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Or we can recruit lawmakers how we choose juries: randomly. Every two years we randomly select 435 individuals to serve in the House and 100 random people for t

Or we can recruit lawmakers how we choose juries: randomly. Every two years we randomly select 435 individuals to serve in the House and 100 random people for the Senate. We pay them well, and they pass a basic literacy test. No money in politics, no parties. You have to for a coalition to govern. One objection could be this: but what if we hire unqualified people. The counterargument: do you think are current legislators are more or less qualified than an average person? Another objection: but what if they don’t want to do it? Counterargument: when a juror does not want to be on a case, they are almost always dismissed from it. Doesn’t mean you get to skip jury duty, just that you don’t get to do that one. One last one: this will disrupt those people’s lives. Counter argument: what Congress is and isn’t doing right now is disrupting everyone’s lives as are lobbyists and special interest groups. Something similar has been done in Ireland with their assemblies. And I do think that if you cannot convince 535 randomly selected average citizens that a law should be passed, that law is probably not worth passing. Democracy is a terrible form of government. It’s just that it is about 5x better than anything else we have invented so far. Doesn’t mean we should stop looking for a better system.

ragebol 10mo ago
Sounds very interesting, but one more counter-points I'd like to see counter-countered: These random people will have to rely on experts a lot for knowledge they lack on any topic, because the world is complex. Now, these experts can be biased, bought, influenced etc. Or be accused of being in some sort of "Deep State" if you're into that. But then again, this can already be the case, now I counter-countered myself.
- IgorPartola 10mo ago
  That’s exactly it: we already have this in the form of the lobby industrial complex. Except it is possibly quite a bit worse because if you stay in Congress for a long time and form a trusting relationship with your lobbyists who by the way also pay to your reelection campaign or support you in other ways, over time you get to accept their expert opinion with less skepticism. If a lobbyist has to start over every 2 years, they can’t sink their teeth as hard into you. And I doubt many congresspeople are experts on most subjects on which they write laws. Some have economics degrees. Some are doctors, some are lawyers. Very few engineers, it seems. If you wanted an alternative system: you could always have a professional group of law writers and a professional group of law opposers try to present arguments to a large assembly of law jurors. If they can’t get 2/3rds majority on a law, it doesn’t pass. This is better than something like direct democracy where everyone votes on an issue because you can’t get the voters’ attention on any one thing for more than a few minutes or a few hours at the most (except a small fraction for whom it is their life for a while). In this law jury setup you can properly brief them. You could have some other body of professional governors who do things like emergency resolutions and maybe basic budget stuff but anything beyond that goes to the assembly for approval. You could create a new assembly as often as every 6 weeks and process a batch of laws at once so that you really rotate out the jurors before they can be influenced. And selection of law writers and law opposers can be something that is reviewed by this kind of assembly too, or just some large pool of professionals who are chosen at random for any given period of time and given the power to present before the assembly. A lot of options here for how to amortize bad behavior such that over the long haul it averages out to close to zero.
  - jkartchner 10mo ago
