Random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions
assemblingamerica.substack.com
assemblingamerica.substack.com
Acts 1:21-26 Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.” So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. Then they prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs.” Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.
Can you imagine this practice replacing the Papal conclave? Or, pastor selection at your favorite Protestant group?
I strongly believe that this is how you solve elections, admissions, and recruitment (or, at least, get closer to an ideal solution).
https://www.volkswagenstiftung.de/en/originality-and-quality...
Which I absolutely love, having wasted months of my life applying for 'regularly' chosen grants and having quasi-random outcomes, without a lottery.
So, the random selection mentioned here may have actually been a fault of Peter's and not something the Bible is endorsing as a means to choose leadership; possibly quite the opposite in this case.
Impetuous or not, Peter was likely influenced by the many decisions made by lots in the Hebrew Scriptures. e.g., picking a scapegoat (Leviticus 16:7-10), assigning priestly duties (1 Chronicles 24), dividing land (1 Chronicles 6:54), etc. Furthermore, Proverbs 16:33 & 18:18 indicates the outcome of lots is from God and reduces conflict.
Anyway, ascribing random processes to the divine for decision making, particularly political situations seems to have strong textual support within the Judeo-Christian tradition. I'm curious about parallels in Islam and other offshoots.
He did not speak of casting lots as being something never endorsed in the Bible, more just for this particular passage, it might not be the takeaway Luke is aiming for. Agree with all your points on 'chance' often being used in scripture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_of_Venice#Selection_of_th...
> New regulations for the elections of the doge introduced in 1268 remained in force until the end of the republic in 1797. Their intention was to minimize the influence of individual great families, and this was effected by a complex electoral machinery. Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge.
The Copts still pick their pope by lot. Of course only from three preselected candidates but still.
Trusted by those that have not looked into whether this is actually the case. The first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was famously against trial by jury, because of how easily lawyers can abuse biases in multiracial societies, based on his first-hand experience [1].
A UK study found his experience is the norm, not the exception - Black and minority ethnic (BME) jurors vote guilty 73% of the time against White defendants, but only 24% of the time against BME defendants [2]. (White jurors vote 39% and 32% for convicting White and BME defendants, respectively. You read that correctly - Whites are also biased against other Whites, but to a much lesser degree)
Edit: To answer what is the alternative to juries: Not all countries use juries, in some the decision is up to the judge, and in some, like France, they use a mixed system of judges and jurors on a panel [3]. The French system would be my personal preference, with the classic jury system coming in second, despite my jury-critical post. Like democracy, it's perhaps the least bad system that we have, but we shouldn't be under any illusions about how impartial and perceptive a group of 12 people selected at random is.
[1] https://postcolonialweb.org/singapore/government/leekuanyew/...
[2] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/judicial-institute/sites/judicial-inst... - page 165 (182 by pdf reader numbering), figure 6.4
And it usually isn't a single judge. There is a panel of judges or en banc.
And juries aren't universal either. Lots of other countries don't have juries but they have a fair and equitable justice system. Look up civil law vs common law.
which is to say the reason I trust judges is the jury keeps them in check by ensuring there isn't value in the above corruption.
But there's huge selection bias in who becomes a judge, and so we end up with a pool of people who are mostly former prosecutors, which is another pool with a huge selection bias.
All of the judges I know personally (though not all I've been around) are well-meaning, fair-minded people, but with maybe one exception they're all true believers in the fairness of the system, and all tend to give tremendous unearned deference to prosecutors. We should absolutely not make them the finders of fact in criminal cases.
Of course you are not entitled to a jury trial in e.g. France unless you are accused of something very serious.
If there are many factual disputes in a case maybe use multiple juries with each jury only deciding on a subset of the facts, chosen so that no jury sees the entire case. They are less likely to be biased if they don't see the entire case.
Sucks, as this level of cherry-picking heavily biases me against the premise. If someone has a good data set, they don't need to drive anecdotes from the outliers. And if they are, is it an attempt to hide that the overall data paints a different picture?
Any juror who knows about the concept of jury nullification is more likely to use it when the defendant reminds them of themselves or when the prosecution has so vastly disproportionate resources over the defendant that the trial can’t possibly be fair.
Then argue it, because that's a pretty large thing to say unsupported
Edit: Not sure why I am being downvoted, I tried to say the same thing dmonitor said.
It seems safe to assume that the LAPD also did/does this to less famous people of color, in which case a higher rate of voting to acquit would not indicate bias by the jury.
I agree with you. I followed it closely at the time, and thought acquittal was the correct verdict based (only) on what the jury saw. We court-watchers, of course, saw everything that the defense managed to exclude, and came to a different (and I do believe more accurate) conclusion, but the jury got it - from their (deliberately constructed by the defense) point of view - right.
It was a formative episode in my civic understanding.
We also have to ask - if the biases in that study were flipped, if White jurors were far more likely to convict BME defendants, and pardon White defendants, and BME jurors were the more even-handed ones, would this not be trumpeted as conclusive evidence of racism?
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-derbyshire-66959198
[2] https://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/24515551.london-disord...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/08/pens...
Sort of like how removing names, ages and photos from resumes removes demographic biases and makes one focus on the actual skillset.
(I’m not sure if this is a good idea, merely wondering if it was tried.)
Otherwise the court starts to include elements of theatrics and objective truth starts to give way to how one presents their case, such as what sort of appearance litigants make. E.g., whenever they're speaking confidently or, say, stuttering nervously. While this can be relevant information (e.g. if someone refuses to look in the eyes it could be a sign one's lying), there are multitude of ways it can be deceiving (e.g. if someone refuses to look in the eyes it could be that they find eye contact generally uncomfortable, for example folks with anxiety disorders do that).
Presenting both litigants through a Vtuber-like interface that re-synthesizes voices, adjusts some patterns of speech (like replacing names with placeholders, or making language gender-neutral), reduces non-verbal signalling, and provides neutral appearances to both parties, feels like something that can make litigants, judge and juries all focus on the abstract ideas of what took place, potentially allowing for a more clear and neutral judgement.
But - of course - it's also perfectly possible that it would fail in some way I fail to foresee.
But the truth of the matter is that in the United States at least, this is all irrelevant. No one gets a trial anymore, not in practice. Everything is plea bargain. Between 95 and 99 out of 100 cases is resolved in that manner, and the common opinion is that there is no capacity to give anyone trials at all.
> We also have to ask - if the biases in that study were flipped, if White jurors were far more likely to convict BME defendants, and pardon White defendants, and BME jurors were the more even-handed ones, would this not be trumpeted as conclusive evidence of racism?
Yes, but why is this relevant? That’s not the case in the statistics you cited.
My comment was pointing out that there are multiple possible (probably simultaneous) causes for the jury statistics.
