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360 points namlem | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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retrac ◴[] No.44562032[source]
The technical term is sortition. And it is my pet unorthodox political position. The legislature should be replaced with an assembly of citizens picked by lottery.
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resource_waste ◴[] No.44562282[source]
Scary stuff.

As I got older, I've leaned more and more into meritocracy.

If we did something like this in the US, we'd have quite a religious/irrational group of leaders. Whereas with a meritocracy, you have at least some filter. The status quo requires politicians to have a bit of an understanding of human nature. Its not flawless, I've seen inferior people beat superiors by using biases, but these were relatively equal races. I've also seen idiots run for office and never catch steam.

We can also look at history and see that society's that did anything with such equal democratic distribution were less efficient than those who had some sort of merit.

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1. AnimalMuppet ◴[] No.44563025[source]
But the current metric of merit is "ability to win elections". That gives us representatives who are not there to make things better, but to set themselves up to win the next election. This sometimes means, for example, prolonging the problem that they got elected to solve, because they can use that problem to win the next election.