6 ms·

Oscar best picture changed from single vote to full preferential ranking

37 points by huangm 17y ago

amalcon 17y ago
Looks like they're using instant runoff voting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_runoff_voting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_runoff_voting
- nas 17y ago
  Boo. IRV sucks (probably as much or more than plurality). Approval voting FTW. See http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/. Noice how Approval and Condorcet voting produce the same pictures (aside from Approval having a little fuzzier edges).
  - bradbeattie 17y ago
    Boo. Approval sucks. Schulze method for the long haul. Majority criterion is fairly important, yeah? Approval (aka restricted range voting) fails that. On a side note, I've been working on a JSON web service to calculate election winners in various systems. Feedback would be sweet. http://vote.cognitivesandbox.com http://vote.cognitivesandbox.com
    - nas 17y ago
      IMHO, Schulze is too complicated for the average voter. People need to understand the voting system. I don't deny that it's theoretically better.
      - lmkg 17y ago
        I heartily disagree that people need to understand the voting system. Ideally, people should just be thinking about ranking the candidates. If the way that the votes are counted will affect the way they vote, that means that strategic voting is a prominent part of the system. Granted, strategic voting is theoretically unavoidable without introducing other degeneracies. But on a quantitative scale, its effect and its frequency are smaller under some voting systems than others.
        bradbeattie 17y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_impossibility_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_impossibility_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard–Satterthwaite_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard–Satterthwaite_theorem
      - bradbeattie 17y ago
        People generally don't understand how their household appliances work. They only care about understanding the interface (e.g. open fridge door, put stuff in, stuff stays cool).
  - hugh_ 17y ago
    Interesting visualizations, but do the problems mentioned have any relevance for real elections? What happens if you move from two dimensions down to one, or up to many dimensions? While some of the pictures look ugly, does any IRV scenario actually result in a disastrous outcome -- ie a candidate with views far away from those of the electorate being able to win? Approval voting seems like a worse idea in practice than in theory. I can easily imagine scenarios in which an unknown (and quite possibly incompetent or extremist) candidate with an attractive-sounding party name could garner enough votes to come out ahead (something like this recently happened with the Family First Party in several Australian elections).
  - tel 17y ago
    That is a really fantastic visualization. It's amazing how much IRV produces inconsistent results.
Maro 17y ago
When reading about voting systems, I'm always reminded of Arrow's impossibility theorem, which everybody should be aware of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem In short, no "fair" voting system can satisfy these three criteria: - If every voter prefers X over Y, then the group prefers X over Y. - If every voter prefers X over Y, then adding Z to the slate won't change the group's preference of X over Y. - There is no dictator.
- ComputerGuru 17y ago
  Never knew about this - thanks for the most interesting read. Is the 2nd factor a problem with the voting system or with the psychology of the voters though?
  - huangm 17y ago
    This is a desirable property of a voting system. If we prefer X over Y (X > Y), then adding Z can give: Z > X > Y, X > Z > Y, or X > Y > Z. Adding Z ought not change the ordering of X and Y.
- huangm 17y ago
  And to relate specifically to Instant Runoff Voting, IRV fails to satisfy monotonicity. It also fails to satisfy the Condorcet Criterion (a commonly held desirable property that the person with the majority #1 votes should be ranked 1st). There exist `better' ranking systems such as ones involving markov chains (http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/577/ http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/577/), but I'd imagine that the Oscar Committee requires their voting/ranking scheme to be palatable to the general public. Using IRV is a good step in the direction of `better' voting, while still being explainable in a few sentences.
  - tel 17y ago
    Slight nitpick: the Condorcet Criterion doesn't actually specify that the one with the majority #1 votes is first ranked. It explicitly states that the candidate that, when compared pairwise with each other candidate, wins most frequently should win overall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_criterion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_criterion
rokhayakebe 17y ago
I always wondered what HN would look like if we used preferential ranking, and almost started to work on something earlier this month.
- byrneseyeview 17y ago
  How does that work when we get different stories at different times? You might be able to come up with a system in which everyone votes on the day's top stories, and then they're ranked, but that would be tedious and would not clearly produce a better result than what we have now.
  - gojomo 17y ago
    Not saying any of this is necessarily a good idea, but to explore an interesting vein of ideas: What if the front page weren't continuously updated, but only updated after fixed balloting periods (say, 6-12 hours long)? Voting would only happen when all stories for a period were in. Each voter would see a different randomized order-of-presentation. Yes, it'd completely change the character of the site. No immediate upvote feedback for being first to submit a 'hot' story. Stories would be guaranteed to lag other 'breaking' news sites by some number of hours. But these changes might be good things: reducing both the incentive to submit, and the rewards for constant reading, of frothy/gossipy linkbait. A site seeking impressions over all else wouldn't want this approach -- but HN isn't ad-driven. 'Slow HN' might be a better HN.
qjz 17y ago
I wonder how long this will last. "Fair" voting approaches such as preferential ranking attempt to address the challenge of producing an outcome that is agreeable to everyone, which is subtly different than recognizing the "best". This will favor a compromise result over one that is challenging, thought-provoking, or "artistic" in other meaningful ways.
- hugh_ 17y ago
  What kind of voting system would result in correctly recognizing "the best" in your opinion? And how does "the best" film differ from the compromise candidate?
  - qjz 17y ago
    In my opinion, the "best" work also scores highly across the criteria. In my experience, the voting body increasingly ignores criteria as it gets larger. Perhaps the quality of the results would improve if the voting body had to rank the criteria to provide weights, then rank their preferences for each criteria. This informs the voting body and the results might surprise (and even please) everyone. But that's complicated. Having designed and run preferential ranking systems for selecting multiple winners (unlike the Oscars), I've seen that polarizing choices tend to get eliminated regardless of artistic merit. Sometimes, we address this by letting the results of the larger voting body inform the decision of a smaller panel, who are allowed to vary the algorithm and play with other variables before making the final determination (in ranking subjective things like art, fairness in voting is not always the main priority). The problem with the compromise candidate is that it is often not anyone's first preference, therefore nobody considers it the best. This is especially true when the number of candidates is large. As an experiment, I'd like to ask voters to select only the best and worst single candidates, then apply a straightforward preferential ranking algorithm against those as if they were the top two choices. I wouldn't be surprised if this would narrow the field to works with the most artistic merit.
finin 17y ago
I've been convinced that range voting it the best -- better than IRV and approval voting. It's intuitive also. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting
- bradbeattie 17y ago
  Range voting is one of the few systems that requires strategic voting with only two candidates. This isn't a good thing. :/ Demographic A (10 voters): Candidate X valued at 40, Y at 60 Demographic B (3 voters): Candidate X valued at 100, Y at 0 Candidate X gets 700 points Candidate Y gets 600 points This scenario demonstrates how susceptible range voting is to tactical voting.
peanutcruncher 17y ago
Kind of like ranking virtue amongst whores. Really doesn't matter how you do it these days.
hugh_ 17y ago
The important question is: how likely is this to change the results? In recent decades there's been a trend for the Best Picture Oscar to wind up going to films which may not be all that good but which are seen as "Oscar-worthy" due to weighty subject matter or otherwise "seeming smart". Historical dramas have made up something like twenty out of the last thirty years' winners, including such so-so films as Braveheart. No comedy has won since Shakespeare in Love (which was acceptably smart-seeming because it had Shakespeare in it) and before that it was Annie Hall (which, incidentally, beat Star Wars). I wonder if preferential ranking will improve the quality of winners by better reflecting the true preferences of the voters rather than the preferences the voters seem to think they ought to have.
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37 points by huangm 17y ago

