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asr comments on The Problem Of Apostasy - Less Wrong
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Well, it would certainly be better than current representative governments. Maybe there's a way to make representative governments work even better, but I don't know how to prevent them to turn into oligarchies¹. A start would be gathering up a popular² constitutional assembly, which would exclude itself from the institutions it will create. Maybe it would come up with representative government anyway, but it may at least think of better checks and balances than what we have now.
[1] Two examples of oligarchy-like features:
[2] By "popular", I mean basically the same thing as in "popular jury": you pick citizen at random, with a few precautions. You do not run an election.
This is not how juries work in America. Really picking twelve people at random turns out to be unworkable -- the population of people who can comfortable afford to spend a week or more on a jury is a very biased sample -- it skews to the elderly and upper-middle-class in ways that would be politically intolerable. Also, since jury deliberations are secret and unmonitored, we go to elaborate lengths to avoid one juror having outside and un-compensated influence.
Courts routinely summon a hundred jurors to fill a panel of twelve. Only a small minority of potential jurors are actually suitable. Both sides of the case have extensive rights to reject jurors, both with and without cause.
It's not so much "pick at random" as it is "audition a lot of people in order to find 12 jurors who are mutually acceptable to the parties." I don't see how that would generalize to decision-making contexts where there aren't two clear predefined sides in a position to say yes or no to particular jurors.
Oops. I did not know the process was that selective. Quickly looking up the French Wikipedia, I see the French system is much less selective (it picks up "only" 3 times too many random candidates).
Now there are also other cases where random assemblies (a couple hundred people, I believe) were conjured to make important decision: election rules in one case (didn't work out the first try), and GMO in the other (the unanimous conclusion was "looks somewhat risky, and we don't see the benefits. No, thanks.").
By the way, we could imagine something between a fully random assembly, and a fully elected one. (This is totally not my idea) Run free elections, where everyone is candidate (no choice). Let people chose, say, 3 people they believe would be good at making the relevant decision (like writing a constitution). We can suggest criteria, such as being good, well tempered, can change one's mind… Now look how the votes are distributed. You can exclude the bottom fifth by assuming many people there are probably not so good. You can also exclude the top fifth to remove fame bias, and exclude authority figures (journalists, professional politicians…). Now you pick a couple hundred people at random among the rest, and propose them to participate in the assembly. Most will accept. Now let them write what they must, and if the decision is important enough (like a constitution), run a referendum, just to be sure. (People are overwhelmingly likely to accept it, but you never know.)