{"id":6038,"date":"2012-02-12T19:02:05","date_gmt":"2012-02-13T02:02:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=6038"},"modified":"2012-02-12T19:02:05","modified_gmt":"2012-02-13T02:02:05","slug":"randomized-governance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2012\/02\/12\/randomized-governance\/","title":{"rendered":"Randomized Governance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What if instead of electing our representatives in government, we simply chose them at random?<br \/>\nA <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rasmussenreports.com\/public_content\/politics\/general_politics\/february_2012\/43_say_random_choices_from_phone_book_better_than_current_congress\">new Rasmussen poll<\/a> asked 1,000 likely voters exactly this question. Turns out, 43% thought that a random choice of people from the phonebook would do a better job than the current legislators, a plurality. Of course, these people were themselves chosen randomly from a phonebook, so I&#8217;m not sure they are entirely unbiased. \ud83d\ude42<br \/>\nBut why stop at the legislators? Why not just write random legislation using <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Context-free_grammar\">context-free grammars<\/a>? We already have software that can\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/pdos.csail.mit.edu\/scigen\/\">automatically write scientific papers<\/a>, so it doesn&#8217;t seem like a stretch. I guess that a lot of this random legislation would be <a href=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=5948\">better than SOPA<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What if instead of electing our representatives in government, we simply chose them at random? A new Rasmussen poll asked 1,000 likely voters exactly this question. Turns out, 43% thought that a random choice of people from the phonebook would do a better job than the current legislators, a plurality. Of course, these people were &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2012\/02\/12\/randomized-governance\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Randomized Governance&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-ha-ha","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}