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Why random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions
172 namlem 160 7/14/2025, 3:28:36 PM assemblingamerica.substack.com ↗
Acts 1:21-26 Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.” So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. Then they prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs.” Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.
Can you imagine this practice replacing the Papal conclave? Or, pastor selection at your favorite Protestant group?
So, the random selection mentioned here may have actually been a fault of Peter's and not something the Bible is endorsing as a means to choose leadership; possibly quite the opposite in this case.
I strongly believe that this is how you solve elections, admissions, and recruitment (or, at least, get closer to an ideal solution).
The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment. The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere. Ireland also has relatively little money in politics, limits on donations, a standards in public office commission, independent constituency boundary commissions, a multi-seat proportional representation system, limits on media ownership, and the highest percentage of University educated citizens of any country. All in all it's helped Ireland come a long way from the 80s and 90s, when Ireland was much worse on corruption indexes.
Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind.
We just passed that "big beautiful bill" and it was quite clear nobody knew or cared what was in it, beyond it being "trump's bill he wants". I'm guessing staffers and lobbyists had a far more detailed understanding of their portions than any elected official did.
It's a reasonable guess that 100 randos would actually write a better bill.
“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” Mark Twain
- modest proposal: yes, have X random people in government, but have a Y-month paid training period before they serve for Z years; ALSO ensure their families want for nothing (read, a decent non-luxurious lifestyle), but prohibit receiving money from lobbyists, PACs, gifts, etc... AND, ensure they get reintegrated into society in a nonpolitical field (with some exceptions) by also offering Y-month long paid training in different fields.
The corruption costs reduction would significantly outweigh any increase in payroll and training.
* Expand the Supreme Court
* Expand the House (and make provisions that keep it updated with each census).
* Statehood for US territories.
The systemic problems with our democracy seem pretty clear, really.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Bases_and_Starting_Poin...
- A randomly selected lower house with an elected upper house (or the reverse)
- policy juries which deliberate only on one specific piece of legislation, which then must be approved by a separate oversight jury before taking effect
- election by jury, where candidates are chosen by "elector juries" who interview and vet the candidates before selecting one
- multi-layer representative selection based on the Venetian model where randomly selected bodies elect representatives, of whom a random subset are chosen to then appoint officials
Right now the lottocratic/sortition-based bodies that exist are purely advisory, though in some places like Paris and Belgium they have gained a good amount of soft power.
It wouldn't be that hard to implement a conservative version of one of these in certain US states though. For example, add "elect by jury" to the ballot, where if it wins the plurality, a grand jury is convened to select the winner (counties in Georgia already use grand juries to appoint their boards of equalization, so there is precedent).
Since the linked article is to a substack called “Assemble America” I feel I should point out that if the apportionment House of Representatives had not been capped at 435 reps, the House would indeed be several thousand strong by now.
Here in the US, we use randomized groups of citizens to determine who gets locked away potentially for life or executed. Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?
Those are screened.
Someone like https://youtu.be/00q5cax96yU?t=60 could be selected without some additional constraints than plain sortition. Ofc then those constraints are politicized.
Honestly, yes. In the case of criminal culpability, it just happens to be the least scary of the available options of who gets to send someone to jail.
For lawmaking, this isn't the case: the work for lawmakers is much more detailed and gameable than a binary question of guilt.
Ideally, the lower house are representatives elected from the common people, and the upper house are the career politicians that understand how the government works.
In the U.S., the 17th amendment[2] changed that, for better or worse (probably both).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
The majority of the bills are written by lobbyists. Most of the bills introduced are so called "copycat" bills.
USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.
Special interests sometimes work to create the illusion of expert endorsements, public consensus or grassroots support. One man testified as an expert in 13 states to support a bill that makes it more difficult to sue for asbestos exposure. In several states, lawmakers weren’t told that he was a member of the organization that wrote the model legislation on behalf of the asbestos industry, the American Legislative Exchange Council.
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...
