Sortition

I&#x27;ve thought a bit about sortition. My favourite way of explaining it: Suppose a billionaire is looking for someone to marry. They want a partner who is interested in them for more than just a paycheque. Say gold-diggers represent just a very small fraction of the population but are extremely good at feigning fascination in pursuit of their goals and finding themselves in the company of billionaires. In fact they are so good at ingratiating themselves with billionaires that any potential partner this billionaire picks from the people he or she knows is likely to be a gold digger. What is a good but non-optimal solution? The billionaire should pick 1000 random people of the gender he&#x2F;she prefers and make their selection from this pack. This cuts out the influence of the adverse selection effects the billionaire experiences just from being a billionaire. If all they’re looking for in a partner is someone in at most in the ~99th percentile of people this approach will work with little cost, as candidates can then be selected from this pool using conventional means. This would not work if gold-digging is a reaction to circumstance rather than an in-built characteristic - the same is true of corruption.<p>For politics, one approach would be sortition applied to those in the 99th percentile on a widely used standardized test like the SATs -it&#x27;s important that this test be used outside politics, too. Sortition would then be applied to narrow down the pool from ~160000 (about the number of people with sufficient scores over a 10 year time-span) to say a few hundred, a few dozen, or less and then a conventional election from there. Though, you may need very attractive salaries to ensure those elected choose to serve as most don&#x27;t have an interest in politics - perhaps a ridiculous pension for life after a few years of service.

Taleb talks about this (though he doesn&#x27;t use the term Sortition) in Antifragile: &quot;instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing—and it happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients—again, those ancients!—were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.&quot;

&quot;It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.&quot; (Aristotle, Politics 4.1294be)

I&#x27;ve also wondered lately if we shouldn&#x27;t add some random element to the way we fund scientific research. Right now, as I understand it, researchers write grant proposals and funding institutions evaluate them and pick the best ones to fund.<p>Presumably then, the researchers who get the most funding would be the ones who are the best at writing grant proposals, and they may or may not be doing the best research or researching the most important things. In theory, there could be brilliant researchers working on important things who don&#x27;t get any money because they lack the ability to persuade people to give it to them.<p>One of my &quot;if I had a billion dollars&quot; dreams is to set up a foundation that would randomly award research grants to field of qualified applicants.<p>I think it&#x27;s the same problem with elections. Governing and campaigning are two different skills. Elections elect people who are good at campaigning, but may or may not be good at governing.

Also called random sample voting.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdd.stanford.edu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdd.stanford.edu&#x2F;</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rsvoting.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rsvoting.org&#x2F;</a><p>&gt;Random-sample voting can be used locally, nationally, regionally, or even globally, with results that are more irrefutable than with current elections but at less than one-thousandth of the cost.

I really thought this was going to be some obscure implementation of Quicksort.

The biggest risk of sortition is moving the balance of power from representatives to the appointed&#x2F;hired bureaucracy. I suspect that non-politicians are much easier to &quot;manage up&quot; against - I fear having it wind up as political lottery winners getting &quot;advised&quot; into going a certain direction.

Athenian democracy is the model people point to, but the worm in the apple is Athenian citizenship rules. The reason selection by lot could work is that a large number of people were excluded from the pool.<p>&quot;Only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens. The percentage of the population that actually participated in the government was 10 to 20% of the total number of inhabitants, but this varied from the fifth to the fourth century BC. This excluded a majority of the population: slaves, freed slaves, children, women and metics (foreigners resident in Athens). The women had limited rights and privileges, had restricted movement in public, and were very segregated from the men. Also excluded from voting were citizens whose rights were under suspension (typically for failure to pay a debt to the city: see atimia); for some Athenians this amounted to permanent (and in fact inheritable) disqualification.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Athenian_democracy#Citizenship_in_Athens" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Athenian_democracy#Citizenship...</a><p>&quot;In regards to Greek mythology, the ephebe was a young man or initiate, around the ages of 17-18, who was put through a period of isolation from his prior community, usually the world of his mother, where he was a child in the community. The ephebe would need to hunt, rely on his senses, on aggression, stealth, and trickery to survive. At the end of the initiation, the ephebe was reincorporated back into society as a man.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ephebos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ephebos</a>

The problem of randomly select citizens for office is that they are as vulnerable to be corrupted as the current elected officials.<p>But, I would like an approach where we randomly select &quot;electors&quot;. They are sequestered, listen to the arguments of the candidates, hold several election rounds and finally come out with he elected officials. Like a jury. They would be dismissed after that.

An interesting mixture of the existing election systems with sortition might be the following: Elections for seats in the parliament are done in the usual fashion. However the number of seats selected by vote in the parliament is only equal to the percentage of voters. The other seats, basically representing the non-voters, are selected by lot.<p>On can justify this by arguing that non-voters are on the one hand not satisfied with the given choices and on the other hand indifferent to who is ruling them. So selecting the seats by lot might actually represent the will of the non-voters best.

