For reference, this is referred to as "sortition", and at least the Athenians felt that it was more democratic than elections. The randomization machines they used for picking winners (kleroterion) are quite ingenious.

In modern times, sortition sometimes shows up in some deliberative democracy proposals.

Athens is a tiny community. And within that the citizens are the aristocrats who know each other by name. Ordinary residents are merchants or slaves.

Sure and when the US was founded the majority of residents were similarly not allowed to vote because voting was restricted voting to a minority of property-owning white males over the age of 21. Democracy has evolved from its Athenian origins, presumably sortition would as well.

I think their point was that it only worked because of such a cohort to randomly select from.

That was also my interpretation and why I made the point that democratic processes have evolved to account for a changing polity.

The US government could not be managed by Athenian sortition any more than it could be by Athenian direct democracy -- the citizenry is too different, the questions too complex.

However, just as the Romans evolved their original Athenian-style direct democracy into representative democracy as their empire grew and became more heterogeneous, sortition has similarly evolved into deliberative democracy.

Well I’m saying more than that.

There is no historical precedent for our democratic system. Not Romans, Greeks, or 13 colonies. Why cite them?

Nobody has ever had a system with 300 million people having almost direct voting while simultaneously having no definition of a citizen besides “born here”.

I’m skeptical. The Trump/Fetterman/RFK phenomenon is the fruit of this democracy, not an unlikely aberration.

We elect leaders - people with skills, knowledge, and expertise.

Does the average citizen even understand discounted cash flows or opportunity cost? And not to mention legal concepts I’m ignorant of.

I don’t see why lowering the quality of candidates by 10x would improve things.

> We elect leaders - people with skills, knowledge, and expertise.

I admire your optimism but saying it doesn't make it so.

We elect people able to convince others they should be elected. Often that means they possess the ability to convince others they have the skills, knowledge, and expertise you describe.

If you think that's the same thing as actually having skills, knowledge, and expertise, well, I have bad news for you...

Optimism would be believing people on the street are as capable as Us senators.

That's because most US senators have been senators longer than most people have been alive.

Most random people off the street would be as capable as a US senator if they spent decades doing it.

People aren’t even good at the menial jobs they do have.

Yes, that's something they have in common with most of Congress.

Literally laughed out loud about this. You might have missed some of the things that prominent leaders with "skill, knowledge, and expertise" have been doing:

https://www.kennedy.senate.gov/public/2025/9/kennedy-calls-f...

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/26/politics/james-inhofe-sno...

Or an even older one: https://rollcall.com/2018/02/16/flashback-friday-a-series-of...

We are definitely not sending our brightest.

- literally a Kennedy - has BA from Harvard - has law degree

That’s not an ordinary person even if we think his health views are dumb.

Isn’t literally a Kennedy a point against proving merit? Do you think many professors would fail a Bush, Clinton, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc? Do such bloodlines even have to apply for admittance to prestigious institutions?

Yes, Kennedys, Bushes, and Zuckerberg's are imuch smarter and more capable than a randomly selected person from Walmart. I'll stand by that.

I absolutely hate the fact that I agree with you, but I think this is actually correct.

It is weird that you included Zuckerberg in that list -- Mark, I presume. I'm pretty sure it was not from a famous nor super wealthy family. Although, he did attend a prestigious high school, so his parents are probably upper middle class in US parlance. And Hillary Clinton is brilliant. Look at GW Bush's kids by comparison.

Edit: I meant to say: And Chelsea Clinton is brilliant.

  got into Harvard

What, like it's hard?

(Cannot resist the legally blonde reference)

Do our current elected leaders understand discounted cash flows or opportunity cost? I'm not seeing evidence our current process results in people skill, knowledge, and expertise, especially given the over representation of people from entertainment.

Yes. across parties senators typically have prestigious law degrees and piles of accomplishments.

I’m not saying that makes them great. But if you want to see the pool of average citizens walk into a Walmart or DMV outside the Bay Area.

Yes. They just don’t talk about it because the voters don’t understand and feel insulted when they hear politicians talk about stuff they don’t understand.

Those advanced concepts are what gets used to dupe people into letting themselves be ripped off.

Sounds very interesting, but one more counter-points I'd like to see counter-countered:

These random people will have to rely on experts a lot for knowledge they lack on any topic, because the world is complex. Now, these experts can be biased, bought, influenced etc. Or be accused of being in some sort of "Deep State" if you're into that.

But then again, this can already be the case, now I counter-countered myself.

That’s exactly it: we already have this in the form of the lobby industrial complex. Except it is possibly quite a bit worse because if you stay in Congress for a long time and form a trusting relationship with your lobbyists who by the way also pay to your reelection campaign or support you in other ways, over time you get to accept their expert opinion with less skepticism. If a lobbyist has to start over every 2 years, they can’t sink their teeth as hard into you. And I doubt many congresspeople are experts on most subjects on which they write laws. Some have economics degrees. Some are doctors, some are lawyers. Very few engineers, it seems.

