The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment. The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere. Ireland also has relatively little money in politics, limits on donations, a standards in public office commission, independent constituency boundary commissions, a multi-seat proportional representation system, limits on media ownership, and the highest percentage of University educated citizens of any country. All in all it's helped Ireland come a long way from the 80s and 90s, when Ireland was much worse on corruption indexes.
Ireland occasionally has a Citizen’s Assembly when the elected politicians feel it is best to do so. The members are supposed to be selected by sortition but this has not always been adhered to. “ Seven replacements joining in January 2018 were removed the following month when it emerged they were recruited via acquaintances of a Red C employee, who was then suspended, rather than via random selection.”
> The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment.
You have to give the secretariat their due. They were excellent at getting the right facilitators, who would ensure the Assembly came to the conclusion the government wanted them to. Eventually they messed up and pushed so hard against public opinion that they got the Assembly to vote in favour of deleting mothers from the constitution and in favour of a meaningless expression of respect for carers. Both were then roundly defeated but the Assembly has been great as a way for governments to build consensus by putting their thumb on the scales.
> The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere.
Contemptible. If politicians don’t want to deal with socially divisive topics they should be doing something else with their lives.
There are a crazy amount of NGOs in Ireland, 1 for every 155 people, many pushing forward their own political policies and views.
https://unherd.com/newsroom/in-ireland-its-progressives-who-...
Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind.
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.
- 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).
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
But I don't see how this fixes the problem currently plaguing US politics which is that elected representatives are passing bulls designed by lobbyists that the representatives don't understand well.
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?
- A largely unrecognized problem with our legislature here in the US is vote inflation: the number of representatives in Congress has fallen way behind the population growth, so that one rep is shared by a much larger group of constituents, devaluing the individual vote of each constituent and making it less likely that a given voter has a personal connection with their legislator.
- The increasing partisanship has reduced the number moderate and independent voices in the legislature.
We could increase the number of representatives in Congress by tripling the number of reps from each district, which would bring the rep-to-voter ratio back more in line with where it was when it was essentially frozen in 1929. Then one of those new reps would be chosen at random from a pool. Since the distribution of moderates in the general population is much higher than in Congress, this should have the effect of moderating partisanship.
that sounds like jury duty selection, in the US anyway, and juries are famously dysfunctional at times, with a single member ignoring the rules and trial and just voting politically.
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?
You can decide to vote, in which case you're removed from the sortition candidate pool. If you don't vote you're in the pool. A common representative body is formed at respective percentages.
This basically makes it so politicians have to race against "some random schmuck". If they can convince people they can do better, nice. Otherwise... too bad.
Of course some people will vote just to get out of the pool, but I think that's fine too.
It would probably make sense to start with a new new "house" or something.
Might even make sense to have some quotas (at least 50% women etc.), so the whole things doesn't have to get to Chinese government size to reflect the populus.
That or pepple would have to be replaced with high frequency
If it comes out 10% female every sortition cohort, you know some funny business is going on.
From a practical point of view the selection process is a bit of a red herring though. The current controls break down because the feedback loop is simply way too long to meaningfully affect the process.
While I personally subscribe to the idea that sortition is a superior way of electing representatives I don't see people considering it seriously. However what everyone can understand is using the same process but with sampling with a higher frequency.
I do like sortition for certain scenarios (definitely favour that over a referendum for instance), but I think it'd work better as something that either has to veto some piece of law or can offer amendments or the likes
> 9 members with IQs under 70 (i.e. mentally handicapped) > 52 members with IQs under 85 > 217 members at or under an IQ of 100 > 370 members with an IQ below the (presumptive) current congressional average of ~115
Congress is terrible, but it's hard to imagine it could be improved by making it less intelligent.
If you could incorporate the OP's point about limited eligibility and "directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool", then a "random" process would likely be superior to elections.
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.
- 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.
]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.
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.
