Sortition—Hacking Government To Avoid Cognitive Biases And Corruption
I’ve elaborated on this form of government I have proposed in great detail on my blog here
http://ecophilosophylife.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/a-thoughtful-constitution-by-sortition.html
The purpose of this post is to be a persuasive argument for my proposed system of democracy. I am arguing along the lines that my legislature by sortition, random selection, is superior to electoral systems. It also mirrors the advances in overcoming bias which are currently being pioneered in the Sciences.
I. The Problem
It is insane that we allow the same people who are elected to cast their eye on society to identify problems, write up the solutions to those problems, and then also vote to approve those solutions. This triple function of government by elected officials isn’t simply corruptible, but is inherently flawed in its decision making process.
II. The Central Committee, overcoming bias, electoral shenanigans, and demographics bias
In my system of sortition election there is a mini-referendum done by a huge sampling of 1,000-5,000 representatives at the highest level. They vote everything up or down and cannot change anything about a bill themselves. They are not congregated into one place and there is no politics between them. They don’t even need to know, nor could they know each other. Perhaps they could be part of political parties, but there is no need or money behind this as the members of what I’m calling the Central Committee (C2) are never candidates and can individually never serve more than once per lifetime or perhaps per decade in 3 year terms.
Contentious issues can be moved to a general referendum. In the 1,000 member C2, any law in the margins of 550-450 can have a special second vote proposed by the disagreeing side such that if more than 600 agree then the item is added to the general monthly or quarterly referendum conducted electronically with the entire population. In this way the average person participates and feels heard by their government on a regular basis.
The major advantage of this C2 is that it is representative. It will have people from all areas, be 50% male and 50% female and will include all minorities. There can be no great misrepresentation or capture of the legislature by a powerful group. This overcome many of the inherent biases of an electoral system which in almost every democracy today routinely under represents minorities.
III. The Issue Committees (IC)
The IC is a totally separate body whose sole job is to identify areas of the law which need updating. They are comprised of 100 citizens and are a split between 51 Regular Citizens (RCs) and 49 Expert Citizens (EC) serving single 3 year terms. There are around 30 ICs and they each serve an area such as defence, environment, food safety, drug safety, telecommunications, changes to government, finance sector, banking sector, etc.
These committees will meet in person and discuss what needs exist which the government can address. They do not get to write any laws, nor do they get to vote on any laws. There are in fact more of these than there are members of the C2 and they will be the primary face of government where the average citizen can send in requests or communicate needs. The IC shines a spotlight on the issues facing the country. They also form the law writing bodies
IV. The Sub Committee (SC)
These are temporary parts of the legislature who write the laws. They have no authority over what topic area they get to write laws about, that is determined by the IC and then voted upon by the C2. They are composed of 10 RCs and 10 ECs with the support of 10 Lawyer Citizens (LC). The LCs do not participate to vote when the draft law can be moved up to the C2 for consideration, they simply help draft reasonable laws.
These SC’s form and dissolved quickly, lasting no more than 3-6 months before a proposed law is made. Being called up to the SC is a lot more akin to being drafted for Jury Duty than the IC or C2 level of government as it is a short term of service.
V. Conclusions
This system is indeed more democratic and more representative than current electoral democracies. It is less prone to corruption and electioneering is impossible as there are no elections.
Members of the C2, IC, and SC parts of intentionally split in their duties so no conflict of interest can arise and there is no legislator bias where they have pet bills and issues to push through for benefits to specific parts of the country.
This system is also less influenced by the views an opinions of the very wealthy and the demographic and economic makeup of the people involved.
And that’s it. Could it work? Would it work? I’d like to think it has some advantages over the current and outdated mechanisms of democracy in terms of new knowledge about how the human mind works.
EDIT: moved notes to bottom of post
NOTE 1: I anticipate this objection. Random Citizens (RC) and Expert Citizens (EC) have various stipulations on their service and on how often they can serve, check out my linked post at the top for details. Suffice to say, the RCs must have completed high school and cannot be intellectually disabled. Whatever you can think of that might disqualify someone for a jury, think of something along those lines.