It's relevant as an indicator of the bias, or lack thereof, of the system as a whole.
[0]https://www.ucl.ac.uk/judicial-institute/sites/judicial-inst... - page iv
Even though the defendant’s ethnicity did not have an impact on jury verdicts, the research found that in certain cases ethnicity did have a significant impact on the individual votes of some jurors who sat on these juries. Statistical analysis of the individual votes of all 319 jurors who took part in the case simulation showed that in certain cases BME jurors were significantly less likely to vote to convict a BME defendant than a White defendant. [..]
The report concludes that this highlights the benefits of permitting majority verdicts and of having 12 member juries. The fact that 12 jurors must jointly try to reach a decision and that majority verdicts are possible meant that more verdicts were achieved and individual biases did not dictate the decision-making of these racially mixed juries. If juries were smaller or if unanimous verdicts were required, then individual juror bias might potentially have a greater impact on jury verdicts.
Sure, but this is a non-statement without qualifying anything behind it. You can defeat any argument by claiming its "multi-faceted". Just like how I am doing to you right now, but instead forcing you into the position where you lack evidence to dismiss.
How? My statement could not be correct if the data was instead: BME jurors vote guilty 73% of the time against White defendants, but only 24% of the time against BME defendants; and White jurors vote guilty 39% of the time against White defendants and 52% (instead of the cited 32%) against BME defendants.
Well, yeah, that’s why data itself doesn’t “show” anything on its own. You first need competing explanations of reality, and then data might help you choose one explanation over another.
> [3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/08/pens...
From the article: William Nelson Morgan, 69, was sentenced to 32 months in prison, having previously admitted violent disorder and carrying a cosh during a riot on County Road in Liverpool on Saturday.
Sounds like he engaged in violence and was carrying a weapon.
Seems that you didn’t read the article you have linked or your definition of engaging in violence is rather obtuse.
Surely you would not equate standing still when a policeman orders you to move and then resisting when they to forcibly move you to murdering a random person for no particular reason? Nor would you agree that the second violent offense deserves a significantly more lenient punishment than the first?
Over-prosecution of minorities is a documented bias.
No, if the biases were flipped, this kind of study would still not be evidence of racism. In the context of all the other studies and the history of slavery and racism, it is reasonable to _guess_ that white jurors are not discriminating against white defendants, and that sampling bias is to blame.
I’m not making a value judgement; I was just pointing out other explanations of the statistics.
BME = black and minority ethnic
This assumes that Whites and BMEs going to trial are equally likely to be guilty.
Shouldn't we assume there would be some hidden delta?
Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind.
Since the linked article is to a substack called “Assemble America” I feel I should point out that if the apportionment House of Representatives had not been capped at 435 reps, the House would indeed be several thousand strong by now.
So bottom line, I’m not so sure is so important that representatives are laywers. Maybe a good mix should be ok?
The majority of the bills are written by lobbyists. Most of the bills introduced are so called "copycat" bills.
USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.
Special interests sometimes work to create the illusion of expert endorsements, public consensus or grassroots support. One man testified as an expert in 13 states to support a bill that makes it more difficult to sue for asbestos exposure. In several states, lawmakers weren’t told that he was a member of the organization that wrote the model legislation on behalf of the asbestos industry, the American Legislative Exchange Council.
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...
Ambiguities get adjudicated and then built into the next version of the rulebook and so it goes with laws. Terms are given specific meaning over time by court decision and are used as boilerplate.
We just passed that "big beautiful bill" and it was quite clear nobody knew or cared what was in it, beyond it being "trump's bill he wants". I'm guessing staffers and lobbyists had a far more detailed understanding of their portions than any elected official did.
It's a reasonable guess that 100 randos would actually write a better bill.
- modest proposal: yes, have X random people in government, but have a Y-month paid training period before they serve for Z years; ALSO ensure their families want for nothing (read, a decent non-luxurious lifestyle), but prohibit receiving money from lobbyists, PACs, gifts, etc... AND, ensure they get reintegrated into society in a nonpolitical field (with some exceptions) by also offering Y-month long paid training in different fields.
The corruption costs reduction would significantly outweigh any increase in payroll and training.
* Campaign Finance Reform
* End Citizens United
* Ranked choice voting (or a variant of same).
* Expand the Supreme Court
* Expand the House (and make provisions that keep it updated with each census).
* Statehood for US territories.
The systemic problems with our democracy seem pretty clear, really.
Interesting. Looking in from a country with a smaller lower house, I think members in the US are already so numerous they seem to fade to the background and their survival becomes mostly about party politics not making a good impression on their district. It's not like most of them could make a good speech while most members are present and listening. Only senators seem individually important enough to make a name for themselves (with the exception of the speaker etc).
But I've never lived and voted in the US so maybe I'm missing something important here.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_generation_sustainabilit...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longtermism#Deprioritization_o...
One very thorny issue is the fact that our system of government is built on respect for the law and the institutions, but the current regime has learned they can just do whatever they want with virtual impunity. They brought tanks, drones and nukes to a knife fight, and the other side is completely unarmed and trying to talk them out of the fight.
We are so fucked.
So no more union political contributions?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Bases_and_Starting_Poin...
“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” Mark Twain
Ideally, the lower house are representatives elected from the common people, and the upper house are the career politicians that understand how the government works.
In the U.S., the 17th amendment[2] changed that, for better or worse (probably both).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
IIRC it's actually somewhat rare to have a bicameral legislature where both houses have roughly symmetrical powers.
- A randomly selected lower house with an elected upper house (or the reverse)
- policy juries which deliberate only on one specific piece of legislation, which then must be approved by a separate oversight jury before taking effect
- election by jury, where candidates are chosen by "elector juries" who interview and vet the candidates before selecting one
- multi-layer representative selection based on the Venetian model where randomly selected bodies elect representatives, of whom a random subset are chosen to then appoint officials
Right now the lottocratic/sortition-based bodies that exist are purely advisory, though in some places like Paris and Belgium they have gained a good amount of soft power.
It wouldn't be that hard to implement a conservative version of one of these in certain US states though. For example, add "elect by jury" to the ballot, where if it wins the plurality, a grand jury is convened to select the winner (counties in Georgia already use grand juries to appoint their boards of equalization, so there is precedent).
1. A filtering mechanism after the selection process. E.g., basic civics questions like how many states are there, a background check, and so on. To make sure you don't pick anyone that's compromised or incapable of serving.
2. A training program that acclimates new members to the system. If terms are say, six years long, then the first year can be entirely devoted to training.
A more organic version of this would be to select at random from people who already served at a lower level. Pick random citizens for city council, then for state you pick from the pool of people who have been city councillors in the past, then for country you pick from people who have already served at the state level. You could, in addition, add past picks to a "veteran pool" to ensure a small percentage of the legislature has been there before and can suffuse their experience.