If you wanted an alternative system: you could always have a professional group of law writers and a professional group of law opposers try to present arguments to a large assembly of law jurors. If they can’t get 2/3rds majority on a law, it doesn’t pass. This is better than something like direct democracy where everyone votes on an issue because you can’t get the voters’ attention on any one thing for more than a few minutes or a few hours at the most (except a small fraction for whom it is their life for a while). In this law jury setup you can properly brief them.

You could have some other body of professional governors who do things like emergency resolutions and maybe basic budget stuff but anything beyond that goes to the assembly for approval. You could create a new assembly as often as every 6 weeks and process a batch of laws at once so that you really rotate out the jurors before they can be influenced. And selection of law writers and law opposers can be something that is reviewed by this kind of assembly too, or just some large pool of professionals who are chosen at random for any given period of time and given the power to present before the assembly. A lot of options here for how to amortize bad behavior such that over the long haul it averages out to close to zero.

Assuming, arguendo, that corruption is somehow not a factor in your scenario, it still doesn't account for ignorance. Consider that jurors in jury trials have one binary decision to make based on the facts and law given to them. They don't need to decide if the law is just (in fact that's explicitly NOT what they're supposed to do). They don't need (and are not supposed) to decide if the situation is fair. That happens elsewhere by folks trained to consider these things. Jurors in jury trials literally apply the law they are given to the evidence they are presented. That's it. Even this burden is often more than a lot of folks can wrap their head around.

The legislature, however, is not there just to nod its head when they think something is a good idea and voting no when it's not. Even if we were to create a space for exactly that, all we've done is push the fallibility to those who are doing the work to write and revise law--but now they're pitching to those off the streets who don't know anything about governance! If anything, lay congresspeople would magnify, not reduce, the problems we have with our current system.

I am definitely not going to argue with almost any of what you said. My main point is that democracy as we have it now clearly has flaws and maybe exploring ways to amend it to work better isn’t a terrible idea. Again, Ireland successfully used randomly selected assemblies to decide in major legislation. Perhaps a state like California that loves doing direct referendums and as a result has referendums decided in part by how successfully the campaign around the given issue is can benefit from a longer deliberation by people who are not known ahead of time.

Currently, the Congressional staff is mostly recruited and retained by the congresspeople, and they become the experts in many situations. They can also be retained by the committees, in which case they are often more non-partisan. They do have some ability to influence the debate, but they usually do not frame it.

If we had national assemblies by sortition every 2 years, I would worry that the the tail (the current structure of Congressional support staff) would wag the dog. A better system would need to be designed to enable good decision-making.

sortition is just democracy but with a weird probabilistic form of voting

As opposed to the determinism we have now?

As a prosecuting attorney who selects and works to convince the "average" juror 5+ times a year, this is not a good idea. You are vastly overestimating what the average level of competence is. Most people, when given unfamiliar knowledge work to do, are so hopelessly biased and ignorant that I definitely think the average congressperson is more qualified to do that kind of work. We are spoiled by selection bias when extrapolating what "average" means in the USA.

I'm reminded of the famous Carlin bit: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

Speaking of "average", every political debate moderator should ask the candidates where they shop and how much milk and eggs cost. Ask them how much it is to fill up their car's gas tank. I don't necessarily think sortition is the answer, but I have more faith that the so called "hopelessly biased and ignorant average person" would address issues that affect me than I do with hopelessly biased and ignorant people like Trump, Johnson, Thune, Schumer and Jefferies, because I know they're only looking out for themselves.

this (sometimes) happens in New Zealand:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/350541328/watch-national-le...

So if you are wealthy enough to have house staff to do all the shopping, cooking, and driving, then you are somehow less qualified to be a member of parliament?

> I definitely think the average congressperson is more qualified to do that kind of work

My sense is that people who advocate for sortition find it attractive not because they believe that the average citizen is more intelligent or better informed than the average career politician, just less corrupt.

Setting aside whether that's even true, I'm not sure whether it would be better to live in a country run by honest idiots or corrupt experts.

>Or we can recruit lawmakers how we choose juries: randomly. Every two years we randomly select 435 individuals to

If anyone doesn't like that number (435), there's already a constitutional amendment to bump it up to 6000ish. It's been ratified by 12 states, so only 26 more needed. Call your state legislator today and ask why they're not ratifying it.

Whoa. Gonna have to congregate in the Capitol One Arena if that happens.

Let's fuck up Congress. Help make it happen.

(In seriousness, they'd be forced to explore other solutions, possibly even regional capitols with some sort of high-tech teleconferencing. Anything that decentralizes and claws back power from DC can't be a bad thing if you ask me.)

> The counterargument: do you think are current legislators are more or less qualified than an average person?

More, obviously. Almost a third of the US House and half the Senate are lawyers. Less than three tenths of a percent of Americans have a JD.

I am honestly curious how many Congresspeople with law degrees could pass the Bar.

But also have you see some of the laws written by them? I am not saying we need to dumb it down, but the fact that an average person who is governed by these laws cannot comprehend these laws is probably not the most desirable quality in a legal system.

Many people who are members of parliament are highly educated, usually in law. It sounds like a terrible idea to randomly select people. I want my MPs to be very well educated.