I've never read up on the republic of Venice, but after quickly scanning the Wikipedia article on its election procedure... that is a strangely large number of voting rounds and lotteries.
Agreed, I'm not sure if it can be made to work either. I have an inkling of a thought that instead of an egalitarian society being required for lottocracy to work, an egalitarian society can be created using lottocracy. But it's just a thought. Hopefully that book holds something close to an answer, but I'll see :)
It's a potentially big problem for sure. It reminds me of stories I've heard about the public education system in some of the Scandinavian countries. From what I remember off the top of my head, Finland has a system where private educational facilities do not exist. Meaning that, if rich or otherwise elite people want their kids to receive a good education, they need to support the public education facilities their own kid attends. I quite like this idea that everyone is nudged towards helping everyone else, even if they mostly care about their own family and friends.
Similarly in a lottocracy you'd want everyone to be a capable leader when their name is picked from the hat. As the professor I listened to put it, lottocracy makes you think what a democracy really values. Is it about everyone's voice being heard, or is there another goal we should care about more? Not an easy question to answer.
I heard about lottocracy/sortition for the first time not long ago and I quite like the idea. The last time was when I heard a professor talk about it, and I was recommended reading the book "Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections" by Guerrero [0].
Something I'd love to see is a Europe-hosted mirror of software repositories like pypi, juliahub, and the like. It feels pretty essential to have these be available no matter what, but I haven't found any such mirrors.
It's amazing to hear it's visible in such a big city. I don't have a good intuition for all the metrics that describe how strong this storm was/is, but when put like this it hits home.
Nice to hear earth weather apps also work great in space haha. I'll keep that in mind when I set up my own notifications. Hopefully I have time to look into it before the next storm hits.
The first time I heard of it was in this Matt Parker video where he helped do this with a school-sized group of kids [0]. An "AI player" made of matchboxes, run by schoolkids, is a fantastically fun idea.
3blue1brown has a great series of videos on the central limit theorem, and it makes me wish there were something similar covering the generalised form in a similar format. I have a textbook on my reading list that covers it, unfortunately I'm I can't seem to find it or the title right now. (edit: it's "The Fundamentals of Heavy Tails" by Nair, Wierman, and Zwart from 2022)
Do you have any good sources for the physics angle?