If it was up to me, if you go to the main domain page, it would route you to the recent topics page, and on that page (and all the forum pages) there would be links to other parts of the forum as well as to such things as the archives page.

This would probably make it a lot more googlable as well as just making it easier on new visitors. The intro page is not inviting, and the page you get to when you click through to the forums is even less so.

Now that the forum has been running for a while and is stable (good job, @Jack-Waugh ) we should be putting some effort into design / user experience and making it more search engine friendly.

There's a whole ton of other things we could be doing (unlike reddit's EndFPTP and election method email list, we have a lot of capabilities neither of them have), but this design/ux stuff is pretty critical if we want more activity (and therefore have any impact whatsoever beyond amusing ourselves talking about stuff).

Maine used ranked choice voting in the last presidential election, the first state to do so:
https://www.themainewire.com/2020/09/maines-high-court-rules-rcv-must-be-used-in-presidential-election/

I'd love to see other states follow suit (whether with ranked choice, approval, or whatever) but I'm concerned that most states wouldn't do it because they are likely to conclude that it is against the interests of the majority of the voters of the state.

I don't know if I have this right, so I am curious if others see a flaw in my logic.

If there are really only two main candidates in the general election, it shouldn't matter if it is FPTP or not. But let's say there is a third candidate that is popular and had wide appeal, drawing voters from each major party candidate. In other words, a candidate that could actually win under a "good" voting system.

The last I remember this happening was Ross Perot. In June before the election, he was the front runner, with 37% favorability compared to 24% for both Bill Clinton or Bush Sr. So a whole lot of people liked Perot most, but ultimately were discouraged from voting for him because they didn't think he'd be a front runner. Instead they strategically voted for either Bush or Clinton.

Perot got 19% of the votes, but of zero electoral votes since those 19% were spread pretty evenly across the country. In some states he came did come in second place, one of them actually being Maine, where he barely edged out Bush.

Now, imagine a state like Maine having RCV in that election. In that case, Perot might well have won Maine's electoral votes, if people ranked their choices sincerely. He would have a lot of first choice votes, but also have a lot more second choice votes than other candidates (since he was seen as more of a centrist). In fact, Perot got more votes than Bush in Maine under FPTP, so I'd say it is extremely likely he would have won under RCV.

But what that would do is result in Maine give their electoral votes to Perot, while the front runners nationwide were Bush and Clinton. Since the majority of Maine voters preferred Clinton to Bush, having RCV would have very likely caused their electoral votes to be wasted, rather than casting them for Maine's preference between the front runners.

Am I missing something here? And if I am right, is there any better way to implement a better voting system in a single state, when the rest of the country is using the old one?

@toby-pereira said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:

Does anyone call it choose-one outside of voting geekery?

I don't know if the general public has a well-known name for FPTP/plurality/choose-one ... even "first past the post" seems to be restricted to voting geekery. Honestly, I think most of the general public in the US just calls it "voting". Or maybe "regular voting" or "normal voting."

But I know that "choose one" seems to be instantly understood without explanation (especially in contrast with ranked choice, which most people have heard of). I consider it a descriptive term rather than a name per se, similar to "ranked choice".

If I say "first past the post" they have no idea what I am talking about, and it always feels awkward that I then have to say "it just means first to cross the finish line, as in horse racing, but don't bother trying to think about how that metaphor applies, because I haven't figured that out myself, but that is just what people call it."

It always seems a distracting side conversation that is avoided if you just say "choose-one voting, which is the common system where you just pick a single candidate and the one with the most votes wins." Nobody stops to asks for an explanation--- "choose one" does the trick of getting the point across.

@cfrank Note that one definition of "Act of Congress" is:

(idiomatic, US, chiefly colloquial) Authorization that is extremely difficult to get, especially in a timely fashion.
Does it take an act of Congress just to get a stop sign on a corner?

But yeah, PR is fine as long as it isn't party-list based, which really rubs me the wrong way. I like more general solutions. One thing I like about about single winner is you can learn about it and use it for voting for all kinds of things that aren't political.

Most of the stuff that talks about PR comes off to me as people are grasping at straws to use black-and-white logic to describe things that intrinsically lie on a spectrum. Like, you don't have "representation" unless "your party" has a member in there. To someone who considers themselves an independent, that simply doesn't compute.

