4 ms·

Bit long winded, but boils down to recommending sortition, which I had not heard of. Interesting: "With sortition, you do not ask everyone to vote on an issue

Bit long winded, but boils down to recommending sortition, which I had not heard of. Interesting: "With sortition, you do not ask everyone to vote on an issue few people really understand, but you draft a random sample of the population and make sure they come to the grips with the subject matter in order to take a sensible decision."

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
The problem is, if I wasn't selected, and the selected group reached the opposite decision from what I wanted, it's easy for me to feel like I wasn't listened to, no matter how well the group did their job. This is a political (or maybe psychological) problem, rather than one of "what's the best process?"
humanrebar 10y ago
Who decides when someone has "come to grips" with a topic? I mean, anyone who disagrees with me obviously hasn't come to grips with the issue, right?
- jerf 10y ago
  It's very similar to jury duty. And you'd try to use similar mechanisms to keep the system fair and balanced. And it would have similar failure cases, but "system without failure cases" isn't really on the table here.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Agree with humanrebar that this has some serious issues. Compared to jury duty you'll face some serious scaling issues.
  - kiruwa 10y ago
    A jury is a very restricted case. There is a supervising judge and two (or more) competing advocates. The process for choosing those advocates is very formalized (defendant selection and public official). Every one of these other participants breaks the analogy enough to make it useless.
    - jerf 10y ago
      I see I may have skipped showing my work on too many steps here for my point to have made sense initially. Sorry, my fault (no sarcasm). So, when you try to concretely manifest the sortition idea, you find yourself stepping in an awful lot of the same problems you get with juries. With a twist, but very similar. I'd intend to have advocates on hand for the various positions, and if you think the bureaucracy won't be stepping in here with procedures and rules, probably enforced by a process moderator that looks an awful lot like a "judge", along with formalized rules for the other parts of the process, you don't know bureaucracies. Surely we don't expect the participants to all be auto-didacts? And yet, we can't just have one person teaching the relevant issues, or that one person has too much of the power. And I don't say this often, but the bureaucrats would be right here. They would be necessary. There's no way sortition is going to be "randomly choose 100 people, stick them in a room with nothing but a problem statement, accept their decision". It shouldn't be, either; it needs more structure than that. Right down to things like shielding the chosen participants from undue influences, and a lot of really interesting questions around transparency... again, quite like a jury.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        > I'd intend to have advocates on hand for the various positions, and if you think the bureaucracy won't be stepping in here with procedures and rules, probably enforced by a process moderator that looks an awful lot like a "judge", along with formalized rules for the other parts of the process, you don't know bureaucracies. In a US-like system, if you replace election of leaders with sortition, there is no superior bureaucracy that can impose a judge-like supervisor on the sortition-based bodies. And if you have an bureaucracy that can impose supervision on the elected bodies you are considering replacing, then you don't have a democracy to replace with sortition to start with, you have bureaucratic aristocracy, and talking about problems of elections and democracy is kind of irrelevant to dealing with your system of government. > There's no way sortition is going to be "randomly choose 100 people, stick them in a room with nothing but a problem statement, accept their decision". There's basically a couple of possible models of sortition; there's a legislature-like model (where sortition is how you choose legislators for a term, and then they are replaced with a new body chosen by the same method.) And there's a case-by-case model where there is some method of proposing an issue, and then there is a "jury" chosen for an adversarial "trial" over the issue. (One way you could do this would be to replace one house of a bicameral legislature with case-by-case sortation, so that the remaining house would propose legislation and provide advocates for [and against, usually] that legislation, who would argue in front of a sortition-chosen panel.) In the latter, case-by-case, approach, there would probably be some bureaucracy supervising the process, and the sortition-based body would be very much like a trial jury in relation to that bureaucracy. But then you aren't replacing the elected body with sortition, you are replacing it with a bureaucracy with sortition serving some function within that bureaucracy.) In the legislature-like approach, though, a supervising bureaucracy is fundamentally inconsistent with the concept. > Surely we don't expect the participants to all be auto-didacts? I would expect members of a legislature chosen by sortition to educate themselves about issues the same way as any other legislature. This probably involves a subordinate bureaucratic infrastructure (e.g., staff employed by each member, and bodies answering to the body as a whole, like the GAO), but not a supervising infrastructure.
  - rwmj 10y ago
    The difference is that juries don't usually have any "skin in the game". It doesn't make any difference to a jury member if the defendant is convicted or not (and when it DOES make a difference, we have a word for it -- jury tampering).
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > It's very similar to jury duty. And you'd try to use similar mechanisms to keep the system fair and balanced. Similar mechanisms to grand or petit juries? Because the latter is what most people are familiar with, but most sortition proposals would seem to be structurally more like grand juries [0]: which are, for structural reasons (including the time commitments involved) far less representative of the jury pool they are notionally drawn from than petit juries are. And the mechanisms which keep them fair and balanced are different (though similar in one way: for both kinds of juries, one of the important methods is that most of the things they do aren't decisive on their own -- except criminal acquittals -- and are inputs to final rulings by judges; for grand juries, this is particularly true, since they act at the very beginning of the process; clearly, this common aspect of the control on juries is not present in most proposals for lawmaking-by-sortition.) [0] For California (and some other US) jurisdictions, take this as "criminal grand juries", as civil grand juries may not even be notionally representative.
protomyth 10y ago
We'll pick a small group of people, and feed them an education that will make them vote our way. Sounds like how many prosecutors use grand juries in the USA these days.
deleted 10y ago
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AnimalMuppet 10y ago

