5 ms·

Can you break that down? Periods are your friend, your comment makes me feel like I'm rereading Moby Dick.

notahacker 5y ago
The main advantage of IRV is that it isn't a particularly strategic vote. You put the candidates you in the order of your actual preference, and that's it (there are edge cases, but compared with other systems, pretty rare ones, and their complexity tends to actually discourage strategic behaviours like elevating a decent candidate you think is more likely to win than your first choices). The strategic considerations you actually might want to make are very basic (if you really, really want to make sure someone doesn't win, you can rank parties you're pretty unimpressed with ahead of them). A ratings ballot, on the other hand, involves massive amounts of thinking. First of all, the concept of what might represent an "honest" approach to intensity of preferences is open to debate. It's US culture to give their Uber driver max marks and tip the serving staff 20%; is this an honest reflection of the intensity of the average American's enthusiasm for service workers relative to people from non-American cultures or simply what they've been taught to do? And real world electoral situations give you all kinds of incentives to do other things (like give your preferred candidate max marks and all the other candidates 0, or all the candidates you don't hate at least 9 out of 10). Is the person who bullet votes max marks for his preferred candidate because that's what the campaign literature suggested really worth more votes than the person who carefully evaluated all the candidates on their merits but doesn't think any of the candidates are worth more than 6 out of 10? With approval voting it's arguably even worse because there's a massive dilemma over whether to vote positively for the candidate(s) you want or negatively to eliminate the risk of candidates you want to lose. Obviously this applies unevenly to different demographics: put someone downright nasty towards a particular demographic on the ballot paper, and suddenly that demographic is under pressure to Approve every other candidate, whilst others continue to happily only vote for candidates they actually want. If you design an efficiency metric with the arguably unjustifiable assumption that votes always represent either a perfect expression of the intensity of their preferences or a simple uniform strategic vote, and you assume that the proportion of people voting strategically is unaffected by voting system, it is unsurprising that voting systems whose main shortcomings are strategic complexity perform well. Even looking at that data, IRV actually outperforms nearly all the systems if you assume IRV voters are honest and voters using the other system are very strategic which isn't unreasonable given the incentive structures of the different systems.
- kortex 5y ago
  Excellent critique of ratings based system. I think this is the biggest problem with multi-point (more than 3 values for score) STAR voting. What constitutes "5 star"? What about 0/blank vs 1 star? Framing is important, and I think STAR would be most optimal with good ol' Likert scale (five or seven point) rather than 0-N stars. But I think even simpler is the "3-point Likert" behavior of V321: approve, disapprove, and "meh, ok." I don't like how IRV forces me to rank candidates I may know little to nothing about (e.g. downballot randos not on "my team"). I don't really care if Kick Puppies Party is above or below Trip Grandparents Party.
  - jlokier 5y ago
    That's why I favour ranked systems that allow you to place multiple candidates at equal rank if you wish, and to leave off ones you really don't like.
    - obelos 5y ago
      Isn't that just a score/range system, then?
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        A score or range system has more possible values than candidates and treats ballots with different numbers but the same ordering differently; its not the same as an unforced preference ranked ballot (a ranked preference ballot that allows ties).
  - notahacker 5y ago
    You're entitled to leave both the Kick Puppies and Trip Grandparents party off your ranking! V321 is certainly more intuitive in the ratings (it's basically an upvote/downvote system) if not the counting, but it's still quite strategic. On the plus side, the most basic strategy of simply upvoting who you want to win and downvoting the candidates you hate ensures the most divisive candidates are removed from the pool and the obscure fringe candidates are unlikely to benefit, but there's a fair bit of juggling how many candidates to upvote or downvote depending on what you think of the candidates seen as most likely to win the final round
gjm11 5y ago
> when you construct a measure designed around their shared features dragonwriter thinks the metric being used in the article linked here was cherry-picked because it favours particular voting systems that the author likes for other reasons. (I do not believe this, nor do I believe the similar allegation made by vintermann in a top-level comment that's currently the highest rated. Neither offered any actual evidence, and the metric used here seems obviously reasonable to me. What I could believe is if someone thinks that VSE / Bayesian regret captures the essence of what matters in a voting system, then they are likely to prefer systems like approval voting or range voting or STAR. I don't see anything wrong with that.) > while ignoring the cultural variation in honest ballot marking for these methods dragonwriter thinks that different voting systems, implemented in different cultures, will exhibit strategic ("dishonest") voting to different extents and in different ways, and thinks this is a problem not addressed in the OP. (The linked article does consider strategic voting, of various different kinds, but it's certainly possible that it isn't realistic enough about what real voters might do. It would be easier to tell whether dragonwriter has found a real problem here, if dragonwriter had given some examples of variation in strategic voting that are important but neglected in the OP.) > resulting from the fact that the ballots for them ask a question that doesn't have an objective relationship to preferences. dragonwriter thinks that what voters primarily have is preferences: candidate A is better than candidate B who is better than candidate C. This is what an IRV ballot asks for. STAR or approval-voting ballots ask different questions (please give a score for how much you like each candidate / please say for each candidate whether you would find them acceptable); dragonwriter finds that unsatisfactory on the basis that voters will have to translate their preferences into answers to those questions, and there is no One True Way to do that. (I disagree with dragonwriter about what's in voters' brains. At any rate, looking within myself, it is very common that I have a better idea of some candidates' acceptability to me than I do of their relative ranking. E.g., maybe there's the Nice Party, which I like a lot, the Mean Party, which I don't like much but concede has some competence, the Evil Party, which I really don't like but again concede has some competence, and a bunch of Crazy Fringe Parties, none of which I know enough about to rate them relative to one another, but all of which I consider obviously unfit to rule. With a range/STAR system, I might rate Nice at 100, Mean at 30, Evil at 10, and the Crazies at 0. Or I might rate Nice at 100, Mean at 70, Evil at 10, and the Crazies at 0. These are importantly different opinions I might have. A preference-ordering system like IRV doesn't let me express the difference between those, but would really like me to say exactly what my order of preference between the Crazies is. For me, range/STAR does the best job of matching the actual kinds of opinions I have about candidates; 3-2-1 is also pretty good; approval and preference-ordering are similar to one another and distinctly worse than those two; and of course plurality/first-past-the-post is hopeless.)

