
Sortition - brianclements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
======
Moshe_Silnorin
I've thought a bit about sortition. My favourite way of explaining it: Suppose
a billionaire is looking for someone to marry. They want a partner who is
interested in them for more than just a paycheque. Say gold-diggers represent
just a very small fraction of the population but are extremely good at
feigning fascination in pursuit of their goals and finding themselves in the
company of billionaires. In fact they are so good at ingratiating themselves
with billionaires that any potential partner this billionaire picks from the
people he or she knows is likely to be a gold digger. What is a good but non-
optimal solution? The billionaire should pick 1000 random people of the gender
he/she prefers and make their selection from this pack. This cuts out the
influence of the adverse selection effects the billionaire experiences just
from being a billionaire. If all they’re looking for in a partner is someone
in at most in the ~99th percentile of people this approach will work with
little cost, as candidates can then be selected from this pool using
conventional means. This would not work if gold-digging is a reaction to
circumstance rather than an in-built characteristic - the same is true of
corruption.

For politics, one approach would be sortition applied to those in the 99th
percentile on a widely used standardized test like the SATs -it's important
that this test be used outside politics, too. Sortition would then be applied
to narrow down the pool from ~160000 (about the number of people with
sufficient scores over a 10 year time-span) to say a few hundred, a few dozen,
or less and then a conventional election from there. Though, you may need very
attractive salaries to ensure those elected choose to serve as most don't have
an interest in politics - perhaps a ridiculous pension for life after a few
years of service.

~~~
maus42
I'd replace the SAT score with some small, fixed amount of people vouching for
you so that you could enter the lottery. (After all, there might be someone
capable who because of some good reasons didn't manage to take SAT, and the
system should be just and fair for them, too.)

The amount should not be so large that you'd need the gigantic ad campaigns
you need today to be elected, but large enough that you need support outside
your immediate family. Maybe ~20. Gathering their 'votes' demonstrates that
you're at least interested in the job, and the element of trust is still there
(someone trusts you would do a good job, and not doing that would be a
betrayal).

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
I think standardized tests are vastly underrated.

One of the nice properties of sortition is it combines well with many other
forms of selection. However, this seems to ruin the point:

>Gathering their 'votes' demonstrates that you're at least interested in the
job, and the element of trust is still there (someone trusts you would do a
good job, and not doing that would be a betrayal).

A big plus of sortition is it does not maximally select for the people most
interested in political power. Having to be elected or self-selected in such a
fashion would mar this.

~~~
randcraw
I agree, tests have their uses. Like any kind of constraint, they can be used
to diminish the search space to increase the desired yield. When devised and
administered fairly, they can go a long way toward leveling a playing field
(or excluding the crazies).

For example, if we want to exclude congress(wo)men who are powermad
egomaniacs, we start by asking knowledgable sources to rank candidates by
lust, greed, and vanity, then exclude from random selection all those who fall
below a certain threshold. Voila, no more psychos (golddiggers) joining the
the Washington Elite.

The lovely part of Sortition is that with a large number of fair &
knowledgable 'rankers' (or 'standardized tests') it's basically impossible to
game the system.

So I vote 'yea' for Sortition.

------
osetinsky
Taleb talks about this (though he doesn't use the term Sortition) in
Antifragile: "instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we
should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and
removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing—and it
happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients—again, those
ancients!—were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen
by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this
effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer
simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain
number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the
functioning of the parliamentary system."

~~~
cousin_it
I haven't read any Taleb, but an an analogy between sortition and simulated
annealing sounds like an igon value moment to me.

~~~
mollmerx
Thanks for that - I'd never heard of the Igon Value Problem and love the
concept.

