See, that is why I don't like first principle. It is just arrogant and ignores complete fields of study. In your example, hundreds of years of political studies and actual experience. Democracy is the owrst political system, except for all the others. It is also the only system that has the slightest chance of protecting civil rights, human rights and to considering a tad more than just the interesst of a powerful majority.

Democracy, means that the political power is not restricted to a subset of the citizens, but all citizens have equal political power.

This principle does not specify anything about the mechanism that determines how certain executive or legislative positions are filled.

Any such position could be filled for example based on the result of a majority voting by all citizens, or by representatives of all citizens, or based on a random choice between all citizens.

These and also many other possible mechanisms are all equally democratic, because any citizen can fill those positions and all citizens have equal influence on who will fill the position.

> Democracy, means that the political power is not restricted to a subset of the citizens, but all citizens have equal political power.

On what basis do you claim it means that?

great nuance, we need more of this understanding of democracy. It is much more (or less for that matter) than just electioneering

> Democracy is the owrst political system, except for all the others

not only objectively impossible to measure but there is no evidence for this. It's Churchillian cliche which has now become a thought-destroying mantra.

Zero correlation is a strong claim. Would you actually predict that a randomly chosen American (whose opinion you distrust) would be all-around more competent than half our actual presidents? Not just the current or last one depending on your affiliation.

I've occasionally toyed with the thought that political duty should be managed in a similar manner as jury duty.

(One of) The problems with political representatives is that they _want_ to be politicians. Either as a means to an end, or as a mechanism to better serve themselves or others like them. On more rare occasions you find the occasional altruist.

Since there's a selection bias going on, how can the current crop act as representatives of their populace when they aren't _like_ those they claim to represent?

I think the jury thing is onto something... a small group rather then an individual can work wonders to cover for the failings and corruptability of the others.

There have been a few US presidents that have been much better than it is likely for a randomly chosen American to be.

Unfortunately, among recent US presidents, there have also been many who have been much worse than it can be expected for a randomly chosen American to be.

I do not believe that it is possible to make with any certainty an estimate of which president selection system would have been superior, i.e. how the better and worse presidents would have been compensated in the 2 systems.

So judging from the US historical experience, it is impossible to reject the system of a random selection of the president, like for jury members, as clearly inferior to a president voted by the people.

Maybe a combined system would be better, with a set of presidential candidates chosen randomly from all citizens, one of which is elected by popular vote.

This would exclude the people addicted to power who have progressed inside their party through dubious means, becoming the party candidates.

A randomly chosen group of Americans, who would not take any campaign donation, who would be truly held accountable for their actions/decisions while in office would, according to me, make better decisions than half of the past presidents.

I think sortition is superior to election for most offices, especially those which should be relatively proscribed in what they do, not requiring exceptional competence, etc.

I'd almost certainly prefer a mechanically determined pool (say, all Walmart store general managers as of 2020 who are natural-born citizens, >35, not felons, etc), and then randomly pick the President from that pool. Maybe let people use negative voting to eliminate 10-50% of the pool first.

I actually really love that idea. Thanks for expanding my mind about what is possible, maybe I can find a way to use it in human systems I do control

As a long time supporter of sortition since i studied the functioning of the Athenian Republic, I am pleasantly surprised by the positive comments under this thread.

It is an idea that is usually so quickly dismissed with "what if we pick a total idiot!?" - as if people optimizing for campaigning as opposed to governing couldn't end up being total idiots as well.

A better contrast would be whether or not you trust a random to do a better job than half the presidents elected after the social media explosion post 2000. Social media and the internet have changed politics to a very large degree.

i think randomised leadership might well work just as well. Certainly we can say it would be more efficient - no campaigning, no pandering to the crowd, no making decisions just to be elected again. More I think on it, the better it sounds!

General elections are largely a mechanism for resolving conflicts and not for finding competent leaders.

Historically, people have fought to select leaders. Such a system puts the strongest and most brutal in power.

Now we let people talk and then vote. It's a mechanism for resolving conflicts that has been extremely successful at its job.

This is, btw, why freedom of speech is so important and why it's exactly whose we least want to hear, who must to be able to speak. We resolve conflicts with people we have conflicts with, not people we agree with. Talk about it or fight about it. Talking has led to, probably, the most peaceful period of human history.

Go one further, why do we need to have leaders at all? Assigning specific jobs to make decisions for specific domains makes sense, but trying to have one person be in charge of everything seems like it's been proven too big a task. Politicians are terrible because anyone with that much centralized power is going to be bad at any individual task.

yeah...acephalous organisation. Theoretically possible but perhaps maybe in future practically possible through technology

I think its the leader part that is the problem, not the democratic vote.

Why do we have one absolute ruler? You could make up reasons about deciding votes and stuff, but clearly it's a throwback to the good old days when one person killed anough people to become King.

The President is not meant to be a ruler. They are the executive, their job is to enact federal policies and enforce laws written by Congress. Over the past several decades Congress has abrogated their responsibilities which has increased the workload of the executive. But even with that increased power the President is not a ruler an is nominally subject to the same laws as anyone else.

I'm not saying they are literally a king, I'm saying there's no logical reason why we need to vote for one person, rather than say 3.

They could work shifts and always have someone awake, while still being able to go on holiday.

Similar applies to CEOs, why does it have to be one person representing the will of many.

The main principle of all political institutions of the Roman Republic, applied during several centuries, was that in any executive function 2 or more people must be elected and a single one can be accepted only temporarily, during emergencies like wars or other calamities.

There are a lot of modern countries who claim to be republics and even USA has a "Republican" party, but all these modern uses of the word "republic" are wrong, because none of them uses this principle of filling all executive positions with multiple people, so that none of them will have all the power of those positions.

The modern states which use the word "republic" justify their claim by having elected leaders, but that was not something specific to the Roman Republic. There were plenty of ancient states with elected leaders and with various other lesser public functions filled by elections.

What distinguished the Roman Republic from all others was the requirement of electing multiple people for all positions, including for the supreme executive function, for which they had 2 consuls, and not 1 president.

> I'm saying there's no logical reason why we need to vote for one person, rather than say 3.

There's many logical reasons. The federal bureaucracy handles the day to day work of federal agencies, not the actual individual elected to be the President. The President appoints a cabinet to oversee those agencies. So there's no need for any individual to be awake 24/7 making decisions which means there's no need for multiple shifts of executives to be available.

Multiple executives would actually be a terrible system as situations last longer than a single shift. Day Shift President would have to hand over a bunch of context to Swing Shift President for any issue lasting longer than a single shift. Swing Shift President may not agree with Graveyard Shift President on the best course of action which leads to an inefficient and/or legally arduous process of adjudicating primacy of authority.

The alternative to choosing leaders by voting isn’t choosing them some other way – it’s not getting to choose at all.

Another alternative is voting without choosing leaders. Aka actually trying democracy.

very good point. Perhaps representative democracy was always a perversion of it, a temporary step whilst we developed the communication technology to move past it