Apart from being caught up in all the corporate tax swindels.

> There is a non-trivial amount of nuance and compromise that goes in lawmaking.

We just passed that "big beautiful bill" and it was quite clear nobody knew or cared what was in it, beyond it being "trump's bill he wants". I'm guessing staffers and lobbyists had a far more detailed understanding of their portions than any elected official did.

It's a reasonable guess that 100 randos would actually write a better bill.

There are many proposed models for how to incorporate sortition into governance. Some examples:

- A randomly selected lower house with an elected upper house (or the reverse)

- policy juries which deliberate only on one specific piece of legislation, which then must be approved by a separate oversight jury before taking effect

- election by jury, where candidates are chosen by "elector juries" who interview and vet the candidates before selecting one

- multi-layer representative selection based on the Venetian model where randomly selected bodies elect representatives, of whom a random subset are chosen to then appoint officials

Right now the lottocratic/sortition-based bodies that exist are purely advisory, though in some places like Paris and Belgium they have gained a good amount of soft power.

It wouldn't be that hard to implement a conservative version of one of these in certain US states though. For example, add "elect by jury" to the ballot, where if it wins the plurality, a grand jury is convened to select the winner (counties in Georgia already use grand juries to appoint their boards of equalization, so there is precedent).

> Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind.

Since the linked article is to a substack called “Assemble America” I feel I should point out that if the apportionment House of Representatives had not been capped at 435 reps, the House would indeed be several thousand strong by now.

That's what bicameral legislatures[1] were meant to address.

Ideally, the lower house are representatives elected from the common people, and the upper house are the career politicians that understand how the government works.

In the U.S., the 17th amendment[2] changed that, for better or worse (probably both).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...

> the idea of a randomized group of citizens making the law of the land scares the heck out of me.

Here in the US, we use randomized groups of citizens to determine who gets locked away potentially for life or executed. Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?

Regardless of how the average person may feel about it on a surface level, I think it's absolutely critical that congress has so many lawyers elected. These people write laws, we need people who actually understand the way law works doing that job.

Have you ever really paid attention to the members of the US House of Representatives?

There are some strong outliers but most are way below the bar of random selection. Do-nothing political nepo babies who are nothing but loud and in a gerrymandered district.

I think it could work well if you added two things:

1. A filtering mechanism after the selection process. E.g., basic civics questions like how many states are there, a background check, and so on. To make sure you don't pick anyone that's compromised or incapable of serving.

2. A training program that acclimates new members to the system. If terms are say, six years long, then the first year can be entirely devoted to training.

Yep, I can get behind sortition between qualified candidates.

I disagree with your example, but things like deciding supreme court justices over the population of judges or department heads over the population of professors seem quite ok.

For lawmaking in particular, it looks like a bad idea. There will be lots of people trying to con the uninformed representatives into behaving badly.

I've long been in favor of sortition, but with (as suggested in the article) a set of qualifying criteria.

Not selecting absolute random people, but people who have established their ability to intelligently handle responsibility, and avoid breaking the law. E.g., once you have achieved a certain level of educational attainment (3.0+ at well-ranked college, managerial-level at established biz, certain mil leadership rank, etc.), pass security clearance, pass citizenship test, etc., you are in the qualified pool, and may be called upon to serve in a legislature. The always-a-newbie problem could be solved by allowing legislators to serve 2nd or maybe 3rd terms by re-election/confidence vote. Same for POTUS, possibly selected by sortition out of the existing legislators who pass a confidence vote.

There is no way a reasonably and responsibly selected random group of achieving responsible people would do worse than a corrupt or craven group, especially worse than the selected-for-corruption — i.e., selected for loyalty-to-leader — currently seated.

But you can't evaluate it in a vacuum. It needs to be compared to the current state of affairs, and to other realistic alternatives.

Our political system effectively selects for sociopathic con men. So would you prefer your laws to be written by those people vs a random group?

The US system is biased towards rural areas and swing states because of the electoral college. Randomness would average out to the will of the people. Like unbiased path tracing, you know?

That would be less of a problem in a legislature, where you don't need unanimity and there aren't any comparable rules about how you are supposed to vote.