NOTE 2: As for the nature of this being different, look at juries. We already use a process of sortition, though heavily and perhaps unfairly constrained in its current form, to determine if people are guilty or innocent and what sort of punishment they might receive. We even use sortition in committees of experts in various forms form peer reviewed journals with somewhat random selection from a pool of qualified individuals or ECs in my system.
NOTE 3: This is not about politics. I often say I am interested in government, but not politics. This confuses a lot of people. If anything, this system would lessen or (too optimistically) eliminate politics. I know there is a general ban on discussion of politics and this is not that. I am trying to modify government and democratic systems to reflect advances in cognitive bias, decision theory, and computer technology to modernize and further democratize the practice of government.
If you want to propose a new system of democracy, why focus on the nation state level?
We could try new styles of democracy for student representation at universities. Getting democracy inside a community of students that attend an university to work is a much easier problem than getting a nation state democracy to work.
If you have really cool ideas you have a chance in convincing a body of students at an university to change the type of democracy that they use.
In Germany parts of the pirate party do govern themselves via liquid democracy. The didn’t simply try the established form of democracy but used a new one.
Comparing Citizendium with Wikipedia is also useful. Citizendium tried to have a much more bureaucratic structure and that made it hard to make good decisions that move the project forward.
There are many communities that need a system to govern themselves and nation states are the hardest to convince to switch to a new unproven system.
I think your blogpost and this article would both be improved by the following procedure:
Start reading at the beginning. For every sentence, ask yourself: Will this make sense to a reader who has read only the foregoing material? If not, rewrite and/or restructure to make the answer yes.
Two random examples. (1) In this article: “NOTE 1. I anticipate this objection.” What objection? (I infer from context that it’s something like “Aren’t you at risk of having the country governed by idiots and madmen?”. But there’s nothing immediately preceding “NOTE 1” that either says that or seems to provoke the reader to say it. (2) In the blogpost: unless I missed it, there is no explanation of just how the “random citizens” (note: in this article you say RC stands for something else, which I’m guessing is a mistake) and “experts” are chosen, nor of other obviously-crucial things like: are they paid?, can they refuse to serve?, can their employers make it difficult for them to serve?, etc. (Which can make a huge difference to how representative your legislative bodies are.)
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.
Many leaders of industry don’t have PhD’s. What’s the process which you want to use to select them?
Why shouldn’t a clever politics professor simply hand out 1,000,000 PhD’s to people who share similar politics as himself to get people into your expert commision?
Who has the power to evaluate the request and make the decision whether something is a hardship?
Or more crucially: Can their employers fire them for not doing what the employer wants when they serve?
Yup, that too.
I found this post hard to follow. It would be more intelligible if you gave a clearer explanation of what problem you are trying to solve. Why exactly is it bad to have the same people look for problems and fix them? Why is it bad to have a legislature that can revise and amend statutes during the voting process?
I also don’t really understand what sort of comment or feedback you are expecting here. Do you want us to discuss whether this lottery-and-many-committees structure is in general a good idea? Do you want us to critique through the details of your scheme?
The scheme seems to have certain advantages and certain disadvantages. I am personally quite skeptical; I would need to see lottery-based administration work at a small scale before I tried it on anything larger than a village.
What sort of evidence would convince you that this was, on balance, a bad idea?
Consider reading http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/15/index-posts-on-raikoth/ for a better thought out (though just as utopian) form of governing.
That sentence suggests that you are unfamiliar with the way things happen in the real world. It frequently happens that the executive has people who write laws and who identify problems.
An US president does campaign on wanting to pass certain laws after he comes into office.
When I was doing Quantified Self PR stuff in Germany a person from some government ministry did interview me for my perspective on legislative issues that come up because of Quantified Self. In a decently governed country the executive does have people who are tasked with researching issues in depth and then reporting back for developing policies. Of course not all laws get initiated by the executive but a good portion of laws do.
Outside of the government you have think tanks who do deep policy thinking. The US Chamber of Commerce does deep thinking about identifying issues on which laws should be passed.
These days you also have some cases where the executive hires a law firm to write a law and then that law is given to parliament and the parliament votes on it.
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.
