The "Bootstrapping Sortition" Problem

Which part of a sortition body is the booty?

Van Gogh bootstrapped his career by painting his own shoes in 1886, which is 100 years before I was born, which is the year Henry George published Protection or Free Trade, and 20 years after the US Civil War

How can I persuade you that sortition works? How am I sure that sortition works? Well, I’m not really sure. How can I be sure?

(By “sortition” here I mean randomly selecting a group of people and having them deliberate on an issue. One term for these bodies are Civic Assemblies. I advocate for Civic Assemblies with a nonprofit in LA called Public Democracy LA, but the movement is global.)

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There have been lots of Civic Assemblies, which are sortition bodies, and mostly in the EU. Most of these sortition bodies have decided things in line with the liberal agenda.

I’ve heard one sortition advocate express the sentiment that they’re kinda happy Trump won, because otherwise they’d have to be directing their sortition advocacy at the disgruntled right, whereas now they get to be talking to disgruntled people on the left, whom they relate to.

However, if Harris had won, I bet there’d exist a sortition advocate from the right who’d express the sentiment that they’re kinda happy Harris won, because otherwise they’d have to be directing their sortition advocacy at the disgruntled left, whereas now they get to be talking to disgruntled people on the right, whom they relate to.

Equal and opposite amount? Unlikely. Very few things are equal and opposite, in my humblest of opinions.

Regardless, were I to approach people right now and present them with results from some of the EU sortition assemblies, “Hey, look at all these results! Like gay marriage! Legal abortion! Lots of gun control!” Many would conclude that sortition sucks.

Let’s get abstract! Suppose there’s a policy α. Some people are pro-α and other people are anti-α. It has exactly 50/50 support. Then you form a sortition body and people deliberate and, well, it turns out that, after time and resources and access to experts, the sortition body decides that α is goodbad and so they approvreject α. Well, the rest of the population, who lack the time and resources and access to experts, well, half of them probably won’t be impressed by this new fangled “sortition” experiment. (Without loss of generality, we could pretend the sortition body concluded α is goodbad and so they approvereject α. Then the other half wouldn’t be so sure they liked sortition.)

There’s a seeming meta level to rational ignorance regarding sortition. (The first level of rational ignorace is just how unworth your time it is thoughtfully develop a stance on policy α.)

This is what I’m calling the “Bootstrapping Sortition” Problem. Even if you got to have a Civic Assembly, would people be happy with what they resolved?

I’m not the first person to talk about this difficulty, but I think it’s funny to call it a bootstrapping problem. Especially because it’s funny to me to think about sortition being like a new compiler for the code of America. Which is programmer humor, but it’s pretty good.

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Let’s get more concrete, but extra hypothetical!

Imagine if Abraham Lincoln had called for a Civic Assembly during his inauguration speech in 1861, a few years before the American Civil War, to address the issue of slavery.

Ok, let me caveat the shit outta this! I’m not going to go do a bunch of American history research right here and now and present it. I’m not going to say what path should have been taken either in 1776, 1865, or in 1492. Clearly, slavery needed to be abolished. Clearly, many forms of slavery still exist and the US government is involved with its persistence globally. Clearly, 620,000+ deaths in the American Civil War was an immense tragedy.

So. Possible policies that Lincoln’s 1860 Civic Assembly (sortition body) might have tossed out and evaluted and proposed one or two or a combination:

— Maybe any human being born afer 186x cannot be a slave

— Maybe any human being born after 186x cannot own other humans

— Maybe tax human ownership

— Maybe the US government could purchase slaves’ freedom (This is what Britain did, but a criticism of this approach was that these repayments were not completed until 2015 and super enriched big slaveowners for hundreds of years!)

— Maybe revoke the cotton gin patent so smaller farmers can afford one and compete with the big plantations more easily

— Maybe allow the South secede and then new states who joined the Union would have to be free states (maybe this actually demonstrates something virtuous about the US government, rather than indicating a weakness)

— Maybe pass a Land Value Tax with a Universal Basic Income, so that inefficient uses of large tracts of land are disincentivized and industries, such as farming or factory meanufacturing, would be less lucrative for an owner who actually had to pay his workers their fair wage

(Recall that Lizzie Magie was the daughter of an abolitionist who then became a Georgist and created the board game we now call Monopoly to demonstrate how those who must rent are still not free!)

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Going back to the undeclared policy α.

I kinda left out a step of the deliberation process. I said the sortition body could adopt or reject policy α, but really, they could proposal an alternative, policy β.

This policy β could have been a lesser known policy or it was conceived during the deliberation. Suppose that is is superior to both α and ~α (that is, it works better than either adopting policy α and the status quo). When β is adopted by the sortition body, now what opinions of sortition does the rest of the society have?

