The election of the doge
generalist.academy
generalist.academy
> A doge was an elected lord and chief of state in several Italian city-states, notably Venice and Genoa, during the medieval and renaissance periods.
Anyone curious about modern sortition:
Citizen juries are chosen by lottery. They review policy and make recommendations. Non binding, but impactful.
https://xraypod.com/show/democracy-nerd/exporting-oregon-sty...
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IMHO:
Treat representation and policy making as distinct and separate activities.
I'm very political. Over time, I've become increasingly disinterested in electoral politics and campaigns. At best, it's tangentially related to policy work. Less so over time.
The real power these days lies with interest groups and lobbyists. Both on the left and right.
There are some notable exceptions, where electeds are effective advocates of change, but they're rare. Most are just doing triage.
And what outsiders see as partisanship is just different teams funded by different coalitions of interest groups.
One of the more interesting points he brings up is that Democracy was not really looked on favorably by serious thinkers throughout history. He also asserts that because, it's implementation coincided with the great leaps forward in science, technology and industrialization, the champions of Democracy are making the classic correlation vs. causation error.
I have near religious faith in democracy. I'm so out of step. I don't know why.
My enthusiasm for democracy originated in my workplace experiments. Ideas gleaned from Peter Drucker, Deming, and probably some others. I just needed an efficient, effective way to get my coworkers to step up and contribute their knowledge and expertise.
I really had no stake in the outcomes.
At the time, my role was often called "facilitator", which I've never liked. I now prefer Michael Lewis inspired label of "referee".
Any way. Democracy in the workplace was like magic. Consensus forming just happened. It took a while to build the trust. My job was mostly to ensure the group honored and delivered on its own decisions. I squashed snipers and saboteurs. It made me very unpopular. Until I was tasked with resurrecting the next zombie project. My team mates missed me after I was gone, belatedly realized that I had empowered them.
I think about how to replicate that success all the time. Still no clue.
Edit: Just pulled up his wiki. Hoppe wrote a book called Democracy: The God That Failed. Explains your down vote. Haha. No worries. The world needs its Eeyores (Austrian flavored libertarians). Helps keep us humanists on mission.
It falls apart as soon as you have huge disparities in privilege, wealth, and education in a nation state - manipulated by industrial narrative management techniques engineered by small privileged castes fighting hard to keep and enhance their caste privileges at the expense of everyone else.
They're not comparable situations. There is no sense in which democracy can ever be a solution in the latter, because it doesn't exist in the first place.
You need relative equality of power between participants and groups for democracy to be viable, and as soon as that disappears - it's gone.
Madison:
> Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks--no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.
* 20 June 1788, Papers 11:163
> It falls apart as soon as you have huge disparities in privilege, wealth, and education in a nation state
I'm not sure that inequality is any worse now than it was, say, during the Gilded Age. Certainly more people have the vote now than ever in the past (especially because of the Civil Rights Act, which the USSC conveniently neutered a few years back).
I still buy into the rational choice theories. Despite the growing evidence to the contrary. Democracy for Realists, folk theory of democracy, and all that.
As I said upthread, I focus on process and feedback loops. Blame my tour of duty as a SQA manager.
I empowered my teams thru delegation. They owned the product. Not me. It was their success. Not mine.
I built trust over time by honoring their decisions. And probably more importantly, fending off attacks on their efforts. Like the helpful SVP PHB giving "suggestions" and shaking the ant farm.
I'm currently totally on board with Stacy Abrams' view of democracy. People buy-in when they see their actions have impact, consequences. They check out when they're ignored.
My own former teammates told me as much. Next manager comes in, asks for input, does their own thing. Completely alienated the team. They never leaned in again.
It takes time, real effort, commitment. Trust is so hard to earn, so easily lost.
YMMV.
My metaphor for democracy is social cognition. It's just a form of group decision making, collective action. Like an optimization algorithm. So I tend to focus on process and feedback loops.
