5 ms·

The equity issues you all are raising are very important, but death with in detail here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956 http://paper

The equity issues you all are raising are very important, but death with in detail here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956. The simplest solution is just to use an artificial currency that everyone is given equal amounts of but can spread over the decisions most important to them. In this piece with Rory Sutherland we discuss this: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9512322/humans-are-doing-democracy-wrong-bees-are-doing-it-right/ http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9512322/humans-are-doing...

tomrod 11y ago
Glen good to see you around HN. One question that comes to mind is whether quadratic voting is the best improvement. I look forward to giving this a read.
- glenweyl 11y ago
  What Lalley and I (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531) prove is that QV is provably the only system of vote pricing that gives you efficiency always, so in some sense it is the best possible improvement, at least the best one that is robust. In more narrow circumstances in finite populations you can do better probably, but it requires a fair bit of detailed knowledge of the situation and a lot of complexity.
lazzlazzlazz 11y ago
And in this moment, VoteCoin was born.
- tgbrter 11y ago
  How do you mine it?
jmckib 11y ago
Hi Glen, I mentioned this in another comment, but copying here because I'd like to hear your thoughts on it: > If enough people are participating in a vote, then the cost of voting (e.g., research + going to polling station) outweighs the benefit (possibility of changing the outcome). The cost of voting is roughly fixed, while the benefit decreases rapidly as the number of participants grows. Does quadratic voting address this, or are there other ideas you've heard of that address that problem?
- glenweyl 11y ago
  Fantastic question. QV does not really address this much; at a quantitative level you are right that it reduces the problem a bit, but you can't beat those asymptotic properties you highlight. The right solution is representative bodies (or random samples). Great work on this by Jerry Green and Jean-Jacques Laffont: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01718517?LI=true http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01718517?LI=tru... If you make the set of deciders smaller this starts to go away. This is arguably the fundamental justification for representative rather than direct democracy. There is a nice property we believe QV has that we (myself and Richard Zeckhauser) are working to prove which is that if you have representatives elected via QV and then those representatives use QV to vote you get efficiency in a hierarchical fashion. So while I don't think QV directly solves this issue, I think it fits nicely into a broader system that does.
  - jmckib 11y ago
    Thanks for answering my question! I hadn't thought of using random samples. So maybe a good solution is QV for representatives, with only a small random sample of the population being able to vote. The representatives should also use QV, of course. I just read a big chunk of your paper "Voting Squared: Quadratic Voting in Democratic Politics", and I really enjoyed it. For a long time I've wanted to do an open source project related to characterizing an optimal government, or at least simulating the outcomes you could expect from different types of governments. If you know of a useful way to go about doing this I'd love to hear it. By the way, I reside in a coliving space with 50+ people, and we've struggled with voting on certain issues that minority groups feel strongly about. I will definitely be suggesting QV!
sytelus 11y ago
There seem to be one big issue with this voting system. It allows variable number of votes per individual but how does an individual choose how much cost to take and exactly how much to vote? I think it is a fallacy to assume that individual would set the number of votes depending on how important they think is the issue. Instead they must speculate how others would vote and optimize their cost accordingly. For example, an individual may depend on wrong information to arrive at conclusion that everyone is in agreement with him/her sentiment and decide to spend less even though they deeply care about specific outcome. Mean while a small group might be secretly conspiring and spends huge sums to win their desired outcome. I would suspect that this voting system would promote speculation based market which can be easily manipulated by either asymmetric information or incorrect information by a small group. Another thing to think about is too many small minority groups. So for instance, assume there are N questions to vote for and for each of these questions, we have a significant minority group that deeply cares about specific outcome. At some point, because of required increased expenditure, wouldn't votes for all questions favor minority sentiment? I think we have to understand that while there is a dark side to "tyranny-of-majority", there is an important bright side too: It shields from scenarios where small group of radicals take over the system because they deeply care about their ideas that are not good for majority.
- sytelus 11y ago
  For people, who are new to HN, do not use downvotes to express your disagreement with author. Use them if the comment was off track, spam, bad mannered or in general not adding any value whatsoever.
  - thomasahle 11y ago
    That is what I thought as well, until this thread happened https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9237644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9237644 Apparently it is the official HN policy that up/down voting is for agreement/disagreement. :-(
    - Frozenlock 11y ago
notahacker 11y ago
The "artificial currency" would ensure votes accurately reflect the importance an individual attaches to an issue relative to other votes, but in practice this gives significantly more "voting power" to groups which seldom participate in votes, even where it is difficult to believe the intensity of their preferences are stronger. Given a fixed budget to be used over a number of votes, an essentially apolitical person told by their community leader to use all their votes in opposing a particular issue they know little about will have more influence on the outcome than a highly-informed, politically-motivated and civic minded regular referendum participant, yet it's difficult to argue the absolute intensity of the preference of the regular voter is lower (this is of course related to the standard welfare economics criticism of cardinal utilities). This isn't a problem if the individuals apportioning their vote budget are similarly-highly-motivated legislators prioritising from a known raft of policies whilst being well informed about which initiatives are most likely to meet with strong opposition (though it significantly advantages parties able to coordinate the efficient distribution of their votes). Probably they can handle the complexities of a voting budget that compensates the losers too. But for a broader electorate that doesn't excel in performing stochastic optimisation problems, doesn't have good intelligence to help them vote tactically, doesn't know what future votes might be, the quadratic nature of the voting system doesn't deal with the problem of budgeted and secret voting being a game of iterated prisoners' dilemma; it might even intensify the problems. It's not too difficult to devise a scenario in which it actually makes the "tyranny of the majority" problem worse: a minority of bigots wish very strongly to enact a law against a minority of regular targets. The disinterested majority wishes to avoid diluting their future voting power by participating, whilst the victimised minority wishes to hold back some of their voting power to avoid being disenfranchised when faced with conceivable future bullying initiatives[1]. In a secret ballot, the bigots can conceivably win if the groups are a similar size (even if they can subsequently reverse the decision) [1]This is mitigated if the losers get their own votes back as compensation, but actually worsened if they get higher compensation, in which case optimum strategy in a iterated electoral battle is to win by the narrowest possible margin, whilst voting for something incredibly unpopular is a practical way to increase your future influence.
- glenweyl 11y ago
  I cannot completely follow this scenario, but if you can write it up as an actual equilibrium analysis I would be fascinated to see this. I have worked very hard to come up with cases where QV does worse than one-person-one-vote and have never found a case where it occurred by a significant margin. But your basic point, that allowing exchange with a broader set of goods to make sure that if all voting is more valued by people they can have more overall voting influence, is something I very much agree with and why I think that while artificial currency is an improvement over one-person-one-vote eventually using cash will be better.
ClayShentrup 11y ago
That Spectator piece is basically 100% false. Here's an explanation from a Princeton math PhD with expertise in voting system design. http://scorevoting.net/BogusBeeQV.html http://scorevoting.net/BogusBeeQV.html

