4 ms·

Romans relied on a few different omens for a lot of things which reduced to injecting randomness into a lot of decision making. I wonder if such things would b

Romans relied on a few different omens for a lot of things which reduced to injecting randomness into a lot of decision making. I wonder if such things would be valuable to add back to modern life… roll dice to determine which tickets to add to the next sprint, legislatures have to flip a coin to trigger a floor vote for a piece of contentious legislation, that kind of thing.

npongratz 4y ago
It could be sold as a meatspace chaos monkey.
galaxyLogic 4y ago
I think that makes sense. If you cannot be very sure of actual evidence why rely on it anyway? But randomness might mean that every time you use the result you learn something, at least you would learn whether your rule-based default value for the control variable is systematically wrong and tilted to one direction or another.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  That goes along with my thinking. Some things are obvious but when you move away from the top topic or two you’ll always have a long list of things where it’s not so clear which should be done next, and there’s plenty which is always important to do but never the most important thing. A bit of randomness injected into that process whether you’re dealing with software tickets, national legislation, or household chores might just lead to better outcomes than relying on the judgement of a few people without enough information to make nonarbitrary decisions and might have bad biases which lead to things getting overprioritized or neglected.
- PebblesRox 4y ago
  I think companies could test their interview process this way. Fill some positions by choosing from the candidate pool at random (there could be a baseline filter to ensure a minimum level of competence) and compare the random hires with the regular hires to see how much of a difference the interview process really makes.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    Fascinating idea. Do you know of a company that’s done this? Or maybe planning to do this?
    - PebblesRox 4y ago
      No, it's just a half-baked idea I've had after reading people's arguments for and against various interviewing approaches.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    We’re more or less hiring at “pass the baseline level of competence” and I don’t think we’re alone.
  - debatem1 4y ago
    I've long advocated for building a candidate pool for both hires and promos from a low baseline (with the option to opt out for promo), then hire/promote randomly out of that pool. Then fire/demote based on demonstrated incompetence. The important thing isn't that you promote the best worker; the key is that it isn't possible for the ambitious-but-incompetent to game their way up.
  - taneq 4y ago
    Wasn’t there some recent research that showed that hiring randomly actually works better on average? Edit: Wait, that was promoting.
rhcom2 4y ago
> Alectriomancy – fortune-telling with chickens https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosities/alectriomancy-fortune-telling-with-chickens/ https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosities/alectriomancy-fort...
anigbrowl 4y ago
Sortilege is a good thing. Right now we have an ostensibly democratic system where elected representatives take part in another election among themselves about which one of them gets to have pre-emptive veto power over all legislative proposals for 2-6 years (in the US).
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  As I noted upstream, sortition's a pretty fascinating concept. A few years ago I'd thought that the US Supreme Court might benefit by both expansion and selecting by lot the judicial panel for any given case. This would throw far more uncertainty into the outcome of any given Supreme Court case, as well as the capacity to throw the court in the benefit of one party or the other for years at a time. That's been proposed by others. Another possibility might be to apply a similar approach to legislation, with an expanded Congress closer to the 30,000:1 constituent to representative ratio initially in the US Constitution rather than the 616,000:1 ratio presently in place. That would result in a House of 11,000 members, however. (I'm willing to accept that this might prove infeasible, though I'd still like to see approaches enabling greater direct representation.) What if, as with the Supreme Court reform proposal, legislative votes were based on a subset of representatives, again allocated by lot from amongst members? Again, though outcomes would over time average to partisan representation, any given vote might, or might not, favour the majority party. One possible consequence: given the impossibility of guaranteeing a known outcome in votes, legislation might be written to more broadly consider overall views. This could avoid exremes, though it's worth noting that extremes gave rise to both highly discriminatory and civil-rights-reform practices. Some extremes seem less bad than others. There's also the probable outcome that the locus of control would shift elsewhere. I'd still like to see some discussion of such concepts.
vgel 4y ago
Athenian democracy worked this way--you had to opt-in to the candidate pool, but then the candidate was chosen randomly from that pool. (Also, if people are interested in randomness in antique decision making, me & my wife made a simulator of an ancient lot oracle unearthed in modern Turkey: https://sortesalearum.com https://sortesalearum.com)
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  > then the candidate was chosen randomly from that pool The sad thing is, I feel that this method may actually produce better results than whatever popularity voting schemes we're currently using.
lolive 4y ago
Double-Face for president !
lolive 4y ago
Is the YiKing still something relevant, in the chinese culture, for decision-making [with a bit of randomness included]?
dredmorbius 4y ago
Numerous cultures did, and do, do that. (It's somewhat enshrined in modern-day RNGs used in simulation and forecasting models.) Michael Schulson's 2014 Aeon essay, "How to Choose" remains at the top of my best reads of the past decade: ... It makes sense that it should have taken Dove some 15 years to realise that randomness could be an asset. As moderns, we take it for granted that the best decisions stem from a process of empirical analysis and informed choice, with a clear goal in mind. That kind of decision-making, at least in theory, undergirds the ways that we choose political leaders, play the stock market, and select candidates for schools and jobs. It also shapes the way in which we critique the rituals and superstitions of others. But, as the Kantu’ illustrate, there are plenty of situations when random chance really is your best option. And those situations might be far more prevalent in our modern lives than we generally admit. ... <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...> Examples include swidden farmers in New Guinea, China's I Ching, the Athenian Greek elections (more a lottery than today's FPTP precise-count balloting), Renaissance Italy's Doges, and contemporary college admissions, with references for further reading.

