6 ms·

I've followed a few links that explain the mechanism of quadratic voting, but still haven't seen a simple explanation of why it might be a good idea. What make

I've followed a few links that explain the mechanism of quadratic voting, but still haven't seen a simple explanation of why it might be a good idea. What makes quadratic voting better than just converting credits directly into votes -- one credit, one vote? ("Cumulative voting")

timdaub 5y ago
The most-comprehensive argument that motivates its existence, I've found in Glen Weyl and Eric Posner's book "Radical Markets."
- iainmerrick 5y ago
  Is there a good summary anywhere besides just reading the book? I'm curious but skeptical. I would have thought that if there is a good and straightforward justification, it would be in the wikipedia page, but it's not. It simply says: Quadratic voting is a variant of cumulative voting in the class of cardinal voting. It differs from cumulative voting by altering "the cost" and "the vote" relation from linear to quadratic. Apart from that there's no comparison to cumulative voting, which seems a lot simpler and more robust against concerns like collusion and sybil attacks. The only other mention of "linear" is in a rather opaque paragraph marked "citation needed". If it's purely a way to allow people to buy votes without having rich people completely corner the market, I guess it makes some sense, but it still seems rather wrongheaded. If you're going to give everybody the same number of virtual tokens, there are no rich people to begin with. If you insist on using an actual currency, there are other possible mechanisms like a universal basic income. Edit to add: Aha, I've found a (the?) paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956 Rational agents maximize their utility by setting marginal cost equal to marginal benefit. This means that if John values being able to incrementally move the outcome in his favor twice as much as Sue values being able to incrementally move the outcome in her favor, John will pay twice as much at the margin as Sue does. For example, John buys 16 votes while Sue buys 8 votes. The exact number of votes that John and Sue buy depends on their estimates of how likely they will be pivotal voters, as explained below, so if John buys 16 votes for $256 (162 ), this does not mean that he values the project at $256. But it does mean that he values the project twice as much as Sue, who buys 8 votes. This emphasis on marginal cost seems to ignore the fact that John and Sue will be working with finite budgets -- the overall real cost of the vote is important too! Unless I misunderstand, the implication is that if the cost were linear, John would buy an unbounded number of votes (as the marginal cost never goes up) which seems absurd. Particularly in the cases where quadratic voting is actually being used in government, when e.g. lawmakers are given 100 tokens to split among different possibilities, I don't think any of the above analysis applies at all, and it's not clear that quadratic voting has any advantages over cumulative voting.
  - afiori 5y ago
    I will be specifically talking about this demo https://www.economist.com/interactive/2021/12/18/quadratic-voting https://www.economist.com/interactive/2021/12/18/quadratic-v... I don't think that quadratic voting is relevant for the case of "Many people need to answer a few shared questions" as it happens it elections. I believe it is for the case "one person needs to answer many questions" as it happens in polling. Of course it can be used in elections as a sort of preference voting, but its effect is to punish extreme opinions (you might be extremely opposed to Statement A but might also want to keep some credits to express your milder opinion about B, C, and D. (of course this also opens more venues for manipulating polling by adding duplicated similar questions...)
    - iainmerrick 5y ago
      That UI is excellent, but it doesn't explain why it should be quadratic and not linear. At first glance, it seems actively bad, as I'm penalised for focusing on just a few issues! Unfortunately the linked article is paywalled. The motivating example in the QV papers I've just skimmed is more about people voting on a sequence of yes-or-no questions, buying some number of votes and being compensated afterwards each time. That's totally different from this one-shot, multiple-questions, fixed-budget example.
  - timdaub 5y ago
    There's also all the academic literature of Weyl et al. that makes the basis of the book, but I've found that to be less accessible [1]. references: - 1: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20181002 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20181002
    - iainmerrick 5y ago
      Having done a bit more reading, I’m increasingly convinced QV has very narrow application rather than being a general voting scheme, and may simply be a vacuous idea. I guess I need to dig into the proof to see what is actually claimed (versus loosely extrapolated). The use of QV in voting scenarios where you have 100 tokens to split among alternatives seems completely motiveless, beyond “QV is great because there’s a mathematical proof.” But a proof of what? Not a proof of anything relating to that voting scheme, as far as I can see.
- jdwyah 5y ago
  Lazy Q, but do you know if there is a reason that the votes need to be whole numbers? If I allocate 7 credits to something is there any reason not to just count that as 2.65 votes? (And by "any reason" I guess I mean "any reason besides lack of comfort with non-whole numbers"). From here it seems like the general principle of social cost still applies / doesn't have anything to do with the step-function nature of things.
  - timdaub 5y ago