tomrod 11y ago

Glen good to see you around HN. One question that comes to mind is whether quadratic voting is the best improvement. I look forward to giving this a read.

glenweyl 11y ago
What Lalley and I (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531) prove is that QV is provably the only system of vote pricing that gives you efficiency always, so in some sense it is the best possible improvement, at least the best one that is robust. In more narrow circumstances in finite populations you can do better probably, but it requires a fair bit of detailed knowledge of the situation and a lot of complexity.

lazzlazzlazz 11y ago

And in this moment, VoteCoin was born.

tgbrter 11y ago
How do you mine it?

jmckib 11y ago

Hi Glen, I mentioned this in another comment, but copying here because I'd like to hear your thoughts on it: > If enough people are participating in a vote, then the cost of voting (e.g., research + going to polling station) outweighs the benefit (possibility of changing the outcome). The cost of voting is roughly fixed, while the benefit decreases rapidly as the number of participants grows. Does quadratic voting address this, or are there other ideas you've heard of that address that problem?

glenweyl 11y ago
Fantastic question. QV does not really address this much; at a quantitative level you are right that it reduces the problem a bit, but you can't beat those asymptotic properties you highlight. The right solution is representative bodies (or random samples). Great work on this by Jerry Green and Jean-Jacques Laffont: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01718517?LI=true http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01718517?LI=tru... If you make the set of deciders smaller this starts to go away. This is arguably the fundamental justification for representative rather than direct democracy. There is a nice property we believe QV has that we (myself and Richard Zeckhauser) are working to prove which is that if you have representatives elected via QV and then those representatives use QV to vote you get efficiency in a hierarchical fashion. So while I don't think QV directly solves this issue, I think it fits nicely into a broader system that does.
- jmckib 11y ago
  Thanks for answering my question! I hadn't thought of using random samples. So maybe a good solution is QV for representatives, with only a small random sample of the population being able to vote. The representatives should also use QV, of course. I just read a big chunk of your paper "Voting Squared: Quadratic Voting in Democratic Politics", and I really enjoyed it. For a long time I've wanted to do an open source project related to characterizing an optimal government, or at least simulating the outcomes you could expect from different types of governments. If you know of a useful way to go about doing this I'd love to hear it. By the way, I reside in a coliving space with 50+ people, and we've struggled with voting on certain issues that minority groups feel strongly about. I will definitely be suggesting QV!

