Following the call for proposals for changing the subtitle of this blog, we have the following proposals:
- The blog of the Kleroterians (i.e., keep the subtitle as is.)
- The political potential of sortition
- Sortition as a democratic tool
- No democracy without sortition
- Because you can’t have democracy when you don’t have sortition
- The democratic potential of sortition
- Sorting out sortition
- A blog to sort out sortition
- Maximus in minimis
- Put the man in the street in the catbird seat
- Democratic lotteries and the potential of sortition
- Selection by lot
- Selecting political decision-makers the way we select jurors
- More democracy by random selection of citizens
- Better democracy through sortition
- Renewing democracy through sortition
- More democracy by haphazardly selected citizens
- Sortition: next step for democracy
- The political potential of democratic lotteries and sortition
- More democracy via sortition
- Democracy and the potential of sortition
- Sortition is the future of democracy
- Better politics through sortition
- Sortition, impartiality, equality, People’s rule
- Democracy through sortition
- Sortition for democracy, fairness and good governance
(I tried to include no more than two proposals by each person. If you feel that there are fewer than 2 of your proposals on the list, or if you otherwise feel that your proposals were unfairly excluded, please let me know as soon as possible.)
Ideally, I would go with proportional representation, so that each subtitle would be used part of the time, where the part is determined by the proportion of the votes it got. However, I am afraid this is technically difficult. (Maybe we can consider changing the subtitle every year?)
As we all know, there are no good voting schemes, so we are left with using a bad one. I suggest then that we use ranked choice. Please respond in the comments below with exactly one ordered list of subtitles from the list above representing your order of preference. Voting closes in a week.
Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition |
Adam Cronkright
Ali
Ahmed R. Teleb
avanderven
avergne
Alex Kovner
azakaras
Brett Hennig
campbellwallace
Simon Threlkeld
Nick Coccoma
codyhipskind
Common Lot Sortitionist
Conall Boyle
constitutionalism
davidschecter
graytmatter
gtridimas
H.J. Hofkirchner
John Burnheim
jgarry20151
johnedwardtaylor
johnhuang865
Jonathan Crock
keithsutherland
Jacob Richter
lukewhito
SimonPek
Nathan El
Nicholas Gruen
Owen Shaffer
Patrick Chalmers
Paul Gölz
paulnollen
peterstone
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
pronfeld
Emil
rcaze
richwbrown
Roger Knights
roslynfuller
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
shaharavin
tbouricius
Ted Wachtel
Joshua Laferriere
theodorestathis
Wayne Liebman
Yoram Gat
Oliver Milne
Equality by lot 
I always liked the original Klerotarians subtitle…nothing is better or more enticing or more mysterious than that. From a marketing point of view, it’s quirky. The reader thinks when first encountering…what the hell is that? It arouses curiosity. And most of all, thanks for all your effort. I am in your debt. Best, Ted Wachtel
>
LikeLiked by 4 people
For the people who read your titles and only a little of everything else: “Selecting political decision-makers the way we select jurors”
LikeLike
Ranked choice voting seems good to me.
LikeLike
Yoram,
Yes there is no PERFECT voting method, but there are really bad ones (one choice plurality), and some that often work well. If we use an STV ranked voting system, we should probably allow duplicate rankings… so a person can give, for example, three equally great choices a 1, a bunch of other options a 2, etc. (it is too hard for a voter to parse a strict order for 26 candidates). There are software programs that can handle duplicate rankings, or it can be done with a spreadsheet, and brute effort (if a voter gives three choices a first ranking, each gets one third of a vote in the first round. If in the next round one of them gets eliminated, then the remaining first choices go up to a half vote each, etc.)
LikeLike
Thank you very much, Ted.
LikeLike
I think ‘KlerotErians’ rules itself out on grounds of spelling difficulty! It was my whimsical neologism, but I accept it is now defunct.