------
amai
"It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as
oligarchic when they are filled by election." (Aristotle, Politics 4.1294be)

~~~
benjohnson
It's a practice done by many Lutheran churches - each person writing who
they'd like for leadership roles and writing it on a slip of paper, and then
drawing one of those slips randomly.

From a theological point of view it allows for the Holy Spirit to act among
us.

From a personal standpoint it works well as it allows candidates to put their
names forward without the embarrassment of losing based on popularity.

~~~
panglott
I suspect this sort of belief is what legitimated sortition in the classical
world: the choice is made by unknown or supernatural powers. Sortition and
"casting of lots" is better known today for divination.

------
imgabe
I've also wondered lately if we shouldn't add some random element to the way
we fund scientific research. Right now, as I understand it, researchers write
grant proposals and funding institutions evaluate them and pick the best ones
to fund.

Presumably then, the researchers who get the most funding would be the ones
who are the best at writing grant proposals, and they may or may not be doing
the best research or researching the most important things. In theory, there
could be brilliant researchers working on important things who don't get any
money because they lack the ability to persuade people to give it to them.

One of my "if I had a billion dollars" dreams is to set up a foundation that
would randomly award research grants to field of qualified applicants.

I think it's the same problem with elections. Governing and campaigning are
two different skills. Elections elect people who are good at campaigning, but
may or may not be good at governing.

~~~
macrael
The one missing part of your understanding: grants are generally reviewed by
researcher-peers, not really "funding institutions". Your proposal is read by
other researches, scores are given to the grant and then a cutoff score is
determined. All grants above that score are funded, those below are not.

This doesn't really change your conclusion, that grant writing is an important
skill for acquiring funding but it's not about impressing the funding
institution, it's about impressing fellow scientists.

~~~
danieltillett
The only problem is the scoring system is highly biased towards track record
of the grant applicant not the actual grant content. On top of this once you
get the grant you can in practice spend the money doing whatever you want.

More fundamentally the peer review process can't actually accurately sort good
proposals from outstanding proposals, but we only have the money to fund a
fraction of the outstanding proposals. Under these conditions just being
honest and moving to a system where all good proposals are put into a lottery
and funded by chance would be better approach.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
See also
[http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1431](http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1431)

------
nabla9
Also called random sample voting.

[http://cdd.stanford.edu/](http://cdd.stanford.edu/)

[http://rsvoting.org/](http://rsvoting.org/)

>Random-sample voting can be used locally, nationally, regionally, or even
globally, with results that are more irrefutable than with current elections
but at less than one-thousandth of the cost.

~~~
dragonwriter
Random-sample voting, as proposed in those links, is a very specific
_application_ of sortition, it is not identical to the broader concept of
sortition in the same way that the system currently used for electing the
President of the United States is an example, but not identical to the broader
concept, of election.

------
toastking
I really thought this was going to be some obscure implementation of
Quicksort.