So bottom line, I’m not so sure is so important that representatives are laywers. Maybe a good mix should be ok?
Ambiguities get adjudicated and then built into the next version of the rulebook and so it goes with laws. Terms are given specific meaning over time by court decision and are used as boilerplate.
There are some strong outliers but most are way below the bar of random selection. Do-nothing political nepo babies who are nothing but loud and in a gerrymandered district.
Getting your team control of a branch of government is way more important than having a 'good' rep in your district, because if you don't, they won't have any ability to do anything for it anyways.
If you couldn't get someone you wanted in the primaries, you just have to hold your nose, close your eyes, lie back, and vote for whomever made it through.
Whether this results in long term problems is a bit of an academic question, given that every election in the past decade is one where you either get to vote for the status quo, or an insane cult of personality.
Little do they realize that a more proportional system that would have them elect reps from the "bad" party in order to get them reps in the ruling party to advocate internally for Alberta does have benefits...
2. Canadian Liberals aren't US MAGA, when they win an election they don't spend six months in caucus to figure out how they can do their best to punish the provinces and people that didn't vote for them.
There's a lot of far-right propaganda in Alberta that implies #2 is happening, but it's not actually factual. Its oil & gas sector has reached record output under the Trudeau government, and Carney is not exactly looking to kill it, either.
Transfer payments are really the only legitimate grievance Alberta should have with the federal government. All of its other problems are either imagined, self-inflicted, are caused by other provinces, or are caused by the US.
I'm going to gently push back on that one a bit. Partially, yes, but also in part due to the federal government deferring to provinces in cases where it actually has the constitutional authority to override them.
I disagree with your example, but things like deciding supreme court justices over the population of judges or department heads over the population of professors seem quite ok.
For lawmaking in particular, it looks like a bad idea. There will be lots of people trying to con the uninformed representatives into behaving badly.
1. A filtering mechanism after the selection process. E.g., basic civics questions like how many states are there, a background check, and so on. To make sure you don't pick anyone that's compromised or incapable of serving.
2. A training program that acclimates new members to the system. If terms are say, six years long, then the first year can be entirely devoted to training.
This is a famously bad idea for U.S. politics.
Like, if you started a grass roots organization with this as your #1 idea, you'd have to eventually dismantle the entire edifice as 100% of your time would be spent answering questions about how this is different than tactics of the Jim Crow era. You'd also make yourself radioactive to any future grassroots efforts: e.g., "Citizens for an Educated Congress: wait a sec, is this that Jim Crow Guy again?" :)
A more organic version of this would be to select at random from people who already served at a lower level. Pick random citizens for city council, then for state you pick from the pool of people who have been city councillors in the past, then for country you pick from people who have already served at the state level. You could, in addition, add past picks to a "veteran pool" to ensure a small percentage of the legislature has been there before and can suffuse their experience.
Not selecting absolute random people, but people who have established their ability to intelligently handle responsibility, and avoid breaking the law. E.g., once you have achieved a certain level of educational attainment (3.0+ at well-ranked college, managerial-level at established biz, certain mil leadership rank, etc.), pass security clearance, pass citizenship test, etc., you are in the qualified pool, and may be called upon to serve in a legislature. The always-a-newbie problem could be solved by allowing legislators to serve 2nd or maybe 3rd terms by re-election/confidence vote. Same for POTUS, possibly selected by sortition out of the existing legislators who pass a confidence vote.
There is no way a reasonably and responsibly selected random group of achieving responsible people would do worse than a corrupt or craven group, especially worse than the selected-for-corruption — i.e., selected for loyalty-to-leader — currently seated.
Accept anyone from Jebus University with its miraculous 100% graduation rate, exclude anyone with a record of "Disrespecting an Officer", and the pool is quickly skewed, a reinforcing feedback-loop in favor of the groups doing the skewing.
It is a method to help maintain a balanced distributon of power, not created it when already gone awry.