sytelus 11y ago

There seem to be one big issue with this voting system. It allows variable number of votes per individual but how does an individual choose how much cost to take and exactly how much to vote? I think it is a fallacy to assume that individual would set the number of votes depending on how important they think is the issue. Instead they must speculate how others would vote and optimize their cost accordingly. For example, an individual may depend on wrong information to arrive at conclusion that everyone is in agreement with him/her sentiment and decide to spend less even though they deeply care about specific outcome. Mean while a small group might be secretly conspiring and spends huge sums to win their desired outcome. I would suspect that this voting system would promote speculation based market which can be easily manipulated by either asymmetric information or incorrect information by a small group. Another thing to think about is too many small minority groups. So for instance, assume there are N questions to vote for and for each of these questions, we have a significant minority group that deeply cares about specific outcome. At some point, because of required increased expenditure, wouldn't votes for all questions favor minority sentiment? I think we have to understand that while there is a dark side to "tyranny-of-majority", there is an important bright side too: It shields from scenarios where small group of radicals take over the system because they deeply care about their ideas that are not good for majority.

sytelus 11y ago
For people, who are new to HN, do not use downvotes to express your disagreement with author. Use them if the comment was off track, spam, bad mannered or in general not adding any value whatsoever.
- thomasahle 11y ago
  That is what I thought as well, until this thread happened https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9237644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9237644 Apparently it is the official HN policy that up/down voting is for agreement/disagreement. :-(
  - Frozenlock 11y ago

notahacker 11y ago

The "artificial currency" would ensure votes accurately reflect the importance an individual attaches to an issue relative to other votes, but in practice this gives significantly more "voting power" to groups which seldom participate in votes, even where it is difficult to believe the intensity of their preferences are stronger. Given a fixed budget to be used over a number of votes, an essentially apolitical person told by their community leader to use all their votes in opposing a particular issue they know little about will have more influence on the outcome than a highly-informed, politically-motivated and civic minded regular referendum participant, yet it's difficult to argue the absolute intensity of the preference of the regular voter is lower (this is of course related to the standard welfare economics criticism of cardinal utilities). This isn't a problem if the individuals apportioning their vote budget are similarly-highly-motivated legislators prioritising from a known raft of policies whilst being well informed about which initiatives are most likely to meet with strong opposition (though it significantly advantages parties able to coordinate the efficient distribution of their votes). Probably they can handle the complexities of a voting budget that compensates the losers too. But for a broader electorate that doesn't excel in performing stochastic optimisation problems, doesn't have good intelligence to help them vote tactically, doesn't know what future votes might be, the quadratic nature of the voting system doesn't deal with the problem of budgeted and secret voting being a game of iterated prisoners' dilemma; it might even intensify the problems. It's not too difficult to devise a scenario in which it actually makes the "tyranny of the majority" problem worse: a minority of bigots wish very strongly to enact a law against a minority of regular targets. The disinterested majority wishes to avoid diluting their future voting power by participating, whilst the victimised minority wishes to hold back some of their voting power to avoid being disenfranchised when faced with conceivable future bullying initiatives[1]. In a secret ballot, the bigots can conceivably win if the groups are a similar size (even if they can subsequently reverse the decision) [1]This is mitigated if the losers get their own votes back as compensation, but actually worsened if they get higher compensation, in which case optimum strategy in a iterated electoral battle is to win by the narrowest possible margin, whilst voting for something incredibly unpopular is a practical way to increase your future influence.

glenweyl 11y ago
I cannot completely follow this scenario, but if you can write it up as an actual equilibrium analysis I would be fascinated to see this. I have worked very hard to come up with cases where QV does worse than one-person-one-vote and have never found a case where it occurred by a significant margin. But your basic point, that allowing exchange with a broader set of goods to make sure that if all voting is more valued by people they can have more overall voting influence, is something I very much agree with and why I think that while artificial currency is an improvement over one-person-one-vote eventually using cash will be better.

ClayShentrup 11y ago

That Spectator piece is basically 100% false. Here's an explanation from a Princeton math PhD with expertise in voting system design. http://scorevoting.net/BogusBeeQV.html http://scorevoting.net/BogusBeeQV.html