I can&#x27;t find the link, but there was a good article about this recently (maybe in the last year) that spent quite a bit of time talking about the selection of the Doge of Venice. IIRC, they had a very complicated process that included sortition, nomination, election, and alternating large and small groups that allow them to select qualified officeholders while simultaneously limiting many of the problems with direct elections.<p>Does anyone have a link?

I&#x27;d like to restore the state appointment of Senators, preserve the House and add a third house, consisting of representatives chosen by sortition from the states, with representation allocated by (federal taxes paid - federal dollars spent), and with the odds of each citizen&#x27;s selection proportional to the amount he pays in taxes. Legislation would need to pass all three houses.<p>It&#x27;ll never happen, of course.

What are chlorite machines?

The justification for sortition is equity. We all have an equal right to have our views taken into account on all issues. Sortition permits the formation of a truly representative chamber of parliament. Elections do not, for a raft of reasons.<p>Representation is necessary because direct democracy is unworkable in large modern states, and because no-one has the time to study and understand every issue, particularly as many are highly technical and complex.<p>It would be absurd to choose one person, or even a small group, by sortition (or elections!), and give them legislative authority. The group chosen must be reasonably large, since a small group cannot be representative.<p>Regarding sortition and tests: Any test is designed to exclude some people. Who has the right to say that these people should be excluded?<p>A common idea is that by excluding the stupid, crazy, corrupt, ambitious, malicious… one will get &quot;better&quot; decisions, &quot;better&quot; legislation. But for any decision to be &quot;good&quot; it must first be equitable. Any exclusion renders the chosen group unrepresentative, and hence is inequitable. Better far to include these &quot;undesirables&quot;: they will be relatively few in number, just as they are in society, and they will not vote as a unified block when decisions are made. Further, the more diverse the group, the better the quality of decisions (when this can be measured). It is not necessary for all the members of a group to be intelligent or well-intentioned for the group to make intelligent choices.<p>As for corruption and the undue influence of multinationals, lobbies, religious groups, and bureaucrats, I believe it is possible to greatly reduce or eliminate this with good design of the institutions.<p>For a fuller discussion of these issues and a proposal for a government based on sortition, you might be interested to read &quot;Down with Elections!&quot;, available as an e-book on Smashwords, Amazon and Apple&#x27;s iTunes bookstore, for about $1. (A blatant plug for my own work).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smashwords.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;view&#x2F;570431" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smashwords.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;view&#x2F;570431</a> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;DOWN-ELECTIONS-C-Wallace-ebook&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B0148T4EWI&#x2F;ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1440520516&amp;sr=1-1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;DOWN-ELECTIONS-C-Wallace-ebook&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B014...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;book&#x2F;down-with-elections!&#x2F;id1032451324?mt=11" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;book&#x2F;down-with-elections!&#x2F;id1032...</a><p>Or you can have it for free as a PDF (less convenient): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropbox.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;7oqo5paiwmwatsp&#x2F;DWE_PDF.pdf?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropbox.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;7oqo5paiwmwatsp&#x2F;DWE_PDF.pdf?dl=0</a>

I&#x27;ve long been interested in the use of sortition in political decision making, and it always surprises me how little it has been seriously studied and considered compared to the potential it seems to have.<p>Much of the information there is is of pretty low quality. It might of course just be such a bad idea that everybody smart enough to give high quality contributions on the topic does not want to waste their time with the idea. But if this is the case it is totally non obvious to me, and most criticism I&#x27;ve read seem to be from people that do not have a clear understanding of the potential advantages sortition might have.<p>Very briefly, for the uninitiated, the main potential advantage of sortition is that it would make political decision making a lot more democratic. People representative of the population at large would actually discuss to make the decision, instead of the citizens making their choice by casting one vote every few years among a set of very similar parties (I know, this simplifies the debate a lot, but it is the main idea). This is very interesting if you are of the opinion (as I am) that lack of democracy is a big problem of our political systems. I believe that most time politicians go agains the will of people they do so for the wrong reasons and with the wrong goals, and way too often.<p>The law of large number makes sure the randomness in sortition is limited and predictable. Whereas with elections there is a big number of arbitrary factors that can greatly influence the results.<p>Of course sortition in practice might have a number of problem often brought up, but none seems unsolvable to the point where it&#x27;s not even worth exploring the idea further.<p>How do you separate expertise from decision power, while still being able to make proper use of the expertise? How to implement sortition in practice? Would they ever let us? Would people be able to handle the pressure? Would they accept the position? And all criticism to democracy in general applies even more to sortition.<p>I think however that if you talked about elections to somebody who never heard about it, you could come up with just as a big number of potential problems. I don&#x27;t know if sortition really is a better idea, but maybe it&#x27;s an idea worth thinking about.<p>I recently read this article on sortition that appeared on the Atlantic which I think is really good: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;education&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-case-for-a-college-admissions-lottery&#x2F;361585&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;education&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-cas...</a><p>Another good starting point for further exploration is the blog Equality by Lot: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;equalitybylot.wordpress.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;equalitybylot.wordpress.com&#x2F;</a>