Comment by panglott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panglott | Hacker News Reader

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...

"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

> 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.

It may also be necessary for election. But you can't disregard the fact that only people who were qualified in some way were allowed to take part in running the country, and in that society it was that democracy was born.

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.

Eh, it sounds like Athens had systems in place to deal with these problems. With cause you could remove people from office and there was some sort of test to determine if you were eligible for the office at all. Their tests for citizenship (which was the only test that mattered for putting yourself up for election) were bigoted, I don't see any reason to hold them up as useful.

> 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.

Actually, one way to see sortition is as a way of scaling direct democracy to large populations.

Sortition and election are both ways of scaling democracy to populations too large to effectively use direct democracy alone; neither is any closer to direct democracy, and it seems to me that each can be viewed as mitigating the distortions imposed by the other (as our system -- in the US, but the same is true in most modern democracies -- tends to use election much more than sortition, it may be that it could be improved by increased use of sortition,)

I feel like sortition is much closer to direct democracy because the distortion is limited by the law of large numbers and can be exactly calculated. Of course this excludes things like people feeling like participating, which happens in direct democracy but not in sortition.

> I feel like sortition is much closer to direct democracy because the distortion is limited by the law of large numbers and can be exactly calculated.

No, it can't. The likelihood of a particular degree of distortion (sampling error) can be exactly calculated; the actual degree of distortion cannot.

That is true, but you could argue that the same is true with elections. What if everybody that wants to vote in a certain way is sick on election day? Not very likely, and of course in case of elections the number is larger and therefore the probability of (this specific type) of distortion is much smaller. But then one is again talking about probabilities. And in case of elections there are many other arbitrary factors that can influence the results.

> That is true, but you could argue that the same is true with elections.

Sure, but its still not an advantage that sortition has over elections.

Why should selection by lot only work, if a large number of people are excluded from the pool?

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