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Comment by aaronbaugher | Hacker News Reader

I've served on a few juries, and they've been far more sensible than Congress. I'm all for selecting representatives the same way, randomly from a pool of law-abiding citizens. Most of the work could be done remotely, so people wouldn't have to quit their jobs and go live in the capital and lose touch with the people back home. Keep the terms short, like 6 months, so they don't have much chance to "grow in office" and start trying to rule the world. Offer a decent stipend to pay for the inconvenience, which could be a fraction of what the current ones cost.

You'd probably have to have a hardship opt-out for people who honestly couldn't do it for personal reasons. But as long as it wasn't too strenuous--and there's no reason it should be--most would be willing to do it, just like jury duty. It's a great idea, very democratic.

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Part of the reason juries work so well is the default “fuck you I don’t understand so I say not guilty”.

If the prosecutor tries to baffle the jury the jury won’t convict.

If something happens similar with “legislative juries” where they’d refuse to pass a complicated law they didn’t understand.

Is that necessarily a bad thing? If the average person doesn't understand a law, shouldn't that law be reworked?

I think that could depend on if we are fine with having an administrative state. I.e. can regular people have simple laws and then have experts work out the highly nuanced details?

The average person in the US reads at below a high school level.

How do you explain to someone who doesn't understand high school level writing, let alone math, that "No, you can't just say Pi is 4, it doesn't work like that" in a way that they will agree in the end, rather than just calling you an elitist shithead who is patronizing them?

That seems like a feature, which would force those writing legislation to stop turning it into thousands of pages of unreadable jargon to hide its purpose.

Today, legislation isn't written by legislators.[1] It's written by lobbyists and special interest groups, then massaged into its final form by legislative staff, who then provide a summary to the figurehead who will be voting on it. Since it's impossible for those legislating to really know what's in the bill, those creating it have no reason not to obfuscate it as much as possible, and every incentive to do so.

[1] https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...

My dream change to the system: If you haven't read the bill - all of it - you can't vote for it.

You want to have 1000-page monstrosities? Knock yourself out. But you're going to have to actually read all 1000 pages. And you're going to have to persuade everyone else to also read all of it.

While I'm dreaming, I have a second dream change: Congress cannot exempt members of Congress from the effect of laws. Hey, Representative So-and-so, you want to change Social Security? You're changing your retirement, too. You want to change healthcare? You're changing your own healthcare, too.

Saying this in a programmers forum is pretty rich.

If you've ever written code that wasn't clear and obvious and necessary to the dumbest script kiddie, it's bad code, right? I'm sure you love those PR bots that sass you for "function getting long" right? They are never wrong, right?

Why do we continue to insist, as the world gets ever more complicated, that non-experts not understanding expert things is a problem with the experts?

Most adults don't understand relativity, so it can't possibly be correct.

> so people wouldn't have to quit their jobs

You would have to work out corruption of the common Joe here. Employers hold massive sway over their employees, and by nature of employing lots of people would have a pretty good chance of employing some fraction of the government. It would need to be possible for these randomly-selected individuals to enact policies that work counter to the interests of their employers without them fearing for their livelihood after their term. Otherwise, we just make lobbying cheap or free: “all of you—vote for this or else.” I think, at minimum, companies should be unable to terminate such individuals for some cooldown period after their term.

Or keep their deliberations and votes secret. "Hey boss. I don't know what you are talking about. Of course I voted for the thing you wanted me to vote for. It must have been all the other suckers."

the vote to increase minimum wage was unanimous Krisoft!

:D Good point. I was thinking about unanimous votes and how they would leak information. Didn't want to over-complicate my comment, but I have a proposal for those too.

What I think we should do, is if the votes are close to unanimous as a matter of policy we report them only as "close to unanimous" without going into numbers. So for example if we have 100 delegates, and 95 voted for, and 5 against we just say "the vote was close to unanimous". And we do the same thing if the true vote was 100/0. All which would get published is that "the vote was close to unanimous", and the actual tally would get destroyed.

Maybe the threshold could be 10 people. So if the vote was 89/11 we would still publish that, but anything more one sided would just get reported as "close to unanimous" up to and including real unanimous votes.

It would still communicate the same thing: an overwhelming majority of delegates agreed on the thing being voted on. But would keep a fig-leaf of deniability for those who might otherwise be pressured.

That being said. I don't think people would vote unanimously on raising the minimum wage. Especially if the number of delegates is high (100 or above). You would get some people who either own a small business, or worry about the economy.

It seems to me that employers would just say: "Well you failed to get everyone else to vote for it, so you're fired."

Treat it like jury duty or reservists called up for military service. To the best of my knowledge, both of those already have legal protections ensuring your job is there when you return.

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