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These results aren't passing the sniff-test for me. If I understand, "honest" voters in the score-like systems stick to some magically-shared mapping of their

These results aren't passing the sniff-test for me. If I understand, "honest" voters in the score-like systems stick to some magically-shared mapping of their own utility to scores on the ballot (totally unreasonable, but let's grant it). Strategic voters, meanwhile, just use the ballots to maximize their own utility. Let's take the simplest, common scenario of two clear frontrunners. In score voting's one-sided strategic scenarios: - Honest voters who support candidate A will put down magical normally-distributed numbers. Their scores for A end up perhaps 10-50% higher than their scores for B. - Strategic voters who support candidate B will maximize B's chance of winning by putting down the highest score for B and the lowest score for A. Score for B will be uniformly 100% higher than scores for B. In this scenario it takes perhaps 2-10 honest A voters for every strategic B voter for A to win. Yet somehow, the VSE for 1-sided strategic score scenarios are all much better than plurality, and equal with approval? This is a commonly-discussed downside for any score voting system, where it gives strategic voters extra power, and, in these 1-sided scenarios, is worse than plurality. The downside is appearing nowhere in this data.

xpe 5y ago
> If I understand, "honest" voters in the score-like systems stick to some magically-shared mapping of their own utility to scores on the ballot (totally unreasonable, but let's grant it). Strategic voters, meanwhile, just use the ballots to maximize their own utility. Yes, this is how the terms are generally used in voting systems literature.
xpe 5y ago
The VSE metric implicitly rewards strategic voting, because strategic voting works. By "works" I mean it helps the individual voter maximize their chance of having their preferences reflected in the outcome. > VSE cannot measure: > - Any desirable characteristics of a voting method > that do not directly relate to outcome (who wins). This includes, for example, a value judgment that says "strategic voting is less desirable than honest voting".
- unholiness 5y ago
  An outcome where 30 strategic B voters win over 70 unstrategic A voters is one I would expect VSE to rate very poorly. That is not a value judgement, and is directly related to the outcome.
  - xpe 5y ago
    Your expectation is not aligned with how VSE is described. See my quotes above, and respond specifically to them if you would like me to continue discussing.
ad8e 5y ago
I believe you are stating that Score0to2 one-sided strategy should measure worse than plurality one-sided strategy. I don't think this is an obvious claim. It seems to depend on the underlying distribution of candidate quality (especially correlations of preferences). I don't know what is up with 1-sided score vs 1-sided approval. That is an interesting observation you made and does look suspicious; we should expect the distortion of power to be greater than the loss of honest expressiveness. When I looked at this project a year ago, I found other strange behaviors that led me to ignore its results, similar to how you are comparing its graphs to your intuition. There is no "correct" model in voting theory. Models are neither good or bad, only to the author's taste or not. For example, with voters on a single dimension, should utility of a candidate be the squared distance, or the absolute distance? How should a candidate's positions be distributed, is n-dimensional Euclidean space good? Should some candidates be straight-up better than others, and what should the distribution be? How should voters be clustered, if at all? What does "strategic" voting mean in each context? What does "honest" voting mean in cardinal contexts? The author's discussion of methodology was lacking, and the missing priors make its results partially meaningless. I also had no success looking through the code for even basic behavior, because it was too hard to navigate. However, this is only a graduate project, and most graduate projects (including mine) are of lower quality than this one, so I wasn't upset. In score systems, voters can sometimes be made honest to an extent. For example, on a book rating site, you probably don't rate all books 0 or 5; you use the full scale. Your ratings have greater self-value than your desire to tip the global score. While your assertion is reasonable that it is not the expected "honest" voting behavior, it is also a behavior worth looking at. This goes back to discussion of methodology; all these assumptions need to be documented, rather than buried in hard-to-read code.
- ClayShentrup 5y ago
  > we should expect the distortion of power to be greater than the loss of honest expressiveness. Intuitive expectations are not the same as empirical data. > There is no "correct" model in voting theory. Of course there is. The ideal would be a model that is exactly like real life. > What does "honest" voting mean in cardinal contexts? Normalization of sincere utilities. > and the missing priors make its results partially meaningless. Be specific. It just sounds like you don't understand how it was done.

xpe 5y ago

> If I understand, "honest" voters in the score-like systems stick to some magically-shared mapping of their own utility to scores on the ballot (totally unreasonable, but let's grant it). Strategic voters, meanwhile, just use the ballots to maximize their own utility. Yes, this is how the terms are generally used in voting systems literature.

xpe 5y ago

The VSE metric implicitly rewards strategic voting, because strategic voting works. By "works" I mean it helps the individual voter maximize their chance of having their preferences reflected in the outcome. > VSE cannot measure: > - Any desirable characteristics of a voting method > that do not directly relate to outcome (who wins). This includes, for example, a value judgment that says "strategic voting is less desirable than honest voting".

unholiness 5y ago
An outcome where 30 strategic B voters win over 70 unstrategic A voters is one I would expect VSE to rate very poorly. That is not a value judgement, and is directly related to the outcome.
- xpe 5y ago
  Your expectation is not aligned with how VSE is described. See my quotes above, and respond specifically to them if you would like me to continue discussing.

ad8e 5y ago

I believe you are stating that Score0to2 one-sided strategy should measure worse than plurality one-sided strategy. I don't think this is an obvious claim. It seems to depend on the underlying distribution of candidate quality (especially correlations of preferences). I don't know what is up with 1-sided score vs 1-sided approval. That is an interesting observation you made and does look suspicious; we should expect the distortion of power to be greater than the loss of honest expressiveness. When I looked at this project a year ago, I found other strange behaviors that led me to ignore its results, similar to how you are comparing its graphs to your intuition. There is no "correct" model in voting theory. Models are neither good or bad, only to the author's taste or not. For example, with voters on a single dimension, should utility of a candidate be the squared distance, or the absolute distance? How should a candidate's positions be distributed, is n-dimensional Euclidean space good? Should some candidates be straight-up better than others, and what should the distribution be? How should voters be clustered, if at all? What does "strategic" voting mean in each context? What does "honest" voting mean in cardinal contexts? The author's discussion of methodology was lacking, and the missing priors make its results partially meaningless. I also had no success looking through the code for even basic behavior, because it was too hard to navigate. However, this is only a graduate project, and most graduate projects (including mine) are of lower quality than this one, so I wasn't upset. In score systems, voters can sometimes be made honest to an extent. For example, on a book rating site, you probably don't rate all books 0 or 5; you use the full scale. Your ratings have greater self-value than your desire to tip the global score. While your assertion is reasonable that it is not the expected "honest" voting behavior, it is also a behavior worth looking at. This goes back to discussion of methodology; all these assumptions need to be documented, rather than buried in hard-to-read code.

ClayShentrup 5y ago
> we should expect the distortion of power to be greater than the loss of honest expressiveness. Intuitive expectations are not the same as empirical data. > There is no "correct" model in voting theory. Of course there is. The ideal would be a model that is exactly like real life. > What does "honest" voting mean in cardinal contexts? Normalization of sincere utilities. > and the missing priors make its results partially meaningless. Be specific. It just sounds like you don't understand how it was done.