In democracies, the branches of govt, legislative, executive, & judicial, and the institutions of society including the press, academia, industry, finance, sport, religion, etc. are all independent and serve to distribute and balance power. In autocracies, all of those are corrupted and/or coerced to serve the whims of the executive.
So, of course, an already-powerful centralized executive would be able to corrupt it as you describe.
But it seems much more difficult to make it happen in a well-balanced system, particularly when some have the responsibility to ensure ongoing fairness.
Do you have a better solution?
If we want to be very careful about a reform like this, we should test it at a smaller scale, such as a city for instance. We can start without any criteria and see if that works well enough. If it does, no need to overcomplicate things.
Our political system effectively selects for sociopathic con men. So would you prefer your laws to be written by those people vs a random group?
“I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” - William F Buckley Jr
“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” - Douglas Adams
- A largely unrecognized problem with our legislature here in the US is vote inflation: the number of representatives in Congress has fallen way behind the population growth, so that one rep is shared by a much larger group of constituents, devaluing the individual vote of each constituent and making it less likely that a given voter has a personal connection with their legislator.
- The increasing partisanship has reduced the number moderate and independent voices in the legislature.
We could increase the number of representatives in Congress by tripling the number of reps from each district, which would bring the rep-to-voter ratio back more in line with where it was when it was essentially frozen in 1929. Then one of those new reps would be chosen at random from a pool. Since the distribution of moderates in the general population is much higher than in Congress, this should have the effect of moderating partisanship.
You can decide to vote, in which case you're removed from the sortition candidate pool. If you don't vote you're in the pool. A common representative body is formed at respective percentages.
This basically makes it so politicians have to race against "some random schmuck". If they can convince people they can do better, nice. Otherwise... too bad.
Of course some people will vote just to get out of the pool, but I think that's fine too.
It would probably make sense to start with a new new "house" or something.
Might even make sense to have some quotas (at least 50% women etc.), so the whole things doesn't have to get to Chinese government size to reflect the populus.
That or pepple would have to be replaced with high frequency
If it comes out 10% female every sortition cohort, you know some funny business is going on.
My point is that so is the percentage of males in any sortition cohort.
Therefore, a consistent female census of 10% or less in all sortition cohorts, would be as unlikely as a consistent male census of 10% or less in all sortition cohorts.
In other words, having one sortition cohort result in 10% males would not be suspicious. Having every sortition cohort result in 10% males would be suspicious in the extreme. So much so that we should start looking for whoever is "putting their finger on the scale" so to speak.
]Further, by eliding deliberation, the initiative process is the worst kind of direct democracy. Except for mob rule, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_democracy
The OP narrowly focuses on the calculus (?) of how randomly choosing reps actually promotes meritocracy.
This wiki article is a good overview of the whole burrito.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens'_assembly
Citizens' assembly makes policy. But then who implements it?
I (currently) believe that we'd still need executives, still need some kind of balance of powers.
So I'm okay w/ electing mayors, sheriffs, governors, etc. Perhaps even multi-seat roles; something between a council and a mayor.
Assuming, of course, we use approval voting for execs, PR for councils.
> 9 members with IQs under 70 (i.e. mentally handicapped) > 52 members with IQs under 85 > 217 members at or under an IQ of 100 > 370 members with an IQ below the (presumptive) current congressional average of ~115
Congress is terrible, but it's hard to imagine it could be improved by making it less intelligent.
If you could incorporate the OP's point about limited eligibility and "directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool", then a "random" process would likely be superior to elections.
In fact, I would argue that idiots in elected bodies are a lot more likely to do damage than random idiots, because they are more likely to be narcissists, and being elected boosts their sense of self-worth. And of course, the most damage is often caused by the most intelligent of them, because the main problem is acting in bad faith, not a lack of wits.
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.
But that's not to say that wouldn't also be the case otherwise.
simple: let voters decide. that is, eliminate the concept of pre-selected candidates and let voters select candidates from the entire population. if you need 10 people, give everyone 10 votes. everyone has a different idea what merrit is, but by giving everyone multiple votes the people for which the most voters think they have merrit will emerge as the winners of the election.
