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.
Will community moderation policy be determined by sortition?
The mods themselves would be selected via sortition in future
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
- Conduct the process of sortition
- Remove mods after a time interval Can in theory do the job perfectly.
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…
Above. Most of them just have their own agendas
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.
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.
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
If they’re smart but using that intelligence towards nefarious goals that’s even worse.
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.
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”
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 works 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.
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.
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.
At this point the method to find leaders could not get any worse.
