3 ms·

No no your links are good, very cool to learn about rangevoting.com, I can see it has a ton to teach. But it's hard to immediately reconcile the data from these

by idrios 4y ago

No no your links are good, very cool to learn about rangevoting.com, I can see it has a ton to teach. But it's hard to immediately reconcile the data from these links with my own intuitions and first hand experiences and draw conclusions while still in the middle of the discussion. You're making the argument that I shouldn't be concerned about people thresholding their votes because scaled sincerity is a nearly optimal strategy in a cardinal voting scheme, so people can vote with their heart and not feel like their vote has been wasted. That's one of the findings in the paper you shared[1] that Scaled Sincerity gets (at worst) 91% of the utility compared to Mean Based Thresholding when there are 3 candidates, 80% percent for 5 candidates, 78% for 9... etc But there'll still inevitably be an election where 2 candidates were very close and the scaled sincerity voters who supported the 2nd place candidate feel like the election was stolen from them. The media will make an uproar about it. Voters will vote with a thresholding scheme after that. So in this case we should just skip to approval voting so people don't feel like they were robbed of the fraction of the vote they didn't contribute to their candidate. Your other point is people will bullet vote in ranked voting and so I'm defending it too strongly. Your other article[0] very strongly argues that IRV is worse than approval voting in regards to getting bullet voters. I know it's a cop out of me to quote the criticisms that the article itself provides, but the data size really is too small. In their summary of comparisons, 16% bullet voting in Burlington and ~21% bullet voting in Irish presidential are not bad percentages in my opinion, and I don't know anything about the SF 07 or Dartmouth 06 elections. I don't understand why the low computational complexity is important as long as the algorithm is simple to understand. Bubble sort has higher computational complexity but is a simpler algorithm than merge sort. But I don't know the details of vote counting in practice. If the computational complexity is so high that you wouldn't even determine who won until days or weeks later and was highly prone to error, then I'd stand corrected. I don't see how cardinal voting would make a difference in there being multiple parties. Edit: Also I don't mean to occupy either of our New Years Eves on this conversation. I could be sold on approval voting if that's the takeaway you're trying to get it. I learned a lot today. Hope nothing I said offended in any way. [0] https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo [1] https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat3.html https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat3.html ^ re-linking these because the context is so far up the thread

godelski 4y ago
> You're making the argument that I shouldn't be concerned about people thresholding their votes because I'm actually trying to get you to apply the same scrutiny to ordinal systems as you are giving to cardinal systems. I actually appreciate that you are critical of cardinal systems but I don't appreciate that you aren't being as critical of ordinals (recognize I'm talking about at least a dozen voting systems here. We have to start here before we can enter the nuance of individual systems but we're not even clear here). To be a good scientist you need to detach yourself from your preference. You need to critique YOUR preference more than you critique the opposing options. You're smart and if you've picked the right system then you should be able to defend it. But if you're smart and picked the wrong thing then you need to change because it isn't about what you like, it is about what is right (I'll keep stressing that no voting system is optimal and we need to define our metrics -- I have stated mine -- but we're not discussing these, we're caught up on a single strategy which appears in both cardinal and ordinal and as far as I can tell you don't recognize the latter). > But there'll still inevitably be an election where 2 candidates were very close Yes, and we need to think about how distant these candidates are from one another. Then ask yourself, can we compose a system where these candidates are similar? Is it always random and we have no control? Or are these candidates always distant and on opposite sides of the spectrum? You may be primed to believe the latter because that's the likely scenario in plurality voting but is this true for all systems? To answer this you need to have a deep understanding of Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE), spoilers (both weak and strong -- aka favorite betrayer criteria), and how we embed preference (this is why I keep mentioning distances between candidates on the ballot. Note that this is a different distance/manifold than the previously mentioned one at the beginning of this paragraph). > 16% bullet voting in Burlington and ~21% bullet voting in Irish presidential are not bad percentages in my opinion I agree it is a cop-out since we see lower bullet voting tendencies in cardinal systems. I agree that sample sizes are small but we do have lots of simulations. Unfortunately we have very little real world data. Unfortunately that means we need to advocate for these systems to get real world natural experiments. Fortunately there are a few approval systems: Fargo ND and St. Luis MS (also Latvia). So we are collecting some of this data and it is very promising so far. We also have non-political versions of this like HN itself! There is only a binary voting system here (until you reach a certain score, then we get range voting). So I'd also argue we have tons of data (also surveys frequently use disapprove/neutral/approve styles of voting. Yes, this is voting). We've seen substantial success with these and I think that's not something we can exclude (though we must be aware of things like vote inflation for certain services, like Uber, that don't exhibit in other services, like old Netflix rating or current ratings). > I don't see how cardinal voting would make a difference in there being multiple parties. Back to the embedding. > I could be sold on approval voting if that's the takeaway you're trying to get it. Let's say all things are equal in effectiveness. Approval is O(n) and RCV is O(n2). I think that's killer and matters a lot (see the main topic). > Also I don't mean to occupy either of our New Years Eves on this conversation. This is one of the few political topics I'm extremely passionate about so I enjoy discussing it. I do want to be clear in that my goal here is not necessarily to get you to come to the cardinal side (though that'd be nice) but I want you to understand that voting methods are extremely complex (lots of people want you to think they are simple) and we shouldn't have strong passions about them without putting significant time to learn (I think discussions can be good learning mechanisms fwiw). Also plenty of time before I'm going anywhere tonight. And you have not offended me in any way. I'm glad we had this conversation. Happy New Years :)

