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Comment by koheripbal | Hacker News Reader

There has to be a maximum to the number of people that you can collect into one chamber and conduct a fruitful debate/meeting.

I wonder if 435 is already too high.

Putting aside the other issues with the US Senate - they do seem to have more effective discourse in the chamber and on the sub-committees.

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I agree that there has to be some ceiling. We don't need that many politicians on the payroll. It looks like the current method of apportionment is as fair as you can reasonably expect (Huntington–Hill). The problem is that each state needs at least one representative, so it's impossible to give California the same representatives per-population as Delaware unless you you give Delaware a fraction of 1 or increase the total representatives.

I wonder if having 2 per state like the Senate would work, but then you could weigh each of those votes in proportion to the representative's state population.

This is an interesting concept. Put the vote multiplier on the backside instead of the front. The Wyoming rep gets 1 vote, but the California rep gets 1.8, etc. This would allow for smaller bodies for more effective debate and you’d give smaller population territories over-representative expression in those debates, but you’d tie the outcomes to be proportional to the populations each representative represents.

I think this is a clever way to keep a cap on a parliamentary body’s size while allowing for more egalitarian representation.

Wouldn’t help combat the other problems of a capped body size (worsening gerrymandering, for example), but it’d be a step in the right direction.

The Dunbar number [1] originally said that the maximum size for a stable social network was ~150; he recently coauthored a paper which brings that down to around 5. WorldCafe always used 5. But, Congress is already split between the political parties, so 435 isn't the number. What they do, however, is break things up into committees - much smaller, with a few members from each party (in theory).

Massive guilds in WoW are broken up by roles to play. So, indeed, the sub-committees are where the action occurs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

> There has to be a maximum to the number of people that you can collect into one chamber and conduct a fruitful debate/meeting.

Then maybe they can work from home.

I guess you’ve never been to a super bowl.

>> There has to be a maximum to the number of people that you can collect into one chamber and conduct a fruitful debate/meeting.

> I guess you’ve never been to a super bowl.

Superbowl attendees are spectators, not participants. The issue isn't collecting together a large number of people in one area, but having all those people participate in a meeting together.

The only thing the House does all together is vote. Discussions are done in committee. Most floor speeches are done in an empty room.

That's exactly the problem. It should be reduced so that the chamber is deliberative again.

Right now it's all for show.

In fairness, they are speaking to a camera. Couldn't say if anyone is watching though.

Why do they have to fit into one chamber? And, IMO, fruitful debate has not been a feature of Congress during my lifetime.

Logistically, each party would choose its leadership, and the House as a whole would choose a Speaker. They would handle the nuts and bolts of when and what legislation would come up for a vote.

It would be interesting to have a lot more granularity in representation -- you'd certainly have reps from the Greens and the Libertarians, along with any number of other parties that were suddenly viable.

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