← Entropy Atlas
Public or distributed
Sortition & civic selection
Random selection can distribute civic duties or scarce opportunities without a chooser.
Evaluation card
What “plenty” means here.
- Required property
- A fixed eligible population, declared selection probabilities, transparent mapping, and credible randomness.
- If it fails
- The population is manipulated, the draw can be rerun, or the public cannot verify the mapping.
- Relevant attacker
- Officials, applicants, or vendors able to edit eligibility or influence the chosen seed.
- The Plenty Line
- Freeze and commit to inputs before the draw, use witnessed public randomness, and publish a reproducible procedure.
- Why more is not automatically better
- Perfect random bits cannot make an exclusionary eligibility list legitimate.
Where it appears
Recognize the pattern.
- 01citizens’ assemblies
- 02visa lotteries
- 03housing allocation
The Plentropy rule
Protect the requirement, then stop.
Freeze and commit to inputs before the draw, use witnessed public randomness, and publish a reproducible procedure.
Once that claim has comfortable evidence and margin, improve the next limiting factor instead of worshipping a larger entropy number.