    I'll attempt explaining in my own words with the risk of exposing my lack of understanding. I'm currently in the office, so I don't have the book with me. So this is from the top of my head. In Weyl and Posner's book "Radical Markets" they motivate quadratic voting as outlined as a way of preference voting where a voter's desire intensity is represented in the vote. Their argument is practically outlined in the pollution + city example I make in the original blog post and where, with the sloppy figure I have attached [1], they reason geometrically that "Nils" should "pay" for reducing the electricity plant's pollution. If you look closely at that figure (which is nicer in the book), you can see that the plane where the cost functions intersect is a triangle. I can't fully reproduce the mathematical reasoning here, but how I understood it is that dependent on Nils's choice, the externality he imposes has quadratic cost given that the triangle's change is affected quadratically. In an isosceles triangle, where volume V is defined dependent on two same length sides, I can see that work out. But I've never worked through that. More intuitively, an example, I'm just making up is if you're annoyingly snorting during a visit to the cinema. If you're the only person snorting and you think that's OK, but nobody else can understand the dialogue - you're not only wasting your money but everybody else's. It's quadratic because of the opportunity cost of everybody wasting 2 hours but having all paid for the film. So both the cost of the cinema running the movie for two hours and everybody paying but not understanding makes your snorting square the cost. Does that make sense? Please correct me if I'm wrong. So essentially, if Nils is picky with anti-pollution, his pickiness costs the town's society quadratically - which is why he should pay the quadratic cost of his pickiness during governance. references: - 1: https://timdaub.github.io/assets/images/cost-of-externality.png https://timdaub.github.io/assets/images/cost-of-externality....
jerf 5y ago
In this particular context it seems to just be one of a zoo of competing alternatives with nothing in particular to recommend it, and some serious drawbacks. I've seen in proposed for voting in the real world where you buy the credits with real money in some growing cost-per-credit, as an attempt to control for rich people being able to buy so much more voting power right now through lobbiests. It has a certain cryptonanarchist or radical libertarian appeal, but the engineer in me points out there doesn't appear to be a path from here to there, since among other things you have to figure out how to fully ban any other form of lobbying by the rich, which is simply not practical. Not even if I include "have a violent" revolution as an option, because no plausible violent revolution would adopt this system at the end of it either. I dunno if it's fair to say people are really hardcoded to "one person, one vote", but for whatever reason it is something that you can get people to generally agree as fair, possibly just because everyone can easily see that the instant you visibly deviate from that there's no longer in point in voting because you will never get to the voting phase; the voting body will never again do anything but argue about how to vote. While I think it's still hopelessly impossible, at least in this context there's some meat to discuss to the proposal, rather than just Yet Another Exotic Voting Method for small groups. (I have to add visibly there because as previous sentences show in that paragraph, I'm well aware we don't have a "one person, one vote" system in practice. In theory it's a Republic, after all, not a Democracy, and in practice, anyone who buys lobbiests has vastly more voting power than you do. But it looks like we do, so it's stable enough for now. It can even be the case that everyone pretty much realizes it, but it's stable enough. But make it visibly obvious that's not what's happening and the fireworks will fly.)
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > you have to figure out how to fully ban any other form of lobbying by the rich In fact, if a society could work out how to do that, they should do that first, and then they might find that all these "let rich people have more voting power" proposals would coincidentally disappear. > it's a Republic, after all, not a Democracy Please don't perpetuate that awful meme. A country can be both, and the US is only "not a democracy" under the most idiosyncratic definition of "democracy". https://mises.org/wire/stop-saying-were-republic-not-democracy https://mises.org/wire/stop-saying-were-republic-not-democra... https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-11/is-u-s-republic-or-democracy-why-some-conservatives-pick-a-side https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-11/is-u-s... https://thebaffler.com/latest/were-a-republic-not-a-democracy-burmila https://thebaffler.com/latest/were-a-republic-not-a-democrac...
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
The idea as I’ve heard it is that with quadratic costs, you’ll end up with people voting in proportion to how much they care. If you care 3x as much as I do, you’ll spend 3x as many votes on it.
- iainmerrick 5y ago
  The idea seems to be that if you care 3x as much, you'll keep buying votes until the marginal cost of each new vote is 3x greater. The marginal cost is linear, the total cost is the integral of that which is quadratic. The fact that you have a finite budget, so you can't just arbitrarily keep buying votes until some threshold is met, seems like a big flaw in the argument.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    Yeah, the goal is to have number of votes voted be proportional to how much you care. I don't know how accurately that pans out when this is really used.