I really struggle with Marxist frames, as I understand them. Like the phrase "democracy is a releveling of society" and "defense of the public sphere". I'm sure that I'll learn from his pushback against the enemies of civil society. Like Hoppe cited by 0xDEADBABE. What polite company now calls "neoreactionaries", but I generally use much more pointed pejoratives.
Again, thank you.
I think randomness is an underrated tool for introducing a sense of “fairness” to problems with strange power dynamics: where everyone is interested in a fair outcome, but the best outcome for any individual causes some harm to the group.
Salary negotiation is one example. Imagine haggling over the range start or range size, and then picking your salary from a uniform distribution contained by that range. I wonder how the distribution of (un-)satisfactory outcomes of this system that would compare to the one we have today.
It’s also interesting to note certain parallels to structures existing today. The group stage draw for the UEFA Champions League comes to mind.
I cannot imagine anyone, ever, being happy with being told "hey you're great but you only rolled a 4 on your salary negotiation so you're $15k out of pocket.
Sometimes you get a company that gets offended at the prospect of negotiation - that's a 1, although if you get an offer rescinded like that it's probably good for you in the long run.
Sometimes you throw out a ridiculous number for whatever reason and the other side says, "mmmm...yeah, okay." That's a 20. But it's not exactly uncommon to gain or lose 5+ figures because of a random person's random whims at a random time.
It can be hard to reconcile that with the notion of a meritocratic society, but cognitive dissonance is the spice of life.
An example of a large range in my head is like 120-140k, a more typical one would be like 120-130k. If you’re good, you could negotiate a bigger range.
That’s an appreciable difference to the employee, but basically a rounding error to the employer.
If you have a high salary today your employer already has an incentive to get rid of you and replace you with a new grad. It already happens.
> If you have a high salary today your employer already has an incentive to get rid of you and replace you with a new grad. It already happens.
This is a little different as the employer is making a trade off between employee experience and employee cost. Employers don't have an incentive to replace an employee with an equally skilled employee at the same market rate, but when the salary is randomly chosen out of a range, employers do have an incentive to replace high rollers with new employees who are statistically likely to roll something lower.
Yay the outcome of the negotiation, the lower part of your range is something you’d be happy with, and the upper is something you’d be quite happy with.
The employer meanwhile is offering you a range from what they’d like, to what they can tolerate.
Anything you get in the middle is satisfactory to both parties, with the added benefit that you didn’t have to beg for it and they didn’t have to cave for it.
Randomness allows for some absolution of responsibility.
If you’re shameless in salary negotiations (not a bad thing for you), this system puts you at a relative disadvantage. But the median person finds salary negotiations to be nerve wracking. I think this helps people closer to the median, by allowing them to negotiate a better position without feeling as guilty about it.
I think that it’s important that the last step is not random. I can’t imagine the job applicant would be happy with their salary being chosen randomly.
They could rid themselves of this conspiracy by randomly selecting the ball-drawer (instead of using a paid random ex-footballer), but they don't. :)
[1]: https://www.eurosport.com/football/champions-league/2015-201...
*It is also worth noting that the main article simplifies the process a little, since a certain threshold approval is required
"This paper discusses the protocol used for electing the Doge of Venice between 1268 and the end of the Republic in 1797. We will show that it has some useful properties that in addition to being interesting in themselves, also suggest that its fundamental design principle is worth investigating for application to leader election protocols in computer science."
The oath of the council of ten? "Jura, perjura, secretum prodere noli" Swear, foreswear, and reveal not the secret.
The other interesting fact about the Italian mercantile city-states is that many of them lasted an amazingly long time. The republics in Venice and Genoa, for example, were only extinguished in 1797 by Napoleon!
It's worth remembering that voting is already only the last step of a process:
1 Candidates self-select
2 party selection panel (or primary election)
3 election
1 voters form into groups of 100-200 (the range is so that a group that's too large can just split)
2 each group elects one of their number
3 sortition among these
I think in practice it would devolve into "join my group and vote for me". You'd see people on Twitter trying to convince their followers to join their fan group. Once they got themselves a group of 100, they'd tell followers to join the group of a friend who was ideologically aligned.