International concerns usually do require treaties and treaties are laws. Do you want that the state doesn’t engage in any international treaties?
You basically want to remove anyone competent enough to think a few years about an issue and develop reasonable strategies to deal with it to be removed from the system.
Even if I would agree with the goal you won’t achieve it.
Again naive. You don’t need to pay politicians money that they listen to experts who spend a lot of time thinking about a specific issue in detail. Listening to experts who study a given subjects for years is what any reasonable person does. That doesn’t automatically means that one does everything that one hears but the ability to actually spend a lot of time to build experience in a subject usually helps when it comes to explaining how to do things.
If you are a bunch of 10 random citizen and 10 people with PhD’s in medicine and you want to overhaul the medical system it makes very much sense to listen to the various stakeholders and their perspective of how a proposed law might effect them.
If you design a system to avoid letting stakeholders speak with the law makers you are going to end up with laws that do things that the people who wrote the law didn’t foresee.
Then you wouldn’t say silly things like: “It is insane that we allow the same people who are elected to cast their eye on society to identify problems, write up the solutions to those problems, and then also vote to approve those solutions.” Of course congressman can do those things but the aren’t the only ones.
Alternatively you could also think you are arguing with fools which is no good assumption to make when you are on LW.
Why do you use abbreviations? To make the text less readable?
To me that sound like someone saying they haven’t analysed their proposal well enough to understand it’s political implications.
Who decides whether the law they write counts as the topic that the IC decided?
How do the experts get selected?
Where’s the executive in your system? In our system we have the executive do things like negotiate international treaties that afterwards get affirmed by parliaments.
Is there a constitution that constrains which laws can be passed?
Citation needed. I always thought that the journal chooses with reviewer it likes and then asks those reviewers. The fact that the do something like a fair sortition would be news for me.
What does “intellectually disabled” mean? Is someone with diagnosed ADHD intellectually disabled? What about autism?
If they don’t know each other who’s the trusted third party that mediates the information flow?
Basically you want them to vote on laws they haven’t read without speaking with other members of the committee who read the laws. Could you explain in more detail why you want things to be that way?
That basically means that the NSA gets to decide every 550-450 split if it wants to do so.
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!
Then you haven’t thought your proposal through.
How many pages of laws do you think can a “regular citizen” read and understand per day? Especially if the people writing the laws have an incentive to not make it obvious what their law does and sometimes hide it issues in obscure paragraphs because they aren’t the people voting on the law?
Do you think that your system will only pass that many pages of law?
You still fail to describe a process which makes the decision about who’s allowed and who isn’t and who is in power of controlling the process.
If you write an IQ test you can write it in a way that women score a bit more or a bit less. You probably can also write it in a way that people with a high degree of openness to experience score better.
Nuclear weapons are protected by air gaps. They have physical guards that are military personal that we trust for protecting the weapons. It’s okay when the military has the power to use nuclear weapons. On the other hand you don’t want to give the military the power to dictate election results.
The fact that you use nuclear launch codes as example is also very ironic. At the beginning congress wanted nuclear launch codes to protect nuclear weapons. The US military didn’t like their weapons to be crippled so they simply set all nuclear weapons to have the same code that all the personal knew. It’s security theater.
There also a nuclear weapon that nearly exploded when 3 of 4 safety measures failed and an airplane crashed. Nuclear launch codes didn’t provide any safety in that case.
The NSA effectively control the cyberspace of the US and therefore can make your electronic election to have any result it wants to. The Chaos Computer Club and associated people have fought voting machine for quite some time now because they effectively mean that powerful people can easily rig elections.
You are basically saying that an dictatorship where the dictator chooses his advisors to write policies is the same system as a system where advisors are picked in some random fashion.
Please don’t use a custom font. It makes it harder to read.
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.
jury—n. a set of (usually) twelve people too dumb to get out of jury duty.
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! ;)
I can’t speak for everyone, but the main thing I’ve taken away from my jury service has been an overwhelming sense of contempt for the participants. It starts with the scheduling, continues into the selection process and compensation, and even filters down into that distinctive courthouse smell of dust and wood varnish and body odor; in sum, though, we’re talking an impression that you’re needed to fulfill a formal requirement, but aren’t actually valued and in fact constitute a major inconvenience that must be worked around. Especially if you demonstrate any initiative, or indeed any traits at all other than having a pulse and a sponge-like capacity for rhetoric.