timdaub 5y ago

The most-comprehensive argument that motivates its existence, I've found in Glen Weyl and Eric Posner's book "Radical Markets."

iainmerrick 5y ago
Is there a good summary anywhere besides just reading the book? I'm curious but skeptical. I would have thought that if there is a good and straightforward justification, it would be in the wikipedia page, but it's not. It simply says: Quadratic voting is a variant of cumulative voting in the class of cardinal voting. It differs from cumulative voting by altering "the cost" and "the vote" relation from linear to quadratic. Apart from that there's no comparison to cumulative voting, which seems a lot simpler and more robust against concerns like collusion and sybil attacks. The only other mention of "linear" is in a rather opaque paragraph marked "citation needed". If it's purely a way to allow people to buy votes without having rich people completely corner the market, I guess it makes some sense, but it still seems rather wrongheaded. If you're going to give everybody the same number of virtual tokens, there are no rich people to begin with. If you insist on using an actual currency, there are other possible mechanisms like a universal basic income. Edit to add: Aha, I've found a (the?) paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956 Rational agents maximize their utility by setting marginal cost equal to marginal benefit. This means that if John values being able to incrementally move the outcome in his favor twice as much as Sue values being able to incrementally move the outcome in her favor, John will pay twice as much at the margin as Sue does. For example, John buys 16 votes while Sue buys 8 votes. The exact number of votes that John and Sue buy depends on their estimates of how likely they will be pivotal voters, as explained below, so if John buys 16 votes for $256 (162 ), this does not mean that he values the project at $256. But it does mean that he values the project twice as much as Sue, who buys 8 votes. This emphasis on marginal cost seems to ignore the fact that John and Sue will be working with finite budgets -- the overall real cost of the vote is important too! Unless I misunderstand, the implication is that if the cost were linear, John would buy an unbounded number of votes (as the marginal cost never goes up) which seems absurd. Particularly in the cases where quadratic voting is actually being used in government, when e.g. lawmakers are given 100 tokens to split among different possibilities, I don't think any of the above analysis applies at all, and it's not clear that quadratic voting has any advantages over cumulative voting.
- afiori 5y ago
  I will be specifically talking about this demo https://www.economist.com/interactive/2021/12/18/quadratic-voting https://www.economist.com/interactive/2021/12/18/quadratic-v... I don't think that quadratic voting is relevant for the case of "Many people need to answer a few shared questions" as it happens it elections. I believe it is for the case "one person needs to answer many questions" as it happens in polling. Of course it can be used in elections as a sort of preference voting, but its effect is to punish extreme opinions (you might be extremely opposed to Statement A but might also want to keep some credits to express your milder opinion about B, C, and D. (of course this also opens more venues for manipulating polling by adding duplicated similar questions...)
  - iainmerrick 5y ago
    That UI is excellent, but it doesn't explain why it should be quadratic and not linear. At first glance, it seems actively bad, as I'm penalised for focusing on just a few issues! Unfortunately the linked article is paywalled. The motivating example in the QV papers I've just skimmed is more about people voting on a sequence of yes-or-no questions, buying some number of votes and being compensated afterwards each time. That's totally different from this one-shot, multiple-questions, fixed-budget example.
- timdaub 5y ago
  There's also all the academic literature of Weyl et al. that makes the basis of the book, but I've found that to be less accessible [1]. references: - 1: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20181002 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20181002
  - iainmerrick 5y ago
    Having done a bit more reading, I’m increasingly convinced QV has very narrow application rather than being a general voting scheme, and may simply be a vacuous idea. I guess I need to dig into the proof to see what is actually claimed (versus loosely extrapolated). The use of QV in voting scenarios where you have 100 tokens to split among alternatives seems completely motiveless, beyond “QV is great because there’s a mathematical proof.” But a proof of what? Not a proof of anything relating to that voting scheme, as far as I can see.
jdwyah 5y ago
Lazy Q, but do you know if there is a reason that the votes need to be whole numbers? If I allocate 7 credits to something is there any reason not to just count that as 2.65 votes? (And by "any reason" I guess I mean "any reason besides lack of comfort with non-whole numbers"). From here it seems like the general principle of social cost still applies / doesn't have anything to do with the step-function nature of things.
- timdaub 5y ago
  I'll attempt explaining in my own words with the risk of exposing my lack of understanding. I'm currently in the office, so I don't have the book with me. So this is from the top of my head. In Weyl and Posner's book "Radical Markets" they motivate quadratic voting as outlined as a way of preference voting where a voter's desire intensity is represented in the vote. Their argument is practically outlined in the pollution + city example I make in the original blog post and where, with the sloppy figure I have attached [1], they reason geometrically that "Nils" should "pay" for reducing the electricity plant's pollution. If you look closely at that figure (which is nicer in the book), you can see that the plane where the cost functions intersect is a triangle. I can't fully reproduce the mathematical reasoning here, but how I understood it is that dependent on Nils's choice, the externality he imposes has quadratic cost given that the triangle's change is affected quadratically. In an isosceles triangle, where volume V is defined dependent on two same length sides, I can see that work out. But I've never worked through that. More intuitively, an example, I'm just making up is if you're annoyingly snorting during a visit to the cinema. If you're the only person snorting and you think that's OK, but nobody else can understand the dialogue - you're not only wasting your money but everybody else's. It's quadratic because of the opportunity cost of everybody wasting 2 hours but having all paid for the film. So both the cost of the cinema running the movie for two hours and everybody paying but not understanding makes your snorting square the cost. Does that make sense? Please correct me if I'm wrong. So essentially, if Nils is picky with anti-pollution, his pickiness costs the town's society quadratically - which is why he should pay the quadratic cost of his pickiness during governance. references: - 1: https://timdaub.github.io/assets/images/cost-of-externality.png https://timdaub.github.io/assets/images/cost-of-externality....

