[HN Gopher] Why random selection is necessary to create stable m...
___________________________________________________________________
Why random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic
institutions
Author : namlem
Score : 188 points
Date : 2025-07-14 15:28 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (assemblingamerica.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (assemblingamerica.substack.com)
| retrac wrote:
| 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.
| gameman144 wrote:
| 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.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| > 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.
| connicpu wrote:
| 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.
| f1shy wrote:
| 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?
| namlem wrote:
| 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.
| burningChrome wrote:
| 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...
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| 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.
| pintxo wrote:
| 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
| ;-)
| almatabata wrote:
| Aren't most of those lawyers the select few that can afford
| to go into politics?
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| 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.
| woooooo wrote:
| > 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.
| esafak wrote:
| But the status quo is considered anomalous by most of the
| world, so I would not use it as a benchmark.
| rolandog wrote:
| 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.
| pstuart wrote:
| "Simple" remedies for American democracy:
| * Campaign Finance Reform * End Citizens United
| * Ranked choice voting (or a variant of same).
|
| Technically totally feasible, just impossible due to the
| current owners.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Also
|
| * Expand the Supreme Court
| jfyi wrote:
| 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.
| andyferris wrote:
| > 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.
| thmsths wrote:
| 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...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| It is anomalous in the historical context of the same
| country.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Otoh, the degradation of democracy into oligarchy and
| then tyranny was called by Socrates...
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| 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_Starti
| ng_Poin...
| underlipton wrote:
| Anomalies cause extinction events.
| shiandow wrote:
| For what it is worth they probably wouldn't write the bill,
| just vote on it.
| abirch wrote:
| 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
| yesfitz wrote:
| 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.w
| ikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
| namlem wrote:
| 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).
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| pintxo wrote:
| This training thingy sounds sensible. But who controls the
| contents of the training? That body will have quite some
| power.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| sampl3username wrote:
| The actually dangerous people are not the obviously
| insane, but the machiavellian dark triad types. Those
| will pass your test.
| pintxo wrote:
| 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.
| breuleux wrote:
| > 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.
| jancsika wrote:
| > 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? " :)
| skrtskrt wrote:
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| jamie_ca wrote:
| 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...
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| > 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.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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?
| mprovost wrote:
| 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
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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?
| Supermancho wrote:
| > 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.
| gameman144 wrote:
| > 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.
| toss1 wrote:
| 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.
| Terr_ wrote:
| 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.
| toss1 wrote:
| 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?
| breuleux wrote:
| 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.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| 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?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| As long as they can pass some basic education and civics tests,
| sure.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I agree, but I'm not convinced that 100% of current Reps
| could pass a civics test.
| resource_waste wrote:
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| _" As I got older, I've leaned more and more into
| meritocracy"_
|
| Sad thing is, that it's impossible.
| f1shy wrote:
| Typically we settle in moneytocracy...
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| 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
| f1shy wrote:
| 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.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| 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.
| sureglymop wrote:
| 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| _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.
| namlem wrote:
| 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.
| ReaperCub wrote:
| > 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| breuleux wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| 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
| bilbo0s wrote:
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| Isn't this a question of how many people you select?
| bilbo0s wrote:
| 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.
| breuleux wrote:
| 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.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yikes, no! Just look at the initiatives that get on the ballot.
| Most have serious failings of understanding how the system
| works.
| meatmanek wrote:
| 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.
|
| If we assume it works sorta like jury duty, a sortition-based
| legislator would have their schedule forcibly cleared, so
| they'd have all day to think about laws. (Presumably for some
| sufficiently-long term, like 6mo to 2yr.) Campaign finance-
| based lobbying (i.e. legalized bribery) would cease to exist,
| though you'd definitely still have paid lobbyists -- people
| who are good at influencing the members of the legislature.
| Bribery would almost certainly happen, but at least it would
| be illegal so hopefully less common than it is now. The
| legislature could still have committees and debates and
| proposed amendments, allowing for refinement of bills before
| they make it to a vote.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Maybe more people would have understanding of how the system
| works in such a system.
| specialist wrote:
| 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
| goda90 wrote:
| 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.
| colmmacc wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| 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
| wrp wrote:
| Any discussion of sortition in politics needs at least a
| mention of _Harrison Bergeron_.
| marcusverus wrote:
| 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.