    Assuming, arguendo, that corruption is somehow not a factor in your scenario, it still doesn't account for ignorance. Consider that jurors in jury trials have one binary decision to make based on the facts and law given to them. They don't need to decide if the law is just (in fact that's explicitly NOT what they're supposed to do). They don't need (and are not supposed) to decide if the situation is fair. That happens elsewhere by folks trained to consider these things. Jurors in jury trials literally apply the law they are given to the evidence they are presented. That's it. Even this burden is often more than a lot of folks can wrap their head around. The legislature, however, is not there just to nod its head when they think something is a good idea and voting no when it's not. Even if we were to create a space for exactly that, all we've done is push the fallibility to those who are doing the work to write and revise law--but now they're pitching to those off the streets who don't know anything about governance! If anything, lay congresspeople would magnify, not reduce, the problems we have with our current system.
    - IgorPartola 10mo ago
      I am definitely not going to argue with almost any of what you said. My main point is that democracy as we have it now clearly has flaws and maybe exploring ways to amend it to work better isn’t a terrible idea. Again, Ireland successfully used randomly selected assemblies to decide in major legislation. Perhaps a state like California that loves doing direct referendums and as a result has referendums decided in part by how successfully the campaign around the given issue is can benefit from a longer deliberation by people who are not known ahead of time.
- projektfu 10mo ago
  Currently, the Congressional staff is mostly recruited and retained by the congresspeople, and they become the experts in many situations. They can also be retained by the committees, in which case they are often more non-partisan. They do have some ability to influence the debate, but they usually do not frame it. If we had national assemblies by sortition every 2 years, I would worry that the the tail (the current structure of Congressional support staff) would wag the dog. A better system would need to be designed to enable good decision-making.
angiolillo 10mo ago
For reference, this is referred to as "sortition", and at least the Athenians felt that it was more democratic than elections. The randomization machines they used for picking winners (kleroterion) are quite ingenious. In modern times, sortition sometimes shows up in some deliberative democracy proposals.
- groundzeros2015 10mo ago
  Athens is a tiny community. And within that the citizens are the aristocrats who know each other by name. Ordinary residents are merchants or slaves.
  - angiolillo 10mo ago
    Sure and when the US was founded the majority of residents were similarly not allowed to vote because voting was restricted voting to a minority of property-owning white males over the age of 21. Democracy has evolved from its Athenian origins, presumably sortition would as well.
    - hrimfaxi 10mo ago
      I think their point was that it only worked because of such a cohort to randomly select from.
      - angiolillo 10mo ago
        That was also my interpretation and why I made the point that democratic processes have evolved to account for a changing polity. The US government could not be managed by Athenian sortition any more than it could be by Athenian direct democracy -- the citizenry is too different, the questions too complex. However, just as the Romans evolved their original Athenian-style direct democracy into representative democracy as their empire grew and became more heterogeneous, sortition has similarly evolved into deliberative democracy.
        10mo ago
groundzeros2015 10mo ago
We elect leaders - people with skills, knowledge, and expertise. Does the average citizen even understand discounted cash flows or opportunity cost? And not to mention legal concepts I’m ignorant of. I don’t see why lowering the quality of candidates by 10x would improve things.
- sagarm 10mo ago
  Do our current elected leaders understand discounted cash flows or opportunity cost? I'm not seeing evidence our current process results in people skill, knowledge, and expertise, especially given the over representation of people from entertainment.
  - groundzeros2015 10mo ago
    Yes. across parties senators typically have prestigious law degrees and piles of accomplishments. I’m not saying that makes them great. But if you want to see the pool of average citizens walk into a Walmart or DMV outside the Bay Area.
  - HDThoreaun 10mo ago
    Yes. They just don’t talk about it because the voters don’t understand and feel insulted when they hear politicians talk about stuff they don’t understand.
- margalabargala 10mo ago
