> 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?
> Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?
Those are screened.
Someone like https://youtu.be/00q5cax96yU?t=60
could be selected without some additional constraints than plain sortition. Ofc then those constraints are politicized.
okay, well that guy won an election so clearly it's possible even without sortition. If people are picked at random then the likelihood of getting some wacko is lower rather than higher, because wackos are more highly motivated to try to act on their wackadoo policies and because of the way voting is implemented, that wouldn't really be a problem for them because it no longer appears to be disqualification for a politician to be crazy, and the crazy ones are the ones who run. On the flip side, the actual rate of totally crazy people across the entire population is likely to be smaller than you expect and random selection would represent the underlying rate of wackos in the public. If it turns out that the rate of wackos is so high that like, 51 percent of your legislature is hearing voices in their head and living like Diogenes, then representative democracy isn't going to help you either.
> Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?
Honestly, yes. In the case of criminal culpability, it just happens to be the least scary of the available options of who gets to send someone to jail.
For lawmaking, this isn't the case: the work for lawmakers is much more detailed and gameable than a binary question of guilt.
