r/Sortition

Below is a writeup of my sortition based political system theory that has continued to be refined over the past 6.5 years, and while long, eases you into understanding (hopefully, maybe) this newer variation of sortition that can easily be misinterpreted as a crazy version of a more centralised model, but is actually a new way to distribute state authority. It gives what sortition promises in cleaning out influence and turning down the pressure on the decision makers, but in the process of solving the lack of mandate issue, that allows monied interests to whip up the public and weaken it over time, I discovered a way to fix it that also revealed a new way to transform how all governments work, for the better:

I’ve been trying to work out why governments can get dramatically more sophisticated, employ more experts, collect more data, write more regulation, and still keep producing the same category of stupid problems.

Not necessarily the same problems. The same type of problem.

Something everyone agrees should be fixed somehow survives three governments.

A company technically complies with the rules while obviously violating their purpose.

The government fixes one loophole, creating two new ones.

An industry becomes important enough that the regulator starts depending on the same people it regulates.

A policy gets designed around an imaginary average citizen who, as far as I can tell, has never actually existed.

We usually explain this as corruption, incompetence, capitalism, socialism, bureaucracy, voter stupidity, political polarisation, whatever.

I think there’s something underneath all of those.

The government has a scaling problem.

And I don’t mean there aren’t enough politicians.

I mean we’re trying to run a massively parallel society through a comparatively tiny, linear, decision-making system.

That distinction leads somewhere quite strange.

Bear with me.

Think about how your body works.

Your brain does not have a committee meeting every morning and issue Regulation 2026/418 explaining how much insulin every cell is permitted to use today.

There isn’t a 900-page Heartbeat Act covering the approved response to every possible combination of temperature, fear, exercise, disease, dehydration, caffeine and the dog suddenly barking at 3am.

Your body is doing an insane number of things simultaneously.

Local signals. Feedback. Correction. Prediction. More feedback. Different systems pushing against one another and settling into something workable.

Society looks much more like that than it looks like an organisation chart.

Millions of people and businesses are making decisions simultaneously using information that often exists only locally.

Then sitting above this giant parallel thing is government, which mostly has one basic tool:

Come up with a general rule.

Apply it to everyone.

Come back later and change it when reality finds an exception.

That seems normal because we’ve been doing versions of it forever.

But imagine actually designing governance from scratch for a society of many millions of independently acting people.

Would you deliberately funnel most corrective power through several hundred elected people, a collection of departments and regulators, then ask them to anticipate enough circumstances to write rules for everybody?

I wouldn’t.

My journey led me to a result that someone might arrive at eventually when asking:

What would democracy look like if democratic decision-making could happen in parallel too?

Not referendums on everything. That would be horrific.

Not replacing elections with randomly selected politicians.

Not an enormous parliament.

Something else.

Take one of the oldest political technologies we already trust ordinary citizens with: the jury.

Now massively parallelise it.

To what 4% of the population comes to as a number, is the amount of juries (at the least) likely being created throughout the year, in seasonal sessions.

Twelve randomly selected citizens.

Remotely working together.

At a pace they prefer.

One issue.

One ruling.

Then that jury is finished.

Not twelve people elected for four years who slowly accumulate a political career, donors, staff, party obligations and institutional relationships.

Twelve temporary people who have one job and then disappear back into society.

Here’s where the idea departs pretty hard from conventional sortition.

These aren’t miniature parliaments.

They don’t sit around writing laws for everyone.

Their natural scope is closer to a court case.

Person/business/entity A has a dispute involving person/business/entity B.

The jury hears it.

The jury can decide what outcome it thinks is fair and reasonable.

Then society moves on.

No need to write a universal 300-clause law predicting every version of that dispute that might occur for the next twenty years.

Just solve the actual thing in front of you.

And then do it again.

And again.

And again.

State by state across the entire country.

That sounds chaotic at first.

I thought so too.

The interesting part is what happens after you have enough of them.

Suppose a company is treating workers in a way ordinary people consistently consider unfair.

One case reaches a jury.

Then another similar one does.

Then another.

The company doesn’t need parliament to eventually notice, draft legislation, negotiate amendments, survive lobbying, pass both chambers, have regulations written, wait for enforcement and then spend ten years litigating what those regulations technically mean.

Management starts noticing a pattern.

“If we keep doing X, juries keep producing Y.”

So they stop doing X.

Competitors notice too.

Insurers notice.

Investors notice.

Industry advisers notice.

Someone starts compiling jury outcomes and selling businesses a service explaining the emerging standard.

Eventually most disputes never reach a jury at all because everybody has a fairly good idea what an ordinary group of twelve people will tolerate.