npongratz 4y ago

It could be sold as a meatspace chaos monkey.

galaxyLogic 4y ago

I think that makes sense. If you cannot be very sure of actual evidence why rely on it anyway? But randomness might mean that every time you use the result you learn something, at least you would learn whether your rule-based default value for the control variable is systematically wrong and tilted to one direction or another.

colechristensen 4y ago
That goes along with my thinking. Some things are obvious but when you move away from the top topic or two you’ll always have a long list of things where it’s not so clear which should be done next, and there’s plenty which is always important to do but never the most important thing. A bit of randomness injected into that process whether you’re dealing with software tickets, national legislation, or household chores might just lead to better outcomes than relying on the judgement of a few people without enough information to make nonarbitrary decisions and might have bad biases which lead to things getting overprioritized or neglected.
PebblesRox 4y ago
I think companies could test their interview process this way. Fill some positions by choosing from the candidate pool at random (there could be a baseline filter to ensure a minimum level of competence) and compare the random hires with the regular hires to see how much of a difference the interview process really makes.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  Fascinating idea. Do you know of a company that’s done this? Or maybe planning to do this?
  - PebblesRox 4y ago
    No, it's just a half-baked idea I've had after reading people's arguments for and against various interviewing approaches.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  We’re more or less hiring at “pass the baseline level of competence” and I don’t think we’re alone.
- debatem1 4y ago
  I've long advocated for building a candidate pool for both hires and promos from a low baseline (with the option to opt out for promo), then hire/promote randomly out of that pool. Then fire/demote based on demonstrated incompetence. The important thing isn't that you promote the best worker; the key is that it isn't possible for the ambitious-but-incompetent to game their way up.
- taneq 4y ago
  Wasn’t there some recent research that showed that hiring randomly actually works better on average? Edit: Wait, that was promoting.

rhcom2 4y ago

> Alectriomancy – fortune-telling with chickens https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosities/alectriomancy-fortune-telling-with-chickens/ https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosities/alectriomancy-fort...

anigbrowl 4y ago

Sortilege is a good thing. Right now we have an ostensibly democratic system where elected representatives take part in another election among themselves about which one of them gets to have pre-emptive veto power over all legislative proposals for 2-6 years (in the US).

dredmorbius 4y ago
As I noted upstream, sortition's a pretty fascinating concept. A few years ago I'd thought that the US Supreme Court might benefit by both expansion and selecting by lot the judicial panel for any given case. This would throw far more uncertainty into the outcome of any given Supreme Court case, as well as the capacity to throw the court in the benefit of one party or the other for years at a time. That's been proposed by others. Another possibility might be to apply a similar approach to legislation, with an expanded Congress closer to the 30,000:1 constituent to representative ratio initially in the US Constitution rather than the 616,000:1 ratio presently in place. That would result in a House of 11,000 members, however. (I'm willing to accept that this might prove infeasible, though I'd still like to see approaches enabling greater direct representation.) What if, as with the Supreme Court reform proposal, legislative votes were based on a subset of representatives, again allocated by lot from amongst members? Again, though outcomes would over time average to partisan representation, any given vote might, or might not, favour the majority party. One possible consequence: given the impossibility of guaranteeing a known outcome in votes, legislation might be written to more broadly consider overall views. This could avoid exremes, though it's worth noting that extremes gave rise to both highly discriminatory and civil-rights-reform practices. Some extremes seem less bad than others. There's also the probable outcome that the locus of control would shift elsewhere. I'd still like to see some discussion of such concepts.

vgel 4y ago

Athenian democracy worked this way--you had to opt-in to the candidate pool, but then the candidate was chosen randomly from that pool. (Also, if people are interested in randomness in antique decision making, me & my wife made a simulator of an ancient lot oracle unearthed in modern Turkey: https://sortesalearum.com https://sortesalearum.com)

Joker_vD 4y ago
> then the candidate was chosen randomly from that pool The sad thing is, I feel that this method may actually produce better results than whatever popularity voting schemes we're currently using.

lolive 4y ago

Double-Face for president !

lolive 4y ago

Is the YiKing still something relevant, in the chinese culture, for decision-making [with a bit of randomness included]?

dredmorbius 4y ago

Numerous cultures did, and do, do that. (It's somewhat enshrined in modern-day RNGs used in simulation and forecasting models.) Michael Schulson's 2014 Aeon essay, "How to Choose" remains at the top of my best reads of the past decade: ... It makes sense that it should have taken Dove some 15 years to realise that randomness could be an asset. As moderns, we take it for granted that the best decisions stem from a process of empirical analysis and informed choice, with a clear goal in mind. That kind of decision-making, at least in theory, undergirds the ways that we choose political leaders, play the stock market, and select candidates for schools and jobs. It also shapes the way in which we critique the rituals and superstitions of others. But, as the Kantu’ illustrate, there are plenty of situations when random chance really is your best option. And those situations might be far more prevalent in our modern lives than we generally admit. ... <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...> Examples include swidden farmers in New Guinea, China's I Ching, the Athenian Greek elections (more a lottery than today's FPTP precise-count balloting), Renaissance Italy's Doges, and contemporary college admissions, with references for further reading.