In any case, that's just a more chaotic form of representative democracy. It's most certainly not meritocratic in any sense.
That is not because voters are stupid. It is because they are rationally ignorant. Why spend hours researching the issues and candidates for a 1 in 10 million chance of having an impact? It makes no sense. However, if we instead convened "elector juries" of a couple hundred randomly selected citizens and gave them the resources to carefully research and vet the candidates before deliberating on who is best, I think they would do a pretty good job.
It isn't about being discerning. If you are going to vote and you are a swing/politically agnostic voter in a two party system (like the US/UK) you have the following three choices really:
* Vote for the least bad candidate / lesser of two evils.
* Protest Vote. In the US this would be probably the Libertarian Party / Green Party. In England this would be Reform / Liberal Democrats / Greens etc.
* Spoil the Ballet / Abstain from voting.
Red/Blue Team diehards aren't worth talking about as they don't decide elections. It is the swing voters.
> Why spend hours researching the issues and candidates for a 1 in 10 million chance of having an impact? It makes no sense.
It makes no sense because you have two actual choices (Red Team / Blue Team) or effectively to choose to not participate.
Additionally most politically agnostic that are over the age of 30 have worked out that you get shafted whoever you vote for.
Sad thing is, that it's impossible.
1. Acres of Diamonds. Russell Conwell. 1900. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rconwellacresofdia...
2. The Gospel of Wealth. Andrew Carnegie. 1889. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gospel_of_Wealth
OTOH, people think that rich people made it by hard working.
I’m not saying there is no correlation whatsoever. But there is much less than most think, and great amounts of luck playing a bigger role, including, but not limited to, where you were born, family, contacts, etc.
Often the people who benefit from injustice are the very ones we've tasked with creating justice. It's easier to believe justice will appear on its own than to face the mess of making it ourselves.
This ignores the fact that "getting people to agree to the policy" is, in fact, extremely important and highly dependent on charisma, eloquence, and the ability to identify and form influential connections. This position imagines human politics devoid of politics and humans.
Suffice it to say, I don't want my phone jockeys taking on engineering duties.
Anyone who has worked in a presidential administration (or a congressional office) can tell you that a leader is effective if and only if they have staff that believes in their message and agenda, and that is willing and able to execute on that agenda.
The practical reality here is that charisma isn't just a way of gaming the "getting elected" part of the job, it's also a requirement to be effective at the job.
> Place critical appointment/hiring processes into the hands of randomly selected oversight boards. These boards manage appointments, evaluations, and dismissals, mitigating biases and discouraging the formation of insular power groups.
This has the same issue elections have, just at a smaller scale. A better analog is juries, and charisma/storytelling definitely matters when you're talking to a jury.
> Directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool. Set and maintain the eligibility standard (such as an exam) by randomly selected oversight board to keep it updated and prevent the standard from being manipulated or gamed.
This is somewhat analogous to college admissions, and the gaming is alive and well there too. You get rid of politics, but you're back to optimizing for KPIs and things. I'm not sure why randomly picking from the top 5% of KPI optimizers is going to be better than picking the top one.
> Firms could randomly select employees or shareholders to serve on their boards. These members can significantly dilute insider collusion and introduce perspectives often overlooked by traditionally selected executives.
Same issue as juries, plus the random picks probably won't know the material well. Although I don't know much about traditional board selections, maybe that's true regardless. If you weight based on % ownership for shareholders, you're de facto giving the seats to big funds, if not, it can quickly become a lottery of like, any random person in the states.
> Use stratified sampling to select committees, ensuring diverse representation of viewpoints, backgrounds, and expertise, contributing to balanced decision-making.
This is the jury thing again? It seems like the solution "randomly pick oversight/approval boards" was listed three times.
> Create randomly composed auditing and oversight committees, deterring corrupt practices through constant unpredictability in oversight.
