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The Greeks already figured out thousands of years ago that the best way to implement democracy was via random selection. Yet here we are, everyone believes that

The Greeks already figured out thousands of years ago that the best way to implement democracy was via random selection. Yet here we are, everyone believes that 'democracy' necessitates 'voting'; totally ignoring all the issues which come with voting. The concept of voting, in a nation of hundreds of millions of people, is just dumb. Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates; everything people think they know was told to them by the corporate-controlled media and they only hear about candidates which were covered by the media; basically only candidates chosen by the establishment. It's a joke. People get the privilege of voting for which party will oppress them. Current democracy is akin to the media making up a story like 'The Wizard of OZ' and then they offer you to vote for either the Lion, the Robot or the Scarecrow. You have no idea who any of these candidates are, you can't even be sure if they actually exist. Everything you know about them could literally have been made up by whoever told the story; and yet, when asked to vote, people are sure they understand what they're doing. They're so sure it's all legit, they'll viciously argue their candidate's position as if they were a family member they knew personally.

PicassoCTs 1y ago
It would make more sense, to vote on policy by giving priorities and preventing impossible votes (cant have tax reduced while demanding more for services)- and then the policy votes get mapped to the corresponding candidates.
- jongjong 1y ago
  This is inferior to random selection because this still has the issue that the candidate could claim to hold certain positions, but once voted in, they may not follow through on any of them. The reality of our current democracy is that anyone who manages to even step onto the arena is likely already bought and paid for. There's a candidate with a prepared narrative to appeal to every kind of fool under the sun. With random selection, you'll get average people, their stated positions hardly matter because once all seats of congress and the senate have been filled with random people, their values will almost certainly reflect the true values of average citizens. That's how probability works. With the current approach to voting; all the candidates you get to choose from have already been pre-screened for: 1. Thirst for power and 2. Alignment with the interests of big capital holders (who paid for their campaigns in order to get to this stage). This is a horrible pre-screening process.
  - Udo 1y ago
    I think what GP meant was voting on policies directly instead of voting in delegates that promise to implement policies.
    - jongjong 1y ago
      If the candidates are legally bound to follow through on policy then it's slightly better yes but there's still a lot of wiggle-room in terms of implementation. Lobbyists often find ways to sneak in convenient loopholes inside regulations. Policy-based voting won't solve that because the voter isn't going to have time to read the full law; it might be many pages. What will happen is people who don't work and have more time on their hands will be more active politically and will get better representation. I mean, it'd definitely be an improvement though.
- vanviegen 1y ago
  People in general don't have the time or inclination to properly study the important details of each an every issue, before voting on them. That's why it makes sense to outsource the decision making to a group of people that are being paid to study these issues full-time. Given some balanced (yes, there's a problem) expert advice, I think rando's might make better choices than career politicians focussed on extending their power. The rando's would just return to their old careers afterwards.
  - PicassoCTs 1y ago
    People though have studied other people. So, vote-forwarding to those who studied, convinced by life-style or example would allow for the votes to propagate to local experts, who then could make the decision as outlined above. If the expert is wrong, the local personality-cult reveals a fraud, that propagation web of votes would with draw and propagate towards new experts.
softg 1y ago
I don't see how selecting the Lion, the Robot or the Scarecrow at random is going to help with any of the issues you mentioned. Now some rando (or group of randos) that you didn't even know existed gets power based on pure luck. You will still need media to learn about them and they could still be made up. At least elections have a veneer of consent since people are asked which of the available options they prefer. Can you imagine anyone going to war because people chosen by a lottery wheel asked for it? This is a problem of scale. The Greeks back then lived in small city-states where random selection meant that every able bodied male had a good shot at holding an important office at least once in their lifetime. You didn't need to hatch devious schemes to come to power. You couldn't abuse your fellow men because they would be in charge tomorrow. That's the true power of random selection and it's completely inapplicable to today's society at large.
- notahacker 1y ago
  There's also the simple fact that in a regular electoral system there is a mechanism for figuring out whether you're voting for the Lion, the Robot or the Scarecrow, called previous track record of that individual or the faction they're affiliated with. And the Lion, Robot or Scarecrow or at least their party usually intend on getting reelected, so whilst they always overpromise, they have some incentive to deliver something the electorate wants. The solution to "candidates don't always deliver what the electorate wanted them to deliver and the electorate doesn't always hold them accountable" isn't "let's put people who never promised anything in the first place and aren't accountable for anything in charge, and somehow assume that they're going to be more benign"
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  > Now some rando (or group of randos) that you didn't even know existed gets power based on pure luck. Being chosen at random could be better than being chosen by elites who are actively trying to oppress you. You get the median thing instead of the below-median thing. > At least elections have a veneer of consent since people are asked which of the available options they prefer. Can you imagine anyone going to war because people chosen by a lottery wheel asked for it? Exactly. It would remove the false veneer of consent. That's a feature, not a cost. > The Greeks back then lived in small city-states where random selection meant that every able bodied male had a good shot at holding an important office at least once in their lifetime. Re-apply the intended principles of federalism so that only decisions of insurmountable national relevance are made at the national level and the large majority of decision are made at the local level.
