.[91]

* Ibid

Yep you can read in the same article that the word “meritocracy” was originally coined as a perjorative word intended to highlight how “merit” is obviously a function of social class and money. It’s wild that everyone is using “merit” and “meritocracy” as though it somehow avoids elitism, when in reality it’s a sneaky way to cement biases without the appearance of bias. Of course people should be judged on their skills and not their wealth. But, how’d they acquire those skills, and why would anyone assume the money didn’t help? Of course it’s a self-reinforcing system. What I don’t know is what the alternative is. Randomness? Maybe, but I’m not convinced.

At the same time few things are as suspicious as an antipathy to the competent being in charge, especially when it comes from the existing elites. It just screams "How dare you interfere with my ordination by connections by being better!".

There are essentially multiple levels of meritocracy. A level 1 meritocracy would judge only by current skills - for better or worse. This may be less than impressive even if technically a meritocracy. It may say, result in most knights coming from noble families trained from birth, but exceptional individuals would not be barred just from their background. Strictly better than a hard caste system but not something to brag about. A level 2 would try to ensure some degree of access to skills and education to all and be more meritocratic. Public education of unequal qualtity would qualify. A theoretical level N would involve completely equal starting points and would thus have pure 'merit' as the decider, even if it only accumulated from luck and the normal curve. Which highlights another issue - the distribution of quality is never perfectly even, it tends to follow a normal curve of some sort.

As for 'solving' the issue. Ability begets ability - this is called education and practice and I doubt there is a true alternative. We would call it rightfully barking mad to ban education for the sake of equity despite education contributing greatly to disparate outcomes. I think that is one of those imperfections of the universe we must accept for now.

First, we need an actual meritocracy --- the purest forms of that I've ever experienced were when in the military when in a unit with an officer who both had good ethics _and_ a good understanding the people under his command, and a school system which I briefly attended when I was very young --- my understanding of the school system based on my recollection and how it was explained to me by my parents in the light of more typical schools was that classes were divided between social and academic: academic classes (English and other languages, math, science) were attended at one's ability level, with a four year cap through eighth grade (after which the cap was removed) and social classes (homeroom, social studies, physical education, home economics and shop class) were attended at one's age level. In addition to grades K--12, many of the teachers were accredited as faculty at a local college, and if need be, students were either transported to that college, or professors from the college would come to the school to teach classes. It was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and simultaneously be awarded a college diploma.

the problem with meritocracy in the military is that it is defined top-down. iaw, there is an in-group that decided who gets to join them.

a better approach would be what i have seen in the boy scouts of america a few decades ago with regards to joining the order of the arrow. there the whole troop would select those who would be invited. most troop members were not members of the OA themselves. thus the ones who were already selected had little influence in who got to join them.

If you seek an interesting example of applied random selection to democratic processes, have a look at France's "Citizens Convention for Climate" [1]. It was a panel of ~150 citizens chosen at random among the general population to think about what could be done to reduce France's carbon footprint, and make proposals that could be implemented into law.

From an environmental POV, this was absolutely useless as the government ignored most of their proposals in the end, but from an experimentation POV, it did demonstrate the viability of "citizens focus groups". In a few sessions over the course of about a year, those 150 random citizens got to meet with actual experts of climate science and french law, and became knowledgeable enough to make informed proposals that actually looked quite good.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climat...

Random selection prevents a dogma from taking roots. If we consider a dogma as an empremeral something that's too complex for one mind, but in a stable group of like-minded people it can settle and grow like some poisonous weed. Shuffling the people by popular vote or by other means is like replacing the soil where that weed grows.

I don't know, I like the idea.

I tend to believe that in democracy and capitalism, corruption makes evil people busy because corruption becomes a quarantined, isolated competition, so they do less serious harm elsewhere, and they get punished if they go too far.

But yes, merit is a sweet lie.

Mixed students and groups always perform better

One study among many corroborating ones showing girls in all girls schools outperform girls in mixed schools

https://www.kidsnews.com.au/humanities/study-reveals-benefit...

I'm not familiar with the Australian education system or this study's design, but at first glance, this quote

>The report, commissioned by the Alliance of Girls’ Schools Australasia, was conducted by Macquarie Marketing Group using OECD data

reads more to me like "we found that all-girl private schools are better than the average of public and private schools", and the obvious reason why is probably *because they're private schools*, and not because they're all-girl.

Same pattern in UK state schools

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35419284

Same comment as above. From your article:

> there are some underlying factors skewing these results, such as: > * grammar schools are more likely to be single-sex > * co-educational schools have a higher proportion of poorer pupils > * girls are more likely to get good results

The original statement which I replied to was an absolute position. These examples invalidate it.

Also note that both of your comments show that people in a position to choose, are choosing single sex schools for their daughters and getting better outcomes on average.

Lastly, while the article mentions some caveats around selective state schools, the other side of that is the UK has many single sex comprehensive schools. We should not ascribe too much weight to the caveat.

Not so surprising. Generally the disruptive students are boys.

I'd be surprised if this was the only reason.

Generally, in mixed-gender groups aged 13+, you will have some dating activity and a subsequent drama / bad blood from various heartbreaks and betrayals. Having to sit in the same classroom makes everything emotionally worse.

This is somewhat less of a problem if the same activites take place outside school and thus are less likely to complicate relationships within the class.

Article evidently recommends satisficing over optimizing employee selection and performance. Which has indeed been proven to be the better option in almost all scenarios, but is sadly forgotten in the move-fast-and-break-things venture-capital-funded era.

In this day and age, why can't we just have electronic direct democracy on policy issues (subject to any logical constraints)? As needed, the votes can optionally be weighed by how informed a voter is. It is like sortition, but the sample size is the population size.