This is a famously bad idea for U.S. politics.
Like, if you started a grass roots organization with this as your #1 idea, you'd have to eventually dismantle the entire edifice as 100% of your time would be spent answering questions about how this is different than tactics of the Jim Crow era. You'd also make yourself radioactive to any future grassroots efforts: e.g., "Citizens for an Educated Congress: wait a sec, is this that Jim Crow Guy again?" :)
There are some strong outliers but most are way below the bar of random selection. Do-nothing political nepo babies who are nothing but loud and in a gerrymandered district.
Getting your team control of a branch of government is way more important than having a 'good' rep in your district, because if you don't, they won't have any ability to do anything for it anyways.
If you couldn't get someone you wanted in the primaries, you just have to hold your nose, close your eyes, lie back, and vote for whomever made it through.
Whether this results in long term problems is a bit of an academic question, given that every election in the past decade is one where you either get to vote for the status quo, or an insane cult of personality.
Little do they realize that a more proportional system that would have them elect reps from the "bad" party in order to get them reps in the ruling party to advocate internally for Alberta does have benefits...
2. Canadian Liberals aren't US MAGA, when they win an election they don't spend six months in caucus to figure out how they can do their best to punish the provinces and people that didn't vote for them.
There's a lot of far-right propaganda in Alberta that implies #2 is happening, but it's not actually factual. Its oil & gas sector has reached record output under the Trudeau government, and Carney is not exactly looking to kill it, either.
Transfer payments are really the only legitimate grievance Alberta should have with the federal government. All of its other problems are either imagined, self-inflicted, are caused by other provinces, or are caused by the US.
I'm going to gently push back on that one a bit. Partially, yes, but also in part due to the federal government deferring to provinces in cases where it actually has the constitutional authority to override them.
Well seems even the "home team" cant do anything either, so why not go for better candidates.
When I was in 4th grade, we struggled with public education, healthcare, etc. Now I have 4th graders of my own and they struggle with the same issues. No progress in a generation.
Our political system effectively selects for sociopathic con men. So would you prefer your laws to be written by those people vs a random group?
“I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” - William F Buckley Jr
“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” - Douglas Adams
Here in the US, we use randomized groups of citizens to determine who gets locked away potentially for life or executed. Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?
Those are screened.
Someone like https://youtu.be/00q5cax96yU?t=60 could be selected without some additional constraints than plain sortition. Ofc then those constraints are politicized.
Honestly, yes. In the case of criminal culpability, it just happens to be the least scary of the available options of who gets to send someone to jail.
For lawmaking, this isn't the case: the work for lawmakers is much more detailed and gameable than a binary question of guilt.
Not selecting absolute random people, but people who have established their ability to intelligently handle responsibility, and avoid breaking the law. E.g., once you have achieved a certain level of educational attainment (3.0+ at well-ranked college, managerial-level at established biz, certain mil leadership rank, etc.), pass security clearance, pass citizenship test, etc., you are in the qualified pool, and may be called upon to serve in a legislature. The always-a-newbie problem could be solved by allowing legislators to serve 2nd or maybe 3rd terms by re-election/confidence vote. Same for POTUS, possibly selected by sortition out of the existing legislators who pass a confidence vote.
There is no way a reasonably and responsibly selected random group of achieving responsible people would do worse than a corrupt or craven group, especially worse than the selected-for-corruption — i.e., selected for loyalty-to-leader — currently seated.
Accept anyone from Jebus University with its miraculous 100% graduation rate, exclude anyone with a record of "Disrespecting an Officer", and the pool is quickly skewed, a reinforcing feedback-loop in favor of the groups doing the skewing.
It is a method to help maintain a balanced distributon of power, not created it when already gone awry.
In democracies, the branches of govt, legislative, executive, & judicial, and the institutions of society including the press, academia, industry, finance, sport, religion, etc. are all independent and serve to distribute and balance power. In autocracies, all of those are corrupted and/or coerced to serve the whims of the executive.
So, of course, an already-powerful centralized executive would be able to corrupt it as you describe.
But it seems much more difficult to make it happen in a well-balanced system, particularly when some have the responsibility to ensure ongoing fairness.
Do you have a better solution?
If we want to be very careful about a reform like this, we should test it at a smaller scale, such as a city for instance. We can start without any criteria and see if that works well enough. If it does, no need to overcomplicate things.
It is not merely adding qualifying criteria, it is setting qualifications AND sortition to select legislators and executives.
>>solve a problem that hasn't been demonstrated to exist ...The main threat to a well-functioning society are people acting in bad faith.
Your second sentence there is entirely correct, and specifically disproves the first. We have a problem
>>we should test it at a smaller scale, such as a city for instance
100% agree, we should test and adjust any changes before scaling up
>>start without any criteria and see if that works well enough
We've pretty much demonstrated that it doesn't
>>uneducated people may not be very effective in coming up with solutions, but their presence is important to remind educated people of their existence.
We do not need to hand uneducated people the keys to power to be reminded of their existence, any more than we should give loaded handguns to toddlers to be reminded of their existence. Intelligent people suitable for leadership can remember the existence of both just fine, thank you. Moreover, with qualified sortition, the selection is random so it is highly likely that qualified, educated, accomplished people who are adjacent to people with issues will be p[ut in power and able to do something for them
I disagree with your example, but things like deciding supreme court justices over the population of judges or department heads over the population of professors seem quite ok.
For lawmaking in particular, it looks like a bad idea. There will be lots of people trying to con the uninformed representatives into behaving badly.
But I don't see how this fixes the problem currently plaguing US politics which is that elected representatives are passing bulls designed by lobbyists that the representatives don't understand well.
As I got older, I've leaned more and more into meritocracy.
If we did something like this in the US, we'd have quite a religious/irrational group of leaders. Whereas with a meritocracy, you have at least some filter. The status quo requires politicians to have a bit of an understanding of human nature. Its not flawless, I've seen inferior people beat superiors by using biases, but these were relatively equal races. I've also seen idiots run for office and never catch steam.
We can also look at history and see that society's that did anything with such equal democratic distribution were less efficient than those who had some sort of merit.
Sad thing is, that it's impossible.
1. Acres of Diamonds. Russell Conwell. 1900. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rconwellacresofdia...
2. The Gospel of Wealth. Andrew Carnegie. 1889. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gospel_of_Wealth
OTOH, people think that rich people made it by hard working.
I’m not saying there is no correlation whatsoever. But there is much less than most think, and great amounts of luck playing a bigger role, including, but not limited to, where you were born, family, contacts, etc.
Often the people who benefit from injustice are the very ones we've tasked with creating justice. It's easier to believe justice will appear on its own than to face the mess of making it ourselves.