You could also form the groups randomly. But assigning every person in the US to a 100-200 person group, arranging for them to meet in person, and letting them socialize enough to know who to pick could be logistically challenging, especially to do in a timely manner. Perhaps if you did it via the internet and used an app such as gather.town to make it feasible to get to know your group. Or perhaps if 100-200 person groups persisted between elections so the overhead of getting to know people was a one-time thing.
All these systems except sortition result in "rule by extraverts", which is arguably undesirable.
An approach that allows for introvert rulers: Let every person nominate whoever they want (including themselves?) Put all those names in a hat, then draw names randomly from the hat for the purpose of sortition. That way if I'm an introvert, and my introvert friend has insightful political opinions, I can nominate them. People would nominate their favorite celebrity a lot, but the flip side of that would be that if you voted for a celebrity whose name was already drawn, your vote is effectively wasted. So there's a bit of an incentive to nominate someone obscure that no one else will nominate. You would probably want to check and see if a person was actually willing to serve before nominating them. (I think it would be unwise to make service in this body mandatory the way jury duty is?)
That one reminds me of liquid democracy, which I believe Glen Weyl has criticized on the basis that it leads to polarization, though I'm not sure why.
Basically, one registered voter would be randomly chosen from each congressional district. They would be obligated to serve for the 2 year term and paid the current salary of a member of Congress ($174,000/year). They would never be part of the lottery again after 1 term.
I think this could have a lot of benefits in terms of reducing partisanship and reducing the effects of money in politics as you would have 1/3 of the US Government that was not dependent on campaign contributions.
If you say "I think we should use sortition to decide voting districts" no one will know what the hell you're talking about. If you say "Voting districts should be approved by citizen juries" it is simple and clear. Avoid jargon that doesn't add any precision.
randomness is good insurance against downside risk, especially when choosing a committee of people (e.g. a jury), but it has about as much upside as delegating everything to a random Youtube commenter.
So in Venice's case, it wasn't so much randomly selecting representatives from all its citizens as it was selecting from already wealthy and influential persons, on the assumption that they were somewhat competent if they could amass and manage their existing power.
True, but how much of that is due to changes in the governmental system?
I'll bet people would take more interest the quality of public education for the average citizen, at least.
* ie. Minimax-ing
Why do the votes for the runner-up matter in that case?
If the vote is 1000 to 0, then the result (vote count) will be different if one person stays home -- 999 to 0 -- but the result (victor) will be the same.
Exactly the same thing is true in the case where it's 1000 to 999. If one of the losing voters stays home, you get a different vote count --- 1000 to 998 -- and the same victor. There are 999 people, half the entire electorate, who can stay home without making any meaningful difference at all.
What is the difference that you see?
To me, the vote count is not the result. The result is one of A won, B won, or that there is a draw. So if the vote count ends up 1 to 0 or 1000 to 0, A still wins, so the 999 votes don't really matter.
In the 1000 to 999 case, yes, everyone whose candidate lost could have stayed at home. But everyone whose candidate won had to come and vote, otherwise there would have been a draw and their candidate would have lost (or at least there would have been a draw).
Also, to be clear, all that I'm describing is more of an emotional argument - analyzing whose vote counts in an election or not is better done through game thelry. If you take the reasoning I laid down further, it sort of breaks down, and it only 'works' retroactively anyway. But I think it captures the feel of what it means for your vote to matter pretty decently.
I would bet that people who voted Biden in Georgia or Pensylvania in last week's elections feel that their personal vote was much more important than people who did the same in NYC do.
The legislature has to have these details if it’s going to do anything at all. If the representatives don’t have that knowledge they’ll get it from somewhere else. That usually means lobbyists, since they’re (representing) the experts in the field.
America is rather an oddity where heads of federal agencies are political appointees whose terms are contingent on the ruling party.
I am not sure if this would be worse, but it would be quite a different political power structure.
Consider how well jury service (doesn't) work. A highly trained class of influencers can game the system towards their preferred choice of outcome using arguments and techniques that are knowingly manipulative.
