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.
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.
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].
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.
I've never read up on the republic of Venice, but after quickly scanning the Wikipedia article on its election procedure... that is a strangely large number of voting rounds and lotteries.
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.
But aren't most HOA horror stories based on people who'd been running them for years if not decades, and only end happily when someone replaces those entrenched in power with new people?
But such groups are almost invariably coordinated. In a legislature based on sortition, there will be a percentage of busybodies/ assholes/ opportunists but they'll have a coordination problem, opponents, and term limits acting to restrain them.
Term limits incentivize a deep state exactly one layer removed from those to which the limits apply, as a repository of institutional knowledge about how things actually get done.
This seems rational. We on't have term limits int he US Congress and it doesn't seem any the better for it.
Japan, a heavily bureaucratized country, systematically moves junior and mid-tier staff around in some departments to minimize the possibility of nest-feathering and empire-building, although I would not say it's perfect by a long way.
We do have term limits for positions like the presidency, and what we see is a perpetual power structure one layer removed, in the party system, which effectively chooses who we're permitted to vote for.
Introducing term limits only forces the wealth and power to change it's face periodically. It is addressing a symptom, not the cause.
It's a potentially big problem for sure. It reminds me of stories I've heard about the public education system in some of the Scandinavian countries. From what I remember off the top of my head, Finland has a system where private educational facilities do not exist. Meaning that, if rich or otherwise elite people want their kids to receive a good education, they need to support the public education facilities their own kid attends. I quite like this idea that everyone is nudged towards helping everyone else, even if they mostly care about their own family and friends.
Similarly in a lottocracy you'd want everyone to be a capable leader when their name is picked from the hat. As the professor I listened to put it, lottocracy makes you think what a democracy really values. Is it about everyone's voice being heard, or is there another goal we should care about more? Not an easy question to answer.
Yes, I suppose there exists an egalitarian and well adjusted hypothetical society where we could find good leaders by random draw. I just don't think we live in anything resembling that society and I'm not sure whether such a society is possible once you reach a certain population size.
I think it's a nice idea, but I'm not sure how we get from here to there
> Yes, I suppose there exists an egalitarian and well adjusted hypothetical society where we could find good leaders by random draw.
If you can find good leaders by random draw, that means the average citizen is a good leader, which would seem to suggest that the average citizen should be a reasonable an hard-to-dupe judge of good leaders, and therefore that elections also work well.
If elections don't work well to select leaders, that's a pretty good piece of evidence that sortition won't, either.
OTOH, the particular failures of sortition and elections may be different, and using a system where both are used for different veto points might be net less problematic than either alone. Consider a bicameral legislature with one house chosen by elections and the other by sortition, for instance.
(OTOH, there is plenty of solid evidence in comparative government of how to do electoral democracy better and people in the US don't seem too interested in that, which is probably a better focus for immediate reform than relatively untested, on a large scale, ideas about avoiding electoral democracy.)
Bit of a nerd-snipe, but I wonder about the idea of sortition of a set of candidates -- say 200 -- out of a larger voting pool, and then voting for one of the randomly selected candidates.
Then you get "at least approx. top 1%" -- but it's still not necessarily an entrenched elite.
Agreed, I'm not sure if it can be made to work either. I have an inkling of a thought that instead of an egalitarian society being required for lottocracy to work, an egalitarian society can be created using lottocracy. But it's just a thought. Hopefully that book holds something close to an answer, but I'll see :)
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.
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.
> We really only practice it in one instance in modern democracy and that's jury duty,
...and even there, it's terribly corrupted. There are all kinds of bizarre ways that people are excluded from juries which bias the result. One commonly-cited example is that people who report moral objections to capital punishment are excluded from being empaneled on a federal jury, under the pretext that because capital punishment is legal under federal law, they'd be unable to carry out the gammut of their duties. Of course this has the convenient result of dramatically biasing juries in favor of the state.
There's also no commonly-implemented proof-of-randomness for selection. We're told that people are randomly selected and get a notice in the mail, but there's no public event where one can go and watch a number tumbler generate the entropy used to select names from the voter rolls, etc.
I just say "I believe in jury nullification and will use that power if necessary".
Easiest out from jury duty ever, and if the judge want's to be a bltch and force me on anyway, well, let's just say that if the law is immoral than the defendant is going to walk.
The last time I was called for jury duty someone said this during jury selection and we were all immediately dismissed and a new pool of jurors brought in.
I unironically want to be on the jury. It's the judges fault for refusing to let principled believers in nullification on. I'm unironically not trying to shrink civic duty.
Then be quiet and don't mention it, lol. EVERYWHERE one learns about jury nullification makes it clear not to mention it in the selection process if you're anywhere near interested in participating.
It's an extraprocedural consequence of how the system is designed to function, the same way the right to revolution is an extralegal option in the Union. Yeah, you can know it and apply it - but don't say it out loud if you want to show any semblance of virtuosity.
> Easiest out from jury duty ever, and if the judge want's to be a bltch and force me on anyway…
“Easiest out” is clearly you avoiding the responsibility. If you wanted to be on a jury you wouldn’t be talking about easy outs or the judge “forcing” you to be on the jury.
