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The author never comes back to it, but the Greeks used a lottery to choose some of their politicians in order to mitigate corruption: https://en.wikipedia.org/

The author never comes back to it, but the Greeks used a lottery to choose some of their politicians in order to mitigate corruption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Selection_by_lot_.28allotment.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Selection_b... I discovered this the other day when trying to find out what "drawing lots" actually meant in the Bible, another form of letting chance decide things. Apparently we don't know exactly what people were using back then.

blue1 12y ago
The Republic of Venice developed that idea to a system of great complexity for electing the Doge, that included copious injections of randomness. There is an interesting analysis of this protocol in a paper by HP laboratories, available here (pdf): http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf