8 ms·

The election of the doge

117 points by flannery 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gen220 6y ago
It’s fascinating how random selection plays an essential role in the election. The final phase’s selection isn’t random, but many intermediary phases are. I think randomness is an underrated tool for introducing a sense of “fairness” to problems with strange power dynamics: where everyone is interested in a fair outcome, but the best outcome for any individual causes some harm to the group. Salary negotiation is one example. Imagine haggling over the range start or range size, and then picking your salary from a uniform distribution contained by that range. I wonder how the distribution of (un-)satisfactory outcomes of this system that would compare to the one we have today. It’s also interesting to note certain parallels to structures existing today. The group stage draw for the UEFA Champions League comes to mind.
- taneq 6y ago
  > Imagine haggling over the range start or range size, and then picking your salary from a uniform distribution contained by that range. I cannot imagine anyone, ever, being happy with being told "hey you're great but you only rolled a 4 on your salary negotiation so you're $15k out of pocket.
  - meekrohprocess 6y ago
    Yeah, it's tough when that happens. But that is kind of how things go: part of the d20 system's charm is that it successfully approximates the absurd range and randomness inherent in ordinary life. Sometimes you get a company that gets offended at the prospect of negotiation - that's a 1, although if you get an offer rescinded like that it's probably good for you in the long run. Sometimes you throw out a ridiculous number for whatever reason and the other side says, "mmmm...yeah, okay." That's a 20. But it's not exactly uncommon to gain or lose 5+ figures because of a random person's random whims at a random time. It can be hard to reconcile that with the notion of a meritocratic society, but cognitive dissonance is the spice of life.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      There's a difference between the appearance of randomness across multiple companies from employers and employees having different priorities (and levels of need, and mistakes, and luck) and actual randomness as a selection heuristic. Actual randomness as a policy gives the company the worst of both worlds: the roll of the dice is likely to often give a good recruit an offer they won't possibly accept but also ensures they can follow it up with a significantly higher offer to a worse employee. Lots of companies sacrifice more productive employees to keep salaries to a budget or consciously pay above market to improve their staff pool, but not many firms aim to both keep many promising recruits' salaries below an arbitrary figure and are willing to offer well above that figure to some obviously weaker candidates within the same time frame.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    "Neat! When's the soonest I can re-apply?"
  - mrmonkeyman 6y ago
    But that's actually what happens. They just don't mention the dice part and wrap it in some BS.
  - Hammershaft 6y ago
    And if you roll a high salary your employer has an incentive to get rid of you and replace you with someone who rolled a 2.
    - gen220 6y ago
      I’m not sure... the difference between a 20 and a 2 shouldn’t be too large. An example of a large range in my head is like 120-140k, a more typical one would be like 120-130k. If you’re good, you could negotiate a bigger range. That’s an appreciable difference to the employee, but basically a rounding error to the employer. If you have a high salary today your employer already has an incentive to get rid of you and replace you with a new grad. It already happens.
      - Hammershaft 6y ago
        In aggregate what appears to be rounding errors to the employer ultimately makes up an appreciable difference in expenditures. > If you have a high salary today your employer already has an incentive to get rid of you and replace you with a new grad. It already happens. This is a little different as the employer is making a trade off between employee experience and employee cost. Employers don't have an incentive to replace an employee with an equally skilled employee at the same market rate, but when the salary is randomly chosen out of a range, employers do have an incentive to replace high rollers with new employees who are statistically likely to roll something lower.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    "hero point" :-)
  - gen220 6y ago
    What you should realize is that you haven’t lost 15k. Yay the outcome of the negotiation, the lower part of your range is something you’d be happy with, and the upper is something you’d be quite happy with. The employer meanwhile is offering you a range from what they’d like, to what they can tolerate. Anything you get in the middle is satisfactory to both parties, with the added benefit that you didn’t have to beg for it and they didn’t have to cave for it. Randomness allows for some absolution of responsibility. If you’re shameless in salary negotiations (not a bad thing for you), this system puts you at a relative disadvantage. But the median person finds salary negotiations to be nerve wracking. I think this helps people closer to the median, by allowing them to negotiate a better position without feeling as guilty about it.