[ Thanks, I now fixed the spelling in the post. -YG ]
LikeLiked by 1 person
26
23
15
16
11
21
6
2
3
LikeLike
14
15
16
20
23
LikeLike
My favourite new sub-titles are:
Better democracy through sortition (no 15)
Democracy through sortition (no 25)
Sortition: next step for democracy (18)
LikeLike
Here’s my vote:
5: Because you can’t have democracy IF (I seem to finally have made up my mind around that) you don’t have sortition
4: No democracy without sortition
25: Democracy through sortition
13: Selecting political decision-makers the way we select jurors
7: Sorting out sortition
8: A blog to sort out sortition
10: Put the man in the street in the catbird seat
LikeLike
26. Sortition for democracy, fairness and good governance
6. The democratic potential of sortition
3. Sortition as a democratic tool
2. The political potential of sortition
7. Sorting out sortition
11. Democratic lotteries and the potential of sortition
19. The political potential of democratic lotteries and sortition
24. Sortition, impartiality, equality, People’s rule
LikeLike
1. The blog of the Klerotarians (i.e., keep the subtitle as is.)
The title and slogan are both fine, Yoram. Changing just words will change nothing. The blog has a completely different problem, its debating format and process: Equality-by-Lot never achieves closure, this renders “debate” quite unsatisfactory and far too often (always?) quite repetitive.
The necessary methodic changes are reasonably easy but I’d be off topic if I go into details.
Best luck, Hubertus
LikeLike
PS I always have to scroll up to check the spelling of Kleroterians and glad to see the blog convenor is equally dyslexic!
LikeLike
1
26
25
12
7
4
LikeLiked by 1 person
RCV limited to top 4 or so would be much more manageable. I don’t know if I can rank more than my top handful. Also, a few of these choices are essentially redundant to me so that makes choosing between them, well, random.
6. The democratic potential of sortition
7. Sorting out sortition 19. The political potential of democratic lotteries and sortition 2. The political potential of sortition
LikeLike
3
24
25
6
1
LikeLike
I really think we all need to hold up until Yoram prepares a ballot format and counting rule… listing likes in comments is too chaotic. It won’t work to rank only top four choices, because it could easily happen that no choice gets a majority even after the ranked tabulation.
LikeLike
Terry,
I don’t want to make this process even heavier than it already is. Let’s give this a shot as is. If trouble ensues, we’ll reconsider.
LikeLiked by 1 person
(I thought the counting rule for Ranked Choice Voting is well defined. If people want to have ties, we can use the procedure you proposed. Personally, this is not important enough for me to bother with ties.)
LikeLike
3
14
15
24
26
LikeLike
In order of preference
19
6
3
11
26
25
2
21
18
14
15
16
22
24
7
8
LikeLike
1. Democracy through sortition (#31)
2. Sortition as a democratic tool (#9)
3. Sorting out sortition (#13)
4. Democracy and the potential of sortition (#27)
5. Renewing democracy through sortition (#22)
6. Sortition: next step for democracy (24) [Prefer a dash instead of colon]
LikeLike
1. The political potential of democratic lotteries and sortition (#19)
2. Democracy through sortition (#25)
3. Democratic lotteries and the potential of sortition (#11)
4. The democratic potential of sortition (#6)
LikeLike
1. Sortition for democracy, fairness and good governance (#26)
2. The democratic potential of sortition (#6)
3. Democracy through sortition (#25)
4. Better democracy through sortition (#15)
5. Sortition as a democratic tool (#3)
6. Sortition: next step for democracy [provided punctuation is eliminated by changing it to “Sortition is the next step for democracy”] (#18)
7. Because you can’t have democracy when you don’t have sortition [“when” could be changed to “if”] (#5)
8. The blog of the Kleroterians (i.e., keep the subtitle as is.) (#1)
LikeLike
1- Sortition, impartiality, equality, People’s rule (#24)
2- Democracy through sortition (#25)
3- The democratic potential of sortition (#6)
LikeLike
[…] are twenty-six options to vote for in the poll for changing the subtitle of this blog and, at the time of writing (08 Jan) we have only seventeen voters. Unless we have a large increase […]
LikeLike
9. Maximus in minimis
10. Put the man in the street in the catbird seat
LikeLike
7. Sorting out sortition
16. Renewing democracy through sortition
6. The democratic potential of sortition
3. Sortition as a democratic tool
LikeLike
Hubertus>> “Equality-by-Lot never achieves closure”
Adding to my remark: Obviously this one thread is the laudable exemption of the general problem. This one will certainly achieve closure by vote, and we can already see that participation is much better than in recent other EbL blogs.
