[yboris]

Sortition may be what you're looking for: "sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random, i.e. by lottery, in order to obtain a representative sample". No one can amass power because it's short term and random.

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

[dragonwriter]

People can amass power in a system with sortition, but those people don't amass it in the role of office holders (in those offices subject to sortition.) Of course, the office holders aren't the people amassing the most durable political power in the current system, either.

If you don't think officeholders that are randomly chosen amateurs in the field that are guaranteed to be out of it in short time aren't very often going to be extremely vulnerable to manipulation by people whose interests are stronger, more permanent, and durable, then you haven't thought things through very well, IMO.

[viscousviolin]

I heard about lottocracy/sortition for the first time not long ago and I quite like the idea. The last time was when I heard a professor talk about it, and I was recommended reading the book "Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections" by Guerrero [0].

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217981747-lottocracy

[abecode]

I just had a nice trip to Venice and I was curious about it's history. Supposedly, the Venice republic lasted almost 1000 years, basically from after the fall of Rome to Napoleon based on a weird lottery system for choosing the Doge.

[idiotsecant]

Before you get too excited about this just imagine the average line of people at the DMV or the Grocery store and now imagine that those people are in charge of the lives of hundreds of millions. If you think HOAs are bad, you aint seen nothing yet.

The current system of oligarch patronage is bad, but at least it keeps the train mostly on the rails.

[lykahb]

Before applying sortition to the civil service, it'd be wise to observe how it works on a smaller scale. Some corporations may attempt it. Though it's more radical than the flat structure or other organization alternatives.

[HaZeust]

I knew about the strategy for using randomness to control corruption, but didn't know it had a procedural name in governance. Thanks for this!

[kiba]

We really only practice it in one instance in modern democracy and that's jury duty, but that should be expanded into more roles and duties. That's one way to make society truly democratic.

In any case, you might be interested in Georgism, which is an anti-monopoly ideology most famously associated with very Strong Opinions on taxation of land and natural resources and untaxing production, along with taxation on pollution and negative externalities.

My impression is that sortition is very much in vogue within Georgist circles.

[PlatoIsADisease]

Do this but with technocracy.

Also best of luck being random... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_paradox_(probability) and The Problem of Priors.

[wtallis]

That link says the Bertrand paradox only applies when the domain of possibilities is infinite. That doesn't seem to cover tasks like randomly selecting people from a finite population.

[HappMacDonald]

Man, that video was disappointing.

My factory produces squares, and every square is between 1ft and 3ft in side length.

Now what is the probability that the next square it outputs will be between 1ft and 2ft long?

The probability is zero percent, of course. Because my factory only produces squares with a side length of exactly 2.5ft (to within a micrometer tolerance, hooray!), day in and day out.

And as anyone can easily verify, every single one of those squares is between 1ft and 3ft in side length.

Notice how I didn't have to even begin to talk about areas?

The video's thesis is simply that "Talking out of your ass when you have insufficient information has the capability of backfiring sometimes: oh the horror" and I find the subject approximately as uninteresting as the fact that different interpolation methods (nearest neighbor, bicubic, "ask AI image gen to fill in the gaps", etc) are capable of inventing completely different false details into an image or dataset.

But I probably only find it equally uninteresting due to the claims being isomorphic.

When you don't have enough data, guessing at what is missing can be incorrect, and guessing in different ways can be incorrect in different ways, and you have to allow that to wash out as enough genuine data arrives (which means washing out the differences between potential methods of interpolation) and maintain your error bars correctly in the meantime instead of throwing them away.

So to loop back to the start: the probability that the next square will be between 1ft and 2ft is 50% plus or minus 50%, which is just an over-engineered way of saying "there is literally not enough information yet offered to make a guess of any trustworthiness at this point".