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Comment by acover | Hacker News Reader

When does it make more sense to just select a random person from millions of competent/trustworthy people and run them?

This has always seemed to be like the best aproach. You never want people that gravitate towards positions of authority to be in such positions. For positions that require some degree of competence you have to settle with what you get, but what qualifications do politicians actually have?.

Its not like we have the modern equivalent of the ancient chinese civil servant exam so that civil servants at least have some basic level of competency. Picking at random cannot possibly be any worse than what we have, it would reduce corruption and would create the incentive to invest more in the education of the general public.

The problem isn’t just that psychopaths want to be in control, it’s that millions of people want psychopaths to be in control. It’s almost as though there’s a gene for self-destructiveness and about half the population has it.

What are your citations?

What are your citations for the sunrise and sunset?

- Herman, J. R. "The response of stratospheric constituents to a solar eclipse, sunrise, and sunset." Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 84.C7 (1979): 3701-3710.

- Sparavigna, Amelia Carolina. "Roman towns oriented to sunrise and sunset on solstices." Available at SSRN 2777118 (2016).

- Woolf, Harold M. On the computation of solar elevation angles and the determination of sunrise and sunset times. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1968.

- Teets, Donald A. "Predicting sunrise and sunset times." The College Mathematics Journal 34.4 (2003): 317-321.

- Greenwood, Margaret Stautberg. "Using rotation matrices to calculate the locations of sunrise and sunset, the hours of daylight, observed path of the Sun, and its elevation angle for any latitude." American Journal of Physics 91.7 (2023): 519-519.

- Muheim, Rachel, Susanne Åkesson, and John B. Phillips. "Magnetic compass of migratory Savannah sparrows is calibrated by skylight polarization at sunrise and sunset." Journal of Ornithology 148 (2007): 485-494.

- Verhulst, Tobias GW, and Stanimir M. Stankov. "Height-dependent sunrise and sunset: Effects and implications of the varying times of occurrence for local ionospheric processes and modelling." Advances in space research 60.8 (2017): 1797-1806.

Very very true.

What!? Who wants a real democracy?

> In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

The legal requirements and cultural qualifications to become a fully enfranchised Athenian citizen were already pretty self-selecting for what that society wanted in a more consensus driven way than most modern countries have.

Well, sure, provided that by "consensus" you mean the opinions of adult, free, male citizens who probably constituted no more than 30 percent of the total adult population.

Athens was a literal minority patriacharcy of landlords, and I don't say that to be contentious or a social justice warrior, etc. just to blandly point out a dull truth.

The US started out that way too.

Also interesting is the machine they used for the random selections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion

I like it, but I have a better and more practical solution: limit the term of every politician to 1 term in any one office, and 3 terms in total.

Make it a grass roots constitutional amendment campaign in the US.

Then, the problem solves itself because the political career no longer becomes a viable power grab. And money interests can’t work fast enough to buy favors.

I think the supreme Court should be like jury duty. Judges and lawyers with ten years experience get called up for one court case only. All random peers who've passed the bar and met basic requirements.

all other political appointments should be ranked choice or like that parliament system where if x party gets 30 percent of vote they get to appoint 30 percent of the positions.

It would beat the part

The Supreme Court requires an expertise in Constitutional law that a random judge or lawyer isn't going to have.

The Supreme Court requires 51 senators to vote for you :) Expertise is definitely not a requirement.

Call it a necessity, then. As much as I mistrust the current Court I still expect them to know more about Constitutional law than the ambulance chaser advertising on a billboard downtown.

Or a la Asimov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)

Curious how you’d evaluate competency or trustworthiness.

You are right. There's no good way to efficiently measure that - even just excluding people with a history of criminal fraud is costly.

A secretary problem setup would eliminate the worst candidates while removing the traditional political gauntlet that selects for lizard people. Purely random also works as there is still a general election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Why should we assume any random person to be either more competent or trustworthy than a politician?

Because a random person is likely to be a regular person.

Regular people are very often incompetent, deceptive and corrupt. Plenty of regular people have psychopathic and sociopathic traits.

Yeah, but politicians are worse. They're typically power-seekers.

Trustworthy - because politics selects for power trippers

Many people become power trippers once power is suddenly thrust upon them.

Of course, but with random selection you will also get people who aren't latent psychos.

Politics, and the our modern. electoral processes in particular, selects for psychopathy since, all else being equal, the charming psycho candidate is more likely to win and level up (to a more prominent election contest).

If there are five election levels (school board -> state house -> house -> senate/governor/president) each with a small bias, by the time a candidate reaches the top he's been fairly well selected for total PoS.

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