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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

Most modern incarnations of this idea revolve around Citizen Assemblies. Ireland, as an example, convened a citizen assembly in order to discuss and propose reforms on topics like abortion, climate change, and political reform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Assembly_(Ireland)

The idea behind Citizens Assembly isn't very controversial. Randomly select a large pool of citizens, have them discuss a topic in great detail with plenty of testimony from experts, and then vote on their recommendations.

In concept, this is very similar to how courtroom juries operate. We don't just let millions of people vote on whether a defendant is innocent or guilty. We instead pick a smaller pool of jurors, force them to sit through weeks of expert testimony and arguments from both sides, after which they cast their votes. Hence why there is a movement to similarly have courtroom juries elect our political representatives as well

https://www.electionbyjury.org/

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I'm always impressed how many of our problems were solved very long ago (in this case, we know Athenians did "Citizen Assemblies" more than a thousand years ago) but then our systems slowly decay and the solution is lost.

That means a well working democratic country with a working welfare and social net will eventually degrade into some random authoritarian shithole. That scares me.

Not true: While frame as "the holy first democratic state", most people were excluded: The ones who were allowed to vote/elect, were mainly the rich upperclass, Women, Slaves, Children etc. weren allowed to participate / attend.

yes, but at the time, they were considered property. With the system the way it currently is, only the rich get to play.

The only way in which this is relevant is if the populations of voters are different in ways that affect the voting mechanism. For all we care they could have been warlord cannibals: all that matters is that we can use the same mechanism.

I mean, if the oppressed where allowed to vote in free and fair elections then they would likely have been oppressed less.

The election of the GOP in the States recently seems to offer a counter to your view.

One of my favorite quotes re: the classics:

"Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago."

Well, seeing how easy it is to get such an answer, I think the most important thing is that people do raise questions and search for the answer.

A bigger problem to me is that so many stopped questioning.

Keep in mind that Athenian democracy was ended through conquest by Macedon, not internal collapse.

I don't see why not just skip the "representatives" part and have juries vote on laws directly.

If you take away the little power people have to influence the government, why not at least do it without adding another layer of indirection?

The idea of a representative is flawed from the start to begin with. There is probably no single person in my country who agrees with me on everything. Therefore any person I choose to represent myself is only an approximation of what I really want.

I increasingly feel like the belief that people need to be ruled by powerful individuals (or worse, i single individual) comes from some primitive need that evolved back when combat ability was your group's primary predictor of survival.

Yea one nice characteristic of a representative democracy is that the voting is a rough approximation of who would win if the swords (guns, whatever) came out and it devolved into civil war. But without the bloodshed and loss.

Doesn't work as well as a proxy in the modern age with our level of technology though I suppose.

In theory, I think the argument for juries electing candidates is one of efficiency: back in normal times, there were many, many issues facing Congress in a given year, and they would pass lots of legislation to handle those issues. Empaneling a new jury for each update to the farm bill or appropriation of money for some random government program seems like a lot of overhead. On the other hand, in the current ridiculous US atmosphere, it seems like Congress only passes a couple bills each session, which are enormous omnibus spending bills using strategic pork and legislative tricks to bypass the consensus-based rules that used to be easy to meet before polarization. I don’t think that’s a good condition though.

I agree that the extreme, though, where a jury elects a monarch, would be excessive. I would be interested in a system where separate juries elect government ministers (e.g. Defence, Education, Housing, etc), so that there would be a better chance that average people’s opinions could be taken into account in the running of each of the government agencies, instead of having all of them run by the same ideology because they’re all appointed by one party or president.

If you have independent votes on everything then you run the risk that there are a bunch of mutually-incompatible things that all get majority approval.

(Would you rather higher taxes or lower? Lower, of course. Higher state pensions or lower? Higher, of course. Stronger or weaker military? Stronger, of course. Better or worse infrastructure? Better, of course. More teachers or fewer? More, of course. More national debt or less? Less, of course. Etc.)

This doesn't require any individual person to be irrational or forgetful or anything, although in fact people frequently are.

Also, whoever selects just which things get voted on has a great deal of power, more than most elected representatives have. If those people are elected then you've effectively got a representative democracy after all; if not, then arguably you've effectively not got a democracy at all.

Representative government as such doesn't solve this problem, but in practice it means that a candidate or party proposes a whole basket of policies to get judged collectively, and between when they get into power and when the electorate decides whether they did a good enough job to elect them again there's enough time for a wide variety of those different interacting things all to have happened and either worked well or not.

I don't want to claim that this works particularly well. But it feels to me like any sort of direct democracy would likely work much worse.

(Maybe there's scope for a hybrid system: elections every few years for representatives who are then obliged to put various classes of major decision to a national vote.)

I dream of this so much. I’ve spent a lot of time in court around juries. It is truly amazing how reasonable people are, how much they listen, and how seriously they take the process. Seeing how regular people acted in jury duty is one of the few things that gives me hope about our country.

By and large, if you give a “Regular Person” a “Solemn Important Duty”, they rise to it and give it their best. We should seek to cultivate institutions that do this far more often.

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