Administrative costs are high in health care and education (which are not really the US federal government), but I can’t find data on this for the labor costs to administrative professionals in government. Source?

Labor costs are high for the federal government, but I thought a lot of that was pensions + regular raises. I don’t think these things should be attributed to capitalism run amok.

Idk if we want to be in a state that can only write ~1000 characters to regulate AI, and that will take at least a 2 month lag?

My gut reaction is exhaustion. I would like this if folks had the time, resources, and politicians weren’t so tied up in party politics.

If you have a functional legislative arm of government, then it produces too many bits of text for the average person to keep up with it, and it’s not terribly efficient for them to try. I don’t need to know the particulars of industrial zoning policy, but I do want it to be sensical.

And if the politicians decide to bundle things together, lots of wedging becomes available. This seems less common for single-issue policy juries (one could even constrain their range on creation).

But in RCV and good support: sure. I think it could be made to work.

I like this! I do prefer physical ballots (we’ve already had a few scares with new tech being hard for folks of certain generations), but that can totally be implemented.

I’m too many levels in and I can’t tell which combination you’re talking about XD

Administration in non-profits and schools mostly.

I think I disagree that each group needs to know the full constitutional law. Politicians often have aids for this, and this proposal doesn’t need to remove the courts. Let them summon a judge and negotiate the final language, or contract out multiple versions and take public comments.

Similarly for the teachers: in court rooms and congress, they aren’t permanent hires. They’re brought in by choice of the group (or someone organizing/arguing to the group). In most areas it is not so difficult to find well credentialed experts, who may in turn suggest other people to talk to (or, should any of them seem sus, may inspire a sortitioned member to suggest a critic). If data is bad, congress can get folks to go and collect the data they want in the way they want. When your job is to understand one issue, I think you have the time to consider multiple views and sort through the claims.

This is very similar to how we do it with juries; a body of the people to stamp/implement the laws written by congress and rules for reading them from judges. I think it’s an improvement.

But I do want to vouch for how teachable people can be. And I think it really changes how we fund/run/manage education when ‘functioning in the senate’ is a mandatory skill.

I worry that a lot of it comes from scale. It’s expensive/tricky to scale up human flexability; I think I’ve seen well meaning people design systems they intended to be human, and got much worse results than the lawyers and bankers. There’s some skill here.

Just logging that this doesn’t match any data I’ve seen, unless you take Nazi to be an obscenely broad tent. Sources + definitions required.

Oh that’s fun. I like this, but you really need that RCV to avoid vote splitting. I wonder if it’s better off as approval? Strategic voting around a sortician option would be very weird.

Cause RCV for a sotrician option is, statistically, likely to pick a moderate voter who leans towards the thing you dislike. There’s something anti-inductive here.

The upvotes are in! There’s at least dozens. 2 dozens.

Consensus is quite hard to corrupt by design. You trade off some substantial amount of efficiency, and most groups aren’t willing to commit to working towards it.

They believe everyone’s got some good in them, and that good will end up getting the important decisions to happen. I note that they don’t seem to actually control for this belief all that hard. Perhaps anyone who doesn’t believe gets too impatient and moves on.

On the extreme end, Quakers. Consensus is clearly a democratic voting scheme, and they’ve run everything from churches to universities to states to companies with it.

There are indeed ways to design it poorly; I’ll just point again to juries to say that we know how to do it competently. I’ll rephrase the objections in terms of juries (but please note the quotes are from a hyperbolic strawman, and not literally what you said. I hope my replies to the strawman are still useful).

“People who don’t care about the particular law/case will refuse to join a jury and they’ll all get stuck in endless deliberation” - being on the jury is not always optional! While there are strategies to avoid being a juror, the large majority of folks don’t use them. People get real nervous about perjury. Also, we have several levers of control here. Congress salaries+benefits aren’t bad, getting an important position might be akin to winning a lottery. Many folks skip voting day because they feel uninformed or are required to work, but we educate jurists and require companies to give time off for their service. Finally, if a jury is stuck we call a new one; by random draw we’ll eventually get a lot of all people from one side or the other. Gridlock is only ever stochastic.

“People could bribe the juries for the outcomes they want!” - extremely risky, the state knows who is on the jury at the same time as everyone else, predicting it ahead of time is impossible, and we strongly regulate the interactions of juries + invested parties once they’re chosen. Note that we can assign political decision bodies to fairly narrow issues, so managing this at scale isn’t so difficult.

Eh - sounds like arguments against centralization of power to me.

Which, under a sortition vote, would mean we would have a chance!

I think we haven’t tested democracy variations quite far enough. I agree that the first-past-the-post model in capitalism has proven extremely vulnerable to mis/disinformation, and made it possible to benefit from the idiocy of your peers. But I don’t think we’ve seen, say, RCV and proportional representation + robust finance laws prove nearly so bad.

Also, I think this take is disingenuous to the roots of democracy. It is a social technology used for legitimacy in tons of situations by many groups, for a variety of reasons. Often it is neither dumb nor a method of obvious control.

You can do it several ways. Athens had anyone who wanted to from the city meet and interview the randomly chosen folks; if the group disliked them, they were removed from the pot and you drew again. Seems like a good fit when the job is comprehensible, and/or needs community backing. Similar in flavor to senate confirmation of appointees.

In juries, we have professionally licensed advocates and referee’s who interview the randomly chosen, and they can reject folks for almost any reason they want. This seems like a good fit when we already have a big body of bureaucrats and managers who will need to work with these folks. Let them do the filtering.

For perpetually rolling positions, give the outgoing folks a small number of vetos on the next draw. They know what the job requires, and limiting the number of objections ensures against corruption.

There’s also levers you can pull if we don’t have a good way to judge competence. My favorites are to increase the number of people on the panel/jury/group, and provide larger budgets and opportunities for the group to get training. Just as congress (and courts) can pull in industry leaders, expert scientists, and decision makers, these decision making bodies should be able to do the same.

I remain a huge fan of sortition. You randomly pick a bunch of people who are willing (and/or able) to do the job, let guardrails veto some of them, train them and let them cook. An unordered list of things to love:

• It’s substantially faster than elections,
• scales to any size polity,
• is definitionally fair,
• no foreign influence in elections,
• parties really do not matter,
• there’s no good way to bribe future would-be politicians because that’s everybody,
• you can enact change by persuading folks one at a time, and every supporter improves your outcomes,
• decision makers can become experts in one thing instead of being vaguely ignorant of everything,
• incentivizes everyone governed to make others healthy, happy, well adjusted, and connected with reality,
• how Athens did it,
• by multiverse theory, there is some branch where all your friends got to make any given decision.

We already do this for the life-or-death task of juries. We have the technology.

(Second choice is RCV w\ MMP; fairvote does good work.)