Link: https://lemmy.world/c/Sortition

Hey, so I've created a community to discuss and talk about sortition, a type of governance where leaders and officials are chosen at random. This was practiced by ancient Athens, and is considered to be much better at representation than normal democracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

At this point the method to find leaders could not get any worse.

This can actually be very effective, it's been done in companies before.

I would love it if you could share the details of it.

!sortition@lemmy.world

I remember in college sort of independently coming up with the idea (there'd be a large pool of representatives, to make bribery harder. And I think we had an idea of like some of them their votes secretly won't count at the end, so your bribe might not even count)

Then one of my friends linked me to the wiki page and I was like "oh"

No! I prefer voting by popularity because it invites corruption and the worst kind of grandstanding assholes who tell people what they want to hear to enrich themselves.

Same experience here. Then I learned about court juries and it kinda confirmed the idea.

At first I thought "ok yeah but the average human is not that smart" and then I started to consider if politicians are above or below the average...

If they're smart but using that intelligence towards nefarious goals that's even worse.

A lottery council would be more to direct general values and goals of the government than day-to-day running. It's essentially a more direct way of holding it accountable, the lottery council can quickly convene without all the hassle of a national election

I don't see how that's better than just having a large representative body and counting all votes. The expected value of a bribe is still the same no matter what percentage of the votes are counted, but a lower percentage also increases the variance such that one bribe has a chance of having a big impact on the voting outcome, whereas if you count all the votes, a single bribe will only ever have a small effect.

I did not intend to claim my college dinner conversation was a flawless political system, heh.

It may have come from the idea that in firing squads, some of the executioners have blanks.

But you're probably right, its probably simpler and fine not to have fake voters. Though it would be funny to have some honey pots..

I don't know, does social intelligence count? It's basically the crowd you'd expect from a top-tier sales job, with some nepotism mixed in.

With a large enough body, it's true bribery gets harder, but you also have some of the same problems as direct democracy. At some point you've basically just made a smaller voting public.

There's very few things about representative democracy that work exactly as intended, but it does makes (illegal) corruption hard to maintain. A politician having a reputation for corruption and self-dealing is one of the few things that voters uniformly don't like, and will actually act on at the polls. (Obviously there's a major counterexample right now, but the trend is undeniable)

A politician having a reputation for corruption and self-dealing is one of the few things that voters uniformly don’t like, and will actually act on at the polls.

I would have agreed with you before Trump. The power of conservative in-group solidarity is powerful, especially when multiplied by media support.

Ah shit, I just ninja edited that it. Too late! Oh well.

It is conservative in-group solidarity, and a crazy cult of personality he managed to stumble into, but that's not a common, easy-to-manufacture situation.

For most of history and still in most places, paying off officials was/is a normal, everyday part of life. Now, living in Canada, I've never paid a bribe, or even been given the opportunity. Democracy seems like the obvious answer as to why; it's not because Canadians are just better.

Will community moderation policy be determined by sortition?

Above. Most of them just have their own agendas

I'd argue below. They are chosen to be empty veasels by their donors. It's why if they are truly challenged by someone playing outside the establishment rules they trip over themselves. Why they refuse to debate. The appearance of cleverness and spectacle of policy fights are just theater. A play written by their patrons and performed to entertain us. The fact that so many of them litterally die in office while being wheeled around like meat puppets is proof of it.

The mods themselves would be selected via sortition in future

Neat! Genuinely cool to see more models of governance than the default BDFL/cool kids' club online.

What will ensure that this is enforced, and people in power won't change the rules once they achieve power?

A modbot. From what I've read, mod can remove another mod from a community as long as they're older than them. So a modbot that's installed in a community, that does 2 things

1. Conduct the process of sortition
2. Remove mods after a time interval
   Can in theory do the job perfectly.

I think the Absolute State of the GOP disproves this. They have their own agendas and are some of the stupidest people alive, because they have cultivated a voter base that will never be satisfied with anyone who isn't at least as illiterate, racist, anti-intellectual, and deluded as they are. Conservative Evangelicalism is a Problem.

Oh yeah thr GOP exists lol. I was stoned and was thinking of just Democrats.

Dope. Although there might be few enough volunteers it's beside the point.