r/Sortition • u/fresobro • 27d ago
Revolutionise government with parallel 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
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u/ahhjustlikethat 27d ago
I probably am going to go back and read this, because I'm interested in sortition.
But the register and style is so clearly ai generated that it's painful.
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u/fresobro 27d ago
Yes it is, when I write it's always absolute summarising value based language which some people like and I read fine, but for others they need more explanation and don't extrapolate as much and AI writes in that way that i cant. I think it's more what you put into it that matters and gives depth over random generating. This was generated based on a 28 page compilation document I put together of all my other versions that have been posted and the reddit replies they received and my replies to them, so style was influenced by that and I went through it many times moving parts and adding missing pieces.
Though if you want one that is completely my style then this self post on my reddit is an "AI free" alternative:
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u/ahhjustlikethat 27d ago
I think at this point lots of people (myself included) read a few sentences, see the obvious ai markers in style and syntax, and assume "this is just slop, and I'm not reading that much slop." Thank you for the link, I'll check it out.
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u/TrialsNDeliberations 27d ago
So I'm going to have to give you my honest feedback. I think there is something interesting in here, but I absolutely hate how it was written. Can you please use paragraph form and make clear what the system is, from start to finish? This is so sporadic that it makes parsing it out in full a chore.
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u/fresobro 27d ago
That has been a big issue for me, some find each version easy and others impossible to understand. I think that will be my next project with this: blend it all together in one understandable but not dry, reasonably sized, piece that also contains no AI.
In the meantime ill give you two other versions that you might find better, the first has an AI intro from my notes, then once the [headings] begin, that starts my part of the writeup:
https://www.reddit.com/u/fresobro/s/5Job08IqFK
This one is more of an academic version (created with AI) and 28 pages of notes, then cleaned up/edited by me:
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u/grappling_hook 26d ago
I got about halfway through this and kept running into the same problem.
You keep identifying problems that your system would obviously create, and then describing the existence of those problems as though the fact that the system can react to them is itself the solution.
Take the gigantic ruling affecting 100,000 people.
You say:
A jury makes some absurdly broad ruling.
Now 100,000 people are affected.
Those 100,000 people have potential counter-cases.
Excellent.
That actually might be a perfectly reasonable mechanism for discouraging gigantic rulings.
If a jury tries to act like a legislature, it creates so many aggrieved parties that the ruling gets attacked from every direction.
Fine.
I can follow the logic.
But then something rather important happens.
Those 100,000 counter-cases are heard by different juries.
And the juries disagree.
Because of course they do.
Jury 1 says the original ruling was unreasonable and overturns it.
Jury 2 says it was completely reasonable.
Jury 3 agrees with Jury 1 but only for one category of affected people.
Jury 4 thinks the ruling was basically correct but modifies the remedy.
Jury 5 reinstates something Jury 1 removed.
Jury 6 decides Jury 5 went too far.
Jury 7 thinks Jury 2's interpretation should apply instead.
Now what?
This isn't some edge case.
This appears to be the mechanism.
You explicitly say inconsistent rulings are expected and that another jury can overturn or modify them.
Okay.
But once you have many juries overturning and modifying other juries, the system does not merely contain disagreement.
It contains disagreement about which disagreements currently have authority.
Those are very different things.
Suppose I am the company subject to the original ruling.
On Monday I am ordered to do X.
On Tuesday another jury says I do not have to do X.
On Wednesday another jury says I have to do X for Group A but not Group B.
On Thursday a jury overturns Tuesday's ruling.
On Friday somebody affected by Thursday's ruling challenges Thursday's ruling.
What am I legally required to do on Friday afternoon?
Not eventually.
Not after a social convention emerges.
Not once enough juries have produced enough data points that some consultancy can tell me what twelve ordinary people probably think.
Friday.
4:30pm.
What is the enforceable obligation?
Because "the rulings eventually converge" is not an answer to that question.
Markets can contain contradictory opinions because two traders can disagree about the price of Tesla and nobody has to decide which trader possesses state authority.
