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Comment by chroem- | Hacker News Reader

This is precisely why we should change our sampling process for selecting representatives, from corruptible elections, to completely random selection.

For more info, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

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The problem here is that you ultimately will get a class of advisors/administrators in the civil service or from third party lobbyists that will serve as a backbone of experience for these groups of people, and they will be needed simply because they lack the experience and knowledge required to make correct decisions.

That in itself will likely devolve into an oligarchic structure.

This is already the base with the lobbying industry, but yes, agreed.

"Michels theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies."

How is sortition going to help? It should either also become an oligarchy, or simply be a dysfunctional government, or not actually have anything at all to do with this subject.

Would you say an average person who works an average job has a reasonable shot at getting into elected office in the United States Congress? If no, then that by definition is a form of oligarchy.

Though random samples and a large enough sample size, you can ensure that at least those in elected (sortitioned?) positions are not members of the oligarchy. Additionally, since sortition is much more efficient in selecting candidates, it's possible to replace some formerly unelected bureaucrats with sortitioned ones. Even if it's not perfect, it's still an improvement.

Who administers the process of sortition? Who ensures that it is properly random and fair? Who enforces the law if it isn't?

>Who enforces the law if it isn't?

Your randomly selected police officer.. ;)

I don't think the 'average person' who works an 'average job' has any qualifications for acting as a member of congress. Taking into consideration that they can't even select competent members of congress, I find it hard to imagine that they would be one.

If you assume the oligarchy is some fraction f of the population, and you select n representatives, then you expect only nf instead of n representatives of the oligarchy. And since f << 1, the oligarchy can not gain control of the legislative body.

As for dysfunctional, depends what kind of people you want in the legislation. If you believe that the kind of people who want to gain power should not be in office, then running for office is a contra indicator for should be in office and you have to use random selection.

Power is held by the person who makes the decision, not who holds the title.

In practice, it's likely that a class of elite advisors will rise up whose only function is to provide guidance to the newly-appointed "official" representatives. They may not hold official office, but if they make all the decisions in practice, wouldn't you say they have the power?

Also, the sortitioned would be even more suspect than elected persons to being bought or to otherwise grabbing whatever post-term benefit they can get. Without any perspective for personal reelection, reelection of their dear party or election of designated-successor aides, they would not have anything to loose by obvious bad behavior. Pure sortition could therefore easily create a lottery ticket mentality, where a grab-what-you-can mindset would be expected and the idea of a bad person in office would shift to an egoist who does not share the benefits by securing lucrative posts for all their extended family.

But smaller sortition "modules" could still be put in place to augment or protect other mechanisms of democracy. A jury to add that witchhunt-spirit to the supreme court might not be the wisest idea, but something like randomized eligibility for the passive vote, maybe only in one of multiple houses, could probably help weaken oligarchic grip without severe disadvantage in other aspects.

Just wrote a sortition channel mode after seeing this.

Of course there's always the chance that your randomly elected leaders might then choose to do away with sortition.

https://github.com/LukeB42/psyrcd/blob/master/scripts/sortit...

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