@jack-waugh said in Deutschland:

This winter (2002-2003), how many of the people living in Germany shall freeze to death, compared to the number of a typical winter of the recent past?

Germans will be spending on how much on methane shipped from the US this winter? How much would they normally spend on that source?

Do German citizens agree with their government's policies in regard to the above two measures?

Are these questions concrete enough?

Are they disqualified on the grounds of who asks them?

Are they valid regardless of who asks them?

None of this has to do with voting theory and bringing them up as you did clearly drove away a newcomer to the forum. (who unsurprisingly said "if this the level of discourse in a voting theory forum, then I hope the rest is not like you") Do you not understand why it got that response?

I think it's perfectly fine to state a view on your favorite voting methods and the like. It's fine to state a "pro-democracy," anti-authoritarian point of view, and to be against toxic politics. Those are issues that are perfectly appropriate to bring up and state a position on.

What you are doing is something else. It's actually bringing in that toxicity. This isn't a "political rants" forum. I don't know where others stand on it, but if it was up to me we'd have moderators who'd remove that stuff before it drives even more people away.

@cfrank said in We should probably have a status update at some point:

The tabulation method cannot be centrally controlled as long as the votes are public. The only thing I want the council to possibly do is make an effort to verify, organize and present the results. We do definitely want a way to organize and separately analyze different groups of ballots.

I hear ya, I'd just hope that could all happen transparently in the forum threads. Any results I posted would link to something like this, where people can paste in ballots, analyze the code, fork the code, etc, so any forum user could check my work (and if they wantm retabulate them in different methods or filtering voters by origin, etc). https://codepen.io/karmatics/pen/ExKZVjM

I mean, I don't care if council members want to come in and verify them, but I honestly doubt they'd want to do it as anything other than regular forum participants. This stuff just seems to lend itself to forums

I could see this leading to something more official.... built in widgets and visualizers, pinned threads, permanent pages, etc, and in that case it makes some sense for the council to be able to approve things, but let's just see how this goes first.

Hopefully if the council does meet soon, they can concentrate on the issues such as entry point, categories/tags, etc... changes that @Jack-Waugh will need to make and I think he wants others to make the decisions before doing so.

@cfrank Well if I understand you correctly, you're suggesting that the state not be "winner take all."

The problem is that not being winner take all is also against the interests of the majority of the voters. If they were to distribute their electoral votes according to the ranking, it will dilute the state's influence.

Interestingly, Maine is one of two states that doesn't have winner take all currently, but distributes them according to congressional district. (I think I see a pattern.... Maine seems to be rather foolishly non-selfish )

But yeah there is the other perspective you mention that party platforms may consider the interests of the state when putting people on the ballot, and that may balance it out so it isn't really against their interests? I don't know.... it's a hard problem to analyze.

@spelunker For better or worse, we're not all like @Jack-Waugh. There's a variety here. I personally don't agree with bringing in political views (such as on Europeon countries buying methane, etc), since I think that is destructive to discussing voting theory and just generally appearing unbiased while avoiding unnecessary conflict. But Jack will be Jack.

If you are actually interested in voting theory and voting methods, feel free to browse the conversations, this is probably the best starting point (its been a bit slow the last few weeks but it picks up): https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/recent

Just curious, how did you find the forum?

@Marylander said in Sensible Rules for Recall Elections:

However, the simplest solution would be to simply hold another election where the governor and potential replacements are all just treated as candidates, as they would be in an ordinary election.

Agree, although I think it should also require any candidate that replaces the governor to beat the governor by a certain amount. The low threshold for ousting someone who has been elected doesn't make sense. California's system is severely broken, and was a huge expense that was completely unnecessary.

Although, in the end, Newsome and Democrats probably benefitted from it this time around.

@sass Yes that gets to the point quickly. I like.

This seems similar in spirit to the one I was proposing recently. The main difference is that mine used cardinal ballots (intended to be identical to STAR ballots, such as if the STAR people might want to offer a Condorcet version of STAR). But otherwise it was like yours in that it ran pairwise matchups first, and if there was a tie, fell back on the simplest way to resolve it.