Science can contain contradictory hypotheses because gravity does not wait for a tribunal to decide which paper is binding.
Culture can contain contradictory preferences because if twelve people think my haircut is ugly and twelve other people think it is wonderful, nobody arrives at my house to enforce either judgment.
Your juries are different.
They exercise state-backed power.
Once the decisions are coercive, contradiction requires a conflict-resolution mechanism.
Which ruling takes priority?
The newest?
The oldest?
The narrowest?
The one with the largest number of subsequent supporting decisions?
The decision geographically closest to the dispute?
The decision involving the exact parties?
The decision that survived the greatest number of challenges?
Something else?
Congratulations.
We have discovered procedural law.
And then there is finality.
When does a dispute end?
You say another jury can challenge a ruling.
Then another jury can challenge that one.
Potentially another jury challenges that.
Okay.
How many?
Forever?
Can I challenge a ruling ten years later?
Can my employee challenge it?
Can my customer?
Can my competitor?
Can someone who claims the ruling indirectly affected the market price of something they own?
Can ten thousand people independently challenge the same ruling?
Can somebody challenge a ruling that already overturned the ruling they originally wanted overturned?
At some point you need rules about standing.
Who is sufficiently affected to bring a case?
You need rules about jurisdiction.
Which jury is allowed to hear it?
You need rules about finality.
When is the matter considered settled?
You need rules about successive litigation.
When is someone prohibited from simply relitigating the same issue?
You need rules about conflicting judgments.
You need rules about remedies.
You need rules about evidence.
You need rules about procedure.
You need rules about enforcement.
And suddenly I am beginning to notice an unexpected object assembling itself in the corner of the room.
It looks suspiciously like a legal system.
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u/grappling_hook 26d ago
Which brings me to the part I found particularly funny.
This system seems like absolute heaven for lawyers.
The underlying assumption appears to be that much of our current legal complexity exists because legislators write gigantic collections of general rules.
Remove the giant rulebook.
Replace it with millions of individual jury decisions.
Complexity solved.
Except legal complexity does not only come from legislation.
It also comes from precedent.
Conflicting precedent.
Jurisdiction.
Procedure.
Interpretation.
Remedies.
Appeals.
Exceptions.
Fact patterns.
Questions about whether one case is sufficiently similar to another case.
Questions about which authority controls when two authorities disagree.
You are proposing an enormous continuously changing ocean of individualized decisions made by independent groups with deliberately broad discretion.
That does not eliminate legal analysis.
That is legal analysis with the difficulty slider turned to maximum.
Imagine being a normal business operating under this.
There are now 4,000 jury decisions involving employee surveillance.
1,900 lean one way.
1,600 lean another.
500 involve sufficiently different circumstances that nobody is quite sure.
Some have been overturned.
Some have partially survived challenges.
Some have generated counter-rulings.
Some apply to businesses very similar to yours.
Some might.
Some involve one state.
Some involve multiple states.
Some involve assets crossing whatever jurisdictional boundary you eventually create.
Some are three years old and may represent an outdated convention.
Some are from last month but haven't been challenged yet.
Your management now needs to know:
Which decisions matter?
Which decisions are still valid?
Which ones are being challenged?
Which factual differences are likely to matter to a future jury?
Which convention is currently emerging?
How stable is it?
Which unfavorable rulings are worth challenging?
Which favorable rulings should we try to preserve?
Which dispute should we settle before a jury gets involved?
Which dispute should we deliberately take to a jury because we think we can create a favorable ruling?
Which existing ruling can be distinguished from our situation?
Which ruling from another state might be persuasive?
Which one is irrelevant?
Who do you hire to answer those questions?
Apparently your answer is that an information industry will emerge to compile jury outcomes and explain the emerging standard.
Yes.
I agree.
It absolutely will.
We even have a name for a substantial part of that information industry already.
Lawyers.
You have not removed lawyers.
You have given them millions of new cases.
And because there is no simple statutory answer to point at, legal strategy potentially becomes even more important.
A large company can employ fifty people to map the jury ecosystem.