  > We elect leaders - people with skills, knowledge, and expertise. I admire your optimism but saying it doesn't make it so. We elect people able to convince others they should be elected. Often that means they possess the ability to convince others they have the skills, knowledge, and expertise you describe. If you think that's the same thing as actually having skills, knowledge, and expertise, well, I have bad news for you...
  - groundzeros2015 10mo ago
    Optimism would be believing people on the street are as capable as Us senators.
benmmurphy 10mo ago
sortition is just democracy but with a weird probabilistic form of voting
- IgorPartola 10mo ago
  As opposed to the determinism we have now?
jkartchner 10mo ago
As a prosecuting attorney who selects and works to convince the "average" juror 5+ times a year, this is not a good idea. You are vastly overestimating what the average level of competence is. Most people, when given unfamiliar knowledge work to do, are so hopelessly biased and ignorant that I definitely think the average congressperson is more qualified to do that kind of work. We are spoiled by selection bias when extrapolating what "average" means in the USA.
- superxpro12 10mo ago
  I'm reminded of the famous Carlin bit: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
- dfxm12 10mo ago
  Speaking of "average", every political debate moderator should ask the candidates where they shop and how much milk and eggs cost. Ask them how much it is to fill up their car's gas tank. I don't necessarily think sortition is the answer, but I have more faith that the so called "hopelessly biased and ignorant average person" would address issues that affect me than I do with hopelessly biased and ignorant people like Trump, Johnson, Thune, Schumer and Jefferies, because I know they're only looking out for themselves.
  - crummy 10mo ago
    this (sometimes) happens in New Zealand: https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/350541328/watch-national-leader-judith-collins-shocks-the-project-host-with-claim-1kg-block-of-cheese-costs-5 https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/350541328/watch-national-le...
  - throwaway2037 10mo ago
    So if you are wealthy enough to have house staff to do all the shopping, cooking, and driving, then you are somehow less qualified to be a member of parliament?
- angiolillo 10mo ago
  > I definitely think the average congressperson is more qualified to do that kind of work My sense is that people who advocate for sortition find it attractive not because they believe that the average citizen is more intelligent or better informed than the average career politician, just less corrupt. Setting aside whether that's even true, I'm not sure whether it would be better to live in a country run by honest idiots or corrupt experts.
NoMoreNicksLeft 10mo ago
>Or we can recruit lawmakers how we choose juries: randomly. Every two years we randomly select 435 individuals to If anyone doesn't like that number (435), there's already a constitutional amendment to bump it up to 6000ish. It's been ratified by 12 states, so only 26 more needed. Call your state legislator today and ask why they're not ratifying it.
- seanw444 10mo ago
  Whoa. Gonna have to congregate in the Capitol One Arena if that happens.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 10mo ago
    Let's fuck up Congress. Help make it happen. (In seriousness, they'd be forced to explore other solutions, possibly even regional capitols with some sort of high-tech teleconferencing. Anything that decentralizes and claws back power from DC can't be a bad thing if you ask me.)
singleshot_ 10mo ago
> The counterargument: do you think are current legislators are more or less qualified than an average person? More, obviously. Almost a third of the US House and half the Senate are lawyers. Less than three tenths of a percent of Americans have a JD.
- IgorPartola 10mo ago
  I am honestly curious how many Congresspeople with law degrees could pass the Bar. But also have you see some of the laws written by them? I am not saying we need to dumb it down, but the fact that an average person who is governed by these laws cannot comprehend these laws is probably not the most desirable quality in a legal system.
throwaway2037 10mo ago
Many people who are members of parliament are highly educated, usually in law. It sounds like a terrible idea to randomly select people. I want my MPs to be very well educated.

