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SORTITION

                                                March 20, 2018

Nicholas Gruen (among other folks) has been
making arguments in favor of reviving an
anicent Greek political system called              [link]
the "sortition".                                    
                                                   [link]
He makes the point that if you just ask people    
their opinion, whatever they may say off the top    
of their heads can easily differ from what they     In his Guardian UK piece, 
would say if only they'd sat down and thought       he discusses evidence that
about it for some time.                             the brexit vote would've
                                                    gone the other way if 
The sortition is a body of randomly                 voters had deliberated 
chosen citizens instructed to research              more over the issue.
an issue, a jury for public policy.
Gruen calls this "deliberative democracy".


This has a number of attractive features:
random selection helps defeat attempts at
subversion-- you might get a person with
a financial interest or an ideological bias
by accident, but it would be hard for a
faction to target the deliberative body.

The small size of the body makes it much more
economically feasible than hoping for careful
consideration from an entire populace, which
is more like the usual democratic ideal.


   Getting to the sortition from the present
   day world presents some challenges--
   there are a few strategies that might be
   workable though:

   If academic studies of sortitions show
   that they anticipate the course of public
   opinion, they might be used as a factor
   in advance polling.

   Newspapers might be willing to fund a
   sortition as an alternate to things like
   "man-in-the-street interviews" and
   panels of experts.

             I would expect that you could lower costs by reducing the
             numbers of people involved, at some expense in accuracy... it
             would take some experimentation to determine an optimum number.
             My guess would be a relatively small number (dozens?) would be
             a big improvement over nothing.

                    Much like Jakob Nielsen conclusions about doing multiple
                    rounds of usability testing with small groups of users:
                    Better to run many smaller sortitions that a few large
                    ones.



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