Sabine Hossenfelder on democracy, republic and sortition

Posted on November 3, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist and fairly prominent YouTube figure with over 1.5 million followers. Her clips are about the physical sciences, but she occasionally strays outside this area. Her most recent video is titled “Is the USA a Democracy or a Republic?”. The analysis she offers is not too perceptive in my mind, but it does have the advantage of mentioning the idea of selecting political decision making bodies using a lottery. This idea gets a brief teaser in the introduction and a bit more detail toward the end of the video.

Naturally, most of the thousands of comments to the video focus on the democracy vs. republic matter, but at least one comment does pick up on the sortition idea:

Problem with representative democracy is that strangers, who do not know you, cannot represent you. The premise is simply false.

Voting is entering a contract, asking to be ruled by a handful of strangers. Extending them Power Of Attorney, four years into the future … If you sign that, whatever happens, you have no right to complain, because you accepted the deal.

Here is what we should do instead : Government by lottery

1000 citizens randomly selected. 200 replacements selected every year, giving five years in government for each. Then perhaps a quarterly online voting session for the rest of us; Yes/No to the bill with slimmest decisive vote, in the 1000-man parlament during that quarter.
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Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Dawkins’ Office-seeks-the-man electoral college, Roger Knight’s “Demiocracy”

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Roger Knights

Richard Dawkins writes in The Spectator:

The Electoral College is nonsense

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have chosen an election year for my American book tour. It’s not that I dislike elections generally. And — praise be — a population of 300 million Americans has managed to raise one presidential candidate who is not a convicted felon awaiting sentence.

No, my problem with American elections — and it viscerally distresses me every four years — is the affront to democracy called the Electoral College. I’ve done the math. The Electoral College can hand you the presidency even if your opponent receives three-quarters of the popular vote. Of course that’s a hypothetical extreme. The familiar reality is that campaigns ignore all but a handful of “swing” states.

A genuine electoral college, however, could work rather well. Voters in every state would elect respected citizens to meet in conclave to find a president — like a university search committee or the College of Cardinals. They’d headhunt the best in the land, interview them, study their publications and speeches, exhaustively vet them — and finally after a secret ballot announce the verdict in a puff of white smoke.
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Filed under: Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 12 Comments »

A kleroterion-inspired statue at the Storm King art center

Posted on October 26, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Artist Taryn Simon created a statue inspired by the kleroterion. It is on display at the Storm King art center in New York state.

Artist Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975) has imagined an election machine based on surviving archaeological fragments of the kleroterion, an ancient device from the beginnings of democracy in Athens.

More at artnet.com.

Filed under: Athens, Sortition | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

Nobel prize winning AI technology creates the “Habermas machine”

Posted on October 21, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Google DeepMind, whose AI product AlphaFold2 won the 2024 chemistry Nobel prize for the company’s founder, Demis Hassabis, has now applied its technology to create a tool they call the “Habermas machine”. The tool is described as working as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline areas of agreement of people making up a discussion group. An excerpt from an article in the MIT Techology review:

AI could help people find common ground during deliberations

Groups using Google DeepMind’s LLMs made more progress in discussing contentious issues. But the technology won’t replace human mediators anytime soon.

Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views.

Perhaps an AI tool could help. Researchers from Google DeepMind trained a system of large language models (LLMs) to operate as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline a group’s areas of agreement on complex but important social or political issues.

The researchers say the tool — named the Habermas machine (HM), after the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas — highlights the potential of AI to help groups of people find common ground when discussing such subjects.

“The large language model was trained to identify and present areas of overlap between the ideas held among group members,” says Michael Henry Tessler, a research scientist at Google DeepMind. “It was not trained to be persuasive but to act as a mediator.” The study is being published today in the journal Science.

Filed under: Academia, Deliberation | 2 Comments »

Citizens’ assemblies and sortition

Posted on October 19, 2024 by Owen Shaffer

Should the term sortition be used as a general term that encompasses citizens’ assemblies? Or is sortition simply one of several ingredients (deliberation, for example) used in citizens’ assemblies? Is this a regional question, North America vs. Europe vs. Australia vs. etc?

Filed under: Deliberation, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Alexander Guerrero’s new book: Lottocracy

Posted on October 18, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Alex Guerrero, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and a longtime sortition advocate, has written to announce that his book Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections (Oxford Press) is now out. It is available now in the UK from the publisher, and available for pre-order everywhere on Amazon.

The book, which has been more than a decade in the making, also has a website, https://www.lottocracy.org/, where highlights, excerpts and other information can be found.

I asked Alex what was new or different about his book compared to previous books advocating sortition. He called out 5 points:

  1. I provide a more detailed and empirically informed set of concerns about electoral representative democracy and a more detailed and multidimensional diagnosis for why electoral democracy isn’t performing well. In doing this, I make the case that there are no straightforward “fixes” for what ails electoral democracy. Chapters 2-6 raise these empirically informed concerns; Chapter 7 considers possible solutions and suggests they will be inadequate.