- cbsks 6y ago
  > Imagine haggling over the range start or range size, and then picking your salary from a uniform distribution contained by that range. I think that it’s important that the last step is not random. I can’t imagine the job applicant would be happy with their salary being chosen randomly.
  - shajznnckfke 6y ago
    From my perspective, that’s pretty much how it works anyway. At the end of the day you’re sampling from a distribution. You can improve the outcome by networking, interview prep, and negotiation strategy but all of those are just changing the shape of the distribution. I would reject the idea of intentionally adding more randomness because the signal is already so obscured.
- a-nikolaev 6y ago
  What if randomness here also might be a mechanism for possible divine intervention?
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    I think it's more likely that "divine intervention" often was a cover for randomness, with extra benefit of granting some legitimacy to the process in religious societies.
- jhanschoo 6y ago
  Mathematicians already know that random selection is a powerful tool in fairness in electoral processes, the problem is with asking the modern democratic citizen and politician to accept a random process.
  - prionassembly 6y ago
    Also ensuring the legitimacy of the random process (which is not really about technical features, but about social consensus): just how much easier is to claim a PRNG (or a rabbit that chooses a box, or paper slips inside cookies) is rigged.
    - gen220 6y ago
      Yep! For a modern day example, there's a famous conspiracy [1] the Champions League draw, which involves pulling balls from a bin, that certain balls are warmed or cooled so that the ball-chooser knows to draw them in a certain round. They could rid themselves of this conspiracy by randomly selecting the ball-drawer (instead of using a paid random ex-footballer), but they don't. :) [1]: https://www.eurosport.com/football/champions-league/2015-2016/sepp-blatter-claims-european-draws-fixed-with-hot-and-cold-balls_sto5647083/story.shtml https://www.eurosport.com/football/champions-league/2015-201...
vncecartersknee 6y ago
In the painting, that room is much smaller than it's depicted I think, or maybe people were a lot smaller in those days
- gverrilla 6y ago
  church culture likes to make buildings (and fantastic ideas) gigantic and super powerful whilst individuals are thought of as small and insignificant and devious and vicious. of course this is not the way the church hierarchy regards itself, but this is the style they will impose for their "art" as a form of propaganda, to push their narratives.
  - microtherion 6y ago
    I remember a tourist guide in Athens a few years ago claiming that you could see in the difference in proportions between the Parthenon (built by a democratic society) and the temple of Olympian Zeus (built by tyrants/emperors) that the former was meant to elevate you, while the latter was meant to make you feel insignificant.
- trosi 6y ago
  Well the room is huge (52.70m x 24.66m x 11.50m), but the painting makes it look even bigger. https://venicewiki.org/wiki/Sala_del_Maggior_Consiglio https://venicewiki.org/wiki/Sala_del_Maggior_Consiglio
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
This is fascinating. One thing that would be awesome to try would be doing this with the House of Representatives in the US. Basically, one registered voter would be randomly chosen from each congressional district. They would be obligated to serve for the 2 year term and paid the current salary of a member of Congress ($174,000/year). They would never be part of the lottery again after 1 term. I think this could have a lot of benefits in terms of reducing partisanship and reducing the effects of money in politics as you would have 1/3 of the US Government that was not dependent on campaign contributions.
- quag 6y ago
  Choosing a random person from the population to be a representative is called sortition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
  - earthboundkid 6y ago
    "Sortition" is a dumb name. Name it so what people already know what it is: "juries". If you say "I think we should use sortition to decide voting districts" no one will know what the hell you're talking about. If you say "Voting districts should be approved by citizen juries" it is simple and clear. Avoid jargon that doesn't add any precision.
- keeganpoppen 6y ago
  i don't mean to be curt, but that sounds awful. in what sort of ideal world would any leader of anything be chosen this way? this is just some post-post-modern madness. you know what another equally reliable, and arguably more palatable, way to ensure 0 impact of campaign contributions? anarchy. just complete, absolute Hobbesian state of nature. at least then we would pick leaders that would help us survive... randomness is good insurance against downside risk, especially when choosing a committee of people (e.g. a jury), but it has about as much upside as delegating everything to a random Youtube commenter.
  - magicsmoke 6y ago
flobosg 6y ago
In case someone else, like me, was expecting canine memes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge > A doge was an elected lord and chief of state in several Italian city-states, notably Venice and Genoa, during the medieval and renaissance periods.
- Kosirich 6y ago