ragebol 10mo ago

Sounds very interesting, but one more counter-points I'd like to see counter-countered: These random people will have to rely on experts a lot for knowledge they lack on any topic, because the world is complex. Now, these experts can be biased, bought, influenced etc. Or be accused of being in some sort of "Deep State" if you're into that. But then again, this can already be the case, now I counter-countered myself.

IgorPartola 10mo ago
That’s exactly it: we already have this in the form of the lobby industrial complex. Except it is possibly quite a bit worse because if you stay in Congress for a long time and form a trusting relationship with your lobbyists who by the way also pay to your reelection campaign or support you in other ways, over time you get to accept their expert opinion with less skepticism. If a lobbyist has to start over every 2 years, they can’t sink their teeth as hard into you. And I doubt many congresspeople are experts on most subjects on which they write laws. Some have economics degrees. Some are doctors, some are lawyers. Very few engineers, it seems. If you wanted an alternative system: you could always have a professional group of law writers and a professional group of law opposers try to present arguments to a large assembly of law jurors. If they can’t get 2/3rds majority on a law, it doesn’t pass. This is better than something like direct democracy where everyone votes on an issue because you can’t get the voters’ attention on any one thing for more than a few minutes or a few hours at the most (except a small fraction for whom it is their life for a while). In this law jury setup you can properly brief them. You could have some other body of professional governors who do things like emergency resolutions and maybe basic budget stuff but anything beyond that goes to the assembly for approval. You could create a new assembly as often as every 6 weeks and process a batch of laws at once so that you really rotate out the jurors before they can be influenced. And selection of law writers and law opposers can be something that is reviewed by this kind of assembly too, or just some large pool of professionals who are chosen at random for any given period of time and given the power to present before the assembly. A lot of options here for how to amortize bad behavior such that over the long haul it averages out to close to zero.
- jkartchner 10mo ago
  Assuming, arguendo, that corruption is somehow not a factor in your scenario, it still doesn't account for ignorance. Consider that jurors in jury trials have one binary decision to make based on the facts and law given to them. They don't need to decide if the law is just (in fact that's explicitly NOT what they're supposed to do). They don't need (and are not supposed) to decide if the situation is fair. That happens elsewhere by folks trained to consider these things. Jurors in jury trials literally apply the law they are given to the evidence they are presented. That's it. Even this burden is often more than a lot of folks can wrap their head around. The legislature, however, is not there just to nod its head when they think something is a good idea and voting no when it's not. Even if we were to create a space for exactly that, all we've done is push the fallibility to those who are doing the work to write and revise law--but now they're pitching to those off the streets who don't know anything about governance! If anything, lay congresspeople would magnify, not reduce, the problems we have with our current system.
  - IgorPartola 10mo ago
    I am definitely not going to argue with almost any of what you said. My main point is that democracy as we have it now clearly has flaws and maybe exploring ways to amend it to work better isn’t a terrible idea. Again, Ireland successfully used randomly selected assemblies to decide in major legislation. Perhaps a state like California that loves doing direct referendums and as a result has referendums decided in part by how successfully the campaign around the given issue is can benefit from a longer deliberation by people who are not known ahead of time.
projektfu 10mo ago
Currently, the Congressional staff is mostly recruited and retained by the congresspeople, and they become the experts in many situations. They can also be retained by the committees, in which case they are often more non-partisan. They do have some ability to influence the debate, but they usually do not frame it. If we had national assemblies by sortition every 2 years, I would worry that the the tail (the current structure of Congressional support staff) would wag the dog. A better system would need to be designed to enable good decision-making.

angiolillo 10mo ago

For reference, this is referred to as "sortition", and at least the Athenians felt that it was more democratic than elections. The randomization machines they used for picking winners (kleroterion) are quite ingenious. In modern times, sortition sometimes shows up in some deliberative democracy proposals.

groundzeros2015 10mo ago
Athens is a tiny community. And within that the citizens are the aristocrats who know each other by name. Ordinary residents are merchants or slaves.
- angiolillo 10mo ago
  Sure and when the US was founded the majority of residents were similarly not allowed to vote because voting was restricted voting to a minority of property-owning white males over the age of 21. Democracy has evolved from its Athenian origins, presumably sortition would as well.
  - hrimfaxi 10mo ago
    I think their point was that it only worked because of such a cohort to randomly select from.
    - angiolillo 10mo ago
      That was also my interpretation and why I made the point that democratic processes have evolved to account for a changing polity. The US government could not be managed by Athenian sortition any more than it could be by Athenian direct democracy -- the citizenry is too different, the questions too complex. However, just as the Romans evolved their original Athenian-style direct democracy into representative democracy as their empire grew and became more heterogeneous, sortition has similarly evolved into deliberative democracy.
      - 10mo ago

groundzeros2015 10mo ago

We elect leaders - people with skills, knowledge, and expertise. Does the average citizen even understand discounted cash flows or opportunity cost? And not to mention legal concepts I’m ignorant of. I don’t see why lowering the quality of candidates by 10x would improve things.

