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Comment by internaut | Hacker News Reader

Can you provide a supporting line of reasoning?

I think corruption is like a weed. It grows when you become acclimatized to your environment and start to exploit it.

Term limits get us closer to a part-sortition. From the wiki:

Author James Wycliffe Headlam explains that the Athenian Council (500 administrators randomly selected), would commit occasional mistakes such as levying taxes that were too high. Additionally, from time to time, some in the Council would improperly make small quantities of money from their civic positions. However, "systematic oppression and organized fraud were impossible". These Greeks recognized that sortition broke up factions, diluted power, and gave positions to such a large number of disparate people that they would all keep an eye on each other making collusion fairly rare.

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There are three key groups at work in the legislation: legislators, the professional staff on whom legislators rely, and lobbyists.

Reducing the average level of experience in the particular legislative institution, and in legislative affairs generally, of the first group increase the relative advantage in systematic knowledge and effectiveness of the latter two groups compared to the first.

Term limits aren't sortition (it's not random, and political parties and the donor class are actively involved in choosing who stands for seats and how much support they have, so, the effects you point to in sortition of breaking up factionsome and reducing corruption simply aren't present.) And, in any case, the level of complexity of a modern nation of 300+ million people different considerably from that of ancient Athens.

> Reducing the average level of experience in the particular legislative institution, and in legislative affairs generally, of the first group increase the relative advantage in systematic knowledge and effectiveness of the latter two groups compared to the first.

That's a good point. How would you solve for X here?

> Term limits aren't sortition (it's not random, and political parties and the donor class are actively involved in choosing who stands for seats and how much support they have, so, the effects you point to in sortition of breaking up factionsome and reducing corruption simply aren't present.)

I was thinking broadly of the system being more or less organized and how in some way incompetence may be less truly dangerous than a bad actor abusing the system.

How about we simply put restrictions on politicians and their interaction with mass media? This many minutes on television, paid for by the State so you don't have to scrounge around for cash? That is just a half-baked example, I take it you understand what I mean by it.

Corruption is a problem in every country but I don't think lobbying and donors exert such an influence in my country Ireland (could be naive here!).

> in any case, the level of complexity of a modern nation of 300+ million people different considerably from that of ancient Athens.

Ha! True. We need a new OS, that is for sure. That is why Patri Friedman (seasteading) has so many of my sympathies.

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