    2. Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Books, Proposals, Sortition | 32 Comments »

First hand testimony from the UK assisted dying citizen jury

Posted on October 16, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Following a piece previously published in The Conservative Woman which was “less than enthusiastic” regarding citizens’ assemblies, a reader of the magazine wrote with her first hand experience as an allotted juror in a citizen jury convened to discuss assisted dying policy in the UK.

The testimony is very interesting and shows the typical inquisitive, perceptive, sensible and open-minded attitude one may expect from a random member of the public (as opposed to the tendentious single-minded attitude exhibited by the opinion writer who authored the previously published piece). While describing the jury process rather favorably and rejecting the label “choreographed charade” that was used by the opinion writer, the testimony quite reasonably expresses displeasure with the fact that the process was presented as being a decision-making process while in fact all decisions were being taken elsewhere and independently of the ongoings in the jury.

My involvement began on February 29, when a letter about the jury arrived. It was addressed ‘To the Resident’ and mine was one of 7,000 addresses selected at random. The jury was to consist of 30 people. Those willing to participate were asked to register on the website of the Sortition Foundation, which had been engaged to recruit jury members ensuring they were broadly representative of the population.

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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 7 Comments »

Opening the People’s House: A New Vision for Executive Leadership in the United States

Posted on October 15, 2024 by Nick Coccoma

By Nick Coccoma, Max Goodman, and Dr. Paul Zeitz off #unifyUSA


The Imperial Presidency

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, it’s time for some straight talk. Our presidential system, once the envy of the world, now struggles to meet the complex challenges of the 21st century. The concentration of power in a single president has led to executive orders on steroids, whiplash between administrations, and a growing disconnect between the American people and their leadership. And with the Supreme Court recently declaring the president above the law, the threat of tyranny looms larger than ever.

But what if there was a way to reinvigorate our democracy, tapping into the collective wisdom of everyday Americans while preserving the efficiency needed for effective governance? What if—just like the legislature and judiciary—we could create an executive branch that truly embodies the spirit of “We the People?”

Today, we propose just that: a bold reimagining of the executive, one that draws on our deepest American values of freedom, community, and service to create a more responsive, accountable, and effective government. Once again, our vision hinges on one bold idea: empowering everyday Americans through democratic lotteries.

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Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Benching the Ref: Democratizing Constitutional Review

Posted on October 15, 2024 by Nick Coccoma

By Nick Coccoma, Max Goodman, and Dr. Paul Zeitz of #unifyUSA

The Evil Umpire

The whole idea of a constitution has one fundamental weakness: Who decides what it means?  In the United States, this subtle but immense power is given to the Supreme Court, and the results have been…anything but subtle. Through its long history, the court has exercised near-absolute power through repressive, sweeping, and downright dangerous rulings. A sampling: “Black people aren’t people.” “Corporations are people.” “You have an unenumerated right to abortion—just kidding, no you don’t.” Most recently: “The ban on insurrectionists holding public office doesn’t actually mean what it says,” and, “The president is above the law—even in cases of treason.”  

These interpretations serve as binding national policy, despite the justices’ total lack of accountability to the people.  The court’s insulation from public sentiment, originally intended to help keep their rulings objective and apolitical, has backfired spectacularly. Instead, lifetime tenure and concentrated power have made appointing justices a partisan dream. And that’s not to mention the luxurious gifts, bribes, and perks lavished on them by billionaires—you know, just for being friends.  No longer can we legitimately claim that the Supreme Court simply “calls balls and strikes.” The umpire has become the most dominant player on the field—the apotheosis of a judicial tyrant. As a result, the whole game of democracy is in jeopardy.

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Filed under: Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Betting on Real Democracy

Posted on October 12, 2024 by Nick Coccoma

By Nick Coccoma, Max Goodman, and Dr. Paul Zeitz of #unifyUSA

During the March on Washington a crowd stretches from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument
Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

The Problem with Elections

As of July 2024, only 16% of Americans approve of Congress.  Think about what that means – more than 4 in 5 US citizens disapprove of the main institution of our democracy – a legislature of their own representatives.  Many aspects of our elections are transparently broken. Through the machinations of entrenched partisanship, gerrymandering, and dark money, only 30 (~7%) of the 435 seats in the House remain competitive in 2024. It’s no wonder so many of us feel deprived of a voice in government.  But it doesn’t need to be this way.  Effective reforms are well-studied, and there’s a bold, practical toolkit available to help defeat our democratic demons. In many cases we can scrap electoral politics entirely while still advancing our sacred democratic experiment.

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Filed under: Elections, History, Proposals, Sortition | 1 Comment »

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