Well, and for grand juries in particular, you're told that (more or less) this will be your life for six months. I certainly opted out as best I could.
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.
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".
REQUEST to include the 4DWW (Four Day Work Week) tag & text in the description to provide a clear signal to companies that workers are yearning for it.
It’ll also save time on both sides. My experience is that companies can be open to it but there’s no way to know without getting into the interview process
I once commented on HN how my favorite Sci Fi novel is Accelerando and the author, Charles Stross, replied to it suggesting I try his The Rapture of the Nerds he co-wrote with Cory Doctorow; I loved it when I read it too.
I love HN - it's basically the only website I visit these days (aside checking mail, watching YouTube, and gardening my GitHub repositories).
In a thematically similar but very different vein, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series was an enjoyable read.
I also recommend Eric Nylund's work, specifically Signal to Noise and A Signal Shattered.
Edit: Well, there you go, Children of Time had 23 mentions now that I've read down further. Disappointed to see Eric Nylund's work fade into obscurity, I rate him up with Neal Stephenson.
I believe he was a staff writer for the Halo series in house as well, something like Marc Laidlaw at Valve, and the books emerged from internal storytelling written for the series. Very interesting stuff.
I also highly recommend his older books Pawn's Dream, Dry Water, and especially A Game Of Universe. They're available on Kindle and part of the Unlimited program so easy to check out.
Those two novels of Nylund's really captured the "dark forest" concept well, though I won't say more so as to avoid spoilers.
I haven't read the source material so I can't speak to the books, but the adaptations of 3 Body (Problem) that I've watched, both the Tencent and Netflix ones, also explore similar themes to Nylund's works. Heck, I just discovered that Liu Cixin coined the "dark forest" term, though he isn't the first to explore it.
Not long ago I came across this book in an HN thread about AI and the future. The moment I saw the title, I knew I had to read it. Crypto, AI, collective intelligence — it hits all the right notes for me.
If you want some other portrayals of the Singularity, see The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect and Friendship is Optimal (and also Caelum Est Conterrens)
I really appreciate Cory Doctorow's work on digital rights, enshittification and other topics, but I couldn't make it more than half way through 'Rapture of the nerds'. Just too strange, I couldn't connect to it. It is very original though. Some people will probably love it.
Occasionally $500/month, but more reliably $300/month in sales of my Video Hub App - lets users browse, search, tag, and organize videos on local / network drives. Aiming to have an 8th anniversary release February 2026.
* Focus on Windows users. Windows desktop share is 10x that of Mac and nowadays Windows users pay almost as willingly as Mac ones.
* Charge several times more.
* Redo the website. In particular get rid of 3D slant and on-hover animations, put larger high-res screenshots, explain each of them well (and not in gray on gray text), put up "Windows / Mac / Linux" in bold friendly and highly-visible letters. Better yet have separate Download buttons for each. Add version and last release date, next to the Download button. Have at-a-glance summary of features closer to the top of the page. Ditto for pricing and trialing details. Ideally, adjust windows chrome in the screenshots based on the web client's OS, i.e. show Windows screenshots to Windows visitors, Mac ones - to those coming from Macs, etc. The last thing you want to show Mac screenshots to Windows people, because it implies that the Windows version was an afterthought.
All in all, the site gives an amateurish/hobby project vibe, and the $5 price cements the impression. If you are to spruce things up a bit, you can potentially live off this app. At the very least and with not much of an effort you can double/triple what you make off it.
Thank you for all the suggestions! I like them and will try to implement at least a few in the coming year (I end up spending more time towards other exciting projects like writing a sci-fi novel and DIY remodeling my house).
With Mac screenshots on the site they won't tell much. Plus the point is that it's worth to actively cater to Windows users even if you don't have many at the moment.
To me, it would have been clearer to avoid the “Demo” button label altogether and be explicit about the different versions and OS targets. Also, I think the visual hierarchy of the two respective buttons is too subtle.
In related news: ironically, Psychedelics disrupt normal link between brain’s neuronal activity and blood flow - thus casting some doubt on findings that under psychedelics more of the brain is connected (since fMRI showed elevated blood flow, suggesting higher brain activity).
As a caveman pondering "Stoned Ape Theory" during the rise of MRI in the 80s, having done light reading of Huxley, McKenna et. al, the claim that vascular variations were so tied to thought patterns in a purely calm and cognitive activity was fascinating. To see the brain of someone as they went through a deck of cards and paused to look at each... astounding! But frustrating also. My first question always was, was the person's hands busy going through the deck and holding up the cards, focusing on them... or were they merely shown the cards sitting still? It seemed the popsci articles often glossed over that information, and any simple "control for coordinated body movement" played second fiddle to the novelty of it all. Then I worked in a club where I was often surrounded by tripping people. I'd fetch them glasses of water and they would always drink. Do you know you can smell them, they smell like fear? The experience has every sweat gland working overtime. When I learned that I greeted this "tripping people MRIs light up indicating enhanced brain connectivity" with a grain of salt. I would not be the least bit surprised if the sweat gland thing also has the brain's vascular system in overdrive.
My favorite explanation for why LSD and similar psychedelics generate the visual patterns they do: mathematics of wrapping polar coordinates of the retina to the rectangular coordinates of the visual processing system:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
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