5 ms·

We should elect the house (or senate, one or the other) by randomly drawing a large number of people from the population. See how easy it is to corrupt 1000-200

We should elect the house (or senate, one or the other) by randomly drawing a large number of people from the population. See how easy it is to corrupt 1000-2000 randomly selected folks who, for the most part, have an ingrained set of morals. It'd be like a jury for the government and they'd easily be able to roadblock the vast majority of bullshit that goes on. We could even let them decide who the president is. Alternatively, we could have it set up so our representatives give up most of their rights to privacy. Their whereabouts, communications/conversations (of all kinds) should be monitored and made public after a short period of time. It could be considered a price they have to pay to be in public office, and we could pay them a lot more so that good people would be willing to do this.

rdl 13y ago
I'd support a house of congress (or part of either or both existing houses) picked via sortition (with a filter for non felon, etc). Ancient Athens actually used this for the very reason of being harder to compromise. The problem with competitive elections for power is the people they attract.
AnthonyMouse 13y ago
The problem with this is that you end up trading corruption for incompetence and uncertainty. Suppose we pick elected officials at random. OK, in the first round we get a bunch of reasonable people and they do a bunch of reasonable stuff. In the second round, maybe the same thing, except that they have different ideas from their predecessors so they end up repealing all the programs and replacing them with still reasonable but quite different ones. Businesses can't plan anything because they don't know what the regulatory environment will look like the year after the election. The churn strains our already-difficult ties with countries like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia when the things the Nth Congress promised get repudiated by the N+1th Congress which is comprised of entirely different people. Then, sooner or later, random chance produces a majority coalition consisting of people who are willing to horse trade for corrupt programs that specifically benefit their own friends and family, or "libertarians" and peace activists who very suddenly disband the entire U.S. military, or nationalist religious fundamentalists who decide to declare war on "Muslims" or drop a nuclear bomb on somebody with the ability to strike back. The thing about politics is that you actually do want professionals running the country. You want people with formal training who know what they're doing. You just have to make sure they're representing us and not somebody else.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  sooner or later, random chance produces a majority coalition consisting of people who are willing to horse trade for corrupt programs that specifically benefit their own friends and family Something that a "professional" would never do, and something that is much likelier to happen by randomly selecting 1000-2000 people, than if people are able to work towards it. It clearly would be nuts to take away the ability to deliberately commandeer a country and swapping it with the so much higher risk of that happening randomly.
  - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
    Elected officials have at least some accountability to the voters. If they do anything sufficiently bad then they don't get reelected, and at any given time there are a majority of elected officials who don't intend to immediately retire and therefore care about being reelected. If you select Congress at random then there is absolutely no accountability whatsoever. They can come in and collude with a majority of the other randomly selected people to each put as much of the country's wealth into their own pockets and the pockets of their friends and family as they can and then retire rich to the south of France. The only thing preventing that would be their own consciences, which may work once or twice but is guaranteed not to work forever. The existing system isn't one with no accountability, it's one with accountability to the people who can drive election outcomes. The problem is that in a functioning system that is only the citizens, but in the current system it's also the campaign donors. That is a problem, but you can't solve it by eliminating all accountability whatsoever.
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      Elected officials have at least some accountability to the voters. If they do anything sufficiently bad then they don't get reelected If I say "pay me 50 dollars, and I will give you X", and then you pay me and I just grin at you, and the WORST you can do to me is to say "fine, then we won't do that again", that's not accountability. The only thing preventing that would be their own consciences, which may work once or twice but is guaranteed not to work forever. Their own consciences AND each other. "Each other" meaning a heterogenous group of people from all walks of life, instead of mostly their buddies and "the people doing the same stuff for a different team", which is so much weaker a check. Ever been where thousands or ten thousands of people are? No cameras, no cops? At least where I am those tend to be peaceful and rather moral on average. Small groups of friends however, they can be real dicks. Split them up and mix them with people they don't know that well, or at all, and they will behave much better. Such is the nature of criminal conspiracy, it doesn't like randomness and shooting from the hip. Don't ask me about the specific implementation details, but I think there should be more "actual accountability", and I don't see why that wouldn't be applicable to "random politicians" as well. For starters, if everybody could theoretically get "drafted" for this tomorrow, many people would make it much more of their business to pay attention to what is going on, to what others are doing in that capacity. That in itself could have a positive effect. And maybe it could start small, with a few hundred random people who have somewhat of an influence. And if that goes well, do more of that. A/B testing, you know? Because if we're just doing Gedankenexperimente, I don't see why how I experienced the world so far, namely that people in general are good even when they might be a bit lame, and people who want power are usually compensating and sport at best some kind of genius of mediocrity, shouldn't win over your concerns.
leot 13y ago
Two key problems with the current system: 1) The financial sector of the economy attracts away many of America's smartest and most charismatic, while simultaneously making a career in public service, especially by comparison, very unattractive for this valuable group. Thus an escape to lucrative lobbying (and gov't contracting) positions becomes the only economic redemption for those experiencing such injustice (as they might call it). 2) There is a school of thought that believes, and aims to show, that gov't can't do anything well. In the U.S., a significant proportion of the time, people who espouse this attitude hold powerful offices -- it's no surprise, then, that they don't instil in their subordinates a sense of civic responsibility and pride. Neither should it be surprising that they behave cynically.

