kevin_standlee | Range Voting

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Range Voting

The folks advocating Range Voting contacted WSFS (actually, the WSFS webmaster,

sfrose) lobbying WSFS to change its voting system from the Instant Runoff Voting system we currently use for site selection and the Hugo Awards. Sharon told them how our rules work and suggested that if they want to change them, they come to WSFS business meetings and propose and debate the changes there, like all other rule changes. The advocate's response, in my opinion, amounted to, "Our proposal is so obviously Right that we shouldn't have to do all that hard, expensive work. You should change your rules because we tell you to do so."

I often tell people who come to me with rules-change proposals, "If you think it's worthwhile, come and submit it yourself. I'll help you with all of the technicalities to the best of my ability, but you have to make your own case, lobby people yourself, and get the votes by convincing people." Most of the time, this discourages them -- democracy is hard work! But sometimes we get people who are willing to work and debate, and sometimes we even get workable changes and improvements.

WSFS rules are intentionally designed to be resistant to change; however, they can be changed if people work hard enough at it. But it's not enough to just lobby a Board of Directors or subvert the Chairman; you have to convince the members.

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And were these advocates SF fans who also happen to think that range voting is a Really Nifty Idea, or are they just trying to force their idea on us, whether it's a Really Nifty Idea or not?

I don't know. I don't recognize their names, so I tend to expect the latter. On the other hand, their attitude struck me as somewhat fannish, in the negative sense. I could easily be reading too much into what they wrote, however.

Nothing wrong with being a fan of something, if your zealousness is warranted by the scientific evidence. I'm a fan of Range Voting like Dawkins is a fan of evolution.

I got the opinion that they weren't fans, but just advocates of Range Voting and may have done some web searching and found out that we use "IRV."

IRV? Is this their term for how WSFS conducts the Hugo balloting? And what does IRV stand for, anyway? I'm guessing the V is for Voting, but at the moment, I'm stumped on the I and the R.

IIRC, Instant Runoff Voting.

As Sharon said, it stands for Instant Runoff Voting, and that is indeed the currently-favored term for the form of preferential balloting we use. We've used different terms for it over time, but IRV is pretty good, because it succinctly describes what the system simulates.

The technical term for the manner in which Hugo voting is counted used to be "alternative vote". But this wasn't a very clear term, and fans often confused it with "single transferable vote," which is actually an entirely different way of counting preferential ballots.

So I was glad when the term "instant runoff voting" arrived, because it was a lot clearer and caused less confusion. It is now the term of choice to describe this system.

Instant Runoff Voting _IS_ Single Transferrable Vote, applied to single-winner elections.

The application of the voting method to single and multiple-winner elections requires quite different set of voting rules. That the IRV rules are a subset of the STV rules does not make them the same, any more than the New Testament being part of the Bible makes them the same.

STV isn't a "subset" of STV. STV can be used to select X winners out of a group of Y. If Y is 100, and X is 5, you call it STV. If Y is 100 and X is 2, you call it STV. If Y is 100 and X is 1, you called it "IRV" -- it's still STV.

The same is true of Range Voting and Reweighted Range Voting. If you use RRV to elect 1 winner, it's just the same as Range Voting. One could just dispense with the distinction, except that you might pick, say, a school board by holding six regional single-winner RV elections, or you might do it by having ONE multi-winner RRV election. But IRV _IS_ STV, make no mistake about it.

STV isn't a "subset" of STV.

I didn't say it was. I said that the IRV rules, not the STV rules, are a subset of the STV rules. They are different methods of counting, one intended for single winners, one for multiple winners, and I refer you to such standard textbooks as Geography of Elections by P.J. Taylor and R.J. Johnston for an explanation of the difference.

You pride yourself on being scientific; now you're being totally irrational.

From Wikipedia:

When the single transferable vote (STV) system using the Droop quota is applied to a single-winner election it becomes the same as IRV.

The rules are no different. You use the same rules, but you just use them on a single winner instead of on multiple winners. That's my understanding based on everything I've read. I'm happy to consent to being wrong if you can show me otherwise.

I have shown you otherwise. Check the textbook I already referred you to, which treats them as separate systems. I consider standard textbooks a little more reliable for such classifications than wiki-fricking-pedia. You could have put that sentence in Wikipedia yourself.

If STV with only one winner is the same as IRV, so is a list system with only one candidate per list. That doesn't make a list system the proper term to describe IRV.

You do not use the same rules for the two. The act of intending it for single winners instead of multiple winners changes the rules. The Droop quota threshold calculation, for instance, which is the key feature of STV, has no place in IRV whatsoever, where you just skip it and go to simple majority. Neither does the surplus vote allocation, a concept totally alien to anything in IRV.

The original point was that IRV is the term for what Hugo voting uses, STV isn't. If you say you're using STV, you mean you're using the full panoply of STV rules to elect multiple winners. We don't. So it's not STV. Period.

Your knowledge of the systems you're criticizing is as poor as your knowledge of how science fiction conventions work, so there's no point in listening to you on anything.

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thebrokenladder.livejournal.com - 2007-01-24 11:35 (UTC) - Expand

Well, to answer your question, I have enjoyed Clarke's Rama series, the City and the Stars, Asimov's old sci-fi mag "Analog", Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials, and many many others. So yeah, I'm a sci-fi fan. But again, I'm not asking you to use Range Voting for ME, I'm asking you to do it for yourselves. So the question is, are YOU a sci-fi fan? If so, then you want the most liked author to win. Range Voting produces vastly higher social utility efficiency than other voting methods, absolutely CRUSHING IRV; so it objectively tends to pick winners who are liked more. I'm not making this up. See http://RangeVoting.org/vsr.html and http://RangeVoting.org/BayRegDum.html

Regards,
Clay

If you want it to change, then YOU have to do the work to convince us. Really.