You’ve produced something that resembles law without having somebody sit down and deliberately write all of it.

An adaptive convention.

A sort of crowd-produced common law, except the decision-maker has broader discretion over the parties in front of it.

And importantly, it can change.

If technology changes and the old convention becomes ridiculous, cases start producing different outcomes.

The standard moves.

No parliamentary software update required.

Now the obvious objection:

Wouldn’t millions of juries contradict one another?

Yes, sometimes.

Especially at the beginning.

I don’t think that’s a bug.

Markets contain contradictory decisions too. So does science. So does culture. The question is whether the contradictions converge.

Say one jury produces a bizarre ruling.

Another affected party challenges it through another jury.

That second jury can overturn or modify it.

Potentially another jury challenges that.

The system isn’t pretending humans suddenly become perfectly consistent.

It’s trying to make inconsistencies cheap to correct.

That distinction matters.

Also the jurors are paid for jury work, but only if their ruling survives ever being overturned, and the jury decides that their decision was bad enough for them to lose some or all of their payment.

Not because I think jurors need punishment.

Because the incentive should be:

“Make a decision another random group of twelve ordinary people could live with.”

Not:

“Win.”

Not:

“Please my political tribe.”

Not:

“Get reelected.”

The unanimity requirement matters here too.

Twelve out of twelve.

That will absolutely make some cases slower.

Good.

These juries aren’t supposed to be miniature activist governments firing decrees across society.

If you want to impose state-backed power on somebody, convincing eleven other random citizens seems like a useful amount of friction.

Then suddenly, a confident declaration arises from someone in the crowd:

“Congratulations, you just invented bribing a jury instead of a politician, here's a medal”.

The defence for this isn’t that random people are morally superior.

They aren’t.

The defence is scale plus reversibility.

Imagine a company bribes one jury and receives an obviously favourable outcome.

Great.

Until another jury looks at the benefit those twelve people received, or the decision that resulted from it, and makes a decision to take it away and overturn the ruling.

To permanently purchase an unfair privilege, you don’t really need to purchase a jury.

You need to purchase enough of the jury ecosystem that future ordinary juries stop undoing what you bought.

The juries themselves decide what case to take, are only paid what the other juries are paid for a similar workload, and are many.

This means jury access is proportionally distributed through the population rather than sold to whoever can afford more of it, so the cost of maintaining that corrupt exception will continue to rise until it reaches the level of corrupting the system itself.

That’s the theory, anyway.

It also creates some entertaining anti-corruption possibilities.

If somebody offers a juror a bribe, imagine the juror being legally able to take it, report it, refuse to perform the requested act, and potentially keep a bounty from the resulting penalty.

Now bribery has a rather unpleasant counterparty risk.

I’m not claiming corruption becomes metaphysically impossible.

Nothing designed for humans gets that luxury.

The design goal is simpler:

Make corruption economically stupid.

And there’s another weird effect that keeps these rulings remaining small in scope.

Imagine one person convinces a jury to issue some gigantic society-wide ruling affecting 100,000 people.

Those 100,000 people now contain a rather large number of potential counter-cases.

So the broader and more intrusive your ruling is, the more opposition you manufacture.

A micro decision produces a micro response.

A macro decision produces a macro response.

Even if they push back over and over on that ruling, other rulings elsewhere in their life will occur to the point that they beg “I give up, just leave me alone”.

The jury complicit in the macro ruling and the other juries who kept reinstating it would lose their jury pay for those rulings.

This will only occur a few times and become a good lesson among many of what to avoid.

So I think the system naturally pushes juries toward relatively narrow rulings because trying to use one jury as a legislature gets you outflanked by other juries.

That’s an important part of this.

The system isn’t supposed to depend on everyone behaving nicely.

It’s supposed to make overreach generate its own opposition.

There’s also another part people tend to misunderstand when I explain this.

I’m not proposing the abolition of the elected government.

The government still exists.

Elections still exist.

The constitution still exists.

The government still handles the things that belong to the government itself: public assets, defence, foreign affairs, constitutional matters and the administration of what the state actually owns.

The jury layer operates alongside it.

Government becomes one part of the system rather than the only place democratic authority can meaningfully act.

The cleanest jurisdictional divide I’ve found are assets.

Who has a majority of asset value in a given place.

The majority of asset value in a geographic space/place/area/territory would be calculated by measuring the largest single asset in an area by space consumed, then the value of that asset and the value of all assets within that asset are then tallied.

The definition of a single asset would be based on past federal and state precedent for all current and future asset types.

Publicly owned stuff: elected government has direct authority.

