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Comment by thechao | Hacker News Reader

Lots of large companies (I'm familiar, via friends, with Exxon) have a strong "rotation" policy in finance & related, for this exact reason. Many classes of fraudulent activity rely on networks of people who trust each other. If you break up the network, you can prevent gross levels of fraud.

Tangentially related: it's one of the reasons why government positions should be (randomly) rotated. In many ways, it's the same reason why we should choose our elected representatives randomly. (Also: I'm under the impression that random selection of representatives is one of the few ways to implement robust, fair representation.)

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The Japanese company that I worked for, for almost 27 years, had a similar policy.

Everyone in Japan, rotated, at least, every two years. Often, more frequently. This included very senior-level executives.

I'm not sure that it was to combat fraud, but I'm sure that was a knock-on effect.

I would work with engineers for many years, but they would be working on different projects, and might suddenly appear in the project I was on, many years after the last time I saw them.

They also had a lot of vacation/holiday time, but the company told them when they would take it. I think that more seniority gave you more discretion.

For people interested in random selection of representatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

The research I've seen (slight) is that a random person is, on average, a more competent statesman than the average politician. (This is a result of the self-selection bias in people choosing a political career.)

The major downside is a lack of accountability; however, at least in large parts of the US, factionalism & gerrymandering have almost completely removed accountability, so we're not really losing anything.

Links to the research?

I don't know if this helps: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344163235_Sortition...

MP means Member of Parliament (or equivalent representative of a democratic government). Belgium has been a hot-spot for this kind of initiative.

Can you point us to any of that research? I'd be very interested to see how they managed to measure people's competence to serve as government officials. I'm frankly skeptical that can be done in a useful way.

I find this idea somewhat compelling. Anecdotally, my favorite boss was someone who did not want the job. He just looked around and realized the alternatives were worse. Meanwhile, everyone else seems to have arrived at the position by wanting the power/wealth of continuing to climb the ladder.

> The research I've seen (slight) is that a random person is, on average, a more competent statesman than the average politician. (This is a result of the self-selection bias in people choosing a political career.)

This seems extremely unlikely just by virtue of the fact that the average person has an IQ of 100 and the average MP doesn’t. Practically guaranteed to be above 115. There are very large differences in education. The median voter in the US is over 50 and never went to, never mind graduate from, college.

Yes.

For that reason, instead of picking people directly at random, pick ballots at random to fill up parliament.

In theory, you could pick random votes first, and then ask them about their choice. But there's all kinds of targeted influence possible at that stage. So let voters make their choice first, and then pick randomly.

You'd need some kind of resolution mechanism for when multiple random ballots have the same candidate on them. Eg give the guys vote in parliament a higher weight, or have people write down multiple candidates in order, or just pick another random vote etc. (Some resolution mechanisms might work better than others. I don't know.)

YES!

I've long thought that once a person attains a certain level of success, roughly including college degree, certain military rank, managerial position of certain scope at medium-large company, etc., they should be subject to random political service in state or federal legislature or executive branches. Perhaps after one term, they can stand for re-election for maximum of two terms, 10 years max, to take advantage of experience gained. Pay should be greater of a set level or 110% of their max earnings in previous 5yrs (so service is not punitive).

There would of course be some random evil and grifters, but their concentration and ability to embed for life would be very limited.

How we get from constitutional structure to there is another question.

I'm all in favour of sortition, but I don't think it's a good idea to force people to serve.

Just pick randomly from all willing candidates to fill up parliament. Or even better: still have elections were people can vote for willing candidates, but instead of picking the winner by some kind of majority or proportionality scheme, you pick n ballots at random to fill up the n seats in parliament.

(You can come up with your favourite scheme to handle the case when a single candidate gets multiple votes for her selected. Eg give her extra weight in decisions?)

I would suggest using sortition only for instances where the law of large numbers helps you. Eg for filling up a parliament with a few hundred representatives, but not for picking a single president.

While an interesting idea, you're now:

1.) Going to throw people into an unfamiliar role for, say, a couple years. So they're going to heavily lean of whatever permanent staff/civil service there is because their knowledge of the job is extremely limited

2.) You'd basically be asking/telling people to take two years off their job--for probably quite limited pay. (Sort of federal grand jury duty on steroids.) Which I can't believe would be very popular.

For 2 just have it be you’re paid the max of the roles minimum or your old salary for those two years, maybe with a good bonus to make it even more palatable.

The government has the benefit of being able to eschew normal market pricing for things including job pay.

By case:

(1.A) Yes. As I said in another comment, though, it turns out that in the limited research that's been done, the average person is somewhat better at doing the job than the average career politician. The argument is that the sort of person who wants to be a career-politician is uniquely unsuited to actually running a government.

(1.B) The civil servants should be randomly rotated.

(2) There's normally a mechanism to preselect a pool of applicants. Universal sortition is interesting, but has drawbacks. I am drawn to a nomination mechanism: you have to get enough (unique) nominations before you're allowed in the sortition pool.

Could start by rotating the members of Congressional committees. Effectively making Congress the pool.

This is a major reform, as the politicians who are captured by various interests have STRONG incentives to join that Committee. For example, look at the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee -- there's only two Senators from states east of the Mississippi River, and one is West Virginia (a major energy provider as well). An elected official requesting a spot on the committee from an energy consuming state will have a very hard time.

https://www.energy.senate.gov/members

The Republican party is somewhat better than the Democrats on this-- Committee reform was a major plank of the 1994 Contract With America and the GOP still has term limits for Committee Chairmen.

https://about.bgov.com/news/frustrated-democrats-mount-push-...

It probably somewhat depends on the level. I don't really expect random state reps or other local elected officials have any particular qualifications. They certainly aren't paid as if they did. In some states, such are basically part-time jobs. I do think it's a job a fair number of people would hate.

Low pay at the state/local level basically guarantees some level of corruption as the pool of applicants gets very tight when you combine small districts with minimum wealth requirements. How much that’s a feature or a bug is debatable.

> (1.B) The civil servants should be randomly rotated.

Institutional knowledge in civil service is the only reason our government functions even as well as it does. I'm not sure that's a great idea.

Also, it's a job like any other, and the more unpleasant you make it, the more workers with options will leave. And the workers with options will tend to be your best ones.

Isn't this sort of how ministries work in the UK, you have a dedicated civil service that does most of the work and then a politician that may or may not know whats going on setting direction?

Source: have watched "The Think of It"

> Isn't this sort of how ministries work in the UK

yes

> you have a dedicated civil service that does most of the work and then a politician that may or may not know whats going on setting direction?

this is the ministers and their private secretary.

> have watched "The Think of It"

you should also watch "Yes Minister" i find it a bit more charming if a little dated, but also quite real.

>you should also watch "Yes Minister" i find it a bit more charming if a little dated, but also quite real.

It has aged well and is arguably more relevant than it was when they released it.

Groups indeed!

When I worked at IBM just out of college, my manager introduced me to someone who was getting promoted three levels up. It turned out that he had some months previously figured out how four people working together could evade the accounting controls and transfer $25 million out of the company on a Friday afternoon and be in Brazil or wherever (never to be seen again, presumably) before Monday. He reported the flaw in the controls and the promotion was the recognition of his acumen...

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