Do members have right to vote according to their conscience?

If yes - why is that a problem? They stick to the overarching rule, and you should argue the rules must be amended.

If not - that's a huge problem IMO and can be summarised with "why pretend jury has any say If they must not stray from the way the case is presented and defended (knowing very well how awful public defense is and how dishonest sometimes police and prosecution can be)" and not replace it with just a judge?

If it's truly random, it should already be 50-52% female.

If it comes out 10% female every sortition cohort, you know some funny business is going on.

Ballot propositions have a number of shortcomings that sortition-based legislatures won't necessarily fall into:

   - Most people filling out their ballots aren't spending very much time on each prop -- they'll typically either vote based on their gut reaction to the title of the prop,  follow a voter guide from an advocacy group they want to align with, or just vote based on whose advertising campaign was most influential.
   - Ballot props, at least in CA, are pretty much directly pay-to-play. There's a price tag for getting a prop onto the ballot, because signature gathering companies charge per signature. (Though at least in SF, conservative ballot props cost more per signature because there aren't as many conservatives to sign. This implies there's _some_ correlation between the cost and the popularity of a particular proposition.)
   - Ballot props are both high-latency and low-bandwidth. Coupled with the fact that they often cannot be overridden except by another ballot prop, and we're basically stuck with any flaw in the bill that passes (unless it's egregious enough that someone's willing to foot the bill for another round of signature gathering and advertising, which will cost about as much as it did for the original bill.)
   - Ballot props don't go through several rounds of amendment before being passed, nor do they really have any debate; there's just a single round of "should this be on the ballot" followed by a single round of "should this be law". This means flawed bills are more likely to end up on the ballot. Because of the high latency mentioned above, voters are often stuck with a choice between a bad solution and no solution to whatever problem the ballot prop is trying to solve.

Maybe more people would have understanding of how the system works in such a system.

Though "participatory democracy" sounds like "direct democracy", they are distinct.

]Further, by eliding deliberation, the initiative process is the worst kind of direct democracy. Except for mob rule, of course.

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

The OP narrowly focuses on the calculus (?) of how randomly choosing reps actually promotes meritocracy.

This wiki article is a good overview of the whole burrito.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens'_assembly

That's the question, right?

Citizens' assembly makes policy. But then who implements it?

I (currently) believe that we'd still need executives, still need some kind of balance of powers.

So I'm okay w/ electing mayors, sheriffs, governors, etc. Perhaps even multi-seat roles; something between a council and a mayor.

Assuming, of course, we use approval voting for execs, PR for councils.

IMO you'd want this to pay pretty well, like 95th percentile income, to help ensure that most people would actually _want_ to serve.

I agree, but I’m not convinced that 100% of current Reps could pass a civics test.

If you have fifty bright and highly competent people, I'm skeptical that adding fifty idiots is going to make much of a difference. Most idiots will accept meritocratic authority if they can be convinced that their needs are taken into account (which they should). Some will obstruct, but probably not enough to significantly derail anything, and the good-faith idiots will bring information and perspectives that wouldn't be considered if they weren't there, so they aren't exactly useless.

In fact, I would argue that idiots in elected bodies are a lot more likely to do damage than random idiots, because they are more likely to be narcissists, and being elected boosts their sense of self-worth. And of course, the most damage is often caused by the most intelligent of them, because the main problem is acting in bad faith, not a lack of wits.

This one specifically is amusing because in my opinion you do have quite a religious/irrational group of leaders in the US.

But that's not to say that wouldn't also be the case otherwise.

The fundamental problem with any purportedly meritocratic arrangement is that you need someone to define the evaluation criteria for what "merit" is, and then someone else to administer the examination. Both are vulnerabilities in the system that lead to formation of a "merit caste" (which sets and enforces standards that favor its members) in the long run, as evidenced by historical examples of states that tried explicit meritocracy.

But the current metric of merit is "ability to win elections". That gives us representatives who are not there to make things better, but to set themselves up to win the next election. This sometimes means, for example, prolonging the problem that they got elected to solve, because they can use that problem to win the next election.

"As I got older, I've leaned more and more into meritocracy"

Sad thing is, that it's impossible.