As I got older, I've leaned more and more into meritocracy.
If we did something like this in the US, we'd have quite a religious/irrational group of leaders. Whereas with a meritocracy, you have at least some filter. The status quo requires politicians to have a bit of an understanding of human nature. Its not flawless, I've seen inferior people beat superiors by using biases, but these were relatively equal races. I've also seen idiots run for office and never catch steam.
We can also look at history and see that society's that did anything with such equal democratic distribution were less efficient than those who had some sort of merit.
But that's not to say that wouldn't also be the case otherwise.
Sad thing is, that it's impossible.
I'm actually in agreement with the OP. An interesting concept in this direction are citizen Councils or assemblies [1]. Essentially a group of random citizens get selected to investigate an (typical local) issue. They are given all the necessary administrative resources and are supposed to come up with a solution/recommendation.
They have been tried on a local level in Australia. In the documentary I saw about this, they said that people generally become engaged in the process and try to understand the nuance and different view points of the issue. Even people coming into the process with more extreme view points adopt more nuance.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/01/citizens-ass...
But imo definitely worth thinking more abt. It might solve a lot more problems than it creates by giving power back to the people.
No idea how it could active implemented, but it seems like a great compromise between the individual freedom of direct democracy and the labor-saving of representational democracy
Then you would still have the right to vote on any particular issue your own way.
Lol, who decides who is more informed? ( at the end of the day, might is right)
Acts 1:21-26 Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.” So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. Then they prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs.” Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.
Can you imagine this practice replacing the Papal conclave? Or, pastor selection at your favorite Protestant group?
So, the random selection mentioned here may have actually been a fault of Peter's and not something the Bible is endorsing as a means to choose leadership; possibly quite the opposite in this case.
Impetuous or not, Peter was likely influenced by the many decisions made by lots in the Hebrew Scriptures. e.g., picking a scapegoat (Leviticus 16:7-10), assigning priestly duties (1 Chronicles 24), dividing land (1 Chronicles 6:54), etc. Furthermore, Proverbs 16:33 & 18:18 indicates the outcome of lots is from God and reduces conflict.
Anyway, ascribing random processes to the divine for decision making, particularly political situations seems to have strong textual support within the Judeo-Christian tradition. I'm curious about parallels in Islam and other offshoots.
I strongly believe that this is how you solve elections, admissions, and recruitment (or, at least, get closer to an ideal solution).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_of_Venice#Selection_of_th...
> New regulations for the elections of the doge introduced in 1268 remained in force until the end of the republic in 1797. Their intention was to minimize the influence of individual great families, and this was effected by a complex electoral machinery. Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge.
The Copts still pick their pope by lot. Of course only from three preselected candidates but still.
Trusted by those that have not looked into whether this is actually the case. The first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was famously against trial by jury, because of how easily lawyers can abuse biases in multiracial societies, based on his first-hand experience [1].
A UK study found his experience is the norm, not the exception - Black and minority ethnic (BME) jurors vote guilty 73% of the time against White defendants, but only 24% of the time against BME defendants [2]. (White jurors vote 39% and 32% for convicting White and BME defendants, respectively. You read that correctly - Whites are also biased against other Whites, but to a much lesser degree)
Edit: To answer what is the alternative to juries: Not all countries use juries, in some the decision is up to the judge, and in some, like France, they use a mixed system of judges and jurors on a panel [3]. The French system would be my personal preference, with the classic jury system coming in second, despite my jury-critical post. Like democracy, it's perhaps the least bad system that we have, but we shouldn't be under any illusions about how impartial and perceptive a group of 12 people selected at random is.
[1] https://postcolonialweb.org/singapore/government/leekuanyew/...
[2] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/judicial-institute/sites/judicial-inst... - page 165 (182 by pdf reader numbering), figure 6.4
We also have to ask - if the biases in that study were flipped, if White jurors were far more likely to convict BME defendants, and pardon White defendants, and BME jurors were the more even-handed ones, would this not be trumpeted as conclusive evidence of racism?
