You started by quoting Yvain about the major advantage of democracy:
A democracy provides a Schelling point, … an option which might or might not be the best, but which is not too bad and which everyone agrees on in order to stop fighting.
Does your proposed system keep that advantage?
While your 1% contemplates the best way to lift one of them to supremacy, what's going to stop the 99% from showing up and grunting "Fuck that shit, you guys are out. Scram!"?
If people agree the test is fair and the randomization is fair, I'm not convinced it would not be stable after a generation or two. Pure sortition does retain that advantage, the IQ filter reduces this but the filter could be adjusted to increase stability. For example, say it took only the 50th percentile. At this level, coordination would be difficult as no one would want to publicly admit they weren't eligible for sortition. Perhaps this would remain true if only the 90th percentile were selected, if not the 99th.
If people agree the test is fair and the randomization is fair
The question is whether people agree the whole system is fair.
Let's imagine that I'm a person below the whatever IQ cutoff you prefer. Please explain to me (ELI5, preferably) how your proposed system is fair to me.
This is by far my favorite form of government. It's a great response whenever the discussion of "democracy is the best form of government we have" comes up. Some random notes in no particular order:
Sadly getting support for this in the current day is unlikely because of the huge negative associations with IQ tests. Even literacy tests for voters are illegal because of a terrible history of fake tests being used by poll workers to exclude minorities. (Yes the tests were fake like this one, where all the answers are ambiguous and can be judged as correct or incorrect depending on how the test grader feels about you.)
This doesn't actually require the IQ testing portion though. I believe the greatest problem with democracy is that voters are mostly uninformed. And they have no incentive to get informed. A congress randomly sampled from the population though, would be able to hear issues and debates in detail. Even if they are average IQ, I think it would be much better than the current system. And you could use this congress of "average" representatives to vote for other leaders like judges and presidents, who would be more selected for intelligence.
In fact you could just use this system to randomly select voters from the population. Get them together so they can discuss and debate in detail, and know their votes really matter. And then have them vote on the actual leaders and representatives like a normal election. I believe something like this is mentioned at the end of the article.
Of course I still like and approve of the IQ filtering idea. But I think these two ideas are independent, and the IQ portion is always going to be the most controversial.
I think the sortition should be entirely opt-in, just like normal voting is. This selects for people that actually care about politics and want to be representatives. Which might select for IQ a bit on it's own. And prevents you from getting uninterested people that are bored out of their mind by politics.
One could argue such a system would be unrepresentative of minority groups. If they have lower IQs or are less likely to opt in. However the current system isn't representative at all. Look at the makeup of congress now. Different demographics are more or less likely to vote in elections as it is. And things like gerrymandering and just regular geographic-based voting distort representation a lot. And yet somehow it still mostly works, and I don't think this system could be any worse in that dimension.
But if it is a concern, you could just resample groups to represent the general population. So if women are half as likely to opt-in, women that do opt-in should be made twice as likely to be selected. I'm not sure if this is a good or desirable thing to do, just that it would quell these objections.
Selecting for the top 1% of IQ is too much filtering. You really don't want to create an incentive to game IQ tests. At least not too much. And remember IQ tests are not perfect, they can be practiced to improve your score. You also don't want a bunch of representatives that are freaks of nature, that have brains really good at Raven's Matrices and nothing else. There are multiple dimensions to intelligence, and while they correlate, the correlation isn't 100%. I'd arbitrarily go with the top 5% - the best scorer out of 20. Even that seems high.
All the discussion about how the system could be corrupted is ridiculous. People had the same objections to regular democracy. How do we trust that the poll workers and vote counters are reliable? What's to stop a vast conspiracy of voting fraud?
Somehow we've mostly solved these problems and votes are trusted. When issues arise, we have a court system that seems to be relatively fair about resolving them. And it's still not perfect. We have stuff like gerrymandering that wouldn't be an issue with sortition based systems.
I hope the mods don't remove this for violating the politics rule. While it is technically about political systems, it's only in a meta sense. Talking about the political system itself, not specific policies or ideologies. There is nothing particularly left or right wing about these ideas. I don't think anyone is likely to be mindkilled by it.
You could implement this today. Found a leadership PAC called 'Smarter Government', use big data to identify the set of people who are the correct age and meet residency requirements for the office the PAC is pursuing, send them all phone calls asking if they're interested in elected office, administer the battery of tests, provide the lucky winner with 1-200k seed money from PAC donors and a competent staff.
I think the testing measures would have to include stuff other than straight IQ, because ultimately, this person has to win an election. Probably by any available means including deception and emotional appeal.
asking if they're interested in elected office
So you're selecting people who want to be politicians again.
Unfortunately, that criteria is probably impossible to do away with completely. Much of the job of a politician requires positive action on the part of the office holder. 'Does not want the job' or 'unwilling to perform the task if chosen' is probably a disqualifying factor, so may as well select against it early in the process. Perhaps a question emphasizing community service (are you interested in taking on a significant responsibility in your community?) would work, but ultimately, it would be impossible to keep the screening process completely secret.