Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@daedalus Ah yes, "I believe that there are clever people who can...", the exact same rationale that ends up burning billions on tech hypes like cryptocurrencies and "AI" due to promises that will never materialize.

Because it's much more appealing to believe in the magical technology, than it is to listen to the people telling you why it can't work...

@spongefile Ah, no, this organization seems to have identified itself as 'conservative' from the very start, so it's unlikely to be the same

@spongefile I mean, I assume there are more than two, probably, it's a somewhat obvious name for a tech conference 🙂

But the organization behind this one, going back many years, has identified itself as 'conservative', and that matches up with the speaker lineup of the current one

@spongefile That is why I linked the page of speakers, it's the right-wing one

@sasha I feel similarly.

@Geoffberner Genuine question: how would you handle the eating and drinking?

For a brief event, "don't eat or drink" is an entirely reasonable policy (at least for most cases), but this is an entire conference, and so people will need to eat and drink at *some* point.

And during summer, you can often get away with eating outside (although then you still need wind, for safety!) but this is in September, where that is a much more difficult proposition.

@sj That does not look quite like the same thing; it still seems to work with applicants.

What makes the random-selection model work, going off experiments with this so far, is that there is nothing to apply or campaign for, there is no 'party reputation' to protect, it is essentially just a civil duty that is assigned - and so 100% of the focus is on researching the actual policy problem rather than on maintaining party politics.

Essentially, there is nothing to be gained or lost personally from drawing any particular conclusion, you get compensated for your work whatever the outcome is and that outcome has zero impact on future selections (not even in an increase in applicants from a particular party for example).

@Heidentweet Some important context here is that what I am describing is a more 'palatable' political model, in the sense that it is (or more accurately, *seems*) closer to what we already have - many of the details are the way they are because of that.

For example, the executive branch being elected is to pre-emptively address concerns of things getting messed up in implementation through bias; with a sufficiently functional policymaking system, this *should* not be necessary, but it is there as a 'defense in depth' type thing.

And to clarify, with 'policymaking' I don't necessarily mean the "figuring out the details of implementation" (that would be the implementation part), but rather the "what should the policy work towards, what are our goals", etc., which is currently determined by elected politicians. That's the part that would be done by a random selection.

In a healthier society, "involving the people who it affects" would be optimal - but it is extremely difficult to make happen in a society like we have that is already having severe problems with its political systems, because often it's not entirely clear upfront who *are* the people it affects, and bringing in people down the road requires an ability to anticipate quickly at scale, which we currently do not have.

Meanwhile, experiments with binding(!) citizen panels in many places have produced very positive results, where the more obscure concerns were also taken into account, because people approached the task as a job rather than as a political battle (after all, there was no re-election to fight over).

There do need to be structures in place so that those affected *can* be consulted effectively, and so that there are reliable sources of information to work from, but given these results, I'm not especially concerned about specific needs getting overlooked due to the people involved.

All in all, I think that in the society we have today, it's much easier to implement "randomly-selected committee consults whichever demographic becomes relevant/affected" than "committee changes over time as it becomes clear who is affected", just because of the predictability that it provides for the process.

Doesn't mean there shouldn't be a long-term effort to improve it further, of course - but again, what I'm describing here is a palatable approach, hopefully the first step on the way to an optimal model, but not the last one.

@sofia@chaos.social That sounds about right to me, and more or less matches what I've observed from local political parties.

@smveerman Ah yeah, just wanted to mention it, in case you (or someone else in NL) was looking for an option right now :)

@smveerman FWIW, I've already spotted a vegan Nutella clone at Lidl a while ago, I don't know if it's permanent or a temporary promo though