So your single sentence could change one word and describe mine:

Among the candidates who tie for winning the most head-to-head matchups, elect the candidate with the best average score.

https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/130/star-like-method-reverse-star

That said, I think yours makes more sense for pitching it to Yang's crew, since they seem to like ranked ballots.

@andy-dienes Hey Andy glad to see you make an appearance! Still have hope you'll come back more regularly.

I agree with most that you say, and while as Discord server may make sense, I think there is still a lot of value in forums. This one, potentially, will get better as we add voting widgets and other gizmos, which I don't see working on Discord. Forums tend to have more permanence, if there is a great conversation, it can be linked to in the future. It seems better for readers not just writers. This forum has yet to live up to a lot of this stuff, but it can. I don't think Discord can, really. Discord seems like it might be good for "lively conversations," which may be entertaining but seem less likely to, I dunno, make the world better?

I do have a feeling this whole topic can take off in a wider way, to a mass audience, if approached well. If a random person comes to this forum, I'm not sure they will immediately see a reason they should care about this stuff. Ok, political polarization messed up their Thanksgiving dinner or something, but beyond that.... why do we need this stuff? If it is "I don't feel represented" or "I want to fully express myself at the ballot box" or even "we could improve the average happiness of voters regarding which candidate won the election", I'd argue they are kinda missing the point.

The main problem we are trying to solve, to me, is the politically-based polarization that is tearing apart society and preventing us from working together for a common goal.

And while others here don't seem to have made this connection (yet?), to me the problem has gotten 100 times more urgent very recently, given that we're suddenly in an AI arms race, which a divided society is especially not ready for. It's sort of like nuclear weapons, except that generative AI spins gold right up until it destroys us all. And one nice thing about nuclear weapons is we can be pretty sure that the weapons themselves aren't going to decide on their own to wipe us out. Another nice thing about nuclear weapons is that the people who build them actually know how they work. (generative AI such as GPT-4 is essentially an enormous matrix of floating point numbers that no one on the planet truly understands why it works the way it does)

(hey I've been accused of being alarmist before. Usually I don't think I am. Here, yeah, I'm pretty freaking alarmist.)

So I'd hope we can make something that draws people in and demonstrates the value of these tools. And if we were able to use our tools to work out our own differences, we'd be demonstrating a model of how to find consensus to the rest of the world.

Ambitious? Yes. Necessary? Most absolutely yes.

Got three and a half hours to watch something fascinating? And scary AF? Enjoy.

"the problem is that we do not get 50 years to try and try again and observe that we were wrong and come up with a different theory and realize that the entire thing is going to be like way more difficult than realized at the start, because the first time you fail at aligning something much smarter than you are, you die."
Youtube Video

this one is equally good but Sam Altman is obviously not as pessimistic (but he does admit he is scared)

Youtube Video

@sarawolk I'd love for you to participate rather than sit back and watch. I think you should start by coming to the forum and posting and being a part of it, rather than just coming in and acting like you own it.

You say you've put 2 years of work into the forum. How? By drafting the by-laws or something? I've seen that Jack actually did the hard work of putting the forum up, something I had originally signed on to do so I was well aware of the size of the task.

The fact of the matter is, you are claiming good things are going to happen at the forum, because you have people ready to come in and do these things. And I don't believe that. I have not seen these people, I honestly don't think they exist. And if they happen to exist, I don't trust their motives, since it doesn't make sense to want to dedicate time to improve a forum you don't participate in, unless you have some other agenda. Mostly, I don't trust that any such individuals will stay motivated, given that they haven't been interested in the forum to date.

What I've seen is the forum floundering because we can't make it better because a group that has no involvement with it, and is often unresponsive for months, has undue control. The forum is almost dead. You claim to have technical people, but when push comes to shove (such as when you've got a singular tech admin with a serious case of Tourettes), where are they?

I will retract my offer and let you run the show as you wish. While I don't think you have the motivated dev and mod teams you describe, please prove me wrong and do great things.

[edited since it was harsh]

[edited]

@sarawolk said in Reddit: Reconsidering the r/EndFPTP Rules:

I agree with you that some well done moderation there would have likely kept @Andy-Dienes and others more engaged and made them feel more respected.