LikeLike
13
14
12
11
6
16
20
25
2
4
3
LikeLike
The original subtitle is great. However, it expresses a sense of commonality of views on the part of the authors and readers of the blog. At this point, I think it can be replaced with another subtile, which instead expresses the idea that the lottery, as a method of choice for the ruling class, creates the conditions for better politics. For this, my indication is for subtitle n. 23: better politics through sortition.
LikeLike
18. Sortition: next step for democracy
LikeLike
[…] new subtitle reflected the full range of interest in sortition. If you want to vote, just go to the Online Poll, look at the list of “candidates”, choose your preference(s) and post a comment, […]
LikeLike
I find Giulanos comment persuasive and would also vote for number 23. The others would be OK too.
LikeLike
In order of preference:
8
1
7
2
26
Indifferent over the rest.
LikeLike
21
6
11
25
26
2
19
1
23
22
13
12
14
20
16
15
18
4
3
5
7
24
8
10
17
9
LikeLiked by 1 person
24
12
6
3
(although I am heartened by support for 1)
LikeLike
26,
23,
15,
16,
6.
If the aim is to broaden the discussion, then this would be my choice.
I hope you are all well.
LikeLike
Thanks! Care to give us a name or a label, for the record?
LikeLike
Apologies. Anonymous Jan 11 4;59 = Olly Dowlen
LikeLike
Thanks, Olly.
LikeLike
Thanks everybody for the votes. It is again gratifying to find out that there are so many people who have an interest in this blog. I do wish we would hear from all of you more often. Please consider getting more involved, even if just by writing a short comment occasionally.
I guess we can close the vote. I’ll tabulate the lists and publish the data file.
In terms of the procedure for deciding the winner, I initially intended to use instant-runoff voting, but Terry Bouricius, who is an expert in those matters, wrote to me saying this method is problematic when there are very many options compared to the number of voters. If there are no objections, I’ll let Terry decide upon appropriate procedure for processing the votes into a final selection.
LikeLike
1. Democracy through sortition
2. Democracy and the potential of sortition
3. Sortition is the future of democracy
4. Sortition, impartiality, equality, People’s rule
5. Sortition for democracy, fairness and good governance
6. Better politics through sortition
7. Selection by lot
8. The political potential of democratic lotteries and sortition
9. Democratic lotteries and the potential of sortition
10. Renewing democracy through sortition
11. More democracy by random selection of citizens
12. Sortition: next step for democracy
13. Sortition as a democratic tool
14. More democracy via sortition
15. Better politics through sortition
16. The democratic potential of sortition
17. The political potential of sortition
18. More democracy by random selection of citizens
19. More democracy by haphazardly selected citizens
20. Selecting political decision-makers the way we select jurors
21. Sorting out sortition
22. A blog to sort out sortition
23. Maximus in minimis
24. Because you can’t have democracy when you don’t have sortition
25. The blog of the Klerotarians (i.e., keep the subtitle as is.)
26. The blog of the Klerotarians (i.e., keep the subtitle as is.)
LikeLike
About tabulation options… There is no inherent right, best, or fair way of selecting a single winner when there are more than three options (I could go on about Kenneth Arrow’s proof or the Gibbard Satterthwaite theorem, but I won’t). Some argue that the Borda Count method is best (top ranked choice on a ballot gets 25 points, second ranked gets 24 points … last ranked gets 0 points IF a voter ranked every candidate), Some favor an instant runoff (single transferable vote), while others point out that in that case a well liked compromise choice could be eliminated early in the runoff simply because nobody gave it a first ranking. Indeed, this compromise candidate could be the “Condorcet winner” that would defeat any of the other choices in a head to head competition. In short different tally rules can generate different winners, and none of them is the “rightful” winner. In this particular case because so many voters ranked only a handful of choices, while some ranked most of the candidates, Borda is particularly problematic. I am inclined to suggest that a Condorcet tabulation is perhaps the most reasonable in this particular case, but am open to any voting theory readers who think different.