  You beat me to it, I also thought the picture behind the link would be a Shiba with a bat punishing horny people.... and that's coming from someone who is from an area that historically use to be governed by a Doge
  - BerislavLopac 6y ago
    Zadar? ;)
    - Kosirich 6y ago
      Istra :)
      - BerislavLopac 6y ago
        To mi je bilo drugo na listi. ;)
- koziserek 6y ago
  https://external-preview.redd.it/cBrUH39qpleJvs6tvBvuRlYSrSEYjfmn8d5URqKdvVw.jpg?auto=webp&s=5c277735c95e1d65f366cf96b689b95a971af8c5 https://external-preview.redd.it/cBrUH39qpleJvs6tvBvuRlYSrSE...
- codetrotter 6y ago
  Same here, kind of. Or rather, I was reminded of the Shibe doggie memes when I read the title, but I expected that it would indeed be about the other kind of doge.
- 1_player 6y ago
blululu 6y ago
For a more mathematical analysis of how this process plays out in terms of representation, I found this article to be very helpful: https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf *It is also worth noting that the main article simplifies the process a little, since a certain threshold approval is required
- 0x445442 6y ago
  Thanks for the link. My first thought when reading the article was there had to be a more simplistic mathematical equivalent.
- synctext 6y ago
  "Electing the Doge of Venice: Analysis of a 13th Century Protocol", https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF.2007.21 https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF.2007.21 "This paper discusses the protocol used for electing the Doge of Venice between 1268 and the end of the Republic in 1797. We will show that it has some useful properties that in addition to being interesting in themselves, also suggest that its fundamental design principle is worth investigating for application to leader election protocols in computer science."
Kosirich 6y ago
I'm a huge advocate of introducing randomness to most of governmental dealings. I draw a parallel to John Rawls "Veil of Ignorance" and how actors in a system behave differently based on the (un)certainty of the outcome. I would be interested if there are modern examples of use of randomness in public offices, government contracts ect. and what are the benefits and negative sides of using randomness to combat corruption.
ajb 6y ago
Like a lot of commentors I think that sortition could be a useful part of the democratic process. However I think it's better as a component than the whole thing, which is also shown in the Doge election. It's worth remembering that voting is already only the last step of a process: 1 Candidates self-select 2 party selection panel (or primary election) 3 election In my opinion a good process would be: 1 voters form into groups of 100-200 (the range is so that a group that's too large can just split) 2 each group elects one of their number 3 sortition among these This preserves most of sortitions resistance to cliques and elite capture, but still gives a decent chance of selecting people in the top 5% by whatever metric the voters prefer, and allows them to learn (let's not select someone like that next time)
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
  Interesting proposal! I think in practice it would devolve into "join my group and vote for me". You'd see people on Twitter trying to convince their followers to join their fan group. Once they got themselves a group of 100, they'd tell followers to join the group of a friend who was ideologically aligned. You could also form the groups randomly. But assigning every person in the US to a 100-200 person group, arranging for them to meet in person, and letting them socialize enough to know who to pick could be logistically challenging, especially to do in a timely manner. Perhaps if you did it via the internet and used an app such as gather.town to make it feasible to get to know your group. Or perhaps if 100-200 person groups persisted between elections so the overhead of getting to know people was a one-time thing. All these systems except sortition result in "rule by extraverts", which is arguably undesirable. An approach that allows for introvert rulers: Let every person nominate whoever they want (including themselves?) Put all those names in a hat, then draw names randomly from the hat for the purpose of sortition. That way if I'm an introvert, and my introvert friend has insightful political opinions, I can nominate them. People would nominate their favorite celebrity a lot, but the flip side of that would be that if you voted for a celebrity whose name was already drawn, your vote is effectively wasted. So there's a bit of an incentive to nominate someone obscure that no one else will nominate. You would probably want to check and see if a person was actually willing to serve before nominating them. (I think it would be unwise to make service in this body mandatory the way jury duty is?) That one reminds me of liquid democracy, which I believe Glen Weyl has criticized on the basis that it leads to polarization, though I'm not sure why.
arminiusreturns 6y ago
I highly suggest reading up on the history of Venice, it's such an informative topic for me in studying history. For example, the War of the Legue of Cambrai is one of the most fascinating and illuminating wars that no one really knows about... a world war before the first world war. The origins of diplomacy (and espionage) there along with the banking and monetery systems alone are worth the study! The oath of the council of ten? "Jura, perjura, secretum prodere noli" Swear, foreswear, and reveal not the secret.
- kdeldycke 6y ago
  More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_League_of_Cambrai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_League_of_Cambrai
- karatinversion 6y ago
  The podcast "The Tides of History" had a bunch of episodes on early modern Italy in general and Venice in particular, which were really eye-opening. The other interesting fact about the Italian mercantile city-states is that many of them lasted an amazingly long time. The republics in Venice and Genoa, for example, were only extinguished in 1797 by Napoleon!
  - pmontra 6y ago
    And if you go on vacation in the region around Venice (Veneto) you'll see so many historical buildings with engraved the San Marco's lion (the emblem of Venice) and flags that it feels like it ended in 1979. It also gives a feeling of the wealth of the Republic of Venice.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
While interesting, it's not an ideal system because it's still the elite picking one of their own.
- a_imho 6y ago
  This is the crux of the problem. Elites are going to represent the elites' problems and serve their incentives. I'm in favor of sortition of choosing representatives on every level.
- zeveb 6y ago
  Why is that a problem? I would rather have a doge from a good family, who has been exposed to international trade and great power politics from birth, than one who was sweeping out the stables three days ago. The non-elite are not inherently purer than the elite, and they are generally less well-educated. I am not certain how 'elite' has become a bad thing: shouldn't we all aspire to be among the elite? I thought that there was some real genius to the English system, which at one time provided voices for both the great families and the citizenry, roughly balanced under the Crown. So too the U.S. system of senatorial selection prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
    I'm somewhat in the same camp. There is always going to be an Elite class in society. Why not let them stay there? Why do we have to play coy about the whole thing on how they are intrinsically evil when in fact they're often the ones with some of the most heavy of burdens. I do think that it's worth some concessions that they do get to have more luxuries in life due to that, but who cares, they were going to get them anyway. At least they're at the forefront for everybody to be aware of and seeing their activities. I'm 100% also behind this because they aren't complete jaded "rags to riches" people. This is one reason why I think in the US we have such a huge issue with selfishness in general. If you worked for what you earned, it is yours. Therefore, it's in everyone's mindset to be selfish/greedy. Whereas if you had an Elite class handle things such as this, you can rest assured everything they do isn't solely for their self interest. They don't do things just for money. If their morals are somewhat sound in reasoning, I can't see why they'd overlook the cost of things much like we do in the US over literally everything.
specialist 6y ago
[Late to the party, sorry.] Anyone curious about modern sortition: Citizen juries are chosen by lottery. They review policy and make recommendations. Non binding, but impactful. https://healthydemocracy.org https://healthydemocracy.org https://xraypod.com/show/democracy-nerd/exporting-oregon-style-democracy https://xraypod.com/show/democracy-nerd/exporting-oregon-sty... -- IMHO: Treat representation and policy making as distinct and separate activities. I'm very political. Over time, I've become increasingly disinterested in electoral politics and campaigns. At best, it's tangentially related to policy work. Less so over time. The real power these days lies with interest groups and lobbyists. Both on the left and right. There are some notable exceptions, where electeds are effective advocates of change, but they're rare. Most are just doing triage. And what outsiders see as partisanship is just different teams funded by different coalitions of interest groups.
- florencebuzz 6y ago
  I highly recommend a short book, Hatred of Democracy by Jacques Ranciere.
  - specialist 6y ago
    Thanks. I'll try to read that. Skimming his wiki and some of the book reviews, I already know it'll challenge me. My metaphor for democracy is social cognition. It's just a form of group decision making, collective action. Like an optimization algorithm. So I tend to focus on process and feedback loops. I really struggle with Marxist frames, as I understand them. Like the phrase "democracy is a releveling of society" and "defense of the public sphere". I'm sure that I'll learn from his pushback against the enemies of civil society. Like Hoppe cited by 0xDEADBABE. What polite company now calls "neoreactionaries", but I generally use much more pointed pejoratives. Again, thank you.
  - 0x445442 6y ago
    I haven't read that reference but I have read some stuff by Hans Hoppe and he raises some very interesting points on the subject. One of the more interesting points he brings up is that Democracy was not really looked on favorably by serious thinkers throughout history. He also asserts that because, it's implementation coincided with the great leaps forward in science, technology and industrialization, the champions of Democracy are making the classic correlation vs. causation error.

