Sir, I will get a crappy president if a plain majority of the voters prefer a crappy president, no matter what the voting method. Getting a crappy president has nothing to do with the matter.
Say I offered you a 1 in 50 chance of getting 200 dollars, or a 1/500 chance of getting 4000$...which would you take? With the former, your expected value is 4$. With the latter it's 8$. Either way, that's barely enough to buy you a jumbo soda for lunch. Both options are crappy. But one is LESS crappy.
Nor has making the voting method "fun" have anything to do with the matter. Making it comprehensible and gaining the trust of the voters does.
Whether voters trust it or not has nothing to do with whether it is actually the best voting method. You might try to explain to someone with Down's syndrome that his expected value with one game at the casino was much higher than with another. He might not understand your proof of that, but you'd still be right. He'd still be better off playing the game with the higher expected value, whether he had confidence in that or not.
If we have nothing better than your arguments to offer, we will never gain the trust of these particular set of voters with range voting.
My arguments are substantial. RV is monotonic; IRV is not. RV passes the independence of irrelevant alternatives; IRV does not. RV passes the favorite-betrayal-lesser-evil criterion (an honest vote for Nader is NEVER a vote for Bush); NO ordinal system passes this. I'm at a loss for what you mean when you say, "If that's all you have to offer".
You seem to be mistaking science fiction fans for the kinds of soulless automatons who would apply scientific principles to every area of their lives.
Why do you have to be soul-less in order to be rational in every aspect of your life? I pour my soul into my music, yet I always adhere to rationalism. Why must we ever substitute superstition for science in any endeavor?
Convention running is not a science, but a combination of science and art.
If your goal is to please the attendees, then all the art really is science. It's the application of your data about what pleases humans, in order to accomplish the goal of creating the greatest utility for them and/or for yourselves.
We must often balance what is theoretically most preferable with what is practically feasible to do, with what people want, and what they find easiest to do and to understand.
I absolutely agree. A great reason to switch to RV would be the greater simplicity. Voters can even abstain from casting votes for unknown options, diminishing the harm done by ignorance, and making the voting process shorter and simpler on a per-voter basis.
That was the first lesson taught me when I went to work for a political campaign, and it applies just as well here. The theoretical, and if present the quite marginal, greater utility of range voting does not overcome these other factors, and it most emphatically does not overcome practical concerns about its utility.
You say "theoretical" as if our calculations are loose guesses. On the contrary, they were derived using quite rigorous modeling. Before discounting them, I'd look over the code, and tell us what methodological errors you find. Hand waving is not a scientific argument. And the utility differences are NOT marginal; they are huge. The benefit you get by going from IRV to Range Voting is almost as much as you'd get by going from RANDOM SELECTION to IRV in the first place. If I suggested you pick the winners by drawing names out of a hat, you'd think I was crazy, right? Well, just a bit crazier than one would be to use IRV instead of switching to Range Voting. It's also nice that RV is simpler than IRV to use and tabulate. It's a win-win-win..
This is especially true if, as you are saying, range voting is not perfect.
Your case is refuted by RV's being much better. It needn't be perfect.
And my point that you are calling "straw man" is not that you literally said it was perfect, it's that you are talking as if you think it is perfect.
No, I'm talking about it as though it is the best known voting system (that is practical to implement). It is.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 05:42 am (UTC)Say I offered you a 1 in 50 chance of getting 200 dollars, or a 1/500 chance of getting 4000$...which would you take? With the former, your expected value is 4$. With the latter it's 8$. Either way, that's barely enough to buy you a jumbo soda for lunch. Both options are crappy. But one is LESS crappy.
Nor has making the voting method "fun" have anything to do with the matter. Making it comprehensible and gaining the trust of the voters does.
Whether voters trust it or not has nothing to do with whether it is actually the best voting method. You might try to explain to someone with Down's syndrome that his expected value with one game at the casino was much higher than with another. He might not understand your proof of that, but you'd still be right. He'd still be better off playing the game with the higher expected value, whether he had confidence in that or not.
If we have nothing better than your arguments to offer, we will never gain the trust of these particular set of voters with range voting.
My arguments are substantial. RV is monotonic; IRV is not. RV passes the independence of irrelevant alternatives; IRV does not. RV passes the favorite-betrayal-lesser-evil criterion (an honest vote for Nader is NEVER a vote for Bush); NO ordinal system passes this. I'm at a loss for what you mean when you say, "If that's all you have to offer".
You seem to be mistaking science fiction fans for the kinds of soulless automatons who would apply scientific principles to every area of their lives.
Why do you have to be soul-less in order to be rational in every aspect of your life? I pour my soul into my music, yet I always adhere to rationalism. Why must we ever substitute superstition for science in any endeavor?
Convention running is not a science, but a combination of science and art.
If your goal is to please the attendees, then all the art really is science. It's the application of your data about what pleases humans, in order to accomplish the goal of creating the greatest utility for them and/or for yourselves.
We must often balance what is theoretically most preferable with what is practically feasible to do, with what people want, and what they find easiest to do and to understand.
I absolutely agree. A great reason to switch to RV would be the greater simplicity. Voters can even abstain from casting votes for unknown options, diminishing the harm done by ignorance, and making the voting process shorter and simpler on a per-voter basis.
That was the first lesson taught me when I went to work for a political campaign, and it applies just as well here. The theoretical, and if present the quite marginal, greater utility of range voting does not overcome these other factors, and it most emphatically does not overcome practical concerns about its utility.
You say "theoretical" as if our calculations are loose guesses. On the contrary, they were derived using quite rigorous modeling. Before discounting them, I'd look over the code, and tell us what methodological errors you find. Hand waving is not a scientific argument. And the utility differences are NOT marginal; they are huge. The benefit you get by going from IRV to Range Voting is almost as much as you'd get by going from RANDOM SELECTION to IRV in the first place. If I suggested you pick the winners by drawing names out of a hat, you'd think I was crazy, right? Well, just a bit crazier than one would be to use IRV instead of switching to Range Voting. It's also nice that RV is simpler than IRV to use and tabulate. It's a win-win-win..
This is especially true if, as you are saying, range voting is not perfect.
Your case is refuted by RV's being much better. It needn't be perfect.
And my point that you are calling "straw man" is not that you literally said it was perfect, it's that you are talking as if you think it is perfect.
No, I'm talking about it as though it is the best known voting system (that is practical to implement). It is.
Regards,
Clay
Clay