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I find that people tend to like the voting system that (they believe) will give their favorite party the best odds. So people that have radical political ideolo

I find that people tend to like the voting system that (they believe) will give their favorite party the best odds. So people that have radical political ideologies, tend to prefer systems that are more likely to allow radical candidates. Note that in practice, people start to vote tactically to prevent radical candidates, so there really isn't any voting system that works great for that purpose anyway. I think the centrist option is probably the best for a number of reasons. I think a particularly bad president can do much more harm, than an unusually good president can do good. E.g. start WW3, or destroy the economy. Not to mention dividing the country and polarizing our political system. Second there is a phenomenon called wisdom of crowds. That if you take the middle of the estimates given by a large number of uninformed people, it usually comes out very close to the true answer. The same should apply to voting. The middle preference of a large number of uninformed voters, should be close to optimal. Third there are studies that show that centrists and moderates tend to have much more accurate beliefs than others. As in, their predictions of future events were the most accurate. Ideological people were extremely biased and inaccurate. That's probably the closest we can get to scientifically measuring how good their policies would be. Lastly, for values questions, where there is no "right answer", the middle should be chosen. It's the fairest choice.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
I'm a radical leftist (seize the means of production!) and I actually favor Approval Voting. It allows for a democratic compromise on single-seat offices, and it can also be more-or-less automatically adapted to a multi-seat body with proportional representation. It allows a voice to small parties or factions without spoiler effects, while being dead simple to implement and making tactical voting relatively difficult. >Lastly, for values questions, where there is no "right answer", the middle should be chosen. It's the fairest choice. As a radical, my problem with this is that the "middle" is defined by the power struggle between the "extremes": it always tracks the formerly "extremist" positions of the winning side. For instance, until last week, nobody would ever have said that privatizing Medicare was anything but extremist far-right lunacy. Coming this year, we're going to hear that it's a mainstream, centrist position. That's not even being said as a statement of fact, since it's transparently false -- people love Social Security and Medicare! It's being said as an imposition of hegemony on the part of the electoral winners, as how "we create our own reality now".

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

I'm a radical leftist (seize the means of production!) and I actually favor Approval Voting. It allows for a democratic compromise on single-seat offices, and it can also be more-or-less automatically adapted to a multi-seat body with proportional representation. It allows a voice to small parties or factions without spoiler effects, while being dead simple to implement and making tactical voting relatively difficult. >Lastly, for values questions, where there is no "right answer", the middle should be chosen. It's the fairest choice. As a radical, my problem with this is that the "middle" is defined by the power struggle between the "extremes": it always tracks the formerly "extremist" positions of the winning side. For instance, until last week, nobody would ever have said that privatizing Medicare was anything but extremist far-right lunacy. Coming this year, we're going to hear that it's a mainstream, centrist position. That's not even being said as a statement of fact, since it's transparently false -- people love Social Security and Medicare! It's being said as an imposition of hegemony on the part of the electoral winners, as how "we create our own reality now".