cmitsakis 1y ago
Good idea. Random selection is interesting but I don't know if it can work today. A solutions for the issue you mentioned "Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates" is a system that allows people to vote only for people they know personally, and use some algorithm (maybe something like the PageRank algorithm that Google used) that rates each citizen according to the votes they get but also the votes are valued according to the rating of each citizen. That way the rating flows to the people who are really trusted by the people and not the best funded career politicians. Just an idea. maybe there are problems with that too if it can be gamed but it's worth trying.
- gruez 1y ago
  >That way the rating flows to the people who are really trusted by the people and not the best funded career politicians. So more people like Donald Trump or Joe Rogan, and less people like Gavin Newsom or Andrew Cuomo?
- andriesm 1y ago
  A solution does exist? - micro democracy, delegate more decision making authority to the smallest geographic unit possible. Then people are voting for someone from their neighborhood.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    This comes with a lot of trade-offs. The complexity of regulation explodes, because everything takes more hops and there's more context switching. Even with just 50 states in the US currently, the complexity is very high. Operating in all 50 states or just a few is very difficult and costs a lot of money. Usually what happens is the "lowest common denominator" solution: whereby companies just follow the superset of laws that comply with the most stringent regions. That's why California law is pretty much the most important state law. California has the biggest economy, and a lot of companies are headquartered there. In addition, their laws tends to be more restrictive for companies. So even if you're in Texas, there's a good chance you're just controlled by California law.
- mlazos 1y ago
afthonos 1y ago
Greek states were neither particularly stable nor particularly long-lived. Irrespective of its moral merits, the Greek system was outcompeted by monarchies and eventually the Roman Republic. It’s hard to pinpoint the blame, exactly, but I’d be cautious, especially since modern democracies arguably came about due to the pressures of industrialization, and previous models developed in very different environments.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  Modern democracies predate the industrial revolution, barely. The modern high touch highly administrative nation state rose out of industrialization.
- nowahlot 1y ago
  American regimes last 4-8 years. We fixed the longevity problem by treating it like a spoon that isn’t there. America today is a Ship of Theseus. None of us lived the experiences that motivated Jefferson and the like. Random figure heads and their only “leadership” role is keep automation and logistics going by essentially making it the public’s work, could work. It satisfies the story mode types to have Dear Daddy stand on a podium and it everyone else who is indifferent and just wants to be a utilitarian cog until they die. No cheesy hustle to make line go up narrative. Rotate in some random schlub, but in a display of pretending it’s an election.
ta1243 1y ago
OK, so I get selected at random. I haven't got the first clue about governing a country, so I'd rely on people telling me what to do. If they can convince me (which will be easy, trillion dollar companies and powerful billionaire oligarchs convince people to act against their own self interest all the time) they end up running the country, but the blame can be taken by me.
- nosianu 1y ago
  > I haven't got the first clue about governing a country Is this really so different from quite a number of high profile politicians today? Many are mostly good at networking and how to use the media machine. The actual competence is with the invisible people behind them, and the bureaucrats. I see little or no difference, even disregarding current administrations (not just in the US).
- BeFlatXIII 1y ago
  …yet we trust juries.
  - Ray20 1y ago
    Most people are idiots and trust things they shouldn't. Lee Kuan Yew doesn't trust juries.
- jongjong 1y ago
  Same as what we have now but I think the moral filter applied would be stronger coming from a random citizen as opposed to a power-hungry citizen. Also, with randomness over the whole population, you can be sure everyone in congress and senate would be different every election cycle. So politicians won't be able to stay in office long enough to form meaningful alliances; they will not trust each other and thus watch each other better to prevent corruption.
foldr 1y ago
There are elements of truth to this, but it’s a wild exaggeration. It feeds into exactly the kind of political cynicism that stops people voting and makes the problem worse.
czl 1y ago
> best way to implement democracy is via random selection Long ago I had the same thought as you and a question occurred: the life anyone is born into is a lottery, so hereditary rulers == democracy?
- K0balt 1y ago
  Interesting proposition. I’ll be giving this some thought.
js8 1y ago
No, voting is not dumb. Direct voting (referendum), representation and sortition (random selection) are 3 basic democratic mechanisms (they distribute power equally among people). But each mechanism has different tradeoffs. How much you get involved, how much expertise you need, and how well your interests are represented. A good political system uses all 3 to public's advantage, to reinforce each other.
hearsathought 1y ago
> The Greeks already figured out thousands of years ago that the best way to implement democracy was via random selection. The greeks ( socrates/plato ) figured out that democracy was a terrible form of government. Then again, the greeks did vote for socrates to drink hemlock. > everything people think they know was told to them by the corporate-controlled media Is there anything sweeter than fox news, a "news" company owned by an australian, railing against foreign influence in american politics? > They're so sure it's all legit, they'll viciously argue their candidate's position as if they were a family member they knew personally. At this point, I'd prefer we ban campaigning and silly staged debates altogether. Just have each candidate post who their masters are and then let the people vote off that. It's far more value to the voter if they knew who the politicians owe their allegiance to than empty campaign promises.