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-derbyshire-66959198
[2] https://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/24515551.london-disord...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/08/pens...
BME = black and minority ethnic
This assumes that Whites and BMEs going to trial are equally likely to be guilty.
Shouldn't we assume there would be some hidden delta?
If there are many factual disputes in a case maybe use multiple juries with each jury only deciding on a subset of the facts, chosen so that no jury sees the entire case. They are less likely to be biased if they don't see the entire case.
And it usually isn't a single judge. There is a panel of judges or en banc.
And juries aren't universal either. Lots of other countries don't have juries but they have a fair and equitable justice system. Look up civil law vs common law.
In fact, if anything, this system seems like it would be even easier to game compared to the status quo. If you select truly at random from the population you're going to pull a lot of people with not a lot in the way of resources, making for a very easy to bribe block, even if you have to repeat the bribes every few years as people shuffle through. If you don't - if you select randomly from, say, only the group of people who got perfect scores on the SATs, or from white land owning males - you're practically begging for tacit collusion as they realize they have essentially the same power that HOAs do when it comes to what we'll do next. Democratically elected politicians at least have enough sense to understand they have to balance their short run desires with their long run interests in continuing to be democratically elected politicians.
[1]: Which I don't admit we should in the first place, cf https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm for one reason why.
Being an electrician makes you good at wiring houses in ways that work, that pass code inspections, and that don't burn down. The feedback loop isn't perfect (you're likely to succeed for a while if you produce flawed work fast that looks good enough to your boss), but it's at least feeding back in the right direction.
Being a politician makes you good at different things - fundraising, advertising, speeches, getting your name in the news - which are totally unrelated or even opposed to creating and executing legislation that is good for society. Sortition says that this relationship is so bad that the outcome under a lottery (the 50th percentile, eliminating the 49% of the population who would be better than average at the job) results in better outcomes than career politicians.
Most politicians outside the narrow world of US national (or otherwise high-profile) politics have very little contact with fundraising or advertising and few will ever give a speech to more than a handful of people. I.e. most parliamentarian democracies are chuck full of politicians that even most of their direct constituents couldn't name with a gun to their heads, even at the national level.
In these kind of systems, actual expertise is really important and political parties will cultivate subject-matter experts and provide them with secure seats or list positions without necessarily putting them into front-row politics. It's just the smart thing to do, if you actually want to have any effect after winning an election.
This is incorrect: elected politicians are much easier to bribe, because bribery of them is totally legal via campaign contributions. It's both expected and indeed necessary for politicians to ask for and take large amounts of money from others for their job.
Policing corruption of randomly selected citizens would be much easier, because the expectation is that none of them would be asking for money or accepting money for their jobs. With strict auditing, anything out of the ordinary would be pretty easy to spot. The problem with the current system is that vast transfers of money to legislators are perfectly ordinary.
Also, with random selection, the odds are higher of finding one or more inherently honest and ethical people who will blow the whistle if there's some kind of mass bribery scheme. But our current pay-to-play election system is a mass bribery scheme. Ask any politician how much time they spend fundraising: it's just a crazy % of their time. You may think politicians are lazy because they take so many breaks from legislating, but they're actually taking breaks to go out and fundraise.
Anyway, I think it's a misconception that poorer people are easier to bribe than richer people. It's also a misconception that richer people are "more successful". In my experience, richer people tend to be more obsessed with money. Many average people just want to be happy, have a family, have friends, enjoy life. They are satisfied with what they have. The only purpose of their job is to make it possible for them to go home from their job. Whereas people at the top never seem to be satisfied with what they have and always want more, more, more.
Mechanisms that effectively prevent this do exist in the literature, to be clear, but I rarely hear of those ones actually getting implemented.
