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Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

>I wonder what would happen if there were not politicians, if the parliament of Europe were the sum of all its citizens voting for laws in some sort of mega-stack-overflow consensus system

There's another way to achieve something similar less chaotically: demarchy, which was used for some things in ancient Greece. This involves electing people at random for a limited time period; if the selection is truly random, then the outcome of a couple hundred randomly selected people voting on something should usually match the outcome of the whole population voting on something. And due to it only being for a short period of time, you avoid anyone accumulating too much power.

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Another advantage is that if you pay random citizens full time to oversee the government, they will be able to talk and negotiate with each other directly, they will have the time to actually study and think about the issues, and they will be able to subpoena the information they need to take good decisions.

If you want people to vote meaningfully on issues, you have to empower them to cast the very best vote they could cast, and demarchy is basically the only way this could be done practically in a large society. The concept of a general election or general referendum is aberrant.

I think you're basically describing the Byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanisms used by blockchains.

It would be chaos, and the real power would shift to the administrators.

If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians. They don't have established networks of experts they believe they can trust. They lack the skills to have effective meetings between more than a handful of people, to negotiate, and to make collective decisions. Administrators would have to provide all that.

That would be bureaucracy in the literal sense of the word.

There'd need to be some filtering before people take office. I like the idea of randomly selecting a small pool of candidates then voting within that pool. Maybe people elect and elector who's job it is to sit for 12 months just assessing people to hold actual power.

Career politicians are better than monarchs or aristocrats, but the fact is that making governance decisions is technically easy. Anyone can do it in principle. Politicians literally don't understand what they are voting on because the breadth of topics is too large and famously the US Congress can go from proposing to voting on complex trillion-dollar spending bills [0] in 48 hours. There is literally no way a random pool of people can do worse than that.

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

The two-party system in the US probably works in a different way than the multi-party system in the EU.

In the EU, and especially in national parliaments, political parties are the primary actors. While individual politicians are often ignorant of the topics they vote on, the parties usually have the relevant expertise, though they are not always willing to take advantage of it. After all, one of the primary functions of a political party is to provide a pool of resources and trusted expertise that is independent both from the government and lobbyists.

These two positions are sitting in contradiction to each other. People chosen by lot are said to lead to administrators making the decisions and that would be bad ... but career politicians govern by giving decision making power to an administrator making the decision and that that is good. I don't think your original comment got to the heart of what you don't like about demarchy.

Furthermore, I personally just flat out don't believe "parties usually have the relevant expertise". What exactly, in detail, is that supposed to mean? Because as I've never seen that technical expertise coming out of a political party.

It's all about checks and balances. When elected representatives have experts of their own, experts whom they trust, they are not as much at the mercy of the government and the lobbyists.

It's the same thing as with elections. You can trust the elections without trusting the government running them, because the party you vote has its own people overseeing the elections. And it's always a party you vote, even in systems where you nominally cast your vote for an individual candidate, because individuals acting on their own are too weak to challenge the system.

The experts you are aware of may be members of a political party, participating in the internal processes of the party to varying degrees. It's one way to be an active citizen. You usually don't know that, because it's not your business to know. Political affiliation is a private matter, after all.

>If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians

This isn't necessarily true. Politicians aren't selected for understanding; their ability to obtain and retain power is entirely due to their ability to attract voters and make deals with other politicians. If you assume a normal distribution of traits, then when people are selected based on scoring a high percentile in just one trait (in this case, political charisma), on average they'll be worse at other traits than if you'd selected a similar number of people completely randomly.

Traits may be normally distributed, but they are not independent. People who are good at something tend to be above average in other things.

People have done some research on that in Finland. Due to mandatory military service, the vast majority of men have taken the same intelligence and personality tests. The research found that male politicians performed better in the intelligence test and were more likely to have favorable personality traits than men in the general population. The effect was already present among the candidates in local elections. The higher up you went, the more significant the effect became.

Citizens assemblies, also called minipublics, have been trialed for years in many places and in many different topics.

In real life these people do not produce legislation/recommendations that are of less quality than politicians.

I recommend a book called "open democracy" that goes into detail about this kind of decision making processes. The OCED has also done a lot of work and has a few reports on the matter too, if you look at their recommendations for "the future of democracy".

Some big experiments in this area have been done in France as recent as a few months ago, in Ireland, in Iceland and the European union as a whole did a very big one a few years ago.

>If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians.

This reminds me of Varoufakis wanting to take the issue to the Greeks, during the Greek bailout negotiations, being told that he was "putting [his] people in a difficult situation of having to make a pivotal decision on complicated matters". He replied "Yes, it's called democracy".

> They don't have established networks

of corrupting lobbyists, that the main thing they are missing.

The average age in the Senate is what, 65? The percentage of people with degrees in science, architecture or engineering is like 10%.

These people are not keeping up with changes in the world, they are not more informed than an average Joe and are definitely less capable of processing new information.

There is no formal qualification required to become a politician and they are not selected based on intellectual merit. In fact my local politician is a ex-convict.

Some states in the US permanently ban felons from voting [1]. I want the eligible voting population to be all citizens over the age of 18 with no regard to history and conduct, because I favor universal suffrage and don't want governments to have leeway over who is "worthy" to vote in a democracy (yes, the US is a representative democracy). My population of eligible representative candidates in a demarchy would be the same. However, other people might not want current criminals or even former criminals to be eligible. Separately, some people might want candidates to pass an intelligence test.

How could the US collectively decide the eligible population of representative candidates for a demarchy?

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

It's nice in theory but politicians will never allow themselves to be replaced by random people, so good luck getting this implemented.

That’s not why it won’t work, the reason is even more fundamental: most people won’t want to do it because it’s a fucking hard job that puts you in the limelight.

Democratic Politics is not there to be efficient. It's there so sociopaths can backstab one another civilized.

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