Constant unpredictability in oversight sounds terrible. The reason we have judges and case law and things in the legal system is that there are tons of edge cases, where reasonable minds will differ. You want to build up a consistent set of guidelines people can follow. A lot of people who are on the edge of rules aren't trying to be corrupt, they're just not sure what they are/aren't allowed to do.
My experience with KPIs also doesn't match the poster. KPIs are mostly ignored and it ends up going back to relationships and who has a better "deck" of accomplishments each year.
I can say "sortition" and "ranked choice voting" and "LVT" and you'd understand what I mean, but to get a broad audience it pays to break it down into concrete ideas like "Random elections" and "More than two political parties" and "Why are we paying landlords to speculate on empty lots?"
Do you mean in common use? Wikipedia has a nice page on that [1]. There are also many papers on that [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sort...
I just had a friend complain to me about LeetCode, saying that it's meaningless since everyone just mindlessly grinds the problem sets.
I pointed out to him that it's called studying for the test.
My take away from this is that uniformed people will believe exactly what you tell them to believe. The tremendous effort that goes into that distracts from the responsibilities or running an organization. So, don't let the unexperienced dictate the criteria for success. I see this a lot in software, people without experience attempting to artificially dictate the terms of success.
Merit is measured in imperfect ways, by other people, and fundamentally, we don't want a hierarchy of classes, even if we claim the higher rankings/elites have merited it.
Human dignity isn't contingent on outperforming others, and everyone would likely rather live somewhere that doesn't feel like constant competition is needed to enjoy leisure, food, shelter, pastimes, etc.
When it comes to who we should trust for critical work, taking decisions on our behalf, etc., we do want someone qualified. I find the idea of "qualification/qualified" much nicer than "merit". The latter seems to imply a deserved outsized reward, like it justifies not why you are given the responsibility of something important, but why you are allowed to be richer, higher ranking, etc., than others.
The key here is that while meritocracy is championed as a means of finding the best, it in reality functions as a system to keep out the worst. You want harness the ambitions in people, even if not everyone's ambitions can actually be met, and you want to mitigate the harms of nepotism, even when eliminating it entirely is impossible.
So the difference between qualifications and merit evaluation are moot from my perspective, the question you need to ask is if whatever selection criteria you prefer is vulnerable to ladder kicking. If you preferred way is more vulnerable than the current system then you are putting the cart in front of the horse.
Also to make my position clear, I can't tell either way in regards to what you have suggested. As far as I was aware, we already select based on qualifications, so it's unclear to me what the exact change you are proposing is.
What do you mean by this? What creates a hierarchy of classes? Different social groups? Differing amounts of wealth? Different amounts of power to get stuff done? I think, in the end, it's got to come down to power, but I feel like it's good for society to distribute more power to people able to get better things done.
I agree with you that the term 'merit' now has a connotation of 'you deserve everything you can get'. It feels like a misappropriation of stewardship to take $100m to buy a yacht. If a government official did that, they would go straight to jail, but we somehow justify it under capitalism because maybe the CEO really wanted a yacht, and that's the only reason they started the business (in which case, I'm actually kind of fine with that $100m going to a yacht, as long as they were in the business of creating, not extracting, wealth). I don't think this is really a solvable problem, because to measure who's good at creating wealth, you kind of have to use wealth. Maybe we could have government-assigned stewards over pots of money, but that might have even bigger problems.
There is just no evidence that like 50 point differences in admissions tests are predictive of anything.
From my perspective, the fundamental justification for sortition is that randomly selected citizens are more representative of the general public and, crucially, less corrupt and corruptible on average than elected representatives.
Why less corrupt? Because I think people who seek power are more corrupt and self-centered on average than those who have power thrust upon them. Why less corruptible? Because randomly selected citizens don't have to fundraise for political campaigns, and they are merely temporary occupants of their seats, not running for reelection and becoming career politicians. As far as I'm concerned, political campaign contributions are legalized bribery. It would be easier to police citizen legislator corruption, because we allow crap from elected officials—campaign contributions, gifted travel, post-legislator lobbying jobs—that we really should make totally illegally and jailable. A lot of "working class" politicians suddenly become super-wealthy after leaving office, and we all know it's quid pro quo. Just outright ban that crap and strictly audit former legislators.