But that's not to say that wouldn't also be the case otherwise.
simple: let voters decide. that is, eliminate the concept of pre-selected candidates and let voters select candidates from the entire population. if you need 10 people, give everyone 10 votes. everyone has a different idea what merrit is, but by giving everyone multiple votes the people for which the most voters think they have merrit will emerge as the winners of the election.
That is not because voters are stupid. It is because they are rationally ignorant. Why spend hours researching the issues and candidates for a 1 in 10 million chance of having an impact? It makes no sense. However, if we instead convened "elector juries" of a couple hundred randomly selected citizens and gave them the resources to carefully research and vet the candidates before deliberating on who is best, I think they would do a pretty good job.
It isn't about being discerning. If you are going to vote and you are a swing/politically agnostic voter in a two party system (like the US/UK) you have the following three choices really:
* Vote for the least bad candidate / lesser of two evils.
* Protest Vote. In the US this would be probably the Libertarian Party / Green Party. In England this would be Reform / Liberal Democrats / Greens etc.
* Spoil the Ballet / Abstain from voting.
Red/Blue Team diehards aren't worth talking about as they don't decide elections. It is the swing voters.
> Why spend hours researching the issues and candidates for a 1 in 10 million chance of having an impact? It makes no sense.
It makes no sense because you have two actual choices (Red Team / Blue Team) or effectively to choose to not participate.
Additionally most politically agnostic that are over the age of 30 have worked out that you get shafted whoever you vote for.
In any case, that's just a more chaotic form of representative democracy. It's most certainly not meritocratic in any sense.
It would probably make sense to start with a new new "house" or something.
Might even make sense to have some quotas (at least 50% women etc.), so the whole things doesn't have to get to Chinese government size to reflect the populus.
That or pepple would have to be replaced with high frequency
If it comes out 10% female every sortition cohort, you know some funny business is going on.
My point is that so is the percentage of males in any sortition cohort.
Therefore, a consistent female census of 10% or less in all sortition cohorts, would be as unlikely as a consistent male census of 10% or less in all sortition cohorts.
In other words, having one sortition cohort result in 10% males would not be suspicious. Having every sortition cohort result in 10% males would be suspicious in the extreme. So much so that we should start looking for whoever is "putting their finger on the scale" so to speak.
- Most people filling out their ballots aren't spending very much time on each prop -- they'll typically either vote based on their gut reaction to the title of the prop, follow a voter guide from an advocacy group they want to align with, or just vote based on whose advertising campaign was most influential.
- Ballot props, at least in CA, are pretty much directly pay-to-play. There's a price tag for getting a prop onto the ballot, because signature gathering companies charge per signature. (Though at least in SF, conservative ballot props cost more per signature because there aren't as many conservatives to sign. This implies there's _some_ correlation between the cost and the popularity of a particular proposition.)
- Ballot props are both high-latency and low-bandwidth. Coupled with the fact that they often cannot be overridden except by another ballot prop, and we're basically stuck with any flaw in the bill that passes (unless it's egregious enough that someone's willing to foot the bill for another round of signature gathering and advertising, which will cost about as much as it did for the original bill.)
- Ballot props don't go through several rounds of amendment before being passed, nor do they really have any debate; there's just a single round of "should this be on the ballot" followed by a single round of "should this be law". This means flawed bills are more likely to end up on the ballot. Because of the high latency mentioned above, voters are often stuck with a choice between a bad solution and no solution to whatever problem the ballot prop is trying to solve.
]Further, by eliding deliberation, the initiative process is the worst kind of direct democracy. Except for mob rule, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_democracy
The OP narrowly focuses on the calculus (?) of how randomly choosing reps actually promotes meritocracy.
This wiki article is a good overview of the whole burrito.
The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment. The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere. Ireland also has relatively little money in politics, limits on donations, a standards in public office commission, independent constituency boundary commissions, a multi-seat proportional representation system, limits on media ownership, and the highest percentage of University educated citizens of any country. All in all it's helped Ireland come a long way from the 80s and 90s, when Ireland was much worse on corruption indexes.
Ireland occasionally has a Citizen’s Assembly when the elected politicians feel it is best to do so. The members are supposed to be selected by sortition but this has not always been adhered to. “ Seven replacements joining in January 2018 were removed the following month when it emerged they were recruited via acquaintances of a Red C employee, who was then suspended, rather than via random selection.”
> The process has been very successful at neutralizing contentious topics. The assembly on abortion showed that a healthy majority consensus could emerge, and led to abortion being legalized in Ireland after a constitutional amendment.
You have to give the secretariat their due. They were excellent at getting the right facilitators, who would ensure the Assembly came to the conclusion the government wanted them to. Eventually they messed up and pushed so hard against public opinion that they got the Assembly to vote in favour of deleting mothers from the constitution and in favour of a meaningless expression of respect for carers. Both were then roundly defeated but the Assembly has been great as a way for governments to build consensus by putting their thumb on the scales.
> The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere.
Contemptible. If politicians don’t want to deal with socially divisive topics they should be doing something else with their lives.
> Contemptible. If politicians don’t want to deal with socially divisive topics they should be doing something else with their lives.
That is debatable. Too much concentration on divisive topics can distract from actual governance. We are now so deeply immersed in the social media world that we tend to consider "constantly raging culture war" to be the norm and the expected pivotal point of all politics, but it is more of a disease of the system.
There is no hard principle that politics should be exclusively performed by elected politicians. Even in the US, plenty of states have ballot initiatives, thus outsourcing decisions about some problems to the citizens themselves.
If the Irish system works similarly and reduces the systemic "inflammation", so to say, by outsourcing it to sortition-based bodies, then I would argue that it might be more efficient at governance than the "rip their throats out over scissor statements" standard that now rules the US and many other places in the world.
There are a crazy amount of NGOs in Ireland, 1 for every 155 people, many pushing forward their own political policies and views.
https://unherd.com/newsroom/in-ireland-its-progressives-who-...
> 9 members with IQs under 70 (i.e. mentally handicapped) > 52 members with IQs under 85 > 217 members at or under an IQ of 100 > 370 members with an IQ below the (presumptive) current congressional average of ~115
Congress is terrible, but it's hard to imagine it could be improved by making it less intelligent.
If you could incorporate the OP's point about limited eligibility and "directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool", then a "random" process would likely be superior to elections.
In fact, I would argue that idiots in elected bodies are a lot more likely to do damage than random idiots, because they are more likely to be narcissists, and being elected boosts their sense of self-worth. And of course, the most damage is often caused by the most intelligent of them, because the main problem is acting in bad faith, not a lack of wits.
Citizens' assembly makes policy. But then who implements it?
I (currently) believe that we'd still need executives, still need some kind of balance of powers.
So I'm okay w/ electing mayors, sheriffs, governors, etc. Perhaps even multi-seat roles; something between a council and a mayor.