by idrios 4y ago

godelski 4y ago

> You're making the argument that I shouldn't be concerned about people thresholding their votes because I'm actually trying to get you to apply the same scrutiny to ordinal systems as you are giving to cardinal systems. I actually appreciate that you are critical of cardinal systems but I don't appreciate that you aren't being as critical of ordinals (recognize I'm talking about at least a dozen voting systems here. We have to start here before we can enter the nuance of individual systems but we're not even clear here). To be a good scientist you need to detach yourself from your preference. You need to critique YOUR preference more than you critique the opposing options. You're smart and if you've picked the right system then you should be able to defend it. But if you're smart and picked the wrong thing then you need to change because it isn't about what you like, it is about what is right (I'll keep stressing that no voting system is optimal and we need to define our metrics -- I have stated mine -- but we're not discussing these, we're caught up on a single strategy which appears in both cardinal and ordinal and as far as I can tell you don't recognize the latter). > But there'll still inevitably be an election where 2 candidates were very close Yes, and we need to think about how distant these candidates are from one another. Then ask yourself, can we compose a system where these candidates are similar? Is it always random and we have no control? Or are these candidates always distant and on opposite sides of the spectrum? You may be primed to believe the latter because that's the likely scenario in plurality voting but is this true for all systems? To answer this you need to have a deep understanding of Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE), spoilers (both weak and strong -- aka favorite betrayer criteria), and how we embed preference (this is why I keep mentioning distances between candidates on the ballot. Note that this is a different distance/manifold than the previously mentioned one at the beginning of this paragraph). > 16% bullet voting in Burlington and ~21% bullet voting in Irish presidential are not bad percentages in my opinion I agree it is a cop-out since we see lower bullet voting tendencies in cardinal systems. I agree that sample sizes are small but we do have lots of simulations. Unfortunately we have very little real world data. Unfortunately that means we need to advocate for these systems to get real world natural experiments. Fortunately there are a few approval systems: Fargo ND and St. Luis MS (also Latvia). So we are collecting some of this data and it is very promising so far. We also have non-political versions of this like HN itself! There is only a binary voting system here (until you reach a certain score, then we get range voting). So I'd also argue we have tons of data (also surveys frequently use disapprove/neutral/approve styles of voting. Yes, this is voting). We've seen substantial success with these and I think that's not something we can exclude (though we must be aware of things like vote inflation for certain services, like Uber, that don't exhibit in other services, like old Netflix rating or current ratings). > I don't see how cardinal voting would make a difference in there being multiple parties. Back to the embedding. > I could be sold on approval voting if that's the takeaway you're trying to get it. Let's say all things are equal in effectiveness. Approval is O(n) and RCV is O(n2). I think that's killer and matters a lot (see the main topic). > Also I don't mean to occupy either of our New Years Eves on this conversation. This is one of the few political topics I'm extremely passionate about so I enjoy discussing it. I do want to be clear in that my goal here is not necessarily to get you to come to the cardinal side (though that'd be nice) but I want you to understand that voting methods are extremely complex (lots of people want you to think they are simple) and we shouldn't have strong passions about them without putting significant time to learn (I think discussions can be good learning mechanisms fwiw). Also plenty of time before I'm going anywhere tonight. And you have not offended me in any way. I'm glad we had this conversation. Happy New Years :)