rdl 13y ago

I'd support a house of congress (or part of either or both existing houses) picked via sortition (with a filter for non felon, etc). Ancient Athens actually used this for the very reason of being harder to compromise. The problem with competitive elections for power is the people they attract.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago

The problem with this is that you end up trading corruption for incompetence and uncertainty. Suppose we pick elected officials at random. OK, in the first round we get a bunch of reasonable people and they do a bunch of reasonable stuff. In the second round, maybe the same thing, except that they have different ideas from their predecessors so they end up repealing all the programs and replacing them with still reasonable but quite different ones. Businesses can't plan anything because they don't know what the regulatory environment will look like the year after the election. The churn strains our already-difficult ties with countries like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia when the things the Nth Congress promised get repudiated by the N+1th Congress which is comprised of entirely different people. Then, sooner or later, random chance produces a majority coalition consisting of people who are willing to horse trade for corrupt programs that specifically benefit their own friends and family, or "libertarians" and peace activists who very suddenly disband the entire U.S. military, or nationalist religious fundamentalists who decide to declare war on "Muslims" or drop a nuclear bomb on somebody with the ability to strike back. The thing about politics is that you actually do want professionals running the country. You want people with formal training who know what they're doing. You just have to make sure they're representing us and not somebody else.

PavlovsCat 13y ago
sooner or later, random chance produces a majority coalition consisting of people who are willing to horse trade for corrupt programs that specifically benefit their own friends and family Something that a "professional" would never do, and something that is much likelier to happen by randomly selecting 1000-2000 people, than if people are able to work towards it. It clearly would be nuts to take away the ability to deliberately commandeer a country and swapping it with the so much higher risk of that happening randomly.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  Elected officials have at least some accountability to the voters. If they do anything sufficiently bad then they don't get reelected, and at any given time there are a majority of elected officials who don't intend to immediately retire and therefore care about being reelected. If you select Congress at random then there is absolutely no accountability whatsoever. They can come in and collude with a majority of the other randomly selected people to each put as much of the country's wealth into their own pockets and the pockets of their friends and family as they can and then retire rich to the south of France. The only thing preventing that would be their own consciences, which may work once or twice but is guaranteed not to work forever. The existing system isn't one with no accountability, it's one with accountability to the people who can drive election outcomes. The problem is that in a functioning system that is only the citizens, but in the current system it's also the campaign donors. That is a problem, but you can't solve it by eliminating all accountability whatsoever.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    Elected officials have at least some accountability to the voters. If they do anything sufficiently bad then they don't get reelected If I say "pay me 50 dollars, and I will give you X", and then you pay me and I just grin at you, and the WORST you can do to me is to say "fine, then we won't do that again", that's not accountability. The only thing preventing that would be their own consciences, which may work once or twice but is guaranteed not to work forever. Their own consciences AND each other. "Each other" meaning a heterogenous group of people from all walks of life, instead of mostly their buddies and "the people doing the same stuff for a different team", which is so much weaker a check. Ever been where thousands or ten thousands of people are? No cameras, no cops? At least where I am those tend to be peaceful and rather moral on average. Small groups of friends however, they can be real dicks. Split them up and mix them with people they don't know that well, or at all, and they will behave much better. Such is the nature of criminal conspiracy, it doesn't like randomness and shooting from the hip. Don't ask me about the specific implementation details, but I think there should be more "actual accountability", and I don't see why that wouldn't be applicable to "random politicians" as well. For starters, if everybody could theoretically get "drafted" for this tomorrow, many people would make it much more of their business to pay attention to what is going on, to what others are doing in that capacity. That in itself could have a positive effect. And maybe it could start small, with a few hundred random people who have somewhat of an influence. And if that goes well, do more of that. A/B testing, you know? Because if we're just doing Gedankenexperimente, I don't see why how I experienced the world so far, namely that people in general are good even when they might be a bit lame, and people who want power are usually compensating and sport at best some kind of genius of mediocrity, shouldn't win over your concerns.

leot 13y ago

Two key problems with the current system: 1) The financial sector of the economy attracts away many of America's smartest and most charismatic, while simultaneously making a career in public service, especially by comparison, very unattractive for this valuable group. Thus an escape to lucrative lobbying (and gov't contracting) positions becomes the only economic redemption for those experiencing such injustice (as they might call it). 2) There is a school of thought that believes, and aims to show, that gov't can't do anything well. In the U.S., a significant proportion of the time, people who espouse this attitude hold powerful offices -- it's no surprise, then, that they don't instil in their subordinates a sense of civic responsibility and pride. Neither should it be surprising that they behave cynically.