~~~
Zikes
I was expecting it to be a portmanteau of sort and partition.

~~~
andrewflnr
A partition algorithm that actually has some stronger almost-sorted condition
on its output than a regular partition.

------
ThrustVectoring
The biggest risk of sortition is moving the balance of power from
representatives to the appointed/hired bureaucracy. I suspect that non-
politicians are much easier to "manage up" against - I fear having it wind up
as political lottery winners getting "advised" into going a certain direction.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The biggest risk of sortition is moving the balance of power from
> representatives to the appointed/hired bureaucracy.

That's a risk, but I don't think its the biggest even within the "balance of
power between officeholders and _X_ " category of risks; I think the biggest
in that category is the shift in the balance of power between office holders
and professional interest group influencers (lobbyists _et al._ ) who aren't
going to be randomly selected short-timers that get swapped out every few
years, they are going to be long-term career professionals representing
entities with lots of resources, durable interests, and a commitment to
achieving them.

OTOH, sortition doesn't have to be a wholesale replacement for elections,
either; it can complement them (as it does now, you just expand the scale.)

Say, have an additional house of the (state or federal, though some of these
powers would be more familiar and perhaps appropriate at the state level)
legislature (the "House of Citizens", say) selected by sortition, and given it
some or all of the following powers: (1) To take any bill passed by the other
house(s) and delay it by putting a hold of up to 90-days on it, after which
the other houses must pass it again before it can move forward for executive
signature or veto (if there are any changes to the version passed later, its
treated as a new bill, and goes back to the House of Citizens again),

(2) To, instead of #1, invoke the power of _referendum_ against any bill
passed by the other house(s), such that if it is approved by the executive (or
passed over executive veto), it is referred to a vote of the electorate at
large who must approve it before it goes into effect,

(3) To directly initiate an _initiative_ measure, that would go directly to a
vote of the electorate at large, and become law with their support, without
the need for approval of the other house(s) or the legislature,

(4) To (for a federal "House of Citizens"), on a supermajority vote, propose
to the State legislatures amendments to the Constitution, without the other
houses (the normal thresholds for ratification would still be required.)

Note that #2 and #3 are powers of the people in many states, but usually
require an expensive process of gathering signatures on petitions to invoke,
making them more accessible to well-funded groups; a sortition-selected body
as an additional avenue could provide an alternate filter that might be less
cost-driven.

------
panglott
Athenian democracy is the model people point to, but the worm in the apple is
Athenian citizenship rules. The reason selection by lot could work is that a
large number of people were excluded from the pool.

"Only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training
as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens. The percentage of the population
that actually participated in the government was 10 to 20% of the total number
of inhabitants, but this varied from the fifth to the fourth century BC. This
excluded a majority of the population: slaves, freed slaves, children, women
and metics (foreigners resident in Athens). The women had limited rights and
privileges, had restricted movement in public, and were very segregated from
the men. Also excluded from voting were citizens whose rights were under
suspension (typically for failure to pay a debt to the city: see atimia); for
some Athenians this amounted to permanent (and in fact inheritable)
disqualification."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Citizenship...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Citizenship_in_Athens)

"In regards to Greek mythology, the ephebe was a young man or initiate, around
the ages of 17-18, who was put through a period of isolation from his prior
community, usually the world of his mother, where he was a child in the
community. The ephebe would need to hunt, rely on his senses, on aggression,
stealth, and trickery to survive. At the end of the initiation, the ephebe was
reincorporated back into society as a man."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebos)

~~~
dragonwriter
> The reason selection by lot could work is that a large number of people were
> excluded from the pool.

Its clear that Athens excluded large numbers of people from the pool of
sortition (just as most democracies before the 20th Century excluded lots of
people from the pool of electors), but its not clear to me how you get from
that to the conclusion that exclusion is necessary for sortition any more than
it is necessary for election.

~~~
panglott
I meant _could_ work, as in the place where it actually did work. I wouldn't
yet argue that mass exclusion is necessary so that it _can_ work.

Whether sortition _can_ work in a large, inclusive, and diverse society is an
interesting question. Democracy can only work in a high-trust environment
where people don't expect their political rivals to say, have them murdered or
nationalize major industries. The expansion of enfranchisement in the U.S. (at
least) has also coincided with the marginalization of very extreme political
movements, like Communism.

Say you have an electorate with a very radical far-left or far-right minority
that is anathema to the rest of the citizenry? In an electoral democracy, the
minority would be excluded in elections (in a first-past-the-post system) or
by inclusion as a clear minority (in proportional representation). In a
sortitive democracy, it seems like they would have to be excluded from
citizenship, or the government would have to have to be large and diffuse
enough that the damage of insane or dangerous people could be constrained by
the rest of society.

When people are introduced to the idea of sortition, mostly they are shocked
by the idea. Because what if you randomly choose a schizophrenic or Hitler to
put in charge of the nuclear weapons? I think you have to encourage this
tactic at a more familiar level—rather than a group of friends voting on a
restaurant, allowing one person to pick after drawing straws. Which, surely,
is not at all like giving them a professional military.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I meant could work, as in the place where it actually did work.

You are still leaping without justification from the way it was implemented
and what was necessary for it to work; this is a form of _post hoc ergo
propter hoc_.

Yes, it was implemented that way in Athens.

That doesn't establish that it _had to be_ implemented that way to work, even
in that environment.

------
huherto
The problem of randomly select citizens for office is that they are as
vulnerable to be corrupted as the current elected officials.

But, I would like an approach where we randomly select "electors". They are
sequestered, listen to the arguments of the candidates, hold several election
rounds and finally come out with he elected officials. Like a jury. They would
be dismissed after that.