PicassoCTs 1y ago

It would make more sense, to vote on policy by giving priorities and preventing impossible votes (cant have tax reduced while demanding more for services)- and then the policy votes get mapped to the corresponding candidates.

jongjong 1y ago
This is inferior to random selection because this still has the issue that the candidate could claim to hold certain positions, but once voted in, they may not follow through on any of them. The reality of our current democracy is that anyone who manages to even step onto the arena is likely already bought and paid for. There's a candidate with a prepared narrative to appeal to every kind of fool under the sun. With random selection, you'll get average people, their stated positions hardly matter because once all seats of congress and the senate have been filled with random people, their values will almost certainly reflect the true values of average citizens. That's how probability works. With the current approach to voting; all the candidates you get to choose from have already been pre-screened for: 1. Thirst for power and 2. Alignment with the interests of big capital holders (who paid for their campaigns in order to get to this stage). This is a horrible pre-screening process.
- Udo 1y ago
  I think what GP meant was voting on policies directly instead of voting in delegates that promise to implement policies.
  - jongjong 1y ago
    If the candidates are legally bound to follow through on policy then it's slightly better yes but there's still a lot of wiggle-room in terms of implementation. Lobbyists often find ways to sneak in convenient loopholes inside regulations. Policy-based voting won't solve that because the voter isn't going to have time to read the full law; it might be many pages. What will happen is people who don't work and have more time on their hands will be more active politically and will get better representation. I mean, it'd definitely be an improvement though.
vanviegen 1y ago
People in general don't have the time or inclination to properly study the important details of each an every issue, before voting on them. That's why it makes sense to outsource the decision making to a group of people that are being paid to study these issues full-time. Given some balanced (yes, there's a problem) expert advice, I think rando's might make better choices than career politicians focussed on extending their power. The rando's would just return to their old careers afterwards.
- PicassoCTs 1y ago
  People though have studied other people. So, vote-forwarding to those who studied, convinced by life-style or example would allow for the votes to propagate to local experts, who then could make the decision as outlined above. If the expert is wrong, the local personality-cult reveals a fraud, that propagation web of votes would with draw and propagate towards new experts.