In a representative democracy, because of the very nature of the selection process at hand, it means "getting elected at all costs". Which is not all the same - and in many cases directly counter to - the desired goal of "governing well".
Merit is measured in imperfect ways, by other people, and fundamentally, we don't want a hierarchy of classes, even if we claim the higher rankings/elites have merited it.
Human dignity isn't contingent on outperforming others, and everyone would likely rather live somewhere that doesn't feel like constant competition is needed to enjoy leisure, food, shelter, pastimes, etc.
When it comes to who we should trust for critical work, taking decisions on our behalf, etc., we do want someone qualified. I find the idea of "qualification/qualified" much nicer than "merit". The latter seems to imply a deserved outsized reward, like it justifies not why you are given the responsibility of something important, but why you are allowed to be richer, higher ranking, etc., than others.
The key here is that while meritocracy is championed as a means of finding the best, it in reality functions as a system to keep out the worst. You want harness the ambitions in people, even if not everyone's ambitions can actually be met, and you want to mitigate the harms of nepotism, even when eliminating it entirely is impossible.
So the difference between qualifications and merit evaluation are moot from my perspective, the question you need to ask is if whatever selection criteria you prefer is vulnerable to ladder kicking. If you preferred way is more vulnerable than the current system then you are putting the cart in front of the horse.
Also to make my position clear, I can't tell either way in regards to what you have suggested. As far as I was aware, we already select based on qualifications, so it's unclear to me what the exact change you are proposing is.
You get in a situation where no one questions the system that evaluated someone's merit, and that system becomes easy to control, so the criteria become that those that are already in power are the only ones that meets it.
> your country will start to fall behind the others, and your quality of life will start to rot
I think this idea also needs to be toned down, many countries have as good or better quality of life than the US and China, yet they are way down whatever competitive latter you want to look at, GDP, military power, land mass, etc. I think corruption as a metric correlates a lot more to QOL than any of those.
What do you mean by this? What creates a hierarchy of classes? Different social groups? Differing amounts of wealth? Different amounts of power to get stuff done? I think, in the end, it's got to come down to power, but I feel like it's good for society to distribute more power to people able to get better things done.
I agree with you that the term 'merit' now has a connotation of 'you deserve everything you can get'. It feels like a misappropriation of stewardship to take $100m to buy a yacht. If a government official did that, they would go straight to jail, but we somehow justify it under capitalism because maybe the CEO really wanted a yacht, and that's the only reason they started the business (in which case, I'm actually kind of fine with that $100m going to a yacht, as long as they were in the business of creating, not extracting, wealth). I don't think this is really a solvable problem, because to measure who's good at creating wealth, you kind of have to use wealth. Maybe we could have government-assigned stewards over pots of money, but that might have even bigger problems.
In that state, you want to enlarge the pool of people whose lifestyle affordances are more and more similar to one another, and since no one is poor for too long, or rich for too long, they don't enshrine themselves as some systemic class of people forming clicks, bad habits, group identity of them and the others, falling into self-selection and preservation, or some vicious cycle that entraps them there, etc.
Anyone who has worked in a presidential administration (or a congressional office) can tell you that a leader is effective if and only if they have staff that believes in their message and agenda, and that is willing and able to execute on that agenda.
The practical reality here is that charisma isn't just a way of gaming the "getting elected" part of the job, it's also a requirement to be effective at the job.
I feel one downside of a district-based system like in the US is that it's harder to build up a healthy mix of representatives, where some are more on the charismatic side and others more on the technical "policy wonk" side. Everyone needs to win their own elections, so it's biased too much towards the charismatic side.
My experience with KPIs also doesn't match the poster. KPIs are mostly ignored and it ends up going back to relationships and who has a better "deck" of accomplishments each year.
Do you mean in common use? Wikipedia has a nice page on that [1]. There are also many papers on that [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sort...
