@Marylander: The submitted paper was describing a new collective choice procedure that can be thought of as a vote-moderated discussion, so yes, it would have been in the context of voting methods.

Given that a week has gone by with no one supplying a reference for "independence of eliminated alternatives", I'm just going to proceed as if the editor meant Arrow's IIA.

@jack-waugh What happened?

@bettervoting Not as far as I know. I checked the Internet Archive to see if they had the image (they did archive some things from the forum but mostly from 2020), but I don't think they archived the thread.

Because early work in the voting-systems field was recorded in Latin at a time when Latin served somewhat as an international language, we who write on this subject should once in a while refer back to the most relevant expressions to this field in that language. Here's my attempt to translate "voting systems" in accusative:

artēs ēligendī

Some people might want to translate "systems" as systēmata. However, Llull used (in singular) ars. And we should follow Llull, the pioneer of our field.

@jack-waugh said in Why isn't anyone talking about the elephant in the room?:

Sass has been saying,

He should come here and defend his positions. I see huge flaws in his logic and approaches, but don't want to feel like I'm attacking someone who isn't here to defend himself.

@jack-waugh That's not what a straw man is. It is misrepresenting someone's position and arguing against that misrepresentation.

If you still don't know, what I did was suggest that your hyperbole strikes me as similar to the listed ones, that come from others who are nuance-challenged.

@jack-waugh The amount of complexity in an IRV Yee diagram increases absurdly quickly as you add candidates, but I don't think there will be infinite complexity with a finite number of candidates the way fractals are infinitely complex.

@robla Yeah, I didn't mean "object" in the sense that I care so much what is on Wikipedia, but just in the sense of "I wish they didn't report RCV elections this way." I guess they (not just Wikipedia, news articles as well) want to make it seem like the winner has a majority, as if majority really makes sense with more than two candidates. There are way better ways of visualizing such elections.

@toby-pereira Quite amusing.

@jack-waugh I have to use it for work. I don't think it is horrible for "final" code, I just wish it was easier to work in plain old javascript as you build things out without causing all sorts of problems. And I'd like it a lot more if browsers supported it natively without having to deal with source maps and such.

@jack-waugh I think most people would prefer not work, at least not work on most of the things that society needs. Plenty of people like to work on things they enjoy, but that (here on Earth) no one would be likely to pay them to do. The only jobs I can think of that people would do even if they aren't paid are either very rare, or it is very rare people who have the talent to do them well enough to make a living at them.

What you are proposing seems both idealistic and kind of oppressive. I don't want to be "rotated through undesirable jobs," that's forced labor. I also don't want to spend my time working on things I hate or am bad at. Even for "undesirable" jobs, some people are more suited than others.

Does your system have any mechanism for incentivizing people to not be lazy? Are they punished if their productivity is low? Are they rewarded if they work really hard?

I also don't see how voting for what needs to be done to be remotely efficient. It certainly doesn't scale up to larger societies.

Regardless, I was treating the need for currency as a given, and trying to find a way to keep it both stable and efficient. Not attempting to make it unnecessary.

I have some ideas on that, but I'll wait until we're talking about the same thing.

There is collective irrationality, or collective behavior that will produce a poor result for the individuals, if you consider starvation, disease, thirst, and early death poor results (which I do).

I think the video doesn't mention incentive structures and I think attention on incentive structures can be key to engineering social relations in such a way as to produce better collective behavior.

Choose-one plurality voting provides an incentive to vote for the lesser evil and no one else, which produces a poor outcome collectively when many people obey the incentive.

Laws that permit the formation of stock corporations in their current form provide to managers and directors an incentive to maximize book profits, no matter how poorly book profits correspond to real profit for the human race. People trained under this incentive then get to determine governmental policy, and in the course of doing that, they continue to obey their training.

@rob said in Way too many categories:

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.)

I've quoted from a different thread because I think this discussion is possibly more relevant here.

I wrote a paper a few years ago making an argument against the future existence of superintelligent AI, based on anthropic reasoning. You might not agree with the argument or think it's a very strong argument, but I thought I'd leave it with you anyway!

@jack-waugh I agree soundly with you. There are many ultimately nihilistic profit seekers who are driving destructive tendencies of the global market, and that’s a full euphemism. It isn’t clear whether that nihilism is actually a value construct (well, it seems if anything to be quite rightly the opposite of one, really) or whether it’s due to a typical lack of awareness or contemplation. But a third alternative is also available, which is a simple (and in enough cases, severe) deficiency in moral character.

Another related topic I consider in this area is the attention economy. You allude essentially to addiction and what I don’t have vocabulary for beyond “post-modernist consumerism.” In my opinion, global attention is a public good that is now being subjected to the tragedy of the commons, and that is all resulting from a de-compartmentalization of access points to attention. It’s also another prisoner’s dilemma. Space and time no longer serve the functional roles of localizing attention to natural social public spheres and communities, and this only drives the lack of awareness and other issues related to mental health (I.e. attention starvation on a global scale, with concomitant depression, I.e. “influencers,” onlyfans, TikTok, etc.). More and more pornographization, commodification and exploitation of human life, even people exploiting themselves.

The only thing I can see that could possibly supplement those barriers is either an artificial enforcement of barriers (a frightening thought) or awareness and personal character. In other words, externally imposed barriers, or barriers of personal choice. Interesting times we live in. Anyway I’m glad at least that others can see this is all more than “just” a moralistic issue.

On a side note, while we’re at the water cooler, I will just mention that I watched a portion of the first Republican candidate debate. I will summarize my thoughts as, “Wow.”

@jack-waugh

The Alliance for Just Money may interest you.

Their program:

Require Congress to be the sole creator of all U.S. money debt-free.
End the privilege of commercial banks to create money.
Transfer all remaining operations of the Fed to the U.S. Treasury.

Government creation of new money will be limited by an independent public agency whose only function is to determine how much new money, if any, should be issued each year (or withdrawn), adhering to a mandate to keep the purchasing power of money stable.

This agency’s decisions will be based on economic data (most of which is already being collected) and citizen input. How that new money is spent, invested, given, or lent is up to Congress, which has the constitutional responsibility not only for creating our money but also for allocating federal government spending.

Don't know if it would work, but it would give capitalists conniptions.

https://www.monetaryalliance.org/