The problem is, if I wasn't selected, and the selected group reached the opposite decision from what I wanted, it's easy for me to feel like I wasn't listened to, no matter how well the group did their job. This is a political (or maybe psychological) problem, rather than one of "what's the best process?"

humanrebar 10y ago

Who decides when someone has "come to grips" with a topic? I mean, anyone who disagrees with me obviously hasn't come to grips with the issue, right?

jerf 10y ago
It's very similar to jury duty. And you'd try to use similar mechanisms to keep the system fair and balanced. And it would have similar failure cases, but "system without failure cases" isn't really on the table here.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Agree with humanrebar that this has some serious issues. Compared to jury duty you'll face some serious scaling issues.
- kiruwa 10y ago
  A jury is a very restricted case. There is a supervising judge and two (or more) competing advocates. The process for choosing those advocates is very formalized (defendant selection and public official). Every one of these other participants breaks the analogy enough to make it useless.
  - jerf 10y ago
    I see I may have skipped showing my work on too many steps here for my point to have made sense initially. Sorry, my fault (no sarcasm). So, when you try to concretely manifest the sortition idea, you find yourself stepping in an awful lot of the same problems you get with juries. With a twist, but very similar. I'd intend to have advocates on hand for the various positions, and if you think the bureaucracy won't be stepping in here with procedures and rules, probably enforced by a process moderator that looks an awful lot like a "judge", along with formalized rules for the other parts of the process, you don't know bureaucracies. Surely we don't expect the participants to all be auto-didacts? And yet, we can't just have one person teaching the relevant issues, or that one person has too much of the power. And I don't say this often, but the bureaucrats would be right here. They would be necessary. There's no way sortition is going to be "randomly choose 100 people, stick them in a room with nothing but a problem statement, accept their decision". It shouldn't be, either; it needs more structure than that. Right down to things like shielding the chosen participants from undue influences, and a lot of really interesting questions around transparency... again, quite like a jury.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > I'd intend to have advocates on hand for the various positions, and if you think the bureaucracy won't be stepping in here with procedures and rules, probably enforced by a process moderator that looks an awful lot like a "judge", along with formalized rules for the other parts of the process, you don't know bureaucracies. In a US-like system, if you replace election of leaders with sortition, there is no superior bureaucracy that can impose a judge-like supervisor on the sortition-based bodies. And if you have an bureaucracy that can impose supervision on the elected bodies you are considering replacing, then you don't have a democracy to replace with sortition to start with, you have bureaucratic aristocracy, and talking about problems of elections and democracy is kind of irrelevant to dealing with your system of government. > There's no way sortition is going to be "randomly choose 100 people, stick them in a room with nothing but a problem statement, accept their decision". There's basically a couple of possible models of sortition; there's a legislature-like model (where sortition is how you choose legislators for a term, and then they are replaced with a new body chosen by the same method.) And there's a case-by-case model where there is some method of proposing an issue, and then there is a "jury" chosen for an adversarial "trial" over the issue. (One way you could do this would be to replace one house of a bicameral legislature with case-by-case sortation, so that the remaining house would propose legislation and provide advocates for [and against, usually] that legislation, who would argue in front of a sortition-chosen panel.) In the latter, case-by-case, approach, there would probably be some bureaucracy supervising the process, and the sortition-based body would be very much like a trial jury in relation to that bureaucracy. But then you aren't replacing the elected body with sortition, you are replacing it with a bureaucracy with sortition serving some function within that bureaucracy.) In the legislature-like approach, though, a supervising bureaucracy is fundamentally inconsistent with the concept. > Surely we don't expect the participants to all be auto-didacts? I would expect members of a legislature chosen by sortition to educate themselves about issues the same way as any other legislature. This probably involves a subordinate bureaucratic infrastructure (e.g., staff employed by each member, and bodies answering to the body as a whole, like the GAO), but not a supervising infrastructure.
- rwmj 10y ago
  The difference is that juries don't usually have any "skin in the game". It doesn't make any difference to a jury member if the defendant is convicted or not (and when it DOES make a difference, we have a word for it -- jury tampering).
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > It's very similar to jury duty. And you'd try to use similar mechanisms to keep the system fair and balanced. Similar mechanisms to grand or petit juries? Because the latter is what most people are familiar with, but most sortition proposals would seem to be structurally more like grand juries [0]: which are, for structural reasons (including the time commitments involved) far less representative of the jury pool they are notionally drawn from than petit juries are. And the mechanisms which keep them fair and balanced are different (though similar in one way: for both kinds of juries, one of the important methods is that most of the things they do aren't decisive on their own -- except criminal acquittals -- and are inputs to final rulings by judges; for grand juries, this is particularly true, since they act at the very beginning of the process; clearly, this common aspect of the control on juries is not present in most proposals for lawmaking-by-sortition.) [0] For California (and some other US) jurisdictions, take this as "criminal grand juries", as civil grand juries may not even be notionally representative.

protomyth 10y ago

We'll pick a small group of people, and feed them an education that will make them vote our way. Sounds like how many prosecutors use grand juries in the USA these days.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]