softg 1y ago

I don't see how selecting the Lion, the Robot or the Scarecrow at random is going to help with any of the issues you mentioned. Now some rando (or group of randos) that you didn't even know existed gets power based on pure luck. You will still need media to learn about them and they could still be made up. At least elections have a veneer of consent since people are asked which of the available options they prefer. Can you imagine anyone going to war because people chosen by a lottery wheel asked for it? This is a problem of scale. The Greeks back then lived in small city-states where random selection meant that every able bodied male had a good shot at holding an important office at least once in their lifetime. You didn't need to hatch devious schemes to come to power. You couldn't abuse your fellow men because they would be in charge tomorrow. That's the true power of random selection and it's completely inapplicable to today's society at large.

notahacker 1y ago
There's also the simple fact that in a regular electoral system there is a mechanism for figuring out whether you're voting for the Lion, the Robot or the Scarecrow, called previous track record of that individual or the faction they're affiliated with. And the Lion, Robot or Scarecrow or at least their party usually intend on getting reelected, so whilst they always overpromise, they have some incentive to deliver something the electorate wants. The solution to "candidates don't always deliver what the electorate wanted them to deliver and the electorate doesn't always hold them accountable" isn't "let's put people who never promised anything in the first place and aren't accountable for anything in charge, and somehow assume that they're going to be more benign"
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> Now some rando (or group of randos) that you didn't even know existed gets power based on pure luck. Being chosen at random could be better than being chosen by elites who are actively trying to oppress you. You get the median thing instead of the below-median thing. > At least elections have a veneer of consent since people are asked which of the available options they prefer. Can you imagine anyone going to war because people chosen by a lottery wheel asked for it? Exactly. It would remove the false veneer of consent. That's a feature, not a cost. > The Greeks back then lived in small city-states where random selection meant that every able bodied male had a good shot at holding an important office at least once in their lifetime. Re-apply the intended principles of federalism so that only decisions of insurmountable national relevance are made at the national level and the large majority of decision are made at the local level.

cmitsakis 1y ago

Good idea. Random selection is interesting but I don't know if it can work today. A solutions for the issue you mentioned "Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates" is a system that allows people to vote only for people they know personally, and use some algorithm (maybe something like the PageRank algorithm that Google used) that rates each citizen according to the votes they get but also the votes are valued according to the rating of each citizen. That way the rating flows to the people who are really trusted by the people and not the best funded career politicians. Just an idea. maybe there are problems with that too if it can be gamed but it's worth trying.

gruez 1y ago
>That way the rating flows to the people who are really trusted by the people and not the best funded career politicians. So more people like Donald Trump or Joe Rogan, and less people like Gavin Newsom or Andrew Cuomo?
andriesm 1y ago
A solution does exist? - micro democracy, delegate more decision making authority to the smallest geographic unit possible. Then people are voting for someone from their neighborhood.
- const_cast 1y ago
  This comes with a lot of trade-offs. The complexity of regulation explodes, because everything takes more hops and there's more context switching. Even with just 50 states in the US currently, the complexity is very high. Operating in all 50 states or just a few is very difficult and costs a lot of money. Usually what happens is the "lowest common denominator" solution: whereby companies just follow the superset of laws that comply with the most stringent regions. That's why California law is pretty much the most important state law. California has the biggest economy, and a lot of companies are headquartered there. In addition, their laws tends to be more restrictive for companies. So even if you're in Texas, there's a good chance you're just controlled by California law.
mlazos 1y ago