Assuming, of course, we use approval voting for execs, PR for councils.
- A largely unrecognized problem with our legislature here in the US is vote inflation: the number of representatives in Congress has fallen way behind the population growth, so that one rep is shared by a much larger group of constituents, devaluing the individual vote of each constituent and making it less likely that a given voter has a personal connection with their legislator.
- The increasing partisanship has reduced the number moderate and independent voices in the legislature.
We could increase the number of representatives in Congress by tripling the number of reps from each district, which would bring the rep-to-voter ratio back more in line with where it was when it was essentially frozen in 1929. Then one of those new reps would be chosen at random from a pool. Since the distribution of moderates in the general population is much higher than in Congress, this should have the effect of moderating partisanship.
You can decide to vote, in which case you're removed from the sortition candidate pool. If you don't vote you're in the pool. A common representative body is formed at respective percentages.
This basically makes it so politicians have to race against "some random schmuck". If they can convince people they can do better, nice. Otherwise... too bad.
Of course some people will vote just to get out of the pool, but I think that's fine too.
that sounds like jury duty selection, in the US anyway, and juries are famously dysfunctional at times, with a single member ignoring the rules and trial and just voting politically.
If yes - why is that a problem? They stick to the overarching rule, and you should argue the rules must be amended.
If not - that's a huge problem IMO and can be summarised with "why pretend jury has any say If they must not stray from the way the case is presented and defended (knowing very well how awful public defense is and how dishonest sometimes police and prosecution can be)" and not replace it with just a judge?
I do like sortition for certain scenarios (definitely favour that over a referendum for instance), but I think it'd work better as something that either has to veto some piece of law or can offer amendments or the likes
From a practical point of view the selection process is a bit of a red herring though. The current controls break down because the feedback loop is simply way too long to meaningfully affect the process.
While I personally subscribe to the idea that sortition is a superior way of electing representatives I don't see people considering it seriously. However what everyone can understand is using the same process but with sampling with a higher frequency.
Anyone who has worked in a presidential administration (or a congressional office) can tell you that a leader is effective if and only if they have staff that believes in their message and agenda, and that is willing and able to execute on that agenda.
The practical reality here is that charisma isn't just a way of gaming the "getting elected" part of the job, it's also a requirement to be effective at the job.
I feel one downside of a district-based system like in the US is that it's harder to build up a healthy mix of representatives, where some are more on the charismatic side and others more on the technical "policy wonk" side. Everyone needs to win their own elections, so it's biased too much towards the charismatic side.
My experience with KPIs also doesn't match the poster. KPIs are mostly ignored and it ends up going back to relationships and who has a better "deck" of accomplishments each year.
Do you mean in common use? Wikipedia has a nice page on that [1]. There are also many papers on that [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sort...
I can say "sortition" and "ranked choice voting" and "LVT" and you'd understand what I mean, but to get a broad audience it pays to break it down into concrete ideas like "Random elections" and "More than two political parties" and "Why are we paying landlords to speculate on empty lots?"
I just had a friend complain to me about LeetCode, saying that it's meaningless since everyone just mindlessly grinds the problem sets.
I pointed out to him that it's called studying for the test.
Unfortunately even that gets abused. I dont know how my process went, but I sure know how my kids' experience was. The school wont give you an application, or send you to the head office to apply (even though you can also apply in-school), or they will do the residency screening the last Friday of the application period (too bad if you happen not to be home on the day they visit.) They will sometimes ask you for original deeds or birth certificates (but your friends will tell you they werent asked for it.)
The randomness can be theatre to show public fairness, but in reality it is anything but random.
In fact, if anything, this system seems like it would be even easier to game compared to the status quo. If you select truly at random from the population you're going to pull a lot of people with not a lot in the way of resources, making for a very easy to bribe block, even if you have to repeat the bribes every few years as people shuffle through. If you don't - if you select randomly from, say, only the group of people who got perfect scores on the SATs, or from white land owning males - you're practically begging for tacit collusion as they realize they have essentially the same power that HOAs do when it comes to what we'll do next. Democratically elected politicians at least have enough sense to understand they have to balance their short run desires with their long run interests in continuing to be democratically elected politicians.
[1]: Which I don't admit we should in the first place, cf https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm for one reason why.
Mechanisms that effectively prevent this do exist in the literature, to be clear, but I rarely hear of those ones actually getting implemented.
That said, the US used to have quite a lot of juror bribery in the late 1800s and managed to successfully crack down on it with harsh penalties, sting operations, and other strategies. Attempting to bribe a juror can get you 15 years in federal prison in the US, it's not taken lightly.
Being an electrician makes you good at wiring houses in ways that work, that pass code inspections, and that don't burn down. The feedback loop isn't perfect (you're likely to succeed for a while if you produce flawed work fast that looks good enough to your boss), but it's at least feeding back in the right direction.
Being a politician makes you good at different things - fundraising, advertising, speeches, getting your name in the news - which are totally unrelated or even opposed to creating and executing legislation that is good for society. Sortition says that this relationship is so bad that the outcome under a lottery (the 50th percentile, eliminating the 49% of the population who would be better than average at the job) results in better outcomes than career politicians.
Most politicians outside the narrow world of US national (or otherwise high-profile) politics have very little contact with fundraising or advertising and few will ever give a speech to more than a handful of people. I.e. most parliamentarian democracies are chuck full of politicians that even most of their direct constituents couldn't name with a gun to their heads, even at the national level.
In these kind of systems, actual expertise is really important and political parties will cultivate subject-matter experts and provide them with secure seats or list positions without necessarily putting them into front-row politics. It's just the smart thing to do, if you actually want to have any effect after winning an election.
This is incorrect: elected politicians are much easier to bribe, because bribery of them is totally legal via campaign contributions. It's both expected and indeed necessary for politicians to ask for and take large amounts of money from others for their job.
Policing corruption of randomly selected citizens would be much easier, because the expectation is that none of them would be asking for money or accepting money for their jobs. With strict auditing, anything out of the ordinary would be pretty easy to spot. The problem with the current system is that vast transfers of money to legislators are perfectly ordinary.
Also, with random selection, the odds are higher of finding one or more inherently honest and ethical people who will blow the whistle if there's some kind of mass bribery scheme. But our current pay-to-play election system is a mass bribery scheme. Ask any politician how much time they spend fundraising: it's just a crazy % of their time. You may think politicians are lazy because they take so many breaks from legislating, but they're actually taking breaks to go out and fundraise.
Anyway, I think it's a misconception that poorer people are easier to bribe than richer people. It's also a misconception that richer people are "more successful". In my experience, richer people tend to be more obsessed with money. Many average people just want to be happy, have a family, have friends, enjoy life. They are satisfied with what they have. The only purpose of their job is to make it possible for them to go home from their job. Whereas people at the top never seem to be satisfied with what they have and always want more, more, more.
In a representative democracy, because of the very nature of the selection process at hand, it means "getting elected at all costs". Which is not all the same - and in many cases directly counter to - the desired goal of "governing well".
My take away from this is that uniformed people will believe exactly what you tell them to believe. The tremendous effort that goes into that distracts from the responsibilities or running an organization. So, don't let the unexperienced dictate the criteria for success. I see this a lot in software, people without experience attempting to artificially dictate the terms of success.
From my perspective, the fundamental justification for sortition is that randomly selected citizens are more representative of the general public and, crucially, less corrupt and corruptible on average than elected representatives.
Why less corrupt? Because I think people who seek power are more corrupt and self-centered on average than those who have power thrust upon them. Why less corruptible? Because randomly selected citizens don't have to fundraise for political campaigns, and they are merely temporary occupants of their seats, not running for reelection and becoming career politicians. As far as I'm concerned, political campaign contributions are legalized bribery. It would be easier to police citizen legislator corruption, because we allow crap from elected officials—campaign contributions, gifted travel, post-legislator lobbying jobs—that we really should make totally illegally and jailable. A lot of "working class" politicians suddenly become super-wealthy after leaving office, and we all know it's quid pro quo. Just outright ban that crap and strictly audit former legislators.
Meritocracy is one of those nonsense words like "rationalism" or "objectivism" that means "just do the obviously right thing". Like "democratic" and "republic" it's more about the flavor and the mouthfeel than anything concrete.
So I think some US right-wingers have been using "meritocracy" as a fig leaf for hurting their usual victims - Poor people, old people, children, women, queer people, black people, brown people, etc. - While saying "Oh we just think that the most qualified people should be in charge" even though their qualification is like, being a billionaire white supremacist, and not actually going to law school or being a good person at all.
So then the online left wing response is somewhere between "What they're doing isn't really meritocracy, because they've appointed pathetically underqualified justices to the Supreme Court following an obvious agenda that they explicitly said they would follow" (True but too sophisticated to fit on a protest sign) and "Meritocracy is bad, actually" (Too deep in the words of Leftist Theory to gather an audience, but online leftists might agree with it)
So the article is saying "Doing a naive first-order meritocracy results in a system that is ripe for corruption and capture. If we add a lot of randomness, it will resist corruption, and then we'll get the meritocracy we actually want."
The ends justify the means. If it gets people to agree with my vision, I support any wording.
This ignores the fact that "getting people to agree to the policy" is, in fact, extremely important and highly dependent on charisma, eloquence, and the ability to identify and form influential connections. This position imagines human politics devoid of politics and humans.
Suffice it to say, I don't want my phone jockeys taking on engineering duties.
After that, the actual representative is selected by a lottery from these people.
My thought was that the parties can't really fight each other. They are forced to pick the best candidate amongst themselves and during the fight, the competition will be intra party. People can select whom they want. The final decision will be random but among people who who the public likes so that will be okay too. The incentives seems to align in a way that beneficial for the public.
However, it'd be complicated to run and probably expensive too so I'm not sure it'd be practical.
From an environmental POV, this was absolutely useless as the government ignored most of their proposals in the end, but from an experimentation POV, it did demonstrate the viability of "citizens focus groups". In a few sessions over the course of about a year, those 150 random citizens got to meet with actual experts of climate science and french law, and became knowledgeable enough to make informed proposals that actually looked quite good.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climat...
We don't want to discourage people from improving once they've met the bar. Learning a skill is often logarithmically distributed: it costs just as much to learn the first 50% as the next 25% and so on. At a minimum, to keep people cost-agnostic, we need
d/dx Pr(selected | didn't learn x%) ~ log(x%)
selection weight = [x log x - x + 1] * C
There is just no evidence that like 50 point differences in admissions tests are predictive of anything.
An 800 on the math section is not enough to even predict if someone made it to the AIME, but it is enough to predict that they spent several weeks taking SAT math section practice tests. It's clearly failing to be predicative of anything the top universities should be looking for. It doesn't mean all standardized tests have to be. The AMC (and then the AIME + USAMO) are standardized tests that universities like MIT do accept scores from, and they actually get useful information from.
Why not just evaluate a cut-off for “very likely to do well” and then make it random?
It’s not like the narrow set of skills measured by the test are all there is to doing well at university. They are never going to be fully predictive.
Sufficient preparation can mitigate low scores, they can't mitigate bad luck.
:s/preparation/wealth/g
I'm very aware there are things a test can't measure. I feel like you should have been the one to bring up these things, but here are a few examples:
- Artistic creativity
- Maker ability
- Entrepeunership
- Political power
I think the issue is, since you didn't identify what a test is missing out on, you weren't sure how to take it into account with university admissions. I have a question for you: do you think someone who is just below the cutoff based on the test, but started a business worth $10m, just does not deserve to be entered into the lottery? That'd be propesterous. So, what is the solution? More holistic admissions that try to take into account these harder-to-put-a-number-on skills.
Plus, you can't get much worse than the 2014 Committee for Science, Space and Technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPgZfhnCAdI
Merit is measured in imperfect ways, by other people, and fundamentally, we don't want a hierarchy of classes, even if we claim the higher rankings/elites have merited it.
Human dignity isn't contingent on outperforming others, and everyone would likely rather live somewhere that doesn't feel like constant competition is needed to enjoy leisure, food, shelter, pastimes, etc.
When it comes to who we should trust for critical work, taking decisions on our behalf, etc., we do want someone qualified. I find the idea of "qualification/qualified" much nicer than "merit". The latter seems to imply a deserved outsized reward, like it justifies not why you are given the responsibility of something important, but why you are allowed to be richer, higher ranking, etc., than others.
The key here is that while meritocracy is championed as a means of finding the best, it in reality functions as a system to keep out the worst. You want harness the ambitions in people, even if not everyone's ambitions can actually be met, and you want to mitigate the harms of nepotism, even when eliminating it entirely is impossible.
So the difference between qualifications and merit evaluation are moot from my perspective, the question you need to ask is if whatever selection criteria you prefer is vulnerable to ladder kicking. If you preferred way is more vulnerable than the current system then you are putting the cart in front of the horse.
Also to make my position clear, I can't tell either way in regards to what you have suggested. As far as I was aware, we already select based on qualifications, so it's unclear to me what the exact change you are proposing is.
You get in a situation where no one questions the system that evaluated someone's merit, and that system becomes easy to control, so the criteria become that those that are already in power are the only ones that meets it.
> your country will start to fall behind the others, and your quality of life will start to rot
I think this idea also needs to be toned down, many countries have as good or better quality of life than the US and China, yet they are way down whatever competitive latter you want to look at, GDP, military power, land mass, etc. I think corruption as a metric correlates a lot more to QOL than any of those.
I see Meritocracy as a deterring force against corruption so I'm sensing some semantic discord here. A nation that starts to rot will be taken advantage of by external entities which will result in a drop on QoL. While GDP and such can somewhat approximate national power, they seem a bit tangential to the discussion imo, the point is rot invites parasites.
> What I am seeing is that the value system behind meritocracy is too close to my liking to self-appointed superiority. I am rich and powerful because I am the smartest, fastest, strongest, and worked the hardest. No one else deserves my position of power unless they too are rich, and if they are not rich, they are not smart and don't merit such position. The idea of merit I think can be subterfuged, old Egyptian leaders were thought to be Gods, so it was deemed they were the only ones that could merit to rule.
But that's the opposite of Meritocracy? Or rather, it's like you are confusing the cause and effort perhaps? It's an oppositional force to the default nepotistic hereditary nobility type systems, which will naturally emerge in every system that does not account for it, these are absolutes. Caveat being that the means of avoiding it are nuanced ofc.
The point is you design systems where positions of power are selected on (best effort) neutral criteria that at minimum narrows the candidate pool down in a way that the preserves a degree of instability, and through which helps prevent calcification of power structures. With a Meritocracy the criteria is via a demonstration of merit/qualifications/evidence you are the most capable for the position.
It does not give someone license to act as if their wealth justifies their position, that's just a simple narcissist. Meritocracy is just a good general principle to follow when designing the process of selection, it's not some complex ideology. Having power never implies you earned it, your merits do, and society is the judge of what exactly those merits are.
You also focus on wealth a lot so I'm wondering if you are primarily pushing back on the thought that having wealth qualifies as intellectual merit? Because if so I very much agree, but I also rarely see this from anyone but narcissists who don't even need a reason to think that in the first place, their conclusion came first. But maybe this is just a blind spot for me.
Money is power, and our modern economic system has made the liquidation of wealth into money easier than ever. It has helped shift power struggles from violent to competitive and allowed some innovative types of tax policy to become possible. But that doesn't make our economy a Meritocracy, what we have is closer to natural selection, where any snake can kill a lion and so on. The perks of capitalism are entirely from it's ability to parry these inevitable power struggles into something society can gain a net benefit from through the innovation that arises from healthy competition. It's impossible to eliminate the power struggles themselves though, those are human nature.
I can see how the concepts can be confused but fundamentally it's a brain (skills) vs brawn (power) thing. A meritocracy advocates for selecting for the most skilled not the most powerful. It's only practical to enforce on a institutional level though.
Merit is defined as:
> the quality of being particularly good or worthy, especially so as to deserve praise or reward
It doesn't accidentally emphasize the fact that it chooses those "worthy of praise and reward"
This is literally part of the term, and I see this ingrained as well often in the ideas and those behind it.
It can be used to justify why you're eating a thousand dollar steak you can't even finish, while someone else goes hungry. You are deserving of it, they are not.
This is what I think we collectively need to tone down: the part about being deserving of praise and reward. We should emphasize only the part about being particularly good.
Off course, the more you benefit others and society, the more it should benefit you. We need this reward mechanism to incentivize people to take risks, and put the work/effort, or be dedicated to certain endeavors that society needs. I'm not questioning that. But it's not because you are deserving that you can enjoy that steak, but because you've helped countless others in ways far beyond that of what you are taking by eating that steak. You've earned it.
I'll give another example... Consider term limits, we don't want to keep in place the same person for too long, even if they still rank number 1. Term limits are amazing at curbing what you talked about and preventing people from kicking the ladder down. It's an auto-eject for people at the top.
The reason is, it's simply unbelievable to think that 8 years later, there is no one else as qualified or even better than you at doing the job. We know assessing "merit" or even qualifications is fuzzy and imperfect. That the rules and criteria used to assess are put in place by those currently with high rankings, etc. It needs mechanisms against abuse like anything else.
And then, in the day to day, people want stability as well. Imagine each day at your job was a make it or get fired challenge. Each day they had someone new come in and perform your duties, than your boss would evaluate who did best and let go the other. This is not a desirable state. So you need a balance.
What do you mean by this? What creates a hierarchy of classes? Different social groups? Differing amounts of wealth? Different amounts of power to get stuff done? I think, in the end, it's got to come down to power, but I feel like it's good for society to distribute more power to people able to get better things done.
I agree with you that the term 'merit' now has a connotation of 'you deserve everything you can get'. It feels like a misappropriation of stewardship to take $100m to buy a yacht. If a government official did that, they would go straight to jail, but we somehow justify it under capitalism because maybe the CEO really wanted a yacht, and that's the only reason they started the business (in which case, I'm actually kind of fine with that $100m going to a yacht, as long as they were in the business of creating, not extracting, wealth). I don't think this is really a solvable problem, because to measure who's good at creating wealth, you kind of have to use wealth. Maybe we could have government-assigned stewards over pots of money, but that might have even bigger problems.
In that state, you want to enlarge the pool of people whose lifestyle affordances are more and more similar to one another, and since no one is poor for too long, or rich for too long, they don't enshrine themselves as some systemic class of people forming clicks, bad habits, group identity of them and the others, falling into self-selection and preservation, or some vicious cycle that entraps them there, etc.
Luck of being born in the Bay Area and going to high school with people in the startup community.
Luck of not being hit by a bus and spending your critical early career years in physical therapy recovering.
Luck in meeting the right people while volunteering in your local political party event.
Luck in going to a different restaurant and so not getting a cold from a patron at your normal restaurant so you performed your best when a scout was at game three days later.
It doesn't surprise me that a bit of randomness from a qualified pool would pay off.
No idea how it could active implemented, but it seems like a great compromise between the individual freedom of direct democracy and the labor-saving of representational democracy
How this solve anything? I might choose a expert representative in matters I don't have a clue, like health policy. But the morons that do "their own research" will see themselves fit to vote because in their minds they know better. So what gives?
when you have a high proportion of morons, there's not much you can do.
Then you would still have the right to vote on any particular issue your own way.
I'm actually in agreement with the OP. An interesting concept in this direction are citizen Councils or assemblies [1]. Essentially a group of random citizens get selected to investigate an (typical local) issue. They are given all the necessary administrative resources and are supposed to come up with a solution/recommendation.
They have been tried on a local level in Australia. In the documentary I saw about this, they said that people generally become engaged in the process and try to understand the nuance and different view points of the issue. Even people coming into the process with more extreme view points adopt more nuance.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/01/citizens-ass...
But imo definitely worth thinking more abt. It might solve a lot more problems than it creates by giving power back to the people.
Lol, who decides who is more informed? ( at the end of the day, might is right)
But as I read on, the Minimax system sounded surprisingly similar to some real scientific concepts, so I investigated and realized it wasn't such a stupid idea - just one with no chance of being implemented.
Now I'm reading about it here, thank you for reminding me of that concept!
a better approach would be what i have seen in the boy scouts of america a few decades ago with regards to joining the order of the arrow. there the whole troop would select those who would be invited. most troop members were not members of the OA themselves. thus the ones who were already selected had little influence in who got to join them.
> In his 2019 book The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits poses that meritocracy is responsible for the exacerbation of social stratification, to the detriment of much of the general population. He introduces the idea of "snowball inequality", a perpetually widening gap between elite workers and members of the middle class. While the elite obtain exclusive positions thanks to their wealth of demonstrated merit, they occupy jobs and oust middle class workers from the core of economic events. The elites use their high earnings to secure the best education for their own children, so that they may enter the world of work with a competitive advantage over those who did not have the same opportunities. Thus, the cycle continues with each generation.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Books
> In his book The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?, the American political philosopher Michael Sandel argues that the meritocratic ideal has become a moral and political problem for contemporary Western societies. He contends that the meritocratic belief that personal success is solely based on individual merit and effort has led to a neglection of the common good, the erosion of solidarity, and the rise of inequality. Sandel's criticism concerns the widespread notion that those who achieve success deserve it because of their intelligence, talent and effort. Instead, he argues that this belief is flawed since it ignores the role of luck and external circumstances, such as social and external factors, which are beyond an individual's control.[91]
* Ibid
There are essentially multiple levels of meritocracy. A level 1 meritocracy would judge only by current skills - for better or worse. This may be less than impressive even if technically a meritocracy. It may say, result in most knights coming from noble families trained from birth, but exceptional individuals would not be barred just from their background. Strictly better than a hard caste system but not something to brag about. A level 2 would try to ensure some degree of access to skills and education to all and be more meritocratic. Public education of unequal qualtity would qualify. A theoretical level N would involve completely equal starting points and would thus have pure 'merit' as the decider, even if it only accumulated from luck and the normal curve. Which highlights another issue - the distribution of quality is never perfectly even, it tends to follow a normal curve of some sort.
As for 'solving' the issue. Ability begets ability - this is called education and practice and I doubt there is a true alternative. We would call it rightfully barking mad to ban education for the sake of equity despite education contributing greatly to disparate outcomes. I think that is one of those imperfections of the universe we must accept for now.
> Place critical appointment/hiring processes into the hands of randomly selected oversight boards. These boards manage appointments, evaluations, and dismissals, mitigating biases and discouraging the formation of insular power groups.
This has the same issue elections have, just at a smaller scale. A better analog is juries, and charisma/storytelling definitely matters when you're talking to a jury.
> Directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool. Set and maintain the eligibility standard (such as an exam) by randomly selected oversight board to keep it updated and prevent the standard from being manipulated or gamed.
This is somewhat analogous to college admissions, and the gaming is alive and well there too. You get rid of politics, but you're back to optimizing for KPIs and things. I'm not sure why randomly picking from the top 5% of KPI optimizers is going to be better than picking the top one.
> Firms could randomly select employees or shareholders to serve on their boards. These members can significantly dilute insider collusion and introduce perspectives often overlooked by traditionally selected executives.
Same issue as juries, plus the random picks probably won't know the material well. Although I don't know much about traditional board selections, maybe that's true regardless. If you weight based on % ownership for shareholders, you're de facto giving the seats to big funds, if not, it can quickly become a lottery of like, any random person in the states.
> Use stratified sampling to select committees, ensuring diverse representation of viewpoints, backgrounds, and expertise, contributing to balanced decision-making.
This is the jury thing again? It seems like the solution "randomly pick oversight/approval boards" was listed three times.
> Create randomly composed auditing and oversight committees, deterring corrupt practices through constant unpredictability in oversight.
Constant unpredictability in oversight sounds terrible. The reason we have judges and case law and things in the legal system is that there are tons of edge cases, where reasonable minds will differ. You want to build up a consistent set of guidelines people can follow. A lot of people who are on the edge of rules aren't trying to be corrupt, they're just not sure what they are/aren't allowed to do.
— Aristotle, Politics
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/18/against-electi...
I was going to write more here but I think that actually sums it up well.
https://www.kidsnews.com.au/humanities/study-reveals-benefit...
>The report, commissioned by the Alliance of Girls’ Schools Australasia, was conducted by Macquarie Marketing Group using OECD data
reads more to me like "we found that all-girl private schools are better than the average of public and private schools", and the obvious reason why is probably *because they're private schools*, and not because they're all-girl.
> there are some underlying factors skewing these results, such as: > * grammar schools are more likely to be single-sex > * co-educational schools have a higher proportion of poorer pupils > * girls are more likely to get good results
Also note that both of your comments show that people in a position to choose, are choosing single sex schools for their daughters and getting better outcomes on average.
Lastly, while the article mentions some caveats around selective state schools, the other side of that is the UK has many single sex comprehensive schools. We should not ascribe too much weight to the caveat.
Generally, in mixed-gender groups aged 13+, you will have some dating activity and a subsequent drama / bad blood from various heartbreaks and betrayals. Having to sit in the same classroom makes everything emotionally worse.
This is somewhat less of a problem if the same activites take place outside school and thus are less likely to complicate relationships within the class.
I tend to believe that in democracy and capitalism, corruption makes evil people busy because corruption becomes a quarantined, isolated competition, so they do less serious harm elsewhere, and they get punished if they go too far.
But yes, merit is a sweet lie.
what? is this like a joke? an "eligibility pool" with "an exam" is going to be....."random" ?
sure! we did this and it's all random white men worth billions of dollars. So weird those were the only people that could pass "the exam"! But we have no idea which white male billionaires it will be, so it's "random" !
The article diagnoses the problem well - Campbell's Law shows how any metric used for selection gets gamed. But randomness isn't the only solution.
The issue isn't meritocracy itself, but our implementation. Current systems fail because "merit" is cheap to fake. LinkedIn profiles, smooth talking, and connections matter more than actual performance.
What if merit claims required real stakes? If claiming expertise meant risking something you'd lose when proven wrong? If your surgical reputation couldn't boost your investment credibility? If gaming the system cost exponentially more than being honest?
Yes, KPIs fail for complex work. But a surgeon with 1,000 successful operations IS more qualified than a random person. That signal has value. Rather than abandon merit for randomness, we need merit systems that are expensive to fake and cheap to verify. Make the track record immutable, domain-specific, and consequential. The technical challenge is hard but solvable. Randomness might help for some positions (jury duty works!), but wherever specific expertise matters - engineering, medicine, research - verifiable performance still beats random selection.
I've been working on a system exploring these ideas [1], but the core insight stands regardless: the author's claim that only randomness can prevent meritocratic decay may be premature. We might just need better verification mechanisms.