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"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."

All major media and academic outlets are, by definition, powerful. To have a megaphone, to have reach, to be able to have thousands or millions of people listen to your message, is the essence of power.

These media and academic outlets, along with political parties, major activist groups, lobbyists, NGO's etc, have evolved to be powerful within the current political framework. The feedback loop between their ability to send messages to the population, and then get votes in return, is what makes them powerful.

Thus, no powerful outlet has any interest in sortition. Sortition would threaten their power. It would be a great unknown, who knows what the political system would look like under such a dramatic change? Thus nobody really talks about it, and if someone does talk about it, nobody retweets them, or cites them, or gives grants to study it, or otherwise gets excited about the idea.

But at any rate, even if you could convince the powers-that-be to implement sortition, I think the idea is fatally flawed. There is a difference between power and authority. A lottery could give people authority - but exercising actual power requires much, much more. It requires real talent at dealing with people, real influence, real knowledge of how things get done.

Democracy, as in real rule by the people, does not exist, cannot exist, should not exist. The Iron Law of oligarchy always wins, and attempts to ignore the Iron Law of Oligarchy and implement "true" democracy simply result in corrupt and degenerate subversion of the on-paper electoral system.

> 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.

Edit to say that your point is interesting and one I hadn't really thought about. This make elections a referendum on the most salient topics, which I guess makes sense. I still think that in elections there are a lot of other factors that influence decisions and given certain voting preferences there are a lot of arbitrary factors that influence the results, more so that in sortition, whose main drawback, as I see it is how little we know about how it would work in practice.

Original message: But even for salient issues there are a lot of random factors in elections. Suppose there is a issue so important that everybody cares and votes based only on that issue. Suppose there are only two candidate, and they have a clear and opposing position on this issue so that things are very simple for voters.

Suppose candidate A gets 50,999,897 votes Suppose candidate B gets 50,456,002 votes

B can still win, as happened with Bush, depending on the voting system. This is just an example and of course depends on the specific voting system. The real point being that for sortition you have simple statistical guarantees, always, independently from salience.

For a particularly dramatic example of this, read G.K. Chesterton's _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_.

In the book, England, late in a long and uneventful history, is governed by lot; a randomly-chosen individual is crowned King and given dictatorial powers. Eventually, the lot falls on a bored nihilist with a fondness for 16th-century uniforms, and within twenty years London is a patchwork of feuding principalities with antiquated weapons, beautiful heraldry, and a whole lot of innocent people dead.

This book confirms what you're saying: it's not very likely that a barking madman will be randomly chosen as dictator, but it only has to happen once.

(The strangest thing about it is that Chesterton saw the most troublesome belligerents, who at one point threaten to use a water tower as a sort of late-Victorian atomic bomb, as the good guys; their willingness to use violence brought beauty and dignity back to a pacific, indolent world. This book was written before Chesterton became Catholic, and its bored nihilism reflects his own feelings at the time; I strongly suspect that it had an influence on the development of fascism, given that Mussolini was a fan of Chesterton's.)

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).

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.

> How do you separate expertise from decision power, while still being able to make proper use of the expertise?

The Danish model of Consensus Conferences (laypeople brought in to work with experts on decision making), might be a good model to follow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_conferences

Hum...

To take a realistic example, let a panel of laypeople read 20 studies, half saying that smoking does cause cancer, and half saying that it doesn't. Then, let the experts of both sides speak to them (not needed to say that the ones defending it doesn't cause cancer are much more confident and charming than the others).

I don't think those people would have reached the correct conclusion.