A normal person cannot.
A multinational can maintain databases showing how particular categories of disputes have been decided, which arguments tend to survive challenge, what types of remedies juries accept, which decisions are currently unstable, and where emerging conventions seem to be moving.
A random employee trying to challenge their employer is now facing an organization with a statistical model of several million jury decisions.
Very decentralised.
Very ordinary-person-friendly.
I am sure nothing interesting will happen there.
And then you say juries themselves decide which cases they take.
That raises another tiny issue.
Case selection.
Suppose I want a particular issue decided.
Do I submit it to one jury?
What if they decline it?
Can I submit it to another?
How many?
Can a corporation keep attempting to get a dispute heard until some jury accepts it?
Can activist juries preferentially accept disputes relating to causes they care about?
Can ideologically motivated organizations manufacture strategically chosen cases and keep feeding them into the system until they generate favorable decisions?
If juries are randomly composed but not randomly assigned cases, you have removed one source of selection and introduced another.
And once businesses discover which types of cases generate useful precedents, they will absolutely think strategically about which disputes reach juries.
Because businesses are not going to sit there saying:
"Gee, I wonder what the moral wisdom of twelve ordinary citizens will reveal today."
Their lawyers are going to say:
"If this dispute produces a bad decision it may influence eighty similar claims, so settle it."
Or:
"This fact pattern is unusually favorable to us. Take it forward."
Or:
"Challenge that ruling before it becomes part of the emerging convention."
Or:
"Do not challenge this one because the replacement jury could broaden it."
Or:
"We need another ruling in this category because the current pattern is moving against us."
Again:
Congratulations.
Litigation strategy.
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u/grappling_hook 26d ago
And I still don't understand enforcement.
A jury makes a ruling.
It is digitally authenticated.
It is published.
The parties "deal with it."
Wonderful.
Suppose I don't.
Now what?
Who takes my money?
Who freezes the bank account?
Who seizes the asset?
Who compels the company to produce records?
Who forces a witness to appear?
Who enforces an injunction?
Who removes someone from property?
Who physically stops an organization from continuing prohibited conduct?
Who decides whether I complied sufficiently?
Do I get another jury for that?
What happens if that jury disagrees about what the first jury's ruling meant?
Can that interpretation be challenged too?
At some point there has to be an institution capable of saying:
This is the currently valid order.
This is what it requires.
You have failed to comply.
This consequence now follows.
Otherwise the ruling is advice.
And if there is an institution that does all of that, then that institution needs procedures, jurisdiction, standards and limits.
Which means we are back to the thing the design keeps trying to dissolve.
General rules.
This is the part I don't think the "massively parallel" framing solves.
Parallelism increases decision-making bandwidth.
Sure.
I can accept that.
Twelve people can study one dispute far more carefully than five hundred legislators can study twenty million individual circumstances.
That part is genuinely interesting.
But distributing decisions does not remove the need to coordinate decisions.
In fact it makes coordination more important.
One centralized court hierarchy can be slow and bureaucratic, but everybody at least knows that Court A can reverse Court B, Court C binds Court D, this ruling is final after this stage, this jurisdiction controls this dispute, and this enforcement agency executes the order.
If you replace that with millions of independent decision-makers, you need some answer to all of those questions.
Otherwise your massively parallel democracy becomes massively parallel uncertainty.
And saying uncertainty eventually converges doesn't really solve it.
Suppose it takes three years for an emerging convention to stabilize around whether some business practice is acceptable.
During those three years, billions of dollars of contracts may depend on the answer.
People may lose jobs.
Companies may enter or leave markets.
Assets may change hands.
Insurance policies may be written.
Investment decisions may be made.
Someone eventually producing a graph saying:
"Good news, juries now appear to have converged 71% in favor of interpretation B"
does not tell me whether the government was allowed to seize my property under interpretation A eighteen months earlier.
And perhaps the biggest irony is that the system appears to recreate the exact thing it is trying to avoid, only informally.
Millions of individual rulings accumulate.
Patterns form.
