Re: Please poke holes in this (was Re: Optimal location of world

On 25 veebr, 17:23, jdnic...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (James Nicoll) wrote:
> In article <fptluk$ko...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> Andrew Plotkin  <erkyr...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>
>
> >Here, James Nicoll <jdnic...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> >>         I was toying with a world-setting and being annoyed with the
> >> frequency with which aristocratic and vanguard governments turn up
> >> SF (1) I was thinking about extremer forms of democracies than we
> >> have. I remembered Bass's megajuries and then a paper on how many of
> >> our supposedly conscious decisions get made before we are aware of
them=

> >> with the rational we use apparently an afterthought to sup****t the
> >> decisions we've already made.
>
> >>         People don't like jury duty because it eats up time

And the common law countries reward it poorly.

 but suppose
> >> there was some way to use the pre-conscious decision making capacity
of=

> >> the entire population in such a way that whatever triggers the
consciou=
s
> >> awareness of a decision is never triggered? People could be taking an
> >> active part in the governance of their nation without being aware of
> >> it at all.
>
> >>         The badly fleshed out idea I had is that this comes out of a
> >> commonly used user interface, and that anyone who is using such an
> >> interface might be donating a small and unnoticed bit of brain power
> >> to the State. Originally I was thinking just reactions to polls but
> >> that gives a lot of power to the poll makers. Instead, they've
> >> harnessed the awesome power of "somehow" to create the collective
> >> preconscious, something that lets most of the people play an active
> >> role in how their nation is run without it being a particular
> >> inconvenience.
>
> >>         How many different failure modes can you see?
>
> >All those pre-conscious decisions are based on consciously
> >assimilating all the context and background first. Which is the
> >time-consuming part of the jury process. But I don't think you want to
> >skip it.
>
> >Also, you get a society in which it's guaranteed that nobody can be
> >held responsible for the major decisions. I suspect you'd be better
> >off hiring Ming the Merciless as your country's CEO.
>
>         That was a plot point with Bass' megajuries: extremely large
> juries seemed to be more likely to go for the death penalty, since
> responsibility was smeared out over so many people.
>
On the other hand, large juries have the advantage of being less
vulnerable to intimidation as well as bribery.

Romans often used rather small juries. Augustus described the results
in a decree about Cyrene. There was a grand total of about 200 Roman
citizens eligible to jury service in the whole province and a number
of cliques existed, so it was relatively easy for a well-connected
Roman to sue a Greek, get his Roman friends to volunteer for jury and
procure a conviction - a number of innocents had suffered capital
punishment as a result.

Athens had the funds to pay a jury pool of about 6000 jurors - in
fact, jury service seems to have been operated for unemployment relief
- so the juries were sized like 501, 301, 201 or 101, depending on the
im****tance of the case. The juries did not deliberate - they sat
silent hearing the speeches of the parties of the case and witnesses,
then voted by strictly secret vote. A simple majority was sufficient
to convict or acquit, so a man could be condemned to death by 251
votes to 250. However, quite naturally most of times the public
opinion was clearer. And if a jury convicts 300 votes to 200, having
10 jurors who are biased because of friend****p, bribery or
intimidation does not sway the vote so decisively. Anyway, the trials
took place in a single day=B4s sitting and assignment of the jurors to
specific trials out of the whole pool of 6000 was done immediately
before the trials started - you had to bribe awfully many jurors to
affect the outcome of any specific case.