Well, it depends. Recall we said α had a 50/50 split. Maybe β has terrible curb appeal and like 70 percent of population doesn’t like it. Or maybe it is immediately embraced, because it had previously been suppressed by elite control over the media or something.

Regardless, the population who isn’t involved is sorta rationally ignorant. So we’re back again to the non-participating public being confronted with a tough decision about evaluating sortition.

Tough.

What I can tell you is that most people find being a participant in a sortition body meaningful and come away believing in that process. I can also say witih some certainty that in American Congress, hardly anyone is trying to find these β proposals. If Congress is collaborating, it is the backroom wheeling and dealing. They’re not having some beautiful, elevated discussion of Truth.

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Abortion. Idk how it should be done. But I only ever hear pro-life and pro-choice. Ok, sometimes about 3rd trimester abortions. Or when the mother’s life is in danger.

I was discussing this with a single mom the other day.

I asked, “What even happens if you get an abortion when it’s illegal? Are you fined or something?”

She was like, “Oh, I’m not even sure!”

“Do you get locked up for baby murder?”

She didn’t think so. She and I agreed it’s such a sad, depressing topic. We also then remembered that the doctor can lose their license.

Then I said, “But I don’t even think our government should be in the business of deciding who can and can’t provide medical care anyway! They’re so bad at it.”

Please note, that I think it would be a bad decision for an American sortition body to abolish the American Medical Association tomorrow. I’m absolutely certain there’s a better, intermediary, β proposal that could be adopted. I have a nice little priority queue of reforms that I would like to see sortition bodies deliberate on, one by one. LVT would be up first.

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I think the Land Value Tax is a kind of β proposal: practically no one’s heard of it, it’s superior to the common taxation policies, and its curb appeal is quite…hard to gauge. Many people think it smacks of communism and many people think it won’t actually “fix capitalism”, since it doesn’t target the super wealthy directly. However, a lot of people do view it as a very simple application of sharing finite resources (space, land, minerals, etc).

Anyway.

I believe we humans are now collectively dreaming the correct dream of equality and liberty and we’ll get there soon.

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Mathematics!

Suppose each time a sortition body that you were not selected for does its thing and ends up picking a policy you support. How do you feel about sortition? Let’s say you assign +3 points to “I feel favorably towards sortition as a form of governance”. However, if that sortition body ends up adopting a policy you don’t like, then you assign -3 points. In any situation where you’re neutral towards the policy, then just +0.

Then suppose your society goes through a sequence of 10 sortition bodies.

While a body could accept or reject a policy, let’s just call the rejection of a policy the same as just accepting a different policy. This way we can just say every sortition body adopts some policy.

Then we can say you either like that policy or you don’t or you’re neutral.

Let’s suppose every issue has a commonly associated policy that splits the population 50/50.

Suppose there’s some chance x of a sortition body coming up with and adopting a novel policy.

Here’s where we can play with things and propose some kind of split among the population that isn’t 50/50. So, since I believe in sortition, let’s say that when the population hears about this novel policy, they have a slightly more favorable view of it. Like instea of 50/50, let’s say this novel policy is view positively 55/45.

Then the resulting population will feel what towards sortition at the end of it?

I don’t know. It’s sorta tempting to write a script to run something like this.

The next step would be whether or not people’s opinions of policies over time, like maybe a year or two (or a day or two in the case of NYC congestion pricing), change.

Other comments: we could assign like +1/-1 to novel policies, to reflect people being not so impassioned about them. Altho maybe that could go the other way, to +5/-5, because people are so gratefult that new ideas are being put forth or they’re so angry that someone is trying to reform a system that’s made their society so valuable.

Anyway. Just a thought experiment experiment or maybe a toy model/simulation I’ll make one day.

Assumptions lurk above and below.

Also, eventually, a lot of people would have been in a sortition body or known someone they trust who was in a sortition body. This would be the brute force approach for addressing the rational ignorance of sortition.

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As for me, I’ve persuaded of sortition mostly by Twelve Angry Men, studying statistics and sampling in college, recently participating in two model civic assemblies, and, initially, by elimination of alternatives (read: disgust/disillusionment/distaste for bloodline aristocracy, a ruling party, election campaigns, right-by-might, or…idk, what else is there? How does anarchy work again?)

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What do you think of my new sortition advocacy slogan?

Political Parties Are
The Worst Parties

Google “Sortition”

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Somehow, I don’t know how, but Alexandra Ocasio Cortez just sent me an email with the subject line, “Why am I considered extreme?” and it concludes “People like to lie about and caricature me a lot, which makes folks believe all sorts of things that aren’t true!”

She wants $10 from me. I don’t have a job, but I live rent free in my dad’s house. Imputed rent is my income.

Hey, you, why don’t you donate $10 to
PublicDemocracyLA.org
or
AssembleAmerica.org
or
DemocracyWithoutElections.org

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Yours truly,
Max