sagarm 10mo ago
Do our current elected leaders understand discounted cash flows or opportunity cost? I'm not seeing evidence our current process results in people skill, knowledge, and expertise, especially given the over representation of people from entertainment.
- groundzeros2015 10mo ago
  Yes. across parties senators typically have prestigious law degrees and piles of accomplishments. I’m not saying that makes them great. But if you want to see the pool of average citizens walk into a Walmart or DMV outside the Bay Area.
- HDThoreaun 10mo ago
  Yes. They just don’t talk about it because the voters don’t understand and feel insulted when they hear politicians talk about stuff they don’t understand.
margalabargala 10mo ago
> We elect leaders - people with skills, knowledge, and expertise. I admire your optimism but saying it doesn't make it so. We elect people able to convince others they should be elected. Often that means they possess the ability to convince others they have the skills, knowledge, and expertise you describe. If you think that's the same thing as actually having skills, knowledge, and expertise, well, I have bad news for you...
- groundzeros2015 10mo ago
  Optimism would be believing people on the street are as capable as Us senators.

benmmurphy 10mo ago

sortition is just democracy but with a weird probabilistic form of voting

IgorPartola 10mo ago
As opposed to the determinism we have now?

jkartchner 10mo ago

As a prosecuting attorney who selects and works to convince the "average" juror 5+ times a year, this is not a good idea. You are vastly overestimating what the average level of competence is. Most people, when given unfamiliar knowledge work to do, are so hopelessly biased and ignorant that I definitely think the average congressperson is more qualified to do that kind of work. We are spoiled by selection bias when extrapolating what "average" means in the USA.

superxpro12 10mo ago
I'm reminded of the famous Carlin bit: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
dfxm12 10mo ago
Speaking of "average", every political debate moderator should ask the candidates where they shop and how much milk and eggs cost. Ask them how much it is to fill up their car's gas tank. I don't necessarily think sortition is the answer, but I have more faith that the so called "hopelessly biased and ignorant average person" would address issues that affect me than I do with hopelessly biased and ignorant people like Trump, Johnson, Thune, Schumer and Jefferies, because I know they're only looking out for themselves.
- crummy 10mo ago
  this (sometimes) happens in New Zealand: https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/350541328/watch-national-leader-judith-collins-shocks-the-project-host-with-claim-1kg-block-of-cheese-costs-5 https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/350541328/watch-national-le...
- throwaway2037 10mo ago
  So if you are wealthy enough to have house staff to do all the shopping, cooking, and driving, then you are somehow less qualified to be a member of parliament?
angiolillo 10mo ago
> I definitely think the average congressperson is more qualified to do that kind of work My sense is that people who advocate for sortition find it attractive not because they believe that the average citizen is more intelligent or better informed than the average career politician, just less corrupt. Setting aside whether that's even true, I'm not sure whether it would be better to live in a country run by honest idiots or corrupt experts.

NoMoreNicksLeft 10mo ago

>Or we can recruit lawmakers how we choose juries: randomly. Every two years we randomly select 435 individuals to If anyone doesn't like that number (435), there's already a constitutional amendment to bump it up to 6000ish. It's been ratified by 12 states, so only 26 more needed. Call your state legislator today and ask why they're not ratifying it.

seanw444 10mo ago
Whoa. Gonna have to congregate in the Capitol One Arena if that happens.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 10mo ago
  Let's fuck up Congress. Help make it happen. (In seriousness, they'd be forced to explore other solutions, possibly even regional capitols with some sort of high-tech teleconferencing. Anything that decentralizes and claws back power from DC can't be a bad thing if you ask me.)

singleshot_ 10mo ago

> The counterargument: do you think are current legislators are more or less qualified than an average person? More, obviously. Almost a third of the US House and half the Senate are lawyers. Less than three tenths of a percent of Americans have a JD.

IgorPartola 10mo ago
I am honestly curious how many Congresspeople with law degrees could pass the Bar. But also have you see some of the laws written by them? I am not saying we need to dumb it down, but the fact that an average person who is governed by these laws cannot comprehend these laws is probably not the most desirable quality in a legal system.

throwaway2037 10mo ago

Many people who are members of parliament are highly educated, usually in law. It sounds like a terrible idea to randomly select people. I want my MPs to be very well educated.