117 points by flannery 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

It’s fascinating how random selection plays an essential role in the election. The final phase’s selection isn’t random, but many intermediary phases are. I think randomness is an underrated tool for introducing a sense of “fairness” to problems with strange power dynamics: where everyone is interested in a fair outcome, but the best outcome for any individual causes some harm to the group. Salary negotiation is one example. Imagine haggling over the range start or range size, and then picking your salary from a uniform distribution contained by that range. I wonder how the distribution of (un-)satisfactory outcomes of this system that would compare to the one we have today. It’s also interesting to note certain parallels to structures existing today. The group stage draw for the UEFA Champions League comes to mind.

taneq 6y ago
> Imagine haggling over the range start or range size, and then picking your salary from a uniform distribution contained by that range. I cannot imagine anyone, ever, being happy with being told "hey you're great but you only rolled a 4 on your salary negotiation so you're $15k out of pocket.
- meekrohprocess 6y ago
  Yeah, it's tough when that happens. But that is kind of how things go: part of the d20 system's charm is that it successfully approximates the absurd range and randomness inherent in ordinary life. Sometimes you get a company that gets offended at the prospect of negotiation - that's a 1, although if you get an offer rescinded like that it's probably good for you in the long run. Sometimes you throw out a ridiculous number for whatever reason and the other side says, "mmmm...yeah, okay." That's a 20. But it's not exactly uncommon to gain or lose 5+ figures because of a random person's random whims at a random time. It can be hard to reconcile that with the notion of a meritocratic society, but cognitive dissonance is the spice of life.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    There's a difference between the appearance of randomness across multiple companies from employers and employees having different priorities (and levels of need, and mistakes, and luck) and actual randomness as a selection heuristic. Actual randomness as a policy gives the company the worst of both worlds: the roll of the dice is likely to often give a good recruit an offer they won't possibly accept but also ensures they can follow it up with a significantly higher offer to a worse employee. Lots of companies sacrifice more productive employees to keep salaries to a budget or consciously pay above market to improve their staff pool, but not many firms aim to both keep many promising recruits' salaries below an arbitrary figure and are willing to offer well above that figure to some obviously weaker candidates within the same time frame.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  "Neat! When's the soonest I can re-apply?"
- mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  But that's actually what happens. They just don't mention the dice part and wrap it in some BS.
- Hammershaft 6y ago
  And if you roll a high salary your employer has an incentive to get rid of you and replace you with someone who rolled a 2.
  - gen220 6y ago
    I’m not sure... the difference between a 20 and a 2 shouldn’t be too large. An example of a large range in my head is like 120-140k, a more typical one would be like 120-130k. If you’re good, you could negotiate a bigger range. That’s an appreciable difference to the employee, but basically a rounding error to the employer. If you have a high salary today your employer already has an incentive to get rid of you and replace you with a new grad. It already happens.
    - Hammershaft 6y ago
      In aggregate what appears to be rounding errors to the employer ultimately makes up an appreciable difference in expenditures. > If you have a high salary today your employer already has an incentive to get rid of you and replace you with a new grad. It already happens. This is a little different as the employer is making a trade off between employee experience and employee cost. Employers don't have an incentive to replace an employee with an equally skilled employee at the same market rate, but when the salary is randomly chosen out of a range, employers do have an incentive to replace high rollers with new employees who are statistically likely to roll something lower.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  "hero point" :-)
- gen220 6y ago
  What you should realize is that you haven’t lost 15k. Yay the outcome of the negotiation, the lower part of your range is something you’d be happy with, and the upper is something you’d be quite happy with. The employer meanwhile is offering you a range from what they’d like, to what they can tolerate. Anything you get in the middle is satisfactory to both parties, with the added benefit that you didn’t have to beg for it and they didn’t have to cave for it. Randomness allows for some absolution of responsibility. If you’re shameless in salary negotiations (not a bad thing for you), this system puts you at a relative disadvantage. But the median person finds salary negotiations to be nerve wracking. I think this helps people closer to the median, by allowing them to negotiate a better position without feeling as guilty about it.
cbsks 6y ago
> Imagine haggling over the range start or range size, and then picking your salary from a uniform distribution contained by that range. I think that it’s important that the last step is not random. I can’t imagine the job applicant would be happy with their salary being chosen randomly.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  From my perspective, that’s pretty much how it works anyway. At the end of the day you’re sampling from a distribution. You can improve the outcome by networking, interview prep, and negotiation strategy but all of those are just changing the shape of the distribution. I would reject the idea of intentionally adding more randomness because the signal is already so obscured.
a-nikolaev 6y ago
What if randomness here also might be a mechanism for possible divine intervention?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  I think it's more likely that "divine intervention" often was a cover for randomness, with extra benefit of granting some legitimacy to the process in religious societies.
jhanschoo 6y ago
Mathematicians already know that random selection is a powerful tool in fairness in electoral processes, the problem is with asking the modern democratic citizen and politician to accept a random process.
- prionassembly 6y ago
  Also ensuring the legitimacy of the random process (which is not really about technical features, but about social consensus): just how much easier is to claim a PRNG (or a rabbit that chooses a box, or paper slips inside cookies) is rigged.
  - gen220 6y ago
    Yep! For a modern day example, there's a famous conspiracy [1] the Champions League draw, which involves pulling balls from a bin, that certain balls are warmed or cooled so that the ball-chooser knows to draw them in a certain round. They could rid themselves of this conspiracy by randomly selecting the ball-drawer (instead of using a paid random ex-footballer), but they don't. :) [1]: https://www.eurosport.com/football/champions-league/2015-2016/sepp-blatter-claims-european-draws-fixed-with-hot-and-cold-balls_sto5647083/story.shtml https://www.eurosport.com/football/champions-league/2015-201...