Looks like they're using instant runoff voting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_runoff_voting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_runoff_voting

nas 17y ago
Boo. IRV sucks (probably as much or more than plurality). Approval voting FTW. See http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/. Noice how Approval and Condorcet voting produce the same pictures (aside from Approval having a little fuzzier edges).
- bradbeattie 17y ago
  Boo. Approval sucks. Schulze method for the long haul. Majority criterion is fairly important, yeah? Approval (aka restricted range voting) fails that. On a side note, I've been working on a JSON web service to calculate election winners in various systems. Feedback would be sweet. http://vote.cognitivesandbox.com http://vote.cognitivesandbox.com
  - nas 17y ago
    IMHO, Schulze is too complicated for the average voter. People need to understand the voting system. I don't deny that it's theoretically better.
    - lmkg 17y ago
      I heartily disagree that people need to understand the voting system. Ideally, people should just be thinking about ranking the candidates. If the way that the votes are counted will affect the way they vote, that means that strategic voting is a prominent part of the system. Granted, strategic voting is theoretically unavoidable without introducing other degeneracies. But on a quantitative scale, its effect and its frequency are smaller under some voting systems than others.
      - bradbeattie 17y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_impossibility_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_impossibility_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard–Satterthwaite_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard–Satterthwaite_theorem
    - bradbeattie 17y ago
      People generally don't understand how their household appliances work. They only care about understanding the interface (e.g. open fridge door, put stuff in, stuff stays cool).
- hugh_ 17y ago
  Interesting visualizations, but do the problems mentioned have any relevance for real elections? What happens if you move from two dimensions down to one, or up to many dimensions? While some of the pictures look ugly, does any IRV scenario actually result in a disastrous outcome -- ie a candidate with views far away from those of the electorate being able to win? Approval voting seems like a worse idea in practice than in theory. I can easily imagine scenarios in which an unknown (and quite possibly incompetent or extremist) candidate with an attractive-sounding party name could garner enough votes to come out ahead (something like this recently happened with the Family First Party in several Australian elections).
- tel 17y ago
  That is a really fantastic visualization. It's amazing how much IRV produces inconsistent results.

Maro 17y ago

When reading about voting systems, I'm always reminded of Arrow's impossibility theorem, which everybody should be aware of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem In short, no "fair" voting system can satisfy these three criteria: - If every voter prefers X over Y, then the group prefers X over Y. - If every voter prefers X over Y, then adding Z to the slate won't change the group's preference of X over Y. - There is no dictator.