Well if you read the thread you'll see there was moderation, by me. I jumped in and smoothed things out. When I called rbj out for being aggressive and told him why it's not ok, he said "Yes. You are exactly correct, @rob."

I've been doing a fair amount of that here, even though I am not in any official sense a moderator. I've had admin power for some time, and here and there use it to deal with spammers and such. But mostly, I just jumping in as a regular user when someone goes out of line and trying to bring it back.

In the course of the thread above (which you really should read if you want to know how I handle moderation here), rb-j "doxxed" Andy by posting screenshots showing proof that Andy had used some particular identity at Reddit that he doesn't use now. Or something like that. Doxxing. I dealt with that like this:

I thought that was moderated about as well as it could have been, although I probably would have DM'd rbj right off the bat if I felt like I was an official moderator. RBJ is very cantankerous (he's always getting banned at EndFPTP and other places and seems proud of it), but he is also really smart and makes good contributions on the legislative side.

I'm curious how you think moderation should be done. Clear rules are nice to have, but there are always gray areas. More importantly, you need someone with good judgement to enforce them in a way that doesn't unnecessarily drive people away. Would you disagree with any of that?

@sarawolk I'm fine with that wording. (as I said in a different thread, when 3 people disagreed with me about any such rule, and I edited it out of my proposal)

There is an issue, though, with the "keep claims factual" idea. There are many in this field that will regularly demand that their view is the one and only correct one. I've seen it a lot. So debating "factual" and for that matter "constructive" can be tricky. Is it factual that IRV is an improvement over Plurality? I tend to think it is, but there are those that disagree.

I remember back in the day a particular well-known and prolific member of the voting theory community (who doesn't participate in this forum and has toned down his approach in the decade since) would berate anyone who didn't agree with the FACT that score voting was objectively the best system because it produced the best utilitarian results according to some way of directly measuring it, and therefore by definition means the most happiness and therefore, it's best. By definition. Not an opinion, fact. He literally drove me off from the community for years. He started almost all of his replies with "Wrong."

That's what I think is the problem that comes up time to time. You can call it partisanship, or negative politics, or whatever. Or just being too strident.

Regardless, I think there is probably no need for specific wording about that, but moderators would simply need to have good judgement.

Any code of conduct is subject to interpretation. I think my posts are far from inflammatory, but you and @Sass have disagreed. (jeez, I was offering significant time and effort to the forum, noted that the forum was nearly a ghost town, and that with Jack departing it could potentially go offline, and advocated for running the forum democratically with every decision I'd make. That's inflammatory? Sorry I don't get that.)

Here is a thread where things got ugly, around that issue, with it devolving into personal attacks ("bullshit!" "denial isn't a river in egypt", "big fucking deal!" "this is so stupid" etc).
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/256/new-method-i-think-hare-squared/12

@sarawolk said in My proposal for this forum:

We recruit some new volunteers to our Forum Council, Tech Committee, and Moderation Committee.

From where? The forum has been nearly a ghost town for most of its existence. But if a team of volunteers want to step up, that sounds like a plan and it doesn't sound like you need what I've offered. I will admit it seems a bit like magical thinking to me, but maybe you know something I don't.

I suggest you assemble this team of volunteers first, let them convince you that they are actually going to stick around and do the work, then make decisions. To me, it doesn't make sense to make decisions assuming a bunch of people are going to be ready to take on responsibilities, especially if those people haven't been participating in the forum already. I just don't see it happening.

When talking to Jack, he seemed to be convinced there was tech team ready to jump in. So maybe I'm wrong. I just have seen no signs of this.

We keep the forum constructive and drama free.

Offering to step up and run this democratically, per the original vision, doesn't sound like drama, and I would consider it constructive. I'm not attacking you or anyone else. I'm just saying the forum wasn't gaining traction, for very predictable reasons. Meanwhile the only person who has taken on day-to-day responsibility for the forum, Jack, says he's not willing to do that anymore. I have offered to spend a lot of my time, time that most people on the council don't seem to have, to both fill in the role Jack had played, while otherwise making positive things happen.