jerf 5y ago

In this particular context it seems to just be one of a zoo of competing alternatives with nothing in particular to recommend it, and some serious drawbacks. I've seen in proposed for voting in the real world where you buy the credits with real money in some growing cost-per-credit, as an attempt to control for rich people being able to buy so much more voting power right now through lobbiests. It has a certain cryptonanarchist or radical libertarian appeal, but the engineer in me points out there doesn't appear to be a path from here to there, since among other things you have to figure out how to fully ban any other form of lobbying by the rich, which is simply not practical. Not even if I include "have a violent" revolution as an option, because no plausible violent revolution would adopt this system at the end of it either. I dunno if it's fair to say people are really hardcoded to "one person, one vote", but for whatever reason it is something that you can get people to generally agree as fair, possibly just because everyone can easily see that the instant you visibly deviate from that there's no longer in point in voting because you will never get to the voting phase; the voting body will never again do anything but argue about how to vote. While I think it's still hopelessly impossible, at least in this context there's some meat to discuss to the proposal, rather than just Yet Another Exotic Voting Method for small groups. (I have to add visibly there because as previous sentences show in that paragraph, I'm well aware we don't have a "one person, one vote" system in practice. In theory it's a Republic, after all, not a Democracy, and in practice, anyone who buys lobbiests has vastly more voting power than you do. But it looks like we do, so it's stable enough for now. It can even be the case that everyone pretty much realizes it, but it's stable enough. But make it visibly obvious that's not what's happening and the fireworks will fly.)

dane-pgp 5y ago
> you have to figure out how to fully ban any other form of lobbying by the rich In fact, if a society could work out how to do that, they should do that first, and then they might find that all these "let rich people have more voting power" proposals would coincidentally disappear. > it's a Republic, after all, not a Democracy Please don't perpetuate that awful meme. A country can be both, and the US is only "not a democracy" under the most idiosyncratic definition of "democracy". https://mises.org/wire/stop-saying-were-republic-not-democracy https://mises.org/wire/stop-saying-were-republic-not-democra... https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-11/is-u-s-republic-or-democracy-why-some-conservatives-pick-a-side https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-11/is-u-s... https://thebaffler.com/latest/were-a-republic-not-a-democracy-burmila https://thebaffler.com/latest/were-a-republic-not-a-democrac...

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

The idea as I’ve heard it is that with quadratic costs, you’ll end up with people voting in proportion to how much they care. If you care 3x as much as I do, you’ll spend 3x as many votes on it.

iainmerrick 5y ago
The idea seems to be that if you care 3x as much, you'll keep buying votes until the marginal cost of each new vote is 3x greater. The marginal cost is linear, the total cost is the integral of that which is quadratic. The fact that you have a finite budget, so you can't just arbitrarily keep buying votes until some threshold is met, seems like a big flaw in the argument.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  Yeah, the goal is to have number of votes voted be proportional to how much you care. I don't know how accurately that pans out when this is really used.