The main advantage of IRV is that it isn't a particularly strategic vote. You put the candidates you in the order of your actual preference, and that's it (there are edge cases, but compared with other systems, pretty rare ones, and their complexity tends to actually discourage strategic behaviours like elevating a decent candidate you think is more likely to win than your first choices). The strategic considerations you actually might want to make are very basic (if you really, really want to make sure someone doesn't win, you can rank parties you're pretty unimpressed with ahead of them). A ratings ballot, on the other hand, involves massive amounts of thinking. First of all, the concept of what might represent an "honest" approach to intensity of preferences is open to debate. It's US culture to give their Uber driver max marks and tip the serving staff 20%; is this an honest reflection of the intensity of the average American's enthusiasm for service workers relative to people from non-American cultures or simply what they've been taught to do? And real world electoral situations give you all kinds of incentives to do other things (like give your preferred candidate max marks and all the other candidates 0, or all the candidates you don't hate at least 9 out of 10). Is the person who bullet votes max marks for his preferred candidate because that's what the campaign literature suggested really worth more votes than the person who carefully evaluated all the candidates on their merits but doesn't think any of the candidates are worth more than 6 out of 10? With approval voting it's arguably even worse because there's a massive dilemma over whether to vote positively for the candidate(s) you want or negatively to eliminate the risk of candidates you want to lose. Obviously this applies unevenly to different demographics: put someone downright nasty towards a particular demographic on the ballot paper, and suddenly that demographic is under pressure to Approve every other candidate, whilst others continue to happily only vote for candidates they actually want. If you design an efficiency metric with the arguably unjustifiable assumption that votes always represent either a perfect expression of the intensity of their preferences or a simple uniform strategic vote, and you assume that the proportion of people voting strategically is unaffected by voting system, it is unsurprising that voting systems whose main shortcomings are strategic complexity perform well. Even looking at that data, IRV actually outperforms nearly all the systems if you assume IRV voters are honest and voters using the other system are very strategic which isn't unreasonable given the incentive structures of the different systems.

