Ain’t a democratic election unless there’s a lottery option on the ballot.

“Took a sabbatical to learn [skill]”

Did you know it’s better for the environment to keep an old gas car running than to buy a new electric vehicle? It’s the same principle. One Polyester shirt that lasts 20 years is better than 20 cotton shirts degrading year after year.

This is entirely inconsistent with my experience, so I suspect there is no correlation. My polyester shirts are silky and breathable, and my cotton blankets are rough and scratchy. I’m sure you have your on experiences that seem to validate your view, so I suspect there is no correlation. Perhaps there is some other processing factor that determines how comfortable or breathable a fabric turns out to be.

Only difference I’ve reliably seen between cotton and polyester is that cotton degrades faster, which makes you buy clothes more often. If you throw clothes away a lot, cotton is better for the environment. If you wear clothes until they’re unusable, polyester is better for the environment.

So… ICE will know both your location and face every time you get in your car? Yeah, I’m sure this won’t result in a genocide. ^/s

The politics isn’t a problem I can solve as an individual.

Welp, that settles it. I’ll just have to live forever.

For what it’s worth, a lot of synthetic biologists are looking into Carbon Concentrating Mechanisms (e.g. carboxysomes) so that we can improve carbon capture in native plants. Honestly, as a protein engineer / synthetic biologist myself there’s even odds I could end up working on it too; though, it’s not my first choice.

I’m pretty sure short-sightedness is more a result of patience and critical thinking, but outdoors might help near-sightedness.

I think career politicians help prevent administrators from taking too much power, and there’s always another level of administrators waiting in the wings with their own self interests. While I agree that there are very few politicians I’d trust with power, having a few who know how things work could prevent a lot of problems. Plus, I strongly suspect that large chunks of the population will rank lottery at the top out of sheer principle, so it’s not just that 50% of the population views these politicians favorably, but that 50% actually see them as good i.e. if 30% puts lottery top out of principle, then 50/70 = 71% of the remaining population to think these career politicians are actually better than a lottery. The more people who are convinced of the lottery being superior, the higher the bar is for career politicians.

Also, this whole transition thing can’t be over stated. We really have to pick our battles to make it happen, and telling politicians that it won’t have much effect because they’ll just advertise themselves and voters won’t even notice the difference is a good transitory narrative that can easily and permanently be undermined after one pro-lottery round of advertising.

The US has always been an electoral oligarchy. It paints itself as a democratic republic to claim that it has consent of the people it governs, but the governed are given no real choices. Would you like to take a right hook or a left hook? Sorry, not getting hit wasn’t an option.

We need to start demanding our cities and states use a ranked sortition approach. Put a lottery option on a ranked voting ballot and make politicians beat the lottery if they want to claim they’re a legitimate ruling class.

Sortition does best as an anti-corruption mechanism, rather than a full system that removes all politicians. I like to merge it with ranked voting by adding a lottery option to the ballot that politicians have to beat. This, for lack of a better term, Ranked Sortition system is also an easier transition from the current system, so even if you want a full sortition this is easier to implement at various local levels where people still need to get used to the idea.

Edit: Also is there a com where we can talk about these sort of voting theory things?

Who gets to say who’s qualified? While I appreciate experts, any filter you add to democracy is dangerous. I think experts should serve a large council of randomly selected citizens and people who were ranked higher than a lottery option in a ranked voting system. That allows us to have career politicians, but also prevents them from entrenching themselves as the “lesser evil”.

This is actually why I advocate for the ranked voting combination. We can have qualified career politicians if more than half the population agrees they’re qualified and decent people, but if they can’t manage that… yeah, the lottery is more an anti corruption mechanism than a way to get rid of politicians.

Yep, the United States is an electoral oligarchy, not a democratic republic.

She advocates for deliberative democracy, so like congress but a randomly selected citizens council/jury that holds power and deliberate and talk about how to solve problems. While I’m not sure if her book said, I get the impression she wouldn’t approve of the amount of power presidents wield. She’d probably advocate that position be more subordinate to a people’s congress, like congress appointing a head of a department rather than the president being some grand leader. At least that’s my impression.

For what it’s worth, I have a PhD in Structural Biology, so I’m not exactly an anti-intellectual. In fact, I personally think we should include both felons and PhDs in the selection pool.

That said, I think there are legitimate criticisms of pseudo-intellectual technocrats who use their credentials to push ideology, and I don’t think it’d be the worst thing in the world if the people who’ve already dedicated their life to actually improving the world could sever the (randomly selected) citizens council without having doubt cast upon them via comparison to power-hungry technocrats. If credentials excluded one from direct power, credentials might be seen as a more honest dedication to one’s work.

Again, I personally think it’s dangerous to exclude anyone from the selection pool. I’m just trying to talk about some of the concerns people might have with the lottery mechanism.

“Citizens Juries” is a phrase often associated with it.

As for PhDs, Experts have tendency to think they know best and move to capture systems. There’s an argument to be made that if you want your opinion respected, you should commit to helping without the benefits and corrupting effect of power.

All the candidates are on the ballot you add a positive or negative number next to the candidates you care about, maybe we add a party modifier that adds +1 or -1 to all candidates of a party. The computer scans your ballot and puts the candidates in order with those numbers. Unranked candidates (i.e. rank zero) are equal to the “lottery” option. We can use this ranking to define the relation between all candidates and sum these relations across the whole population. Going through these sum relations we start with whatever relation gets the most votes and set that as true (blue > red) and it’s opposite as false (red > blue). Then the next and next until we have know how the population ranks all the candidates. Any candidate less than or equal to the “lottery” option gets dropped. Above the lottery option, you start with the top ranked candidate and work your way down until you run out of positions. If you hit the lottery option before running out of seat those seats are filled with randomly selected citizens. The citizens can decline and we re-roll, but there’s no opt-in process – no power seeking.

The book “Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule” by Hélène Landemore advocates for something similar but without the ranked voting part. She advocates just for pure lottery.

Do you trust the pedophilic warmongers more than a council of 100 random people? Sure, you’ll get a block of idiots and few PhDs, but mostly you’ll get normal people with different perspective on life. If you’re really worried, ban felons (and PhDs) from the random selection to make sure you get mostly normal people.

Also, who decides who’s qualified? You’ve probably heard this argument about being qualified to vote, but being qualified to rule is just as problematic. Any test you make to decide who can rule will be captured by the rulers and used to entrench their power. Right now the decision is made via campaign financing. On the other hand, if you have random citizens then suddenly there’s a very big incentive for every part of our society to make sure everyone is educated and well-treated, least enough of these uneducated or mistreated citizens get randomly selected and collectively agree to remove the problem.