That means showing up at WSFS business meetings, proposing changes and convincing people to vote for your proposed changes.

Why do I need to show up in real life? It's a lot easier to go back and forth in a debate/discussion online, where we can refer to our facts and figures, and cite a myriad of sources, and can't interrupt each other. Real life debates SUCK. Like, have you ever seen a creationist debate a scientist? It's insane. The creationist will just say a couple of things like, "But of course there's no evidence for evolution" or "the odds I evolved are like the odds a Boeing jet assembled itself". Of course, these claims are so outrageously senseless that the scientist has to focus not to choke and have an aneurysm, but having to go into all the wordy detail just to diffuse a single stupid comment in a scientific manner, can be distracting without having the ability to carefully plan out the sequence of your counter-arguments, and edit yourself. So I think online debates are far better, and I believe the Center for Range voting has enough evidence in just a few pages to pretty much destroy IRV. I've linked to much of it here in this forum. If anyone has any _cogent_, thought-out counter-arguments to offer, I'd love to hear them. But the argument from incredulity grows tiresome.

Regards,
Clay

Why do I need to show up in real life?

You don't, if you don't mind being irrelevant. I like to make a difference, so if I care about something, I get out there and do something meaningful about it. (That includes things other than SF fandom, such as my time spent as a public-transit advocate including a term on the Caltrain Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board Citizens' Advisory Committee as one of the appointees from Santa Clara County, California.)

When I wanted things to change in WSFS, I got out there and did the work necessary to make it happen. If I'd just sat back and complained that "I know better than you do, my proposals are obviously right, and you're stupid for not adopting them," then nothing would have happened and I would have been consigned to irrelevancy. Personally, I find that dissatisfying.

I believe the Center for Range voting has enough evidence in just a few pages to pretty much destroy IRV.

True, but it appears to me that it rests on a circular argument. You've defined the success conditions in a way that guarantees that your preferred alternative will always win.

Why do I need to show up in real life?

Because the WSFS rules are made at (surprise!) the WSFS meetings. By real people who show up and do the work.

I don't see why this is so difficult for you to understand.

But the argument from incredulity grows tiresome.

The argument of, "I can't be bothered to show up in person to try and convince the people who do," alas, does not grow tiresome. It's been that way for years.

Because the WSFS rules are made at (surprise!) the WSFS meetings. By real people who show up and do the work.

I don't see why this is so difficult for you to understand.

I wish I had time to promote Range Voting, be a musician, and keep my full-time job, AND manage my relationship with my girlfriend. But clearly I can only have so many hobbies. The point I'm trying to make, as I keep explaining again and again, is that there's good reason for YOU to want to show up at those meetings and get this system, because YOU will be the one benefiting. WE would benefit a little, by having another organization we could point to and say, "Hey, these cool people who do the Hugo awards use Range Voting!" But YOU would be the ones benefiting a lot more.

The argument of, "I can't be bothered to show up in person to try and convince the people who do," alas, does not grow tiresome. It's been that way for years.

I can give you more than sufficient evidence of RV's benefits right here. Then YOU can show up and DEMAND Range Voting, because YOU will see better results with it. Do it out of pure selfishness. Do it for yourself.

I don't see what's wrong with the current system. Sure, I don't always agree with the results, and I won't always agree with the results regardless of what voting system is used. Life's a bitch. (I mean, c'mon, Downbelow Station won a Hugo? Never got past page 50.)

I don't care about Range Voting and really, I can't be bothered to make your arguments for you, because I have my own life, and my own interests and they don't coincide with your Pure And Holy Vision Of How Things Ought To Be.

If you want to make it happen, show up and do the work. I'm not going to do it for you.

You should want your election results to coincide with how YOU and the other voters think things ought to be. That's the point of an election. Range Voting will give you almost as big of an improvement over your current system, as your current system improves over drawing a name out of a hat. Think about how much more representative winners become by going from random selection to your current voting method. Now add another 80-90% of that increase. Do you really want randomness to play such a huge part in your elections?

Your continued inability to comprehend what any of us are saying impresses me greatly. Let me see if I can make it clearer for you.

As an aside, what you think that I should want and what I think I should want are not necessarily intersecting sets. (For that matter, who on Earth are you to say what I "should" want?)

Re: I'm a geek

thebrokenladder.livejournal.com - 2007-02-10 22:35 (UTC) - Expand

Re: I'm a geek

filkerdave.livejournal.com - 2007-02-11 00:23 (UTC) - Expand

As we've been telling you, your argument boils down to "Do what I say because I'm so obviously right." You aren't the first person to claim this and I doubt you will be the last.

More accurately my argument was, "Doing this would be of great benefit to you, and here's the overwhelming evidence."

I can't think of any reason you and others here would be so hostile about a great improvement. I feel like Darwin or Einstein, being told, "This evolution stuff is crap" or "This time dilation stuff is crap". Well, the evidence says otherwise. Do you want to be a creationist? Do you just enjoy having a bad election system? In that case I don't understand why you don't just pick the winner out of a hat.

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