LikeLike
I don’t know anything about voting tabulation, but as only 4 respondents ranked more than 10 choices, it might be fair to limit the options to single figures. The average looks to be around five (although Ahmed notes that RCV is limited to the top four, so that might be better). But I’m still worried that only a tiny number of readers voted at all — this reinforces my view that voluntarism is incompatible with representative democracy as there is no way of knowing the preferences of those who didn’t vote.
LikeLike
Keith>> “But I’m still worried”
There is even more reason to be worried.
Finding a slogan, part of a branding exercise, is a skilled activity which requires an appropriate methodology. Here the process is: (1) collecting a few random ideas and (2) voting on a laundry list of dozens of ideas. WTF?
The old saying: To the hammer every problem is a nail.
No problem analysis, no structuring, no deliberation, no impact forecasting. Why has traffic been shrinking? Is it really due to a suboptimal ranking of “sortition”? What other SEO keywords will bring traffic? How will the various ideas improve traffic, why and by how much?
This reduced process could be indicative of a worryingly reduced understanding of sortition as but one – albeit important – building block of sound collective decision making.
Back to the matter:
As a futurist, I predict that the relative down trend of objectively measurable traffic of this blog will continue regardless of a change in subtitle until some other fundamental things change. (I am tempted to create a prediction question on Prediki to keep track of my forecast until next year.)
LikeLike
Yes indeed, it certainly gives the lie to the slogan Diversity Trumps Ability (recall also that the slogan originated in the pre-Donald era). I’m happy to go along with the idea that democracy trumps strategy (in line with the main title of this blog), but when only .025% of the electorate exercises their right to vote the result is aleatocracy, not democracy. I don’t think option 17 (“More democracy by haphazardly selected citizens”) was intended to be satirical (it would be if it had been suggested by TMD!), but if it wins the poll as the result of a statistical aberration we might as well shut up shop.
LikeLike
Yes, and worse: Yoram wants to grow traffic. So who is the ‘electorate’, really? We have a classic case of survivorship bias at hand.
LikeLike
Some interim results for the vote:
I converted each person’s ballot into a 26 by 26 matrix of pairwise comparisons. Ideally I would next add all these matrices cells to see if one choice could beat all the others, but I don’t seem to have a command that does that in Open Office Calc (spreadsheets) so unless someone knows how to add matrices, that is WAY too time consuming to do by hand. But more importantly, so few voters ranked even half the candidates that there is no real application of a “Condorcet winner” concept or even a “runoff winner.”
Here is what I can tell you all so far. No choice is a favorite of a majority of voters. The options that are most often ranked by voters are options 6 The democratic potential of sortition,
15 Better democracy through sortition,
25 Democracy through sortition,
26 Sortition for democracy, fairness and good governance
Option 6 was at least ranked SOMEWHERE on just over half the ballots.
Since very few voters compared these “top” options with rankings on their ballots, it would be misleading to declare a “winner.”
I would suggest that we either leave it to Yoram to select one of these, or we consider this a “primary” round and have a runoff limited to these four choices. If Yoram agrees to a new vote, all voters must rank at least three of them in order of preference. You can have a preference order even among candidates you think are all bad…. you simply rank the least bad first, etc.
LikeLike
6 and 26 meet the needs of Conall et al, whereas 15 and 25 refer specifically to a system of government. So I would suggest we go for a subtitle that doesn’t exclude the founders of this blog (i.e. 6 or 26).