I suppose there’s an argument to be made for doing it anyway, but I’ve never been one for martyrdom.
Wow, note to self, never reply to comments not directly relating to the idea or adding to the conversation or seek to argue definitions. Will this get me negative karma too? I stand by my reply. If you refuse a jury then you also refuse to participate in your democracy out of individually selfish motives. Is that a wrong analysis to think the person who comes up with some excuse is doing so to benefit themselves and that the knock on effects of that are a negative indicator for democracy?
Tapping out.
If only.
A stream of invective composed mostly of ad hominem non sequiturs does not a good snark make. You’ll have to up your game :-P
P.S. Did you check your mind for a pulse recently?
https://makeyourlaws.org/strategy would be nice example of practical liquid democracy thinking and how to interfer with the existing US system.
Your link is wrong—I think you’ve got the URL and the description the wrong way round.
Ah, yes it was. Thanks. Fixed now.
I think they may have used something like this in Ancient Greece, although I don’t know if I remember correctly...
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.
Juries have a lot of “professional supervision.” In the Common Law system, the judge restricts who can serve on the jury, determines the relevant law, tells the jury what specific question of fact they are deciding, controls the evidence shown to the jury, does the sentencing, and more. My impression is that the non-Common Law systems that use juries give them even less discretion. So when we have citizen-volunteers, we get good results only by very carefully hemming them in with professionals.
You can’t supervise the executive in the same way. By definition, the executive is the part of the government in control of the coercive apparatus. If the nominal executives aren’t able to give orders to the military without the approval of some other body, then the nominal executives aren’t really in charge; they’re just constitutional decoration, like the modern British monarchy, or the Presidium of the USSR.
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.
I don’t care at all about the details here. That would have to be hashed out by the people in question to come up with they think is a fair system. The central idea I was considering would be the effect of removing elections, removing donor dependency removing re-election concerns, and in general accounting for cognitive biases in a democracy while taking into account more people’s opinions.
I also wanted to challenge people’s thinking by getting them to consider if they actually believe in democracy. I think far fewer people really believe in it. They think the average person is too dumb or they think smart people should be in charge. They think the seeming inevitability of corruption negates any system improvement in a defeatist attitude. Belief in democracy is low amongst most everyone I’ve met in life. They want leaders, they want inspiration, they want propaganda, and they want someone else to take care of running and thinking about government. This separate and only tenuously connected system of government and its people is not what I would think of as democracy. I think we have redefined the term so that what we are doing right now IS democracy, no matter what it is that we are doing. We refuse to collectively consider what it would mean if we are NOT living in a democracy.
I think we can improve things I think we can eliminate sources of bias by design. I think sortition can accomplish a lot of those goals by eliminating the majority of incentives and avenues for corruption which exist today. I think more people can be more involved in democracy, I think the government can be two fingers on the wrist of the people measuring their pulse, and I think that is a good thing. I don’t think we can tinker around the edges and remove money based or influence based corruption from a system of democracy reliant on electoral systems. More regular general referendums will invovle people and get them thinking about government. It need not be someone else’s job for us to rule ourselves, that is internally inconsistent outside of a world of perfect trust in elected career politicians. I don’t have that trust that they will be beholden to the people. I’d guess most people agree that that is not currently the case as judged by public opinion polls of trust in government (citation, meh)
if the problem is corruption and poor demographics with too many rich white men and not enough of anyone else and we are not attached forever and ever to the idea of elections = democracy. Then perhaps we can abandon or at least consider alternatives to the electoral system. I think sortition takes into account biases. I think that by having large enough central committee to pass legislation, it acts as a small version of the general referendum to capture the will of the people. What is the point of calling a system democracy if it is incapable of capturing or going along with the will of the people? 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. And it is what we have today and most western countries with elections, massive private influence through wealth, power, and political parties. And I thought we were not supposed to win arguments by redefining terms :)
Cheers!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
What specific biases do you mean?