I think the problem with direct voting on issues is that, in general issues are complicated and nobody (politicians neither) has the time to familiarise themselves with every topic. This makes direct voting be easily influenced by lobbying towards extreme positions, because those offer "easy" answers when nuance is required.

I'm actually in agreement with the OP. An interesting concept in this direction are citizen Councils or assemblies [1]. Essentially a group of random citizens get selected to investigate an (typical local) issue. They are given all the necessary administrative resources and are supposed to come up with a solution/recommendation.

They have been tried on a local level in Australia. In the documentary I saw about this, they said that people generally become engaged in the process and try to understand the nuance and different view points of the issue. Even people coming into the process with more extreme view points adopt more nuance.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/01/citizens-ass...

It still runs into the problem of rational ignorance. When your vote is diluted by millions of others, it doesn't make sense to spend significant effort on thoroughly researching the issues at hand.

Who controls the voting agenda, though? Setting the agenda, controlling the available options, is just as important or arguably more important than the result of the votes.

California ballot propositions haven given every example you could need of the failure states of direct democracy on specific policy proposals: monied interest groups try year after year to find the magic combination of euphemisms and branding that will get the confused and uninformed voters to give them what they want.

One catch with any such system is that it effectively gives more power to people who are more motivated to actively participate in the process, which correlates with having stronger and more extreme political opinions. One could argue that it is only fair - everyone has the power to participate, after all, and if some people choose not to, they can't complain about the end result. But even so, an endless bitter fight between political extremes is unlikely to result in good governance (and I'm saying this as someone with fairly extreme political positions).

I have wondered this too. Some stumbling blocks might be (1) lots of people are not well informed enough or care enough to participate -- which if true, would suggest there is a deeper problem (2) how to prevent lots of coersion.

But imo definitely worth thinking more abt. It might solve a lot more problems than it creates by giving power back to the people.

I don't know about you, but I sure as heck do not want to have to research and vote on every issue, and I also don't want other unaccountable citizens casting knee-jerk votes directly on issues they have no clue about based on what they heard on TikTok either.

I like the concept of “liquid democracy” —- it’s direct democracy, but you can select somebody to act as your proxy so you don’t need to stay up to date on everything. But you can revoke proxy status at any time or for any particular issue if you want to override them.

No idea how it could active implemented, but it seems like a great compromise between the individual freedom of direct democracy and the labor-saving of representational democracy

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy

>Voters in a liquid democracy have the right to vote directly on all policy issues à la direct democracy; voters also have the option to delegate their votes to someone who will vote on their behalf à la representative democracy.[2] Any individual may be delegated votes (those delegated votes are termed "proxies") and these proxies may in turn delegate their vote as well as any votes they have been delegated by others resulting in "metadelegation".[3]

How this solve anything? I might choose a expert representative in matters I don't have a clue, like health policy. But the morons that do "their own research" will see themselves fit to vote because in their minds they know better. So what gives?

well, right now all those single-issue morons band together to elect a moron that gets the power to vote on every issue.

when you have a high proportion of morons, there's not much you can do.

The political parties would probably print out a flyer containing their suggested votes for each issue. If you already were going to vote for the party anyway, this has a neutral effect since that's basically what happens with a representative.

Then you would still have the right to vote on any particular issue your own way.

Our representatives are regularly casting knee-jerk votes on issues based on what they heard in places far more toxic than TikTok, so don't think it would be much of a difference tbh.

What does that mean? Would you support or oppose the decision to subsidize domestic synthetic fertilizer manufacturing by providing them with an 5% tax break?

One can always abstain. One doesn't have to vote on everything.

the as needed part is scary, the people running the algorithms can just choose all the laws.

>optionally be weighed by how informed a voter is.

Lol, who decides who is more informed? ( at the end of the day, might is right)

www.ElectionByJury.org

This essay is stream-of-consciousness assertions and predictive guessing, if not wish-casting. Like all such essays, it can be refuted with two words: "I / We disagree" (with the logic). I don't agree with many of the assertions nor do I predict those outcomes.

If you think lobbying is bad now, wait till you see lobbying under sortition

TLDR: I've built a system that challenges the author's claim that only randomness can prevent meritocratic decay - see link at bottom.

The article diagnoses the problem well - Campbell's Law shows how any metric used for selection gets gamed. But randomness isn't the only solution.

The issue isn't meritocracy itself, but our implementation. Current systems fail because "merit" is cheap to fake. LinkedIn profiles, smooth talking, and connections matter more than actual performance.

What if merit claims required real stakes? If claiming expertise meant risking something you'd lose when proven wrong? If your surgical reputation couldn't boost your investment credibility? If gaming the system cost exponentially more than being honest?

Yes, KPIs fail for complex work. But a surgeon with 1,000 successful operations IS more qualified than a random person. That signal has value. Rather than abandon merit for randomness, we need merit systems that are expensive to fake and cheap to verify. Make the track record immutable, domain-specific, and consequential. The technical challenge is hard but solvable. Randomness might help for some positions (jury duty works!), but wherever specific expertise matters - engineering, medicine, research - verifiable performance still beats random selection.

I've been working on a system exploring these ideas [1], but the core insight stands regardless: the author's claim that only randomness can prevent meritocratic decay may be premature. We might just need better verification mechanisms.

[1] https://unrival.info

This author somehow managed to avoid the word "sortition" under which this concept has been studied for millennia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/

I knew it as demarchy, which the author also avoided.

> Directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool. Set and maintain the eligibility standard (such as an exam) by randomly selected oversight board to keep it updated and prevent the standard from being manipulated or gamed.

what? is this like a joke? an "eligibility pool" with "an exam" is going to be....."random" ?

sure! we did this and it's all random white men worth billions of dollars. So weird those were the only people that could pass "the exam"! But we have no idea which white male billionaires it will be, so it's "random" !

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