| breuleux wrote:
| 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.
| baxtr wrote:
| So no elections?
| specialist wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| meatmanek wrote:
| IMO you'd want this to pay pretty well, like 95th percentile
| income, to help ensure that most people would actually _want_
| to serve.
| fsckboy wrote:
| 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!"
| treyd wrote:
| 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.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Just give it the same income as current congress
| representatives. That's already a 90th percentile income.
| vannevar wrote:
| 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.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| 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.
| eqvinox wrote:
| 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.
| ClayShentrup wrote:
| sortition is a more general concept.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > 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.
| DennisP wrote:
| 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.
| naasking wrote:
| Not fully replaced, but some percentage should be reserved for
| sortition. This can increase efficiency and break deadlocks,
| like two party rule.
| lupire wrote:
| 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/
| k__ wrote:
| I knew it as demarchy, which the author also avoided.
| methuselah_in wrote:
| Mixed students and groups always perform better
| harvey9 wrote:
| 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...
| leblancfg wrote:
| 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.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Same pattern in UK state schools
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35419284
| leblancfg wrote:
| 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
| harvey9 wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Not so surprising. Generally the disruptive students are
| boys.
| samdung wrote:
| The Complicated Business of Electing a Doge
|
| https://www.theballotboy.com/electing-the-doge
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| namlem wrote:
| 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.
| dataflow wrote:
| 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| parpfish wrote:
| 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
| aeve890 wrote:
| >Voters in a liquid democracy have the right to vote
| directly on all policy issues a la direct democracy; voters
| also have the option to delegate their votes to someone who
| will vote on their behalf a 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?
| parpfish wrote:
| 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.
| djeastm wrote:
| 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.
| lapcat wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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...
| torginus wrote:
| 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?
| OutOfHere wrote:
| One can always abstain. One doesn't have to vote on
| everything.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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).
| smath wrote:
| 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.
| almosthere wrote:
| the as needed part is scary, the people running the algorithms
| can just choose all the laws.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >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)
| _--__--__ wrote:
| 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.
| neehao wrote:
| 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...
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| 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.
| namlem wrote:
| 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.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| 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.
| namlem wrote:
| 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.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > _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.
| tfourb wrote:
| 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.
| lapcat wrote:
| > 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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".
| dartharva wrote:
| 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.
| lapcat wrote:
| 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.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| > 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.
| torginus wrote:
| * 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.
| Nicook wrote:
| that's true, but are you trying to measure people's ability to
| study for the test?
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| 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.
| akomtu wrote:
| 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.
| ecshafer wrote:
| 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.
| wslh wrote:
| > 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...
| ecshafer wrote:
| 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.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| 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?"
| timdellinger wrote:
| 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.
| Nicook wrote:
| Article suffers a bit from the common hackernews intellectual
| bias.
| braiamp wrote:
| 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.
| biomcgary wrote:
| 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?
| nashashmi wrote:
| seems quite meritocratic with a pinch of (Lord's) randomness.
| The merit is "been with [Jesus] since baptism to taken"
| underlipton wrote:
| "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).
| a_bonobo wrote:
| 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.
| pruetj wrote:
| 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.
| cafard wrote:
| Hobbes talks about this a little in Chapter 36 of _Leviathan_ ,
| mentioning not only Matthias, but a couple of Old Testament
| instances.
| didibus wrote:
| 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.
| yesco wrote:
| 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.
| didibus wrote:
| 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.
| programjames wrote:
| > 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.
| didibus wrote:
| 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.
| zzzeek wrote:
| > 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" !
| throw0101c wrote:
| From the Wikipedia SS 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_
| programjames wrote:
| > 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%)
|
| or selection weight = [x log x - x + 1] * C
|
| Note that x is on a scale from 1 to 0, where a 0 means there is
| nothing more you can improve at the skill, and a 1 means you need
| to improve at everything.
| atmosx wrote:
| 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
| austin-cheney wrote:
| 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.
| ClayShentrup wrote:
| www.ElectionByJury.org
| lokar wrote:
| 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.
| quirkot wrote:
| > 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.
| underlipton wrote:
| 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.
| norseboar wrote:
| 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.
| fiforpg wrote:
| 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.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Much of the fitness test can be from self selection (you apply
| for a random spot.) Many people wont bother to apply.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| 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.
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