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Random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions

(assemblingamerica.substack.com)
360 points namlem | 3 comments | 14 Jul 25 15:28 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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hiAndrewQuinn ◴[14 Jul 25 16:57 UTC] No.44562419[source]▶
The underlying assumption here seems to be that there is no or even negative value in someone actively specializing their labor into politics, and I just don't think that's true. To the extent we have to "do politics" at all [1], it's probably best handled by the people who have dedicated their lives to becoming politicians, the same way that getting your house wired is probably best done by someone who spent their life becoming an electrician.

In fact, if anything, this system seems like it would be even easier to game compared to the status quo. If you select truly at random from the population you're going to pull a lot of people with not a lot in the way of resources, making for a very easy to bribe block, even if you have to repeat the bribes every few years as people shuffle through. If you don't - if you select randomly from, say, only the group of people who got perfect scores on the SATs, or from white land owning males - you're practically begging for tacit collusion as they realize they have essentially the same power that HOAs do when it comes to what we'll do next. Democratically elected politicians at least have enough sense to understand they have to balance their short run desires with their long run interests in continuing to be democratically elected politicians.

[1]: Which I don't admit we should in the first place, cf https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm for one reason why.

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1. namlem ◴[14 Jul 25 17:10 UTC] No.44562613[source]▶
The French government and private interest groups alike attempted to manipulate the Citizens Convention for Climate back in 2019 and were not successful fwiw. When lobbyists tried to approach delegates outside the convention, they were quickly snitched on. Existing legal frameworks for preventing corruption among jurors and elected officials should suffice to protect assemblies from similar influence attempts.
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2. hiAndrewQuinn ◴[14 Jul 25 17:17 UTC] No.44562711[source]▶
Would you necessarily know if they were successful? Can you actually prove that not a single person in that convention accepted some kind of kickback for e.g. changing their vote?

Mechanisms that effectively prevent this do exist in the literature, to be clear, but I rarely hear of those ones actually getting implemented.

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3. namlem ◴[14 Jul 25 18:36 UTC] No.44563696[source]▶
Well we mostly know what positions these groups were pushing for. It's possible that some influence went unnoticed.

That said, the US used to have quite a lot of juror bribery in the late 1800s and managed to successfully crack down on it with harsh penalties, sting operations, and other strategies. Attempting to bribe a juror can get you 15 years in federal prison in the US, it's not taken lightly.