Also regarding drama: I've gone out of my way to try to suppress drama on the forum, only once using my admin powers (in a case of doxxing, I edited a post and diplomatically DM'd its author [1]), but often stepping in [2], sometimes in the awkward situation of, well, our tech admin posting stuff that many found offensive, off-topic and divisive. I don't know if anyone else ever has, other than a couple people weighing in, such as @spelunker did when he first arrived and was greeted by some toxic content, or as @Andy-Dienes did in that same situation. (I believe we've lost Andy, one of our best contributors --- I don't want to speak for him but I believe the "tone" of the forum was a significant thing that drove him away, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't because of a discussion of the future of the forum, since he also wished for some significant changes [3]).

Regardless, I am not trying to rehash events of two years ago, and am not attacking anyone. I don't see how this is escalating anything. I do feel that general issues about the forum's future should be resolvable in public at the forum. I understand taking things to private discussion for very specific cases, but for discussing how decisions are made at the forum and such..... why the need for secrecy? If you are worried about someone coming to the forum and being put off by my post...well, sorry, but I don't get it. If they are going to be put off by anything, it is that there is little activity, and whatever activity there is is not easy to find without several clicks, and if they do that, sometimes it is toxic and off topic. Not that we are talking about options to make the forum better.

I am honestly confused as to Jack's ongoing role. I understood he was wanting to back away due to frustration over a non-responsive council. If this wasn't the case, I would never have offered to step up.

That said, I think we need a lot more than what Jack has been doing, as I have outlined above. Basically, someone who is likely to be here on a daily basis, managing the social side, adding features and organizing the site and content etc. I don't see why a forum would be expected to succeed in the absence of this.

In any case, my offer stands for the time being but unless I hear strongly enough that people want this, I'm mostly assuming that the few left at the forum aren't interested.

1. (the doxxing has been removed but this is one conversation where moderation was otherwise needed) https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/256/new-method-i-think-hare-squared/12

2. https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/301/deutschland/14
   https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/303/the-metadiscussion
   Note that if Jack wasn't the admin of the board, and we had anyone else who was actively moderating, a better way to handle it is for a moderator to delete the post, and DM Jack to diplomatically explain why without making a big public deal.

3. Here is where Andy suggested improvements , we all agreed, and nothing happened. If I had the role I propose, I would have put it to an open vote (on the forum), notified the council, and unless there were objections within a week or two, made the changes:
   https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/227/way-too-many-categories
   I would have, separately, proposed and held a vote on changing the front page to be the "recent activity page", with a banner for links to other things at the site such as the CES forum archive.

@sarawolk I get notification emails from the forum. Is it possible gmail is flagging it as spam? I remember that happened at one point.

@jack-waugh It's good to know NodeBB has worked without a hitch. I suggested it in the first place (when I was going to be the one deploying it), and worried afterwards that it might end up being problematic. The only reason for using it (as opposed to just a hosted forums plan) was so we could bend it to our will, but that hasn't happened yet. I've got a whole bunch of cool stuff I'd be ready to add (mostly voting widgets, static pages and shared source code and data files) once we can be confident there is someone to fulfill the role of "standing at the ready in case trouble arises"

Still hoping to have a call with you where we can talk about technical and logistical stuff. I'd like to know as much as possible before the council meeting so it is clear what I am proposing.

@jack-waugh said in My proposal for this forum:

Jack's role

I would like to know what you think that is.

You are free to describe it in your own words, but what I intended is that you have been the person who got it running and keeps it running, and if changes are made, makes them.

I am aware you have chosen not to be particularly involved in what you call social aspects. However, you have been the most prolific poster, often posting new things when the board seems dead, which often gets the discussion happening again. While this is something that anyone can do, it appears to me to be a positive contribution you've been making to the social side.

But mostly I meant you "run" the forum in a technical sense.It appears that, after getting it running (which was a pretty big undertaking), you haven't done a whole lot in terms of improving it other than to just keep it running. That's not a complaint, just an observation. My own view is that regular improvements would be a plus, and for that to happen, we need a combination of someone having the drive and ability to do such improvements, and a more streamlined process for getting approval for doing them. (i.e. publicly put it to the forum and going with what people agree to, rather than waiting for council meetings that may never happen)