vncecartersknee 6y ago

In the painting, that room is much smaller than it's depicted I think, or maybe people were a lot smaller in those days

gverrilla 6y ago
church culture likes to make buildings (and fantastic ideas) gigantic and super powerful whilst individuals are thought of as small and insignificant and devious and vicious. of course this is not the way the church hierarchy regards itself, but this is the style they will impose for their "art" as a form of propaganda, to push their narratives.
- microtherion 6y ago
  I remember a tourist guide in Athens a few years ago claiming that you could see in the difference in proportions between the Parthenon (built by a democratic society) and the temple of Olympian Zeus (built by tyrants/emperors) that the former was meant to elevate you, while the latter was meant to make you feel insignificant.
trosi 6y ago
Well the room is huge (52.70m x 24.66m x 11.50m), but the painting makes it look even bigger. https://venicewiki.org/wiki/Sala_del_Maggior_Consiglio https://venicewiki.org/wiki/Sala_del_Maggior_Consiglio
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

This is fascinating. One thing that would be awesome to try would be doing this with the House of Representatives in the US. Basically, one registered voter would be randomly chosen from each congressional district. They would be obligated to serve for the 2 year term and paid the current salary of a member of Congress ($174,000/year). They would never be part of the lottery again after 1 term. I think this could have a lot of benefits in terms of reducing partisanship and reducing the effects of money in politics as you would have 1/3 of the US Government that was not dependent on campaign contributions.

quag 6y ago
Choosing a random person from the population to be a representative is called sortition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  "Sortition" is a dumb name. Name it so what people already know what it is: "juries". If you say "I think we should use sortition to decide voting districts" no one will know what the hell you're talking about. If you say "Voting districts should be approved by citizen juries" it is simple and clear. Avoid jargon that doesn't add any precision.
keeganpoppen 6y ago
i don't mean to be curt, but that sounds awful. in what sort of ideal world would any leader of anything be chosen this way? this is just some post-post-modern madness. you know what another equally reliable, and arguably more palatable, way to ensure 0 impact of campaign contributions? anarchy. just complete, absolute Hobbesian state of nature. at least then we would pick leaders that would help us survive... randomness is good insurance against downside risk, especially when choosing a committee of people (e.g. a jury), but it has about as much upside as delegating everything to a random Youtube commenter.
- magicsmoke 6y ago

flobosg 6y ago

In case someone else, like me, was expecting canine memes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge > A doge was an elected lord and chief of state in several Italian city-states, notably Venice and Genoa, during the medieval and renaissance periods.