ComputerGuru 17y ago
Never knew about this - thanks for the most interesting read. Is the 2nd factor a problem with the voting system or with the psychology of the voters though?
- huangm 17y ago
  This is a desirable property of a voting system. If we prefer X over Y (X > Y), then adding Z can give: Z > X > Y, X > Z > Y, or X > Y > Z. Adding Z ought not change the ordering of X and Y.
huangm 17y ago
And to relate specifically to Instant Runoff Voting, IRV fails to satisfy monotonicity. It also fails to satisfy the Condorcet Criterion (a commonly held desirable property that the person with the majority #1 votes should be ranked 1st). There exist `better' ranking systems such as ones involving markov chains (http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/577/ http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/577/), but I'd imagine that the Oscar Committee requires their voting/ranking scheme to be palatable to the general public. Using IRV is a good step in the direction of `better' voting, while still being explainable in a few sentences.
- tel 17y ago
  Slight nitpick: the Condorcet Criterion doesn't actually specify that the one with the majority #1 votes is first ranked. It explicitly states that the candidate that, when compared pairwise with each other candidate, wins most frequently should win overall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_criterion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_criterion

rokhayakebe 17y ago

I always wondered what HN would look like if we used preferential ranking, and almost started to work on something earlier this month.

byrneseyeview 17y ago
How does that work when we get different stories at different times? You might be able to come up with a system in which everyone votes on the day's top stories, and then they're ranked, but that would be tedious and would not clearly produce a better result than what we have now.
- gojomo 17y ago
  Not saying any of this is necessarily a good idea, but to explore an interesting vein of ideas: What if the front page weren't continuously updated, but only updated after fixed balloting periods (say, 6-12 hours long)? Voting would only happen when all stories for a period were in. Each voter would see a different randomized order-of-presentation. Yes, it'd completely change the character of the site. No immediate upvote feedback for being first to submit a 'hot' story. Stories would be guaranteed to lag other 'breaking' news sites by some number of hours. But these changes might be good things: reducing both the incentive to submit, and the rewards for constant reading, of frothy/gossipy linkbait. A site seeking impressions over all else wouldn't want this approach -- but HN isn't ad-driven. 'Slow HN' might be a better HN.

qjz 17y ago

I wonder how long this will last. "Fair" voting approaches such as preferential ranking attempt to address the challenge of producing an outcome that is agreeable to everyone, which is subtly different than recognizing the "best". This will favor a compromise result over one that is challenging, thought-provoking, or "artistic" in other meaningful ways.

hugh_ 17y ago
What kind of voting system would result in correctly recognizing "the best" in your opinion? And how does "the best" film differ from the compromise candidate?
- qjz 17y ago
  In my opinion, the "best" work also scores highly across the criteria. In my experience, the voting body increasingly ignores criteria as it gets larger. Perhaps the quality of the results would improve if the voting body had to rank the criteria to provide weights, then rank their preferences for each criteria. This informs the voting body and the results might surprise (and even please) everyone. But that's complicated. Having designed and run preferential ranking systems for selecting multiple winners (unlike the Oscars), I've seen that polarizing choices tend to get eliminated regardless of artistic merit. Sometimes, we address this by letting the results of the larger voting body inform the decision of a smaller panel, who are allowed to vary the algorithm and play with other variables before making the final determination (in ranking subjective things like art, fairness in voting is not always the main priority). The problem with the compromise candidate is that it is often not anyone's first preference, therefore nobody considers it the best. This is especially true when the number of candidates is large. As an experiment, I'd like to ask voters to select only the best and worst single candidates, then apply a straightforward preferential ranking algorithm against those as if they were the top two choices. I wouldn't be surprised if this would narrow the field to works with the most artistic merit.

finin 17y ago

I've been convinced that range voting it the best -- better than IRV and approval voting. It's intuitive also. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting

bradbeattie 17y ago
Range voting is one of the few systems that requires strategic voting with only two candidates. This isn't a good thing. :/ Demographic A (10 voters): Candidate X valued at 40, Y at 60 Demographic B (3 voters): Candidate X valued at 100, Y at 0 Candidate X gets 700 points Candidate Y gets 600 points This scenario demonstrates how susceptible range voting is to tactical voting.

peanutcruncher 17y ago

Kind of like ranking virtue amongst whores. Really doesn't matter how you do it these days.

hugh_ 17y ago

The important question is: how likely is this to change the results? In recent decades there's been a trend for the Best Picture Oscar to wind up going to films which may not be all that good but which are seen as "Oscar-worthy" due to weighty subject matter or otherwise "seeming smart". Historical dramas have made up something like twenty out of the last thirty years' winners, including such so-so films as Braveheart. No comedy has won since Shakespeare in Love (which was acceptably smart-seeming because it had Shakespeare in it) and before that it was Annie Hall (which, incidentally, beat Star Wars). I wonder if preferential ranking will improve the quality of winners by better reflecting the true preferences of the voters rather than the preferences the voters seem to think they ought to have.

hello003 17y ago

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