afthonos 1y ago

Greek states were neither particularly stable nor particularly long-lived. Irrespective of its moral merits, the Greek system was outcompeted by monarchies and eventually the Roman Republic. It’s hard to pinpoint the blame, exactly, but I’d be cautious, especially since modern democracies arguably came about due to the pressures of industrialization, and previous models developed in very different environments.

potato3732842 1y ago
Modern democracies predate the industrial revolution, barely. The modern high touch highly administrative nation state rose out of industrialization.
nowahlot 1y ago
American regimes last 4-8 years. We fixed the longevity problem by treating it like a spoon that isn’t there. America today is a Ship of Theseus. None of us lived the experiences that motivated Jefferson and the like. Random figure heads and their only “leadership” role is keep automation and logistics going by essentially making it the public’s work, could work. It satisfies the story mode types to have Dear Daddy stand on a podium and it everyone else who is indifferent and just wants to be a utilitarian cog until they die. No cheesy hustle to make line go up narrative. Rotate in some random schlub, but in a display of pretending it’s an election.

ta1243 1y ago

OK, so I get selected at random. I haven't got the first clue about governing a country, so I'd rely on people telling me what to do. If they can convince me (which will be easy, trillion dollar companies and powerful billionaire oligarchs convince people to act against their own self interest all the time) they end up running the country, but the blame can be taken by me.

nosianu 1y ago
> I haven't got the first clue about governing a country Is this really so different from quite a number of high profile politicians today? Many are mostly good at networking and how to use the media machine. The actual competence is with the invisible people behind them, and the bureaucrats. I see little or no difference, even disregarding current administrations (not just in the US).
BeFlatXIII 1y ago
…yet we trust juries.
- Ray20 1y ago
  Most people are idiots and trust things they shouldn't. Lee Kuan Yew doesn't trust juries.
jongjong 1y ago
Same as what we have now but I think the moral filter applied would be stronger coming from a random citizen as opposed to a power-hungry citizen. Also, with randomness over the whole population, you can be sure everyone in congress and senate would be different every election cycle. So politicians won't be able to stay in office long enough to form meaningful alliances; they will not trust each other and thus watch each other better to prevent corruption.

foldr 1y ago

There are elements of truth to this, but it’s a wild exaggeration. It feeds into exactly the kind of political cynicism that stops people voting and makes the problem worse.

czl 1y ago

> best way to implement democracy is via random selection Long ago I had the same thought as you and a question occurred: the life anyone is born into is a lottery, so hereditary rulers == democracy?

K0balt 1y ago
Interesting proposition. I’ll be giving this some thought.

js8 1y ago

No, voting is not dumb. Direct voting (referendum), representation and sortition (random selection) are 3 basic democratic mechanisms (they distribute power equally among people). But each mechanism has different tradeoffs. How much you get involved, how much expertise you need, and how well your interests are represented. A good political system uses all 3 to public's advantage, to reinforce each other.

hearsathought 1y ago

> The Greeks already figured out thousands of years ago that the best way to implement democracy was via random selection. The greeks ( socrates/plato ) figured out that democracy was a terrible form of government. Then again, the greeks did vote for socrates to drink hemlock. > everything people think they know was told to them by the corporate-controlled media Is there anything sweeter than fox news, a "news" company owned by an australian, railing against foreign influence in american politics? > They're so sure it's all legit, they'll viciously argue their candidate's position as if they were a family member they knew personally. At this point, I'd prefer we ban campaigning and silly staged debates altogether. Just have each candidate post who their masters are and then let the people vote off that. It's far more value to the voter if they knew who the politicians owe their allegiance to than empty campaign promises.