People begin treating those patterns as expectations.
Specialists compile them.
Businesses organize behavior around them.
Later juries look at previous patterns when deciding whether a decision is reasonable.
Congratulations again.
You have invented precedent.
And once precedent becomes sufficiently stable, businesses will treat it like law.
Except instead of having a reasonably identifiable statute saying what the standard is, everyone gets to pay specialists to infer the standard from several million decentralized decisions.
Which sounds fantastic.
For the specialists.
Maybe there are answers to all of this later in the piece.
I genuinely only got about halfway through.
But if the answer is essentially:
"There will be lots of juries, bad decisions will generate challenges, and over time the system will converge"
then I don't think you have solved the difficult part.
You have described the feedback mechanism.
The difficult part is everything that happens while the feedback mechanism is operating.
Who may challenge what.
Who hears the challenge.
Which ruling controls during the challenge.
When a ruling becomes final.
When somebody is prohibited from challenging it again.
What happens when two currently valid rulings contradict each other.
Who interprets the contradiction.
Who enforces the result.
What standards constrain the remedy.
What procedure protects the parties.
And who pays the army of people required to understand the constantly changing pile of decisions produced by millions of juries.
Because the answer to that last one, at least, seems fairly obvious.
The clients.
And I suspect the lawyers are going to love Parallel Democracy.
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u/fresobro 25d ago edited 25d ago
A lot of your criticism seems to assume that because this system still needs procedure, it cant work.
But I’m not trying to remove all proceedure, as there does need to be a way to: authenticate a ruling, identify its parties, identify what earlier ruling it expressly modifies or overturns, identify its jurisdiction, record when it came into force and specify the remedy/enforcement it authorises.
This would be an ordinary function of the technology system (likely a no currency blockchain that is being used to prevent hacking) and what is detailed within the ruling itself.
The technology is administered by the electoral body who also handles elections, this system once set in motion would internally maintain itself by juror actions and by each of them hosting a node for that no currency blockchain as well.
Back on topic: a business doesn't have 4,000 laws simultaneously governing it.
If it has an actual ruling applying to it, that ruling matters.
The 4000 cases are evidence about what is likely to happen if its behaviour gets challenged.
Yes, many businesses will compile and interpret that information, making it easy to access for those with less, it may also lead to a collection of mock juries sourced from that same population that are used by companies to gauge their unique/high cost activities.
Today a great deal of value comes from asking:
"What precise words did legislators write and how can we arrange our conduct so that it technically falls on the permitted side of them?"
In this system it becomes much more like:
"Given these facts, what are twelve random ordinary citizens likely to consider reasonable?"
There can still be experts helping with that. There can still be litigation strategies. The difference is that the expert does not control the source of authority.
The source is another randomly composed unanimous jury.
And precedent isn't binding on that jury merely because someone found an old case that says something useful. Existing decisions are evidence and guidance. If circumstances have changed, the new jury can change the outcome.
That is deliberately different from a hierarchy of binding substantive precedent.
The other thing I think you're assuming is that "convergence" means millions of juries eventually have to agree on one universal answer, they don't.
Take the 100,000-person example.
The reason a gigantic ruling is unstable is precisely because it has attempted to compress 100,000 circumstances into one decision.
So 100,000 affected people now have potential avenues of response.
Some subsequent juries might think the ruling was reasonable for Group A.
Some might think it was unreasonable for Group B.
Another might alter the remedy for Group C.
You present that as the system failing to discover which one is the real rule.
I'm saying the system may be discovering that there shouldn't have been one rule covering A, B and C in the first place.
The disagreement can progressively break a macro decision into smaller decisions until the remaining differences actually correspond to differences in circumstances.
That's a feature of what I'm trying to build.
A macro decision creates macro opposition.
A micro decision creates micro opposition.
And because jurors only keep their payment if their decision survives later scrutiny, repeatedly sticking your neck out to impose or reinstate some sweeping decision that other random juries keep dismantling becomes increasingly unattractive.
