Hacker News Reader

Comment by mercurial | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but in the current system, how many of these facts come to the lawmakers via deep-pocketed special interest groups? How many lawmakers know what war looks like, when they vote for military action? How many have any idea of how to regulate the banking sector? How many vote only based on what their party has decided?

There is the question of writing laws in the appropriate legalese. In practice, at least in France, most laws come from the executive branch, and the Parliament examines them in a commission, "patches" them by adding amendments, and votes. I'm sure the legalese part could be taught or handled by specialists. Apart from that, I don't see why it would function in a worse fashion that what we currently have.

View on HN

Sure, many of the decisions in the current system are 'impure' in some way. Everybody has a price, everybody makes mistakes, everybody is uninformed about things. The big difference is the decisions still come from the elected lawmakers. They're often wrong, and even more often just guessing, but in the very least the system is transparent, we know where the power resides.

In the case of a randomized group, that power isn't with the group, it's with the people who educate them on the matters and who frame the issue. There are a million ways to present any matter, and none of them are objective. You're putting the power to influence and even determine a nation's decisions in the hands of the experts that inform them, rather than the randomly selected people. It would become very efficient to buy those people instead of the voters.

The problem of the matter isn't whether it would function worse. The problem is that it would function less transparently. It would ostensibly be a fair and completely unbiased system, but that could be manipulated behind the scenes in far more insidious ways. That's very dangerous. Personally, I would rather have a more unfair but more transparent system.

How is the current system transparent in this regard? How do you know where your MP/Congressperson got their information from (since we apparently agree that representatives are often not expert in the subject matter)?

I don't know, but at least I know it's them making the decision. I know they're corruptible, and I know their information can be manipulated and can be incomplete. It's transparent because everybody knows this, that's why we can complain about it. In some cases, we can call out lawmakers for it and get things changed. We know which ones tend to decide badly, and we can vote against them. It's an important balance in the system. If I have no control over who votes, and the whole system is made to look objective, that balance and that transparency is lost.

Ok, so your main beef with the lottery system is the anonymity of the randomly selected lawmakers? Well, if you don't know who they are, neither do the lobbyists. You still have Berlusconi/Putin-style influence-by-media, but that's not any different from what you have now.

My beef isn't with the anonymity, my beef is with the supposed objectiveness of the educators they use to give the randomly selected lawmakers the knowledge they need to decide. Those are the people to lobby, those are the people to buy, but they are hidden from the rest of the population. The only way to keep them honest would be to make every bit of information they give to the lawmakers public and freely available, so we can be sure the lawmakers aren't being manipulated. That runs into the same problems the delegate democracy has too: you can't make everything public in a state that still has foreign affairs.

My understanding is that only few representatives get close to state secrets, and they get them all from the executive branch (eg, the Intelligence Committee is relying on whatever the country's intelligence services deigns to tell them). Don't see why it should be different with randomly-selected lawmakers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com