Private sector: citizen juries have direct authority.

There will obviously be ugly boundary cases.

Good.

Those are exactly the kind of things I want, because if the boundary doesn’t survive contact with reality then the system doesn’t survive either.

But the basic distinction matters because otherwise we’ve just reinvented government with millions of tiny departments.

That isn’t what I’m proposing.

There is no Department of Jury Decisions employing 80,000 people to turn every ruling into regulations.

The ruling is the administrative act.

A jury agrees on an outcome.

It is published and digitally authenticated.

The parties deal with it.

If someone thinks it’s unreasonable, another jury can become involved.

Similar decisions accumulate into conventions.

Businesses mostly respond to those conventions rather than reading every individual ruling, just as they don’t personally read every court judgment produced today.

In fact I’d expect an entire information industry to appear almost immediately around this.

“Here’s what juries are currently doing with refunds.”

“Here’s the emerging standard on employee surveillance.”

“Here’s how similar disputes over AI-generated work have been decided during the last six months.”

Businesses could actually plan around that.

The question changes from:

“What can our lawyers technically argue is permitted?”

to something closer to:

“What would twelve ordinary citizens consider reasonable if somebody challenged this?”

I think those produce very different corporate cultures.

This is also where the idea starts having consequences I didn’t originally design into it.

Take insurance.

Today an insurance contract can contain enormous amounts of carefully engineered language determining exactly when the company owes you money.

Under this system the contract still matters.

But if the outcome created by some technical exclusion strikes repeated juries as obviously unreasonable, the technical brilliance of the exclusion stops being much of a defence.

Companies start anticipating that.

Product descriptions become more honest for the same reason.

Returns get easier.

Employment conditions change.

Whistleblowing becomes valuable.

Safety standards evolve.

Not because Parliament has passed the Omnibus Be Nicer Act.

Because repeated case-level decisions create economic consequences and businesses adapt before they become the next case.

The same mechanism would extend into social spending.

Governments would only be able to tax, as a percentage of the economy, a level that funds essential government operations and not much else beyond that, due to the parallel paced influence of the juries over public sector supply chains that go out into the private sector.

That doesn’t destroy healthcare, disability support, education, infrastructure and other social services, society will always want these, so will the juries.

My expectation is that jury rulings would gradually place obligations on businesses, and businesses would respond by developing standardised organisations or funds that collect and distribute those obligations fairly and efficiently.

So imagine somebody has a child requiring disability support that the existing system does not cover.

They challenge the refusal.

A jury decides the support is reasonable.

Other comparable cases appear.

A rough boundary starts emerging around what society is willing to fund.

Businesses don’t want to individually reinvent disability administration every Thursday, so specialist organisations emerge to manage contributions and payments.

Eventually most of it becomes boring infrastructure.

Until the standard becomes unfair or outdated.

Then somebody challenges it again.

The important distinction is that a jury isn’t sitting down one afternoon and announcing:

“Congratulations Australia, we just redesigned education.”

That’s exactly the type of macro ruling the rest of the system pushes against.

The change happens from specific cases outward.

Small decisions create patterns.

Patterns create expectations.

Expectations create institutions.

Institutions remain challengeable.

I also know what some of you political nerds are thinking because you have said it before:

“This is just Sortition.”

Sortition is definitely in its ancestry.

I’ve been interested in sortition for years.

But most sortition proposals I’ve seen still use randomly selected people as a replacement or supplement for the same basic centralised political structure.

A citizens’ assembly.

A randomly selected chamber.

A deliberative body recommending legislation.

This asks a different question.

What happens if you take the distribution part of sortition seriously enough that there is barely a centre at all?

Not 500 randomly selected legislators.

An enormous rotating population of temporary jurors resolving individual problems simultaneously.

The point isn’t primarily that random citizens are wiser than politicians.

The point is bandwidth.

A legislature has to generalise.

Millions of juries do not.

And this is probably the largest philosophical disagreement underneath the entire thing.

Most political systems are designed around finding the right rules.

The right tax rate.

The right labour law.

The right healthcare structure.

The right welfare settings.

The right regulations.

Then everybody fights like hell because whichever side gets control can impose its preferred answer across millions of people.

This system starts from the assumption that there isn’t one permanently correct answer.

There are just circumstances.

And circumstances keep moving.

So instead of trying to perfect the rulebook, increase the amount of feedback.

Instead of concentrating enough intelligence at the top to predict society, let society continuously correct itself.

Instead of asking five hundred people to understand twenty million situations, ask twelve people to understand one.

Then repeat.

A lot.

[This is]

Parallel Democracy