Meritocracy is one of those nonsense words like "rationalism" or "objectivism" that means "just do the obviously right thing". Like "democratic" and "republic" it's more about the flavor and the mouthfeel than anything concrete.
So I think some US right-wingers have been using "meritocracy" as a fig leaf for hurting their usual victims - Poor people, old people, children, women, queer people, black people, brown people, etc. - While saying "Oh we just think that the most qualified people should be in charge" even though their qualification is like, being a billionaire white supremacist, and not actually going to law school or being a good person at all.
So then the online left wing response is somewhere between "What they're doing isn't really meritocracy, because they've appointed pathetically underqualified justices to the Supreme Court following an obvious agenda that they explicitly said they would follow" (True but too sophisticated to fit on a protest sign) and "Meritocracy is bad, actually" (Too deep in the words of Leftist Theory to gather an audience, but online leftists might agree with it)
So the article is saying "Doing a naive first-order meritocracy results in a system that is ripe for corruption and capture. If we add a lot of randomness, it will resist corruption, and then we'll get the meritocracy we actually want."
The ends justify the means. If it gets people to agree with my vision, I support any wording.
We don't want to discourage people from improving once they've met the bar. Learning a skill is often logarithmically distributed: it costs just as much to learn the first 50% as the next 25% and so on. At a minimum, to keep people cost-agnostic, we need
or Note that x is on a scale from 1 to 0, where a 0 means there is nothing more you can improve at the skill, and a 1 means you need to improve at everything.https://www.theballotboy.com/electing-the-doge
Plus, you can't get much worse than the 2014 Committee for Science, Space and Technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPgZfhnCAdI
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.
Being an electrician makes you good at wiring houses in ways that work, that pass code inspections, and that don't burn down. The feedback loop isn't perfect (you're likely to succeed for a while if you produce flawed work fast that looks good enough to your boss), but it's at least feeding back in the right direction.
Being a politician makes you good at different things - fundraising, advertising, speeches, getting your name in the news - which are totally unrelated or even opposed to creating and executing legislation that is good for society. Sortition says that this relationship is so bad that the outcome under a lottery (the 50th percentile, eliminating the 49% of the population who would be better than average at the job) results in better outcomes than career politicians.
Most politicians outside the narrow world of US national (or otherwise high-profile) politics have very little contact with fundraising or advertising and few will ever give a speech to more than a handful of people. I.e. most parliamentarian democracies are chuck full of politicians that even most of their direct constituents couldn't name with a gun to their heads, even at the national level.
In these kind of systems, actual expertise is really important and political parties will cultivate subject-matter experts and provide them with secure seats or list positions without necessarily putting them into front-row politics. It's just the smart thing to do, if you actually want to have any effect after winning an election.
This is incorrect: elected politicians are much easier to bribe, because bribery of them is totally legal via campaign contributions. It's both expected and indeed necessary for politicians to ask for and take large amounts of money from others for their job.
Policing corruption of randomly selected citizens would be much easier, because the expectation is that none of them would be asking for money or accepting money for their jobs. With strict auditing, anything out of the ordinary would be pretty easy to spot. The problem with the current system is that vast transfers of money to legislators are perfectly ordinary.
Also, with random selection, the odds are higher of finding one or more inherently honest and ethical people who will blow the whistle if there's some kind of mass bribery scheme. But our current pay-to-play election system is a mass bribery scheme. Ask any politician how much time they spend fundraising: it's just a crazy % of their time. You may think politicians are lazy because they take so many breaks from legislating, but they're actually taking breaks to go out and fundraise.