I can say "sortition" and "ranked choice voting" and "LVT" and you'd understand what I mean, but to get a broad audience it pays to break it down into concrete ideas like "Random elections" and "More than two political parties" and "Why are we paying landlords to speculate on empty lots?"
https://www.kidsnews.com.au/humanities/study-reveals-benefit...
>The report, commissioned by the Alliance of Girls’ Schools Australasia, was conducted by Macquarie Marketing Group using OECD data
reads more to me like "we found that all-girl private schools are better than the average of public and private schools", and the obvious reason why is probably *because they're private schools*, and not because they're all-girl.
I just had a friend complain to me about LeetCode, saying that it's meaningless since everyone just mindlessly grinds the problem sets.
I pointed out to him that it's called studying for the test.
There is just no evidence that like 50 point differences in admissions tests are predictive of anything.
An 800 on the math section is not enough to even predict if someone made it to the AIME, but it is enough to predict that they spent several weeks taking SAT math section practice tests. It's clearly failing to be predicative of anything the top universities should be looking for. It doesn't mean all standardized tests have to be. The AMC (and then the AIME + USAMO) are standardized tests that universities like MIT do accept scores from, and they actually get useful information from.
Why not just evaluate a cut-off for “very likely to do well” and then make it random?
It’s not like the narrow set of skills measured by the test are all there is to doing well at university. They are never going to be fully predictive.
> In his 2019 book The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits poses that meritocracy is responsible for the exacerbation of social stratification, to the detriment of much of the general population. He introduces the idea of "snowball inequality", a perpetually widening gap between elite workers and members of the middle class. While the elite obtain exclusive positions thanks to their wealth of demonstrated merit, they occupy jobs and oust middle class workers from the core of economic events. The elites use their high earnings to secure the best education for their own children, so that they may enter the world of work with a competitive advantage over those who did not have the same opportunities. Thus, the cycle continues with each generation.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Books
> In his book The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?, the American political philosopher Michael Sandel argues that the meritocratic ideal has become a moral and political problem for contemporary Western societies. He contends that the meritocratic belief that personal success is solely based on individual merit and effort has led to a neglection of the common good, the erosion of solidarity, and the rise of inequality. Sandel's criticism concerns the widespread notion that those who achieve success deserve it because of their intelligence, talent and effort. Instead, he argues that this belief is flawed since it ignores the role of luck and external circumstances, such as social and external factors, which are beyond an individual's control.[91]
* Ibid
There are essentially multiple levels of meritocracy. A level 1 meritocracy would judge only by current skills - for better or worse. This may be less than impressive even if technically a meritocracy. It may say, result in most knights coming from noble families trained from birth, but exceptional individuals would not be barred just from their background. Strictly better than a hard caste system but not something to brag about. A level 2 would try to ensure some degree of access to skills and education to all and be more meritocratic. Public education of unequal qualtity would qualify. A theoretical level N would involve completely equal starting points and would thus have pure 'merit' as the decider, even if it only accumulated from luck and the normal curve. Which highlights another issue - the distribution of quality is never perfectly even, it tends to follow a normal curve of some sort.
As for 'solving' the issue. Ability begets ability - this is called education and practice and I doubt there is a true alternative. We would call it rightfully barking mad to ban education for the sake of equity despite education contributing greatly to disparate outcomes. I think that is one of those imperfections of the universe we must accept for now.
From my perspective, the fundamental justification for sortition is that randomly selected citizens are more representative of the general public and, crucially, less corrupt and corruptible on average than elected representatives.
Why less corrupt? Because I think people who seek power are more corrupt and self-centered on average than those who have power thrust upon them. Why less corruptible? Because randomly selected citizens don't have to fundraise for political campaigns, and they are merely temporary occupants of their seats, not running for reelection and becoming career politicians. As far as I'm concerned, political campaign contributions are legalized bribery. It would be easier to police citizen legislator corruption, because we allow crap from elected officials—campaign contributions, gifted travel, post-legislator lobbying jobs—that we really should make totally illegally and jailable. A lot of "working class" politicians suddenly become super-wealthy after leaving office, and we all know it's quid pro quo. Just outright ban that crap and strictly audit former legislators.