~~~
marcosdumay
I'd argue they are not. For a start, there'll be no campaign contributions to
deal about later, and no seeking of campaign funding.

~~~
randcraw
Right. I'd argue that most of the distortion in US governance is due not to
incompetance but malice (like bias that serves moneyed interests), and this
malice is deliberate. Random selection alone would cause the 'malice factor'
to diminish to the mean. Thus future governors would be no more malevolent (or
incompetent) than the average Joe.

------
amai
An interesting mixture of the existing election systems with sortition might
be the following: Elections for seats in the parliament are done in the usual
fashion. However the number of seats selected by vote in the parliament is
only equal to the percentage of voters. The other seats, basically
representing the non-voters, are selected by lot.

On can justify this by arguing that non-voters are on the one hand not
satisfied with the given choices and on the other hand indifferent to who is
ruling them. So selecting the seats by lot might actually represent the will
of the non-voters best.

------
gherkin0
I can't find the link, but there was a good article about this recently (maybe
in the last year) that spent quite a bit of time talking about the selection
of the Doge of Venice. IIRC, they had a very complicated process that included
sortition, nomination, election, and alternating large and small groups that
allow them to select qualified officeholders while simultaneously limiting
many of the problems with direct elections.

Does anyone have a link?

~~~
devinhelton
Was it this article by Nick Szabo on Unpredictable Elections? He talks a bit
about the Venetian method:
[http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-
elect...](http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-
elections.html)

~~~
gherkin0
I don't think that was the one I read, but it's just as good.

------
zeveb
I'd like to restore the state appointment of Senators, preserve the House and
add a third house, consisting of representatives chosen by sortition from the
states, with representation allocated by (federal taxes paid - federal dollars
spent), and with the odds of each citizen's selection proportional to the
amount he pays in taxes. Legislation would need to pass all three houses.

It'll never happen, of course.

------
323454
What are chlorite machines?

------
campbellwallace
The justification for sortition is equity. We all have an equal right to have
our views taken into account on all issues. Sortition permits the formation of
a truly representative chamber of parliament. Elections do not, for a raft of
reasons.

Representation is necessary because direct democracy is unworkable in large
modern states, and because no-one has the time to study and understand every
issue, particularly as many are highly technical and complex.

It would be absurd to choose one person, or even a small group, by sortition
(or elections!), and give them legislative authority. The group chosen must be
reasonably large, since a small group cannot be representative.

Regarding sortition and tests: Any test is designed to exclude some people.
Who has the right to say that these people should be excluded?

A common idea is that by excluding the stupid, crazy, corrupt, ambitious,
malicious… one will get "better" decisions, "better" legislation. But for any
decision to be "good" it must first be equitable. Any exclusion renders the
chosen group unrepresentative, and hence is inequitable. Better far to include
these "undesirables": they will be relatively few in number, just as they are
in society, and they will not vote as a unified block when decisions are made.
Further, the more diverse the group, the better the quality of decisions (when
this can be measured). It is not necessary for all the members of a group to
be intelligent or well-intentioned for the group to make intelligent choices.

As for corruption and the undue influence of multinationals, lobbies,
religious groups, and bureaucrats, I believe it is possible to greatly reduce
or eliminate this with good design of the institutions.

For a fuller discussion of these issues and a proposal for a government based
on sortition, you might be interested to read "Down with Elections!",
available as an e-book on Smashwords, Amazon and Apple's iTunes bookstore, for
about $1. (A blatant plug for my own work).

[https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/570431](https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/570431)
[http://www.amazon.com/DOWN-ELECTIONS-C-Wallace-
ebook/dp/B014...](http://www.amazon.com/DOWN-ELECTIONS-C-Wallace-
