Troesoyer on the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast (part 2)

Posted on August 25, 2026 by Yoram Gat

This continues my review of Ian Troesoyer’s discussion of sortition with Scott Bennet, host of the Let’s Make Them Pay podcast. Part 1 is here.

3. Values and interests vs. epistemic limitations (0:13:15). Troesoyer is concerned about “class bias” in elected government. To demonstrate it, he brings up a favorite example of Terry Bouricius. A body full of landlords would make different decisions than a body in which renters are represented. This is obvious and uncontroversial. But what is the mechanism behind this effect? The straightforward mechanism refers to values and interests. Landlords promote the values and interests of landlords, renters promote the values and interests of renters. Yet, Treosoyer presents this as a matter of “bias” or “limited perspectives”. According to this telling, the landlords are “trying to do their best”. They are very much open to representing the values and interests of the renters, but due to their limited perspective they are unaware of how things look like from the renters’ perspective and thus ignore their values and interests. Bennet goes as far as saying that just there being one or two renters in a body full of landlords would “make such a difference”. (Treosoyer agrees, but not too enthusiastically, if I am not mistaken.)

Leaning heavily on the supposed epistemic difficulties of the elected decision makers in arriving at “good decisions” is a standard trope of “deliberative democrats”. (A typical example of this tendency is Alex Guerrero’s book Lottocracy.) The epistemic effect may (or may not) exist, but emphasizing it and de-emphasizing the effect of the conflict of values and interests is unjustified. Presumably the appeal of this tendency is that it sounds less crass and confrontational, and avoids presenting the electoral elite and its allies as outright exploiters. Instead it presents them as well-meaning simpletons. The well-meaning landlords, for example, despite their openness to renters’ perspectives, have never had the idea of calling a few renters to appear before their body to express those perspectives.

But why would we want to avoid the idea that the electoralist rulers are exploitative? We, the people, are in a very high stakes struggle with them. Why should we be reluctant to point out that they exploit us for their own benefit? Nobody in the West would be reluctant to say that the rulers of countries who have been designated as official enemies – say, those at the top of the Chinese, Russian or Iranian systems – are cynically exploiting the their people. It is considered an obvious fact. Anyone who would say that Xi, Putin or Khamenei really want to do what is best for their people but are hampered by a limited perspective would be considered a fool or an apologist. Until we stop thinking better of our elected rulers than we think of other people’s rulers (elected or not), we have not freed ourselves from our mental chains, from the electoralist stranglehold on our political thinking.

4. Rational ignorance (0:15:40). “The problem is rational ignorance. If you are going to understand sortition, that is the fundamental problem that sortition solves.” Again, the focus on rational ignorance as a problem with electoralism is a common trope, although not among the “deliberative democrats” this time, but among the “rational choice” crowd.

I have refuted the importance of rational ignorance as a source for the shortcomings of electoralism here. Cognitive constraints are a fundamental effect, but they only explain why an egalitarian all-to-all politics is impossible and thus some sort of a small decision making body is needed at all. Again, the fact that elections do not produce policies that serve the average person is directly attributable to the principle of distinction, and appeals to rational ignorance should be avoided in this context. To paraphrase Treosoyer: