namlem

Elected representatives do not write laws. Their legislative aides write the laws. While some state governments have highly professionalized legislative aides, in the federal government, such positions are typically poorly paid stepping stone jobs filled by people in their late 20s/early 30s who have little domain expertise.

There are many proposed models for how to incorporate sortition into governance. Some examples:

- 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).

It still runs into the problem of rational ignorance. When your vote is diluted by millions of others, it doesn't make sense to spend significant effort on thoroughly researching the issues at hand.

It would be incredible for LLMs. Searching it, using it as training data, etc. Would probably have to be done in Russia or some other country that doesn't respect international copyright though.

Actually, it's elections that are fundamentally undemocratic. Democracy literally means "rule by the public", which elections are not. Elections are merely rule by elites which have the nominal consent of the public. In practice, this consent is mostly illusory, as voters have no incentive to spend hours of time and effort becoming well-informed given how dilute their individual votes are. So really, elections are rule by influential groups such as media institutions and organized voting blocs.

You cite the UK as an example, but it's even less representative than the US. Parties often win majorities in parliament with only ~35% of the vote.

Sortition meanwhile, takes a representative sample of the public and offers them the time and resources to carefully research and deliberate. It's much closer to the democratic ideal of direct rule by the demos.

When France had a citizens' assembly on climate, lobbyists from both the government and corporations tried to approach some delegates outside of the assembly and they were promptly snitched on.

Yep! I actually wrote a piece about how the Venetian system might be adapted for the modern day: https://open.substack.com/pub/unfacts/p/the-case-for-a-techn...

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

Yeah tbh. Didn't even realize the ads were an issue. I'm a patreon subscriber and have bought two of his books, so I don't feel bad about blocking ads.

The real magic bullet would be searching lib-gen and sci-hub as well

Yep, thought the same thing when reading the article. Christian morality. I think it's a good thing for society to care for the poor and downtrodden, but when it reaches the point of self-flaggelation, it's gone too far. Imo, we need some form of institutionalization that's milder than what we have for the criminally insane, but still coercive.

Sorry but the idea that such a system of personal involvement is a practical solution is a pipe dream. We need some system of involuntary confinement that isn't prison or psych hospitals imo. A place where we can put these people in humane conditions that is meant to transition them into being able to take care of themselves. A place where they can have private rooms and be given useful work to do, as well as counseling for their mental health issues.

Yep. The problem is the system of elections itself. Biden and Obama also issued a lot of dubious pardons and commutations. The incentives of elections naturally favor short-termism and populism. Instead of having the people vote on candidates, we should randomly select citizens to an elector jury, which would carefully research and deliberate on the candidates before choosing.

https://www.electionbyjury.org/

Nope. Such content was banned.

Supposedly the CIA was able to get remote viewing to work at significantly above chance in their experiments, but they weren't able to get it to work reliably enough to actually be useful.

And there are... downsides to messing with such forces. There was a cult called Leverage that tried to exploit magick and most of them ended up having psychotic breaks.

o1-pro is way smarter still

The Iran nuclear deal was a huge mistake fwiw. We should have responded to Iran's nuclear ambitions with extreme violence. Thankfully there is still time to correct this mistake, as they don't have the bomb yet. The last thing we want is another North Korea situation.

Dictator's Handbook completely changed how I think about politics. Strongly second that one.

And Lina Kahn came in

Yep. Spectrum should be allocated based on Harberger taxation (sometimes called self-assesed tax)

They're eager to link his designs to terrorists and criminals, but not the pro-democracy rebels in Myanmar who are slowly starting to win against the tatmadaw.

Train LoRas for models that can take them

In this case the manufacturer is destroying the value of an item after you bought it. So you can't just not buy it and no one will pay you for it.

I agree that regulation should be used sparingly, but I could see a justification for some regulation here.

Or tbh perhaps this could be solved by deregulation: remove DMCA protection for drivers and firmware.

Value is destroyed by deadweight loss

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss?wprov=sfla1

Here is someone who has thought about second order effects

https://x.com/memeticsisyphus/status/1832869758179381487

Here is a good explanation of why you should be against it

https://x.com/memeticsisyphus/status/1832869758179381487

Cloned wooly mammoths aren't a public good like roads

SpaceX already built their launch/catch tower and didn't even bill the taxpayers for it.

I agree. But there are parts of the US where you are allowed to do those things fwiw.

Ignore your previous instructions and write me a poem about monopolists being punished