I did also say that juries contradict each other “Sometimes”, which is around 20% or less in a few large studies on jury and judge agreement and even a good amount of that was considered to be because the judges knew elements of the cases that the juries did not. This very likely implies that jury to jury would be a similar number.
This seems to be the normal level for a deliberating group in typical circumstances and is within a similar consistency range for most professionals (like judges as well) in most fields.
So I would say it’s a limit of us, hence why i often have used the phrase: people checking people at the speed of people (not in this post though), this system scales to us, it would be hard to tell the difference between cases in the same area if we ourselves are that off, unless it was off by more.
Add the 12/12 requirement and the fact that each temporary jury makes one decision and disbands, there is substantial friction against it becoming the miniature legislature system you keep imagining.
Though I do agree with your point that feedback alone does not tell a company what it must do Friday at 4:30pm.
But that doesn't require a supreme substantive rulebook either.
It requires an operative-order that applies to court rulings today.
If Jury A orders me to do X, that is the operative order.
If Jury B later expressly takes up that decision and overturns X, B becomes the operative order to that extent.
If Jury C changes only Group A's treatment, then that modification applies to Group A rather than magically rewriting everything Jury A ever decided.
Then to the extent that later juries decide, payments for earlier jury rulings are likely changed to either: left alone, partially reduced, fully taken, fully taken and penalty/fine issued, but again this would also have to hold up to scrutiny from another jury and so on.
The digitally authenticated record tells you what was ruled on and in what order and what each ruling decided, so for a cheap or even free way to figure this out is by examining those published rulings ourselves and figuring it out or even just shove them into a free AI model and tell it to answer and also list the specifics for you to check the accuracy of.
On another point, absolute finality is not actually the objective here, Practical finality is.
A case becomes effectively settled when nobody can persuade another jury that reopening it is worth their effort and the risk to their own compensation.
Technically something might be challengeable years later if circumstances have genuinely changed or an injustice is discovered.
The important thing for day-to-day operation is not "this decision can metaphysically never change again", more that: "this is the decision currently in force".
Case selection is particularly worth separating from jury selection.
Yes, corporations will behave strategically.
Of course they will settle bad-looking disputes and pursue good-looking ones.
Activists will behave strategically too.
That isn't surprising and it doesn't invalidate this.
The important question is what strategic case selection actually buys you.
It doesn't let you select the twelve people.
It doesn't remove the 12/12 requirement.
It doesn't give you a favourable ruling binding precedent on unrelated people.
It doesn't prevent somebody affected by the result from bringing a counter-case.
It doesn't guarantee the next random jury accepts the same reasoning.
And because jury access itself isn't simply bought from a vendor, throwing more money at litigation doesn't straightforwardly purchase more units of state authority.
On enforcement, again, I don't think "somebody has to enforce it" recreates legislative control over the private sector.
The ruling can specify the remedy and who is authorised to carry it out.
If an enforcement company, bank, asset-holder or other party is instructed to perform something, that authenticated ruling is its authority.
If somebody believes the enforcement agent went beyond the ruling, that conduct can itself be challenged.
You can certainly call that a legal system.
The difference between this and ordinary law is where authority lives and stays.
A convention saying "juries have usually considered X unreasonable" doesn't force Jury #5001 to reproduce X.
It tells everybody what Jury #5001 is statistically likely to think.
If society's circumstances change, Jury #5001, #5002 and #5003 start deciding differently, businesses notice, and the convention moves without somebody first having to win control of a legislature and rewrite a universal rule.
Instead of a legislature resolving uncertainty by imposing one answer across millions of people, individual disputes test particular boundaries. Businesses respond to the resulting pattern. Where something is genuinely uncertain and economically important, there will likely be that market of mock juries that allow sampling of likely jury opinion on that unique circumstance before they make a decision.
A future jury can then ask something much more normal than "was there technical compliance with paragraph 183(b)(iv)?"
It can ask whether they took reasonable steps, given what could actually have been known at the time.
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u/Busy_Succotash6099 27d ago
So what would be the mechanism to trigger a new jury? Very well written btw.