Kosirich 6y ago
You beat me to it, I also thought the picture behind the link would be a Shiba with a bat punishing horny people.... and that's coming from someone who is from an area that historically use to be governed by a Doge
- BerislavLopac 6y ago
  Zadar? ;)
  - Kosirich 6y ago
    Istra :)
    - BerislavLopac 6y ago
      To mi je bilo drugo na listi. ;)
koziserek 6y ago
https://external-preview.redd.it/cBrUH39qpleJvs6tvBvuRlYSrSEYjfmn8d5URqKdvVw.jpg?auto=webp&s=5c277735c95e1d65f366cf96b689b95a971af8c5 https://external-preview.redd.it/cBrUH39qpleJvs6tvBvuRlYSrSE...
codetrotter 6y ago
Same here, kind of. Or rather, I was reminded of the Shibe doggie memes when I read the title, but I expected that it would indeed be about the other kind of doge.
1_player 6y ago

blululu 6y ago

For a more mathematical analysis of how this process plays out in terms of representation, I found this article to be very helpful: https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf *It is also worth noting that the main article simplifies the process a little, since a certain threshold approval is required

0x445442 6y ago
Thanks for the link. My first thought when reading the article was there had to be a more simplistic mathematical equivalent.
synctext 6y ago
"Electing the Doge of Venice: Analysis of a 13th Century Protocol", https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF.2007.21 https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF.2007.21 "This paper discusses the protocol used for electing the Doge of Venice between 1268 and the end of the Republic in 1797. We will show that it has some useful properties that in addition to being interesting in themselves, also suggest that its fundamental design principle is worth investigating for application to leader election protocols in computer science."

Kosirich 6y ago

I'm a huge advocate of introducing randomness to most of governmental dealings. I draw a parallel to John Rawls "Veil of Ignorance" and how actors in a system behave differently based on the (un)certainty of the outcome. I would be interested if there are modern examples of use of randomness in public offices, government contracts ect. and what are the benefits and negative sides of using randomness to combat corruption.

ajb 6y ago

Like a lot of commentors I think that sortition could be a useful part of the democratic process. However I think it's better as a component than the whole thing, which is also shown in the Doge election. It's worth remembering that voting is already only the last step of a process: 1 Candidates self-select 2 party selection panel (or primary election) 3 election In my opinion a good process would be: 1 voters form into groups of 100-200 (the range is so that a group that's too large can just split) 2 each group elects one of their number 3 sortition among these This preserves most of sortitions resistance to cliques and elite capture, but still gives a decent chance of selecting people in the top 5% by whatever metric the voters prefer, and allows them to learn (let's not select someone like that next time)

qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
Interesting proposal! I think in practice it would devolve into "join my group and vote for me". You'd see people on Twitter trying to convince their followers to join their fan group. Once they got themselves a group of 100, they'd tell followers to join the group of a friend who was ideologically aligned. You could also form the groups randomly. But assigning every person in the US to a 100-200 person group, arranging for them to meet in person, and letting them socialize enough to know who to pick could be logistically challenging, especially to do in a timely manner. Perhaps if you did it via the internet and used an app such as gather.town to make it feasible to get to know your group. Or perhaps if 100-200 person groups persisted between elections so the overhead of getting to know people was a one-time thing. All these systems except sortition result in "rule by extraverts", which is arguably undesirable. An approach that allows for introvert rulers: Let every person nominate whoever they want (including themselves?) Put all those names in a hat, then draw names randomly from the hat for the purpose of sortition. That way if I'm an introvert, and my introvert friend has insightful political opinions, I can nominate them. People would nominate their favorite celebrity a lot, but the flip side of that would be that if you voted for a celebrity whose name was already drawn, your vote is effectively wasted. So there's a bit of an incentive to nominate someone obscure that no one else will nominate. You would probably want to check and see if a person was actually willing to serve before nominating them. (I think it would be unwise to make service in this body mandatory the way jury duty is?) That one reminds me of liquid democracy, which I believe Glen Weyl has criticized on the basis that it leads to polarization, though I'm not sure why.

arminiusreturns 6y ago

I highly suggest reading up on the history of Venice, it's such an informative topic for me in studying history. For example, the War of the Legue of Cambrai is one of the most fascinating and illuminating wars that no one really knows about... a world war before the first world war. The origins of diplomacy (and espionage) there along with the banking and monetery systems alone are worth the study! The oath of the council of ten? "Jura, perjura, secretum prodere noli" Swear, foreswear, and reveal not the secret.

