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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

As an educated voter, I would not want to vote for my nuclear inspector, because their job solely consists of managing tail risk[1], and I have zero ability to evaluate their qualifications, or job performance.

I have no ability to accurately determine whether or not one of five candidates actually knows what they are doing, or if they are just a hustler who knows how to play Buzzword Bingo. I suppose I could spend months of my life trying to get educated on the subject, but I don't have time to do so, and neither do my neighbors.

This is why representative democracies exist. You vote for a representative, and it becomes their job to wrangle domain-specific underlings.

[1] The only feedback signal I can trust is 'Did a one-in-a-thousand-year event occur under their watch?' [2]

[2] And if it did, well shucks, what am I going to do now? Fire them in the next election? The damage is already done.

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> As an educated voter, I would not want to vote for my nuclear inspector

The chief job of local environmental assessors would likely be gathering and aggregate local data sources to monitor and track a wide variety of emissions, including non-radioactive emissions in areas with no nuclear industry.

> I have zero ability to evaluate their qualifications, or job performance

The feedback signal to watch would be whether newspapers and activists say they are compromised by financial ties to local industries, which can be assisted by financial disclosure forms.

> This is why representative democracies exist

Another option which relied more on Congress would be to have the House & Senate appoint one independent environmental assessor from each state, which were required to be permanent residents of each state, to attend an annual meeting once per year, to form an independent board of oversight. The assessors would have to be permanent residents of the state they were appointed to represent and submit financial disclosure forms.

the flaw in that reasoning is that you’re creating a single point of subvertible power (and failure). that might have made sense 250 years ago before the advent of electricity and telecommunications (and smaller systemic dangers), but not so much anymore. it also doesn’t solve the ‘aww shucks’ issue you mention at all, which really is an incentives issue beyond representation (you could instead, as a wild supposition, make all representatives live within 20 miles of the plant to align incentives).

we should elect 10s if not 100s of such representatives at a time (and those folks can hire further experts as necessary) so that no one rep has inordinate power, because depending on a single person is certain to fail at some point. that also is more likely to provide diversity of thought, which is crucial to effective decision-making. we’re rich enough as a nation to support such a panel without batting an eye.

> you could instead, as a wild supposition, make all representatives live within 20 miles of the plant to align incentives

Isn't it possible this would increase the chance they had financial ties to the nuclear industry? My initial thought was that if you appointed environmental scientists to monitor emissions in areas without nuclear plants, they could also check the work of other assessors in areas with nuclear plants, to make sure their colleagues were honest, when attending board meetings.

So you would get bright people which were otherwise uninvolved to check the work and listen to what was being discussed.

Another option which would not rely on local election, would be to have Congress appoint 50 environmental assessors, one from each state, which were required to be permanent residents of each state they were appointed to represent, rather than employees of a national office. The assessors would then meet once per year to form a national oversight board.

> "Isn't it possible this would increase the chance they had financial ties to the nuclear industry?"

possibly, but i'd guess it's unlikely to be a significantly material effect, since you'd still be aiming to get a diverse group of representatives (many of whom would then have to move to be near one of the many nuclear plants in the state/country). i lived within 20 miles of a nuclear plant for a small part of my life and plenty of people in the area had nothing to do with the plant.

i think the more important bit is having wide and diverse representation and limiting the corruptibility of any individual representative.

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