Sortition - Hacking Government To Avoid Cognitive Biases And Corruption

Indeed, probably too much in my own head. This was a first attempt at explaining a system I understood and not enough consideration was given.

I could have put those notes at the bottom as post scripts once someone had a half decent understanding of the system. Indeed, I stuffed up between random and regular citizen, they are about the same thing in my mind, as they don't need to have any qualification.

It was a lengthy step I skipped to describe how they were chosen. Basically a person needs to be within the normal range for intelligence to be an Regular/Random Citizen selected for any level of government. Going into a thousand and one possibilities about what that means seems silly. This is a draft based around my wanted to explore sortition, not a ready to go system which is meant to be adopted.

Same goes for experts. They will be either leaders of industry or PhD's in their field. All related disciplines for a given field will register upon completion of a PhD. Take for instance agriculture. Scientists from various fields from food policy to soil science to agricultural ecology would be put into the pool of candidates available for expert selection.

I think the short term sub-committes who write laws are more akin to juries in terms of the time they serve. Others are more like being drafted into military service at the higher levels. Unlike an actual draft where huge percentages of the population are effected, this is only a few thousand people, many of whom would probably earn more money working in the legislative. Those who wouldn't earn more...well there is some price to living in a democracy, I never said personal interest or pure capitalism at the expense of freedom was a good idea or a huge part of this proposed system. Just like in military service, job positions will be held for the person while they serve.

They are paid, they cannot refuse to serve unless they can show extreme hardship to their interests. The highest level who vote on laws stay where they are, but get staff. They'd rent out an office for three years and have some helpers, just like congresspeople in the US right now have staff.

can their employers make it difficult for them to serve?

Or more crucially: Can their employers fire them for not doing what the employer wants when they serve?

I am fully aware of how things happen in the real world. I know of the corruption and loopholes and work arounds which have been established to degrade democracy and to address issues some 300 year old document could never have predicted.

I would negate their power to do more than continue to propose legislation. There would be no standing law making committee to write laws. They would have a very short turn around time and measures could be taken to prevent special access from being created. The SC's have no reason to listen to the Chamber of Commerce. They need no election funds or advertisements and they will not serve more than one term. I'm attempting to engineer a real world solution to design out the causes and motivations for legislators to engage with special interest groups.

Also the executive will have less influence in this system. It is the role of that branch to enforce laws and deal with international concerns. Not to write laws. It would be a good thing if that branch were less involved in legislation.

Abbreviations shorten the text, many posts on LW use them.

I have thought out the political implications and my desire was to design a system which has less of a place for politics. The void for politics to fill in how we conduct ourselves could be reduced intentionally.

The top level of government reads the bill and the call for a bill. If it doesn't match up with the focus of the call, then they can vote it down. Alternately the mid level issue committee could serve as a buffer to read proposed legislation before voting in a simple majority to pass it up to the top level of government.

Expert selection addressed in other comment.

This is a description of the legislative system only. I have the executive and judiciary outlined in my link and did not wish to discuss them and their system interplay here.

Sure, there can be a constitution with super authority which is difficult to modify. Again, excluded for brevities sake.

Perhaps I've confused about the journal citation industry. Certainly the journal can screen their pool of peer reviewers, but there will still be one. I suppose it was overstrong to imply a forced level of complying with peer review requests...but there is an implicit one. If a professor always declines to review papers, then they wont be asked again by the journal as it becomes a waste of time. It is also better as there is a pool of reviewers and the researchers are removed from that choice. The researcher cannot choose who reviews their article, in that sense there is a type of low-enforcement level sortition from a limited pool of candidates in place.

How random citizens are selected is addressed above. They must be in the normal range for intelligence, with a cut off on the low end, pick an IQ point like 75 or 80 based on a running average and some fixed standard deviation away from that average. Severe intellectual disabilities such as down-syndrome or psychosis can be initially excluded from the selection pool so that they are not constantly being screened out. I mean severe when I meant severe, something everyone could agree upon.

They would work from a specially designed computer system for communicating and voting. Could it be hacked or compromised, sure...but so could nuclear missile launch codes.