kdeldycke 6y ago
More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_League_of_Cambrai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_League_of_Cambrai
karatinversion 6y ago
The podcast "The Tides of History" had a bunch of episodes on early modern Italy in general and Venice in particular, which were really eye-opening. The other interesting fact about the Italian mercantile city-states is that many of them lasted an amazingly long time. The republics in Venice and Genoa, for example, were only extinguished in 1797 by Napoleon!
- pmontra 6y ago
  And if you go on vacation in the region around Venice (Veneto) you'll see so many historical buildings with engraved the San Marco's lion (the emblem of Venice) and flags that it feels like it ended in 1979. It also gives a feeling of the wealth of the Republic of Venice.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

While interesting, it's not an ideal system because it's still the elite picking one of their own.

a_imho 6y ago
This is the crux of the problem. Elites are going to represent the elites' problems and serve their incentives. I'm in favor of sortition of choosing representatives on every level.
zeveb 6y ago
Why is that a problem? I would rather have a doge from a good family, who has been exposed to international trade and great power politics from birth, than one who was sweeping out the stables three days ago. The non-elite are not inherently purer than the elite, and they are generally less well-educated. I am not certain how 'elite' has become a bad thing: shouldn't we all aspire to be among the elite? I thought that there was some real genius to the English system, which at one time provided voices for both the great families and the citizenry, roughly balanced under the Crown. So too the U.S. system of senatorial selection prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  I'm somewhat in the same camp. There is always going to be an Elite class in society. Why not let them stay there? Why do we have to play coy about the whole thing on how they are intrinsically evil when in fact they're often the ones with some of the most heavy of burdens. I do think that it's worth some concessions that they do get to have more luxuries in life due to that, but who cares, they were going to get them anyway. At least they're at the forefront for everybody to be aware of and seeing their activities. I'm 100% also behind this because they aren't complete jaded "rags to riches" people. This is one reason why I think in the US we have such a huge issue with selfishness in general. If you worked for what you earned, it is yours. Therefore, it's in everyone's mindset to be selfish/greedy. Whereas if you had an Elite class handle things such as this, you can rest assured everything they do isn't solely for their self interest. They don't do things just for money. If their morals are somewhat sound in reasoning, I can't see why they'd overlook the cost of things much like we do in the US over literally everything.

specialist 6y ago

[Late to the party, sorry.] Anyone curious about modern sortition: Citizen juries are chosen by lottery. They review policy and make recommendations. Non binding, but impactful. https://healthydemocracy.org https://healthydemocracy.org https://xraypod.com/show/democracy-nerd/exporting-oregon-style-democracy https://xraypod.com/show/democracy-nerd/exporting-oregon-sty... -- IMHO: Treat representation and policy making as distinct and separate activities. I'm very political. Over time, I've become increasingly disinterested in electoral politics and campaigns. At best, it's tangentially related to policy work. Less so over time. The real power these days lies with interest groups and lobbyists. Both on the left and right. There are some notable exceptions, where electeds are effective advocates of change, but they're rare. Most are just doing triage. And what outsiders see as partisanship is just different teams funded by different coalitions of interest groups.

florencebuzz 6y ago
I highly recommend a short book, Hatred of Democracy by Jacques Ranciere.
- specialist 6y ago
  Thanks. I'll try to read that. Skimming his wiki and some of the book reviews, I already know it'll challenge me. My metaphor for democracy is social cognition. It's just a form of group decision making, collective action. Like an optimization algorithm. So I tend to focus on process and feedback loops. I really struggle with Marxist frames, as I understand them. Like the phrase "democracy is a releveling of society" and "defense of the public sphere". I'm sure that I'll learn from his pushback against the enemies of civil society. Like Hoppe cited by 0xDEADBABE. What polite company now calls "neoreactionaries", but I generally use much more pointed pejoratives. Again, thank you.
- 0x445442 6y ago
  I haven't read that reference but I have read some stuff by Hans Hoppe and he raises some very interesting points on the subject. One of the more interesting points he brings up is that Democracy was not really looked on favorably by serious thinkers throughout history. He also asserts that because, it's implementation coincided with the great leaps forward in science, technology and industrialization, the champions of Democracy are making the classic correlation vs. causation error.