It is beneficial to making the case for your election if you know what you're talking about more than the other guy (yes this is still something people care about, see Tucker Carlson of all people clowning on Ted Cruz for knowing nothing about Iran), and having as a real structural possibility people having a lot of experience as politicians is conducive for building expertise rather than spending more resources continuously trying to re-educate the revolving door of random selections on the same things.

but representative/indirect democracy offers no guarantees either of . . . alignment with the "median citizen" either.

Election + recall. That's why I said that if there was still recall then it would just be elections via negativa, but that's not to say they are equivalent. I think we can probably agree that people who would otherwise be flagrantly working against the popular will would have at least some reason thereby not run in an electoral system (or have liabilities based on any available record of their attitudes to tank their chances), while sortition would not have this effect in the slightest because it removes self-selection as a factor, and again if there are recall elections then this is just an extremely inefficient electoral system rather than something really new.

Depending on how the actual representative elections are set up, it will be biased to favor towards a type of person who can win those elections.

That's not just the bias, that's the system itself, yes.

Right now it's basically the best fundraisers and servants of capitalism, but theoretically without all that capital influence, elections may be most easily won by demagogues who gain popularity in ways that are not societally beneficial in other ways (lying, scapegoating, sophistry, etc)

Those things can be useful, but they (especially overt lying) have their own hazards, and you shouldn't discount that being correct can also be helpful.

And depending on what constituency they represent, in the long term there could opportunity to extract their own personal or group benefits from their representative role at the expense of society at large.

I gave very few specifications, but measures to prevent personal benefit are something that I already strongly emphasized, so I don't see why you bring this up as though I hadn't. Benefiting others is a tougher issue, but I don't think we should just throw our hands up in that respect. I think in general we should have legislation to penalize trying to benefit small groups of private citizens for its own sake, and I think there's a limit to the extent that you can transfer benefits in a system that has socialized ownership of the means of production.

If I understand you right, you believe "actual democracy" should produce results that align with the median citizen.

Overall, yes.

But as I see it, the "median citizen" does not exist as an individual, only in the aggregate,

I did say median, which is not the same as mean (the main difference being that, in an odd-numbered set of items, the median is always an actual member of the set), but depending on how you want to define it, neither exist, sure. However, I don't see why this particularly matters since I never said that the median citizen is who would get elected, nor do I think that that's a desirable outcome. I am saying that a politician should be made to follow majority opinion, even when it does not reflect their opinion on what would be best if they could dictate what popular opinion is.

so I think you would actually hit a closer alignment to that ideal by just picking a sufficiently large number of random people than trying to create electorial conditions that allow a smaller number of professionalized representatives to respond popular opinion more exactly

What it does is make the most likely outcome that on an 80:20 issue, 20 will be working toward the minority opinion and can use other issues as a means to extract concessions disproportionate to their position, rather than having a >80% number of representatives following the 80% line because it's the majority stance.

And logistically, since you don't need to run hundreds/thousands of elections to fill the seats, you can also easily scale up legislative bodies too for a smaller delegate to citizen ratio.

This is one of those places where I think the "depoliticizing politics" issue is more egregious, because the populace being involved in elections is a good thing, even if the current election circus is terrible (and Americans especially have a distorted view on this because of how particularly horrible our election cycle is). I'm curious about what scale you want representation to operate at when you say "scale up" though, because having a huge political class seems like its own productivity sink.

Of course this assumes the selection process is truly random too.

Yeah, that's a bit of an issue but I don't think it's interesting to talk about, so I'll worry about it when someone outside of a forum takes sortition seriously and granular procedural questions like that matter.

To continue my example, there wouldn't be much need for recalls because the length of the sortition term would be very short- like 1 year or a single legislative session.

We should have recalls even if the session is a month long, because it's not like it's going to be too short to matter unless it's so short that it's not functional to start with. Moreover, the effort involved in training people for that level of churn seems awful.

being sorted wouldn't be a job but a temporary civic duty (that you could also refuse if you wanted).

People being able to refuse presents its own issues (also further breaks down the jury comparison).

You wouldn't lose your job as it's relatively short time and everyone knows what is going on.

I wasn't saying that you'd get fired for missing work for a year, come on. What I mean is that if you have an ongoing project of some kind, from engineering to therapy, and then "oops, you're on a municipal council for a year, sorry". It would potentially really mess stuff up for you or make things much harder for others.

There would still be professional bureaucrats and advisors to help them out through their short term, but they wouldn't have any formal power of their own.

Are they elected? How many are there in proportion to representatives? Do you see how this might undercut the supposed integrity of this system compared to democracy?

Also, I think such a system would naturally lead to more civic engagement.

Would you like to elaborate? Personally I think that having elections that actually represent popular opinion would probably do a better job of directly eliciting civic engagement.

It's just my opinion that representative democracy has had enough time in the sun to make it's own flaws glaringly obvious that I don't favor it anymore.

Your main frame of reference, if you're anything like 98% of users on this board, is a bourgeois pressure valve that was explicitly designed to not be able to do what it claims to do. Countries like Cuba have done a good job of showing how a better democracy -- not a perfect one, merely a better one -- has the potential to make society capable of radically better policy than we see elsewhere.