i rest my case

[election by jury]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG8SwAFQFuU

[election by jury]

weird. this was me but it doesn't show it. this is frustrating.

On Thursday, January 18, 2024 at 10:02:13 PM UTC-8 election by jury wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG8SwAFQFuU

[Paul Melman]

Haha such displays of public ignorance are amusing but I have a story to provide a bit of a counter narrative. 

My friend used to work at a prestigious biglaw firm in Manhattan. Every year, they held a raffle at their Christmas party to raise money for charity. They put out the raffle prizes and a bucket in front of each one for the tickets. The problem? The buckets didn't have lids, so you could see how many tickets were in each one. My friend, being a rationally thinking individual, immediately realized the optimal strategy of waiting until the end to put tickets in all the bins with the fewest tickets (and just give out any prizes he won but didn't want as gifts to friends and family). His cohort of 8 or so fellow highly educated 1st year attorneys all questioned why he was doing this. He explained his logic but all of them decried his strategy as foolish. All of these lawyers were either top half of their class from an Ivy or top 10% from a highly ranked non-Ivy btw, so hardly unintelligent folks. Unsurprisingly, my friend won more raffle prizes than anyone else, but the other first years insisted it was just dumb luck anyway. The following year, it happened again, with the exact same results. 

My point being that highly intelligent, highly educated individuals can't be trusted to be reliable sources of knowledge or wisdom outside of their narrow specialty. One of the biggest selling points of juries/citizens assemblies imo is that they optimize for breadth of experience rather than depth. Depth can be acquired during deliberation (to some degree). Breadth of experience is much harder to inject into system. 

[Clay S]

interesting. my interest is less about breadth, and more about the idea that anyone can become an "instant expert" if exposed to deep deep education on a topic. for instance, how would our views on nuclear power look if we all had to watch this video before casting our vote on politicians with a range of views on nuclear power?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDUvCLAp0uU

in addition to the issue of merely having "more information", the jury context pulls people away from their political in-group and social media bubbles or echo chambers. this makes them more psychologically capable of wrestling with their own identity, e.g. accepting the reality of climate change even though your in-group and information/media bubble is skeptical. serving on a jury creates a sense of civic responsibility. your "tribe" becomes that group of community peers more so than your fellow fox news or democracy now watchers.

diversity itself isn't even so much the point to me. it's just a consequence of using random selection, the point of which is merely to make sure the group's overarching ideological center of balance is roughly approximate to that of the electorate itself. if you could turn a slider that pulls all the members toward the center, while preserving the statistical accuracy with respect to the overall position of the two groups in issue space, i doubt you'd get much difference in outcomes. and you might even have some improvements in efficiency insofar as a group of ideologically aligned centrists might get along better and have a better chance of embracing the truly optimal positions, which by definition should be at the political centroid in the first place. a kind of related video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA

this relates to my skepticism of proportional representation.

you could look at it the opposite way. right now we have a very diverse election turnout, because people all across the political spectrum vote. but the ideological center of balance is distorted, because there are demographic turnout disparities. i.e. the people who show up to vote are older/whiter/wealthier/etc. than the electorate as a whole.

that said, this is purely an academic argument, because there's no way to directly select a statistically valid sample of the population (as in, same rough ideological center of balance) without a random sample, which is necessarily going to be diverse. and i accept it's quite possible the benefits of diversity outweigh the potential for in-fighting between the communist atheist on the jury and the free market religious conservative on the the jury.

but it's an important consideration, because if the juries vote in single-member districts, or if they use multi-winner voting methods that aren't proportional (e.g. plain score voting), then you'll get highly competent elected officials who closely match the average views of the voters they serve (well, what those voters actually want more so than what they think they want, given they've deliberated). do we want the juries using proportional representation tho, so they elect e.g. city councils that are diverse? a whole other can of worms, but probably one that will come up when we put our first election by jury proposal on the ballot.

* i think we should definitely highlight the fact that demographic turnout disparities are solved with sortition/EBJ, because you effectively get compulsory universal voting, stochastically speaking.

[Rajiv Prabhakar]

Interesting! Maybe the other lawyers were playing 3D chess by considering both the likelihood of winning and the monetary value of the prize, while your friend was putting his tickets in a bunch of worthless knick-knacks? Haha, I'm exaggerating - I just like to imagine why people may be doing seemingly irrational things.

I agree 100% with your conclusion that highly intelligent/competent people can still be extremely ignorant outside of their area of expertise. The American Journal of Cardiology once ran an editorial titled something like "Why Doctors Are Poor Investors." Another cool thing with the jury system is that even if a randomly selected jury lacks breadth in a certain area, the politician making her case can bring in expert witnesses to patiently educate the jurors about the things they are ignorant about. They can even bring in experts whom the jury would have never thought to talk to, on topics that the jury may not have even considered. Sure, the jurors still need to be smart enough and open-minded enough to process this information. But at least they are exposed to it in far more detail, which will certainly help.

Regards,
Rajiv

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[Clay S]

On Saturday, July 20, 2024 at 11:34:35 AM UTC-7 rajivprab wrote:

even if a randomly selected jury lacks breadth in a certain area, the politician making her case can bring in expert witnesses to patiently educate the jurors about the things they are ignorant about. They can even bring in experts whom the jury would have never thought to talk to, on topics that the jury may not have even considered.

THIS THIS THIS THIS.