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Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

Democracy is a really shitty form of government. It prevents tyrants, and it prevents a single party from holding power for too long. Which are great benefits over, e.g. monarchies. But the average voter isn't informed enough to really understand all the issues. So who wins isn't really correlated with who is best or who is right.

In my ideal form of government, the representatives would not be elected, but randomly sampled from the population. There would also be an education and IQ test, and it would only take from the top 5% of the population or so.

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That reminds of this excerpt:

“For the last century, almost all top political appointments [on the planet Earth] had been made by random computer selection from the pool of individuals who had the necessary qualifications. It had taken the human race several thousand years to realize that there were some jobs that should never be given to the people who volunteered for them, especially if they showed too much enthusiasm. As one shrewed political commentator had remarked: “We want a President who has to be carried screaming and kicking into the White House — but will then do the best job he possibly can, so that he’ll get time off for good behavior.”

― Arthur C. Clarke, Imperial Earth

A "representative democracy" is one specifically where the average voter doesn't need to be informed enough to really understand all the issues, and that's supposed to be its advantage. In contrast, direct democracy is best when all the voters (have the time to) understand the issues. But that's not very pragmatic, so we do representative democracy. But of course, that has its own issues, as what to understand moves from "the issues" to "the candidates".

Somehow, this reminded me of this bit by Douglas Adams From "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish" (in part):

    "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much
    assume that the government they've voted in more or
    less approximates to the government they want."
    "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
    "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
    "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again,
    "why?"
    "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said
    Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162557-it-comes-from-a-very-...

I understand the purpose of representative democracy. In theory voters vote for representatives instead of policies, but in reality they do vote for policies. And in practice representatives to pander to voters, and various other interests.

With the infrastructure available today we should be able to do a hybrid direct-representative model and also have multiple representative delegations that we can change on an ad-hoc basis (i.e. not just at elections).

For example, on some issues, I might like to do the research and make my own decision, while for other issues I might trust and delegate to a representative for that set of issues, and for a third set of issues I might trust and delegate to a different representative.

A large part of being a politician is the social skills to get people onside. A random sampling based on education and IQ isn't going to give you that.

But that's exactly the problem. It selects for people who are charismatic and good at playing political games. Rather than people who are good at selecting the best policies.

Arguably, those political games should be necessary in a system where compromise is essential to forming policy.

Or have the next version of AlphaGo run things.

AlphaGov

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