Range Voting
Jan. 4th, 2007 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeThe folks advocating Range Voting contacted WSFS (actually, the WSFS webmaster, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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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Re: Erroneously?
Date: 2007-01-24 11:58 am (UTC)Being disproven by Wikipedia has really upset you apparently, so much so that you are now responding to me with completely random nonsense comments. Oh, kayyy.
It's not bugs in your software, it's the assumptions made when writing the software and creating the data.
Our assumptions range from one extreme to another, and everywhere in between. Range Voting beat the other systems by a huge margin, no matter WHICH assumptions we used. You guys seem to be having a really hard time following that part. If we assume voters are stupid, Range Voting wins. If we assume they are educated, Range Voting wins. If we assume they are strategic, Range Voting wins. If we assume they are honest, Range Voting wins.
If the software has some kind of flaws that you'd care to point out, we'd welcome your specific analysis and suggestions for improvement.
Social utility/cost benefit/"economic man" arguments are always liable to drift away from reality
The simulations used hundreds of millions of different randomized distributions of voters and candidates, and yet Range Voting consistently won out, by a large margin. No matter what placement you think is realistic, with that many simulations, some of them should have come close to modeling real world distributions, yet Range Voting consistently won, and by a lot. If this effect was purely coincidence, we should have expected to see many scenarios where Range Voting just randomly happened to do worse than other systems. Yet that didn't happen. Clearly then, it's not just a random coincidence. The odds of that are infinitesimally low. We can be extremely confident that this really is an effect of the properties of Range Voting, and not just some random fluke. If it was just a random fluke, we wouldn't expect it to hold true over hundreds of millions of trials.