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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

> In the real world, sure.

Can you point at one? A council with "widely diverse viewpoints" that is actually an effective, tie-braking decision maker?

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Judge panels (like SCOTUS), county boards, city councils, school boards, non-profit boards and councils, corporate boards.

I actually don't think this is the case. Almost all of these in the US are largely bipartisan, not nonpartisan. In some cases they also tend to self select for people that favor certain viewpoints. NIMBYism is prevalent in local government, for example.

They're optimized to serve the interests of the two prevailing parties in the US, which aren't the only two legitimate viewpoints.

I’ve had better experiences and I also find that issues that aren’t neatly D or R weigh more heavily on them in smaller or more local jurisdictions. I think there is a good case to be made for a similar dynamic on a social media’s board, where the mechanics of good moderation and guidance, combined with cordial operating principles, should be too front-and-center to ignore.

I am not super familiar with US judicial bodies and what their mandate actually entails, but, in general, what judges do fundamentally revolves around interpreting laws and/or constitutions.

Twitter does, of course, also have to comply with law. In regards to this council we are however specifically focusing on an area, that is not already decided by law. Coming up with a decision in a "wildly diverse group" without the need to argue along law (because that is not what your mandate asks for), is a very, very different setup.

I feel the other examples are problematic for other reasons, i.e. "city councils": In the EU people get elected into these positions and no one mechanism will be placed for them to have "wildly different viewpoints". They get elected to get something done, which will then revolve around making compromises, or just not being involved in the process.

Interesting. In the US councils represent different areas of their city or county, and those areas have different political party leanings as well as different economic and community goals, and that’s what brings the diversity to the governing body. There are cities that are too uniform for this to work well, of course.

Supreme Court justices, despite their huge partisan differences and passionate disagreements on many individual cases, often talk about how they personally enjoy working with each other. My impression is that this is true of many Congressional committees as well, although it's less legible there because most congressmembers find it politically advantageous to talk about how mad they are at the other party.

There's a huge amount of history there, though. It didn't just get formed this week. It's got some members who have been on the court since the early 90s. Some since the late 90s and others in the aughts. The SCOTUS has long-lived institutional memory and norms of behavior. It's members also tend to become somewhat isolated from what's going on in the culture outside.

Every institution was new at some point.

Sure. The Oversight Board. Facebook did exactly this years ago.

oversightboard.com/decisions

Interesting! Glancing at the board, there is a clear makeup of highly educated, decorated, democratic, liberal-ish people. I would be hard pressed to call this setup one that focuses on "wildly diverse viewpoints".

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