Meritocracy is one of those nonsense words like "rationalism" or "objectivism" that means "just do the obviously right thing". Like "democratic" and "republic" it's more about the flavor and the mouthfeel than anything concrete.
So I think some US right-wingers have been using "meritocracy" as a fig leaf for hurting their usual victims - Poor people, old people, children, women, queer people, black people, brown people, etc. - While saying "Oh we just think that the most qualified people should be in charge" even though their qualification is like, being a billionaire white supremacist, and not actually going to law school or being a good person at all.
So then the online left wing response is somewhere between "What they're doing isn't really meritocracy, because they've appointed pathetically underqualified justices to the Supreme Court following an obvious agenda that they explicitly said they would follow" (True but too sophisticated to fit on a protest sign) and "Meritocracy is bad, actually" (Too deep in the words of Leftist Theory to gather an audience, but online leftists might agree with it)
So the article is saying "Doing a naive first-order meritocracy results in a system that is ripe for corruption and capture. If we add a lot of randomness, it will resist corruption, and then we'll get the meritocracy we actually want."
The ends justify the means. If it gets people to agree with my vision, I support any wording.
This ignores the fact that "getting people to agree to the policy" is, in fact, extremely important and highly dependent on charisma, eloquence, and the ability to identify and form influential connections. This position imagines human politics devoid of politics and humans.
Suffice it to say, I don't want my phone jockeys taking on engineering duties.
a better approach would be what i have seen in the boy scouts of america a few decades ago with regards to joining the order of the arrow. there the whole troop would select those who would be invited. most troop members were not members of the OA themselves. thus the ones who were already selected had little influence in who got to join them.
— Aristotle, Politics
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/18/against-electi...
Unfortunately even that gets abused. I dont know how my process went, but I sure know how my kids' experience was. The school wont give you an application, or send you to the head office to apply (even though you can also apply in-school), or they will do the residency screening the last Friday of the application period (too bad if you happen not to be home on the day they visit.) They will sometimes ask you for original deeds or birth certificates (but your friends will tell you they werent asked for it.)
The randomness can be theatre to show public fairness, but in reality it is anything but random.
My take away from this is that uniformed people will believe exactly what you tell them to believe. The tremendous effort that goes into that distracts from the responsibilities or running an organization. So, don't let the unexperienced dictate the criteria for success. I see this a lot in software, people without experience attempting to artificially dictate the terms of success.
After that, the actual representative is selected by a lottery from these people.
My thought was that the parties can't really fight each other. They are forced to pick the best candidate amongst themselves and during the fight, the competition will be intra party. People can select whom they want. The final decision will be random but among people who who the public likes so that will be okay too. The incentives seems to align in a way that beneficial for the public.
However, it'd be complicated to run and probably expensive too so I'm not sure it'd be practical.
From an environmental POV, this was absolutely useless as the government ignored most of their proposals in the end, but from an experimentation POV, it did demonstrate the viability of "citizens focus groups". In a few sessions over the course of about a year, those 150 random citizens got to meet with actual experts of climate science and french law, and became knowledgeable enough to make informed proposals that actually looked quite good.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climat...
We don't want to discourage people from improving once they've met the bar. Learning a skill is often logarithmically distributed: it costs just as much to learn the first 50% as the next 25% and so on. At a minimum, to keep people cost-agnostic, we need
d/dx Pr(selected | didn't learn x%) ~ log(x%)
selection weight = [x log x - x + 1] * C
Plus, you can't get much worse than the 2014 Committee for Science, Space and Technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPgZfhnCAdI
Luck of being born in the Bay Area and going to high school with people in the startup community.
Luck of not being hit by a bus and spending your critical early career years in physical therapy recovering.