Anyway, I think it's a misconception that poorer people are easier to bribe than richer people. It's also a misconception that richer people are "more successful". In my experience, richer people tend to be more obsessed with money. Many average people just want to be happy, have a family, have friends, enjoy life. They are satisfied with what they have. The only purpose of their job is to make it possible for them to go home from their job. Whereas people at the top never seem to be satisfied with what they have and always want more, more, more.
In a representative democracy, because of the very nature of the selection process at hand, it means "getting elected at all costs". Which is not all the same - and in many cases directly counter to - the desired goal of "governing well".
Mechanisms that effectively prevent this do exist in the literature, to be clear, but I rarely hear of those ones actually getting implemented.
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.
a better approach would be what i have seen in the boy scouts of america a few decades ago with regards to joining the order of the arrow. there the whole troop would select those who would be invited. most troop members were not members of the OA themselves. thus the ones who were already selected had little influence in who got to join them.
> In his 2019 book The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits poses that meritocracy is responsible for the exacerbation of social stratification, to the detriment of much of the general population. He introduces the idea of "snowball inequality", a perpetually widening gap between elite workers and members of the middle class. While the elite obtain exclusive positions thanks to their wealth of demonstrated merit, they occupy jobs and oust middle class workers from the core of economic events. The elites use their high earnings to secure the best education for their own children, so that they may enter the world of work with a competitive advantage over those who did not have the same opportunities. Thus, the cycle continues with each generation.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Books
> In his book The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?, the American political philosopher Michael Sandel argues that the meritocratic ideal has become a moral and political problem for contemporary Western societies. He contends that the meritocratic belief that personal success is solely based on individual merit and effort has led to a neglection of the common good, the erosion of solidarity, and the rise of inequality. Sandel's criticism concerns the widespread notion that those who achieve success deserve it because of their intelligence, talent and effort. Instead, he argues that this belief is flawed since it ignores the role of luck and external circumstances, such as social and external factors, which are beyond an individual's control.[91]
* Ibid
https://www.kidsnews.com.au/humanities/study-reveals-benefit...
>The report, commissioned by the Alliance of Girls’ Schools Australasia, was conducted by Macquarie Marketing Group using OECD data
reads more to me like "we found that all-girl private schools are better than the average of public and private schools", and the obvious reason why is probably *because they're private schools*, and not because they're all-girl.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35419284
> there are some underlying factors skewing these results, such as: > * grammar schools are more likely to be single-sex > * co-educational schools have a higher proportion of poorer pupils > * girls are more likely to get good results
Also note that both of your comments show that people in a position to choose, are choosing single sex schools for their daughters and getting better outcomes on average.
Lastly, while the article mentions some caveats around selective state schools, the other side of that is the UK has many single sex comprehensive schools. We should not ascribe too much weight to the caveat.
I'm actually in agreement with the OP. An interesting concept in this direction are citizen Councils or assemblies [1]. Essentially a group of random citizens get selected to investigate an (typical local) issue. They are given all the necessary administrative resources and are supposed to come up with a solution/recommendation.
They have been tried on a local level in Australia. In the documentary I saw about this, they said that people generally become engaged in the process and try to understand the nuance and different view points of the issue. Even people coming into the process with more extreme view points adopt more nuance.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/01/citizens-ass...
But imo definitely worth thinking more abt. It might solve a lot more problems than it creates by giving power back to the people.
Then you would still have the right to vote on any particular issue your own way.
No idea how it could active implemented, but it seems like a great compromise between the individual freedom of direct democracy and the labor-saving of representational democracy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
How this solve anything? I might choose a expert representative in matters I don't have a clue, like health policy. But the morons that do "their own research" will see themselves fit to vote because in their minds they know better. So what gives?
when you have a high proportion of morons, there's not much you can do.
Lol, who decides who is more informed? ( at the end of the day, might is right)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/
what? is this like a joke? an "eligibility pool" with "an exam" is going to be....."random" ?
sure! we did this and it's all random white men worth billions of dollars. So weird those were the only people that could pass "the exam"! But we have no idea which white male billionaires it will be, so it's "random" !