Thesh wrote:I think sortition by, let's say a separate jury selected for each bill, who then hear arguments, do research, form discussion groups, and then vote can work if your bills are fairly small. The bills that have a thousand pages, and five hundred unrelated items is just going to be too much. Even with the legislature we have today, for the most part it's a handful of negotiators and the individual legislators listening to their party leadership on whether to vote in favor.
For "thousand page" bills I think there are some things to keep in mind:
- Complexity and length are related, but not he same thing.
- Ninety percent of the bill is in ten percent of the content.
- We have different layers of law: Statutes, case law, and policies set by executives.
The reason we have the layers is that the legislature can't always anticipate every detail or know changes in relevant facts.
However, sometimes they can anticipate details and issues, and accounting for all that can take up a lot of space.
There is (in my decidedly non-expert opinion) benefit to thinking about the "core" and "expansion" of a law separately. Which I think is more or less what's happening already. The congress person comes up with a rough idea of of a bill they wish to pass, and their aides write up something that implements that and also handles corner cases and rigorously defines what everything means.
I think to formalize this, we could have the jury write the core, and aides/experts write the expansion. The Jury would at least review the expansion and maybe there'd be some partisan/adversarial system for calling BS.
The expansion would be subject to judicial review if it wasn't a good faith attempt at interpretation (Example, if the core said "Necrophilia is illegal" and expansion that included "Consensual homosexual sex between two living adults" as "Necrophilia" would be invalid.)
Zamfir wrote:If you think about it, this almost describes the Old School Tie network itself. Some kids and their families are given a privileged upbringing, and if they show promise and don't screw up, they become the default candidates for leadership functions throughout society.
I think is very important here to be aware of what qualifies as "screwing up". Screwing up for a scholarship kid is very different than screwing up for a legacy kid.
Soupspoon wrote:The big problem that I pointed out, was that a child of an unprivelidged background given support enough to get out of the black hole of their background and represent their class at government level would necessarily be uplifted out of his/her background whilst doing so, and may well not have the grounding in reality that we are seeking in such a child. The solution to that is difficult to work out. I've tried looking at a number of potential variations, myself, without true success, but I don't know the originator's thoughts, if any, regarding this issue.
I think the thing is that life experience and background aren't strictly either / or things.
The thing about recursion problems is that they tend to contain other recursion problems.