Luck in meeting the right people while volunteering in your local political party event.
Luck in going to a different restaurant and so not getting a cold from a patron at your normal restaurant so you performed your best when a scout was at game three days later.
It doesn't surprise me that a bit of randomness from a qualified pool would pay off.
But as I read on, the Minimax system sounded surprisingly similar to some real scientific concepts, so I investigated and realized it wasn't such a stupid idea - just one with no chance of being implemented.
Now I'm reading about it here, thank you for reminding me of that concept!
> Place critical appointment/hiring processes into the hands of randomly selected oversight boards. These boards manage appointments, evaluations, and dismissals, mitigating biases and discouraging the formation of insular power groups.
This has the same issue elections have, just at a smaller scale. A better analog is juries, and charisma/storytelling definitely matters when you're talking to a jury.
> Directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool. Set and maintain the eligibility standard (such as an exam) by randomly selected oversight board to keep it updated and prevent the standard from being manipulated or gamed.
This is somewhat analogous to college admissions, and the gaming is alive and well there too. You get rid of politics, but you're back to optimizing for KPIs and things. I'm not sure why randomly picking from the top 5% of KPI optimizers is going to be better than picking the top one.
> Firms could randomly select employees or shareholders to serve on their boards. These members can significantly dilute insider collusion and introduce perspectives often overlooked by traditionally selected executives.
Same issue as juries, plus the random picks probably won't know the material well. Although I don't know much about traditional board selections, maybe that's true regardless. If you weight based on % ownership for shareholders, you're de facto giving the seats to big funds, if not, it can quickly become a lottery of like, any random person in the states.
> Use stratified sampling to select committees, ensuring diverse representation of viewpoints, backgrounds, and expertise, contributing to balanced decision-making.
This is the jury thing again? It seems like the solution "randomly pick oversight/approval boards" was listed three times.
> Create randomly composed auditing and oversight committees, deterring corrupt practices through constant unpredictability in oversight.
Constant unpredictability in oversight sounds terrible. The reason we have judges and case law and things in the legal system is that there are tons of edge cases, where reasonable minds will differ. You want to build up a consistent set of guidelines people can follow. A lot of people who are on the edge of rules aren't trying to be corrupt, they're just not sure what they are/aren't allowed to do.
I was going to write more here but I think that actually sums it up well.
I tend to believe that in democracy and capitalism, corruption makes evil people busy because corruption becomes a quarantined, isolated competition, so they do less serious harm elsewhere, and they get punished if they go too far.
But yes, merit is a sweet lie.
what? is this like a joke? an "eligibility pool" with "an exam" is going to be....."random" ?
sure! we did this and it's all random white men worth billions of dollars. So weird those were the only people that could pass "the exam"! But we have no idea which white male billionaires it will be, so it's "random" !
The article diagnoses the problem well - Campbell's Law shows how any metric used for selection gets gamed. But randomness isn't the only solution.
The issue isn't meritocracy itself, but our implementation. Current systems fail because "merit" is cheap to fake. LinkedIn profiles, smooth talking, and connections matter more than actual performance.
What if merit claims required real stakes? If claiming expertise meant risking something you'd lose when proven wrong? If your surgical reputation couldn't boost your investment credibility? If gaming the system cost exponentially more than being honest?
Yes, KPIs fail for complex work. But a surgeon with 1,000 successful operations IS more qualified than a random person. That signal has value. Rather than abandon merit for randomness, we need merit systems that are expensive to fake and cheap to verify. Make the track record immutable, domain-specific, and consequential. The technical challenge is hard but solvable. Randomness might help for some positions (jury duty works!), but wherever specific expertise matters - engineering, medicine, research - verifiable performance still beats random selection.
I've been working on a system exploring these ideas [1], but the core insight stands regardless: the author's claim that only randomness can prevent meritocratic decay may be premature. We might just need better verification mechanisms.