kortex 5y ago
Excellent critique of ratings based system. I think this is the biggest problem with multi-point (more than 3 values for score) STAR voting. What constitutes "5 star"? What about 0/blank vs 1 star? Framing is important, and I think STAR would be most optimal with good ol' Likert scale (five or seven point) rather than 0-N stars. But I think even simpler is the "3-point Likert" behavior of V321: approve, disapprove, and "meh, ok." I don't like how IRV forces me to rank candidates I may know little to nothing about (e.g. downballot randos not on "my team"). I don't really care if Kick Puppies Party is above or below Trip Grandparents Party.
- jlokier 5y ago
  That's why I favour ranked systems that allow you to place multiple candidates at equal rank if you wish, and to leave off ones you really don't like.
  - obelos 5y ago
    Isn't that just a score/range system, then?
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      A score or range system has more possible values than candidates and treats ballots with different numbers but the same ordering differently; its not the same as an unforced preference ranked ballot (a ranked preference ballot that allows ties).
- notahacker 5y ago
  You're entitled to leave both the Kick Puppies and Trip Grandparents party off your ranking! V321 is certainly more intuitive in the ratings (it's basically an upvote/downvote system) if not the counting, but it's still quite strategic. On the plus side, the most basic strategy of simply upvoting who you want to win and downvoting the candidates you hate ensures the most divisive candidates are removed from the pool and the obscure fringe candidates are unlikely to benefit, but there's a fair bit of juggling how many candidates to upvote or downvote depending on what you think of the candidates seen as most likely to win the final round

gjm11 5y ago

> when you construct a measure designed around their shared features dragonwriter thinks the metric being used in the article linked here was cherry-picked because it favours particular voting systems that the author likes for other reasons. (I do not believe this, nor do I believe the similar allegation made by vintermann in a top-level comment that's currently the highest rated. Neither offered any actual evidence, and the metric used here seems obviously reasonable to me. What I could believe is if someone thinks that VSE / Bayesian regret captures the essence of what matters in a voting system, then they are likely to prefer systems like approval voting or range voting or STAR. I don't see anything wrong with that.) > while ignoring the cultural variation in honest ballot marking for these methods dragonwriter thinks that different voting systems, implemented in different cultures, will exhibit strategic ("dishonest") voting to different extents and in different ways, and thinks this is a problem not addressed in the OP. (The linked article does consider strategic voting, of various different kinds, but it's certainly possible that it isn't realistic enough about what real voters might do. It would be easier to tell whether dragonwriter has found a real problem here, if dragonwriter had given some examples of variation in strategic voting that are important but neglected in the OP.) > resulting from the fact that the ballots for them ask a question that doesn't have an objective relationship to preferences. dragonwriter thinks that what voters primarily have is preferences: candidate A is better than candidate B who is better than candidate C. This is what an IRV ballot asks for. STAR or approval-voting ballots ask different questions (please give a score for how much you like each candidate / please say for each candidate whether you would find them acceptable); dragonwriter finds that unsatisfactory on the basis that voters will have to translate their preferences into answers to those questions, and there is no One True Way to do that. (I disagree with dragonwriter about what's in voters' brains. At any rate, looking within myself, it is very common that I have a better idea of some candidates' acceptability to me than I do of their relative ranking. E.g., maybe there's the Nice Party, which I like a lot, the Mean Party, which I don't like much but concede has some competence, the Evil Party, which I really don't like but again concede has some competence, and a bunch of Crazy Fringe Parties, none of which I know enough about to rate them relative to one another, but all of which I consider obviously unfit to rule. With a range/STAR system, I might rate Nice at 100, Mean at 30, Evil at 10, and the Crazies at 0. Or I might rate Nice at 100, Mean at 70, Evil at 10, and the Crazies at 0. These are importantly different opinions I might have. A preference-ordering system like IRV doesn't let me express the difference between those, but would really like me to say exactly what my order of preference between the Crazies is. For me, range/STAR does the best job of matching the actual kinds of opinions I have about candidates; 3-2-1 is also pretty good; approval and preference-ordering are similar to one another and distinctly worse than those two; and of course plurality/first-past-the-post is hopeless.)