I want them to read the laws of course! I never said they shouldn't. The top level people in the C2 would have staff to help them organize their schedules and such. The IC/SC would create summaries of the issue brief calling for a law, the sub-committee would also create a brief of the proposed legislation. There is less worry of underhanded tricks and total crap being put into laws as no one has any constituents or donors to service. These are far more impartial and less invested citizens. The C2 is like a mini-referendum. They are a capture of what people would think if they took time to evaluate each proposed law. I want it to be that way to avoid corruption and bias on several levels. The people voting on the law didn't write it and have no investment in it passing or not, bias is removed at this step. They are less likely to have systemic corruption issues as they do not court donors or voters. They are to act as the average citizen would and individually matter very little. There are at least a thousand of them. They simply vote the way they want to and all the results are tallied up to take a measure of the collective will of the people. They are more sensitive to the will of the people as they are not removed from their communities. They live in their regular house and do not travel out of state to engage in full time politicking. I argue they are better connected to the real world than someone tied to the narrow and myopic range of 'voter issues' or campaign nonsense where single issues are compressed down to easy to understand sound bites.

Not sure what you mean by NSA. The C2 or the executive (not described how here) can reject a bill, if the majority, perhaps 60% of the C2 have a secondary vote, then it can go to a broad referendum for all citizens to consider. Essentially the mini-referendum group of the C2 is shown to be not sensitive enough to measure the will of the people and a wider referendum is needed on such contentious issues.

Cheers!

Alas a copy and paste job. And while fonts do matter, I am not in the camp of people who care. In the future I'll try to remember to use the site specific font. I hardly ever notice fonts at all unless they are horribly unintelligible like cursive writing or custom fonts for advertisements.

People who skip out on jury duty - people who don't believe or want to engage in their democratic government and want to live in a fascist world run by dumb people. Not rational on a large scale, only rational in putting Ayn Rand style capitalistic individuality first. Ignores and derides collectivist cultures and people who place value over democracy above personal profit for not being just like them.

If we're being snarky! ;)

Ah, yes it was. Thanks. Fixed now.

Indeed, while I am into my own world of designing a system; I certainly never meant to imply the idea was original. Sortition was one of the original methods of expanding democracy to larger settlements, towns, and cities when direct democracy with full participation became infeasible due to there being too many people. It still has a place in many systems around the world from juries to grand juries which can indict people for crimes and investigate. For whatever reason it seems to have held on in the realm of justice more than in legislative or executive/military parts of government.

I don't care at all about the details here.

You wrote a lot of useless details such as whether a committee as 30 or 40 members. You didn't write something about details of how power works that matter such as how experts get selected.

Takeaway message, use more dark arts or better frame arguments.

Try using the outside view: of all the people who conclude something similar to the above when their ideas are poorly received here, what fraction are actually right? If this fraction is low, definitely explore other hypotheses. Frankly, I find yet another plan for more rational governance without any any attempt at an implementation mechanism to be quite boring and not worth spending many clock cycles on.

I also wanted to challenge people's thinking by getting them to consider if they actually believe in democracy.

You do realize that there are people here that don't believe in democracy, right? These people are unlikely to be impressed by schemes to fix democracy with more democracy.

If we need smarter, better, faster, more informed, super leaders to decide things for us and hold back the excesses of the people, to have our betters constrain, control, and limit the will of the people...then that is not democracy except through redefining the therm.

Whose democracy definition are you using? The one of the ancient Greeks? To what extend does it matter whether our present system is democracy as they would have wanted democracy to happen?

Why do you think that democracy as you define it is the most important thing?

Ok, so aside from presentation and procedure, I haven't seen any objections to the idea of splitting up the three stages of government based decision making to better align itself with wide accepted proposals on LW to reduce cognitive bias in the modern practice of Science.

Takeaway message, use more dark arts or better frame arguments.

You don't make a real argument of why it's good to split things up into three stages. There a lot of vague things that are not well defined so it's necessary to first get clear about what the actual argument is before I would more clearly say that I reject the system.

I think sortition takes into account biases.

What specific biases do you mean?