LikeLike
Terry,
Thanks for your work and advice.
I could probably manipulate the matrices you created using the R software, if that would be useful.
In any case, let’s go with your recommendation. Selecting from your short list, I would go with “The democratic potential of sortition”, but I am also fine with having a second round. So up to you.
LikeLike
Fine with me to go with option 6, “the democratic potential of sortition.” I can’t claim it is the “democratic choice” of the Blog readers, but it was never clear to me that that was even worth pursuing.
LikeLike
Ideal. Short, sweet, simple and inclusive.
LikeLike
Like most of the new slogans: wooden, technical, boring. The old one at least spoke to people. But since the slogan does not matter much: whatever.
With due respect, I am truly astonished – actually horrified – how many of this illustrious circle – all? – seem to believe that this is how to harness collective intelligence for a collective decision.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The other advantage is it also open-ended enough to include a sceptical viewpoint (soritition might have limited democratic potential).
Yoram:> I can’t claim it is the “democratic choice” of the Blog readers, but it was never clear to me that that was even worth pursuing.
That’s a strange (and rather worrying!) perspective for a blog committed to democratic equality. It might even be interpreted as somewhat elitist.
LikeLike
Here’s my ordering, most to least favoured:
26
15
6
25
Or we could go with a wild card: ‘The Sortition Blog’.
LikeLike
Here’s my ordering, first named is most favorite:
15
6
25
26
LikeLike
Ronald,
If we ended up with 15 then Conall Boyle would be excluded from posting to the blog that he founded. That’s why I favour the more inclusive titles (even though my own work is exclusively devoted to better politics through sortition).
LikeLike
Keith,
Sorry I don’t understand the problem!? I think that Conall will follow a democratie decision. I am not a defender of privileges for founders.
PS I believe that ‘stronger’ democracy is better than ‘better’ democracy
LikeLike
Yes, but he will follow the decision by “voting with his feet”. You need to understand that there are a variety of approaches to sortition — some of us (like Yoram, you and me) are interested in the democratisation of our political system through descriptive representation; some (like Peter and Oliver) are interested in the Blind Break as as way of reducing factionalism and corruption in electoral politics; some (like Conall and Barbara) are interested in the lot as a way to equalise distribution of scarce resources and unpopular tasks. Whilst EbL will most probably continue to further the interests of the first group, adopting an “inclusive” subtitle will mean that the latter two groups can continue to upload posts and make comments, whereas subtitles 15 and 5 would mean that their interests were no longer included in the range and scope of this blog. Why would you want to do that?
LikeLiked by 1 person
You’re right Keith, I dont’ want to do that. I change my preference and place 26 on the first position, it include indeed both, democracy and fairness. So both groups can be satified.
LikeLike
Ronald de Vries>> PS I believe that ‘stronger’ democracy is better than ‘better’ democracy
Let’s not say ‘stronger democracy’ for ‘simplistic voting’ please. It is in reality an extremely ‘weak method’. The last minute flurry of rule bending by some actors in this exercise at hand is case in point.
Keith’s statement already raises one issue with botched method: naive majority voting may alienate minorities, in our example those with a special interest in EbL. A vicious circle: once the community loses its first minority when the disregarded “vote with their feet”, the next voting round may be won by another, even smaller majority within the remaining first majority.
Where will this lead to? To this …
https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/styles/1080_wide/public/2020-02/FIW%202020%20-%20GRAPHIC02_14%20years%20of%20decline_final_digital.png?itok=5pN_cBAO
… a sliding decline until a majority of accumulated minorities does not believe in ‘democracy’ any longer. And it’s not poor democracy’s fault, just shitty methodology. (Excuse my French.)
LikeLike
That’s ideal Ronald
Hubertus: All the more need for the Superminority Principle. And I think the identity of the “rule benders” demonstrates that it’s possible to act as an advocate for a position that undermines one’s own interests!
LikeLike
[…] This is to announce the results of the vote for a new subtitle for this blog. […]
LikeLike