ebook/dp/B0148T4EWI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1440520516&sr=1-1)
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/down-with-
elections!/id1032...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/down-with-
elections!/id1032451324?mt=11)

Or you can have it for free as a PDF (less convenient):
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/7oqo5paiwmwatsp/DWE_PDF.pdf?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/7oqo5paiwmwatsp/DWE_PDF.pdf?dl=0)

------
fela
I've long been interested in the use of sortition in political decision
making, and it always surprises me how little it has been seriously studied
and considered compared to the potential it seems to have.

Much of the information there is is of pretty low quality. It might of course
just be such a bad idea that everybody smart enough to give high quality
contributions on the topic does not want to waste their time with the idea.
But if this is the case it is totally non obvious to me, and most criticism
I've read seem to be from people that do not have a clear understanding of the
potential advantages sortition might have.

Very briefly, for the uninitiated, the main potential advantage of sortition
is that it would make political decision making a lot more democratic. People
representative of the population at large would actually discuss to make the
decision, instead of the citizens making their choice by casting one vote
every few years among a set of very similar parties (I know, this simplifies
the debate a lot, but it is the main idea). This is very interesting if you
are of the opinion (as I am) that lack of democracy is a big problem of our
political systems. I believe that most time politicians go agains the will of
people they do so for the wrong reasons and with the wrong goals, and way too
often.

The law of large number makes sure the randomness in sortition is limited and
predictable. Whereas with elections there is a big number of arbitrary factors
that can greatly influence the results.

Of course sortition in practice might have a number of problem often brought
up, but none seems unsolvable to the point where it's not even worth exploring
the idea further.

How do you separate expertise from decision power, while still being able to
make proper use of the expertise? How to implement sortition in practice?
Would they ever let us? Would people be able to handle the pressure? Would
they accept the position? And all criticism to democracy in general applies
even more to sortition.

I think however that if you talked about elections to somebody who never heard
about it, you could come up with just as a big number of potential problems. I
don't know if sortition really is a better idea, but maybe it's an idea worth
thinking about.

I recently read this article on sortition that appeared on the Atlantic which
I think is really good:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/the-
cas...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-a-
college-admissions-lottery/361585/)

Another good starting point for further exploration is the blog Equality by
Lot:
[https://equalitybylot.wordpress.com/](https://equalitybylot.wordpress.com/)

~~~
dragonwriter
> The law of large number makes sure the randomness in sortition is limited
> and predictable. Whereas with elections there is a big number of arbitrary
> factors that greatly can influence the results.

With elections, there are constraints which make deviations from the
preference of the electorate less likely the greater the salience of the issue
is. Sortition distributes the _issues_ on which the decisionmakers deviate
from the represented population randomly, which means that salience of the
issue does not affect the likelihood of deviation between the decisionmakers
and the represented population.

This is a significant weakness in sortition compared to elections, that needs
to be weighed against whatever advantages are identified for it.

~~~
mrob
Why not use both? Select a random sample of candidates and then hold an
election. By adjusting the number of candidates you can have the process act
more like pure sortition (low number) or pure election (high number).

~~~
randcraw
That's a grand idea, but because most of the random lot would be unknowns, I
think it would quickly devolve into electing the outlier -- either the one
person we do know, or the one who had the superficial traits that the
electorate favors most. We'd choose on the basis of celebrity and beauty,
since those skills needed for leadership (e.g. good ideas, fairness, capable
at delegation, and courage) are too subtle to be detected by a popularity
contest, 95% of which takes place only on TV.