You'd soon end up with an oligarchy disguised as a civil service. Representatives would come and go, the civil service would remain and "guide" them.
The real power would continue to be lobby influence - and very likely explicit corruption of both civil servants and representatives.
1. If an incumbent wants to keep their seat, they keep their seat with a K% chance, say 50/50; and,
2. All remaining seats are chosen at random from the eligible (see below) that apply for the position.
An additional tweak is to require 'previous experience' by having statesfolk work in lower level representative positions. For instance: anyone qualifies for city council (maybe not metropolises) or county level positions; a person just puts their name in the hat to get started. Once a statesperson has successfully had a complete term at city/county level they can move to the state level, then the Federal level. It could even be lateral: lower-house to upper-house. There are 10s-of-thousands of county & city level positions, giving a sizable pool of new statesfolk to draw from.
The incumbency mechanism allows a subset of representatives to maintain stability & gain experience "in situ"; the pipelining provides a naturally trained pool of statesfolk. The sortition mechanism is a robust anti-gerrymandering, anti-corruption, anti-just-about-everything-we-don't-like-in-government mechanism.
I'd argue that the worst aspect of the US political system is the fine margins between two fiercely partisan factions which random members of the public tend to strongly identify with. Making which faction with ~45% hardcore supporters [in swing states] has control a matter of dumb luck as opposed to whether their conduct impresses or appals the few people able to see merit in both political philosophies doesn't sound like an improvement.
Also, the incentive to be corrupt certainly isn't weakened by removing any incentive to present oneself as clean for future re-election from the equation.
If you want to make Congress more effective, pay them and their staffers as much (or more) than they'd make in the private sector. https://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/documents/keeping_cong...
This would take the veto away from the President, and give it to a random selection of people.
Maybe combine it with an amendment stating that all regulations must be passed by the Congress, or at least be ratified by the House of Citizens …
A good arrangement would be:
- Elect 50 Senators nationally by proportional representation (2% party vote = 1 senate seat)
- The Senate works with parliamentary style vote of no confidence system instead of fixed term lengths (fixed term lengths have repeatedly been a disaster for the US). Let's say the maximum is 6 years, in keeping with tradition
- The Senate appoints the President and cabinet directly, instead of using the Electoral College first and then approving the Cabinet. Since the Senate is now national, it's essentially national popular vote for President.
- The House remains on a 2 year limit, but add more Reps (1 per 100K people is good) and do things like Instant Runoff Voting and multimember constituencies.
- For the House districts, have the Federal Election Commission draw up plans and…
- Have the plans approved by citizen juries. It's crazy to just send one random person to congress and expect them to do well, but it's not crazy to ask random 100 people from across the country to come together to give oversight to bureaucrats. We have 12 random people give oversight to criminal trials already. Juries are good at oversight.
- We could also use citizen juries for some Supreme Court stuff, but that might be harder because the cases end up being very technical at that level.
Agreed on adding more representatives.
I'm in favor of sortition of choosing representatives on every level.
The non-elite are not inherently purer than the elite, and they are generally less well-educated. I am not certain how 'elite' has become a bad thing: shouldn't we all aspire to be among the elite?
I thought that there was some real genius to the English system, which at one time provided voices for both the great families and the citizenry, roughly balanced under the Crown. So too the U.S. system of senatorial selection prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment.
I'm 100% also behind this because they aren't complete jaded "rags to riches" people. This is one reason why I think in the US we have such a huge issue with selfishness in general. If you worked for what you earned, it is yours. Therefore, it's in everyone's mindset to be selfish/greedy. Whereas if you had an Elite class handle things such as this, you can rest assured everything they do isn't solely for their self interest. They don't do things just for money. If their morals are somewhat sound in reasoning, I can't see why they'd overlook the cost of things much like we do in the US over literally everything.
Also, there is a moral argument about equality and diversity. If you interpret democracy as in rule-by-the-people it is only fair that everyone has a chance to represent.