Why isn't anyone talking about the elephant in the room?

[Jack Waugh]

@rob said in Why isn't anyone talking about the elephant in the room?:

money is spent messaging voters how to strategically vote for them

No, the point is that faced with vote splitting, voters seek a bandwagon to join, lest their vote be wasted, and money and fame are the leading indicators of a bandwagon.

I have been thinking that we need a clearer expression of this point than Dr. Smith provided.

[Jack Waugh]

@rob said in Why isn't anyone talking about the elephant in the room?:

I didn't remove it, nodeBB did. (People can just scroll up...)

I didn't shoot you, my gun did.

I'm asking you to edit the link back in, because otherwise you are misquoting me.

Sorry about the "whack a mole" series of posts. Next time, I will try to edit all points into fewer posts.

[rob]

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

people do not have much tendency toward cooperation unless the system is explicitly designed to reward cooperation over selfishness?

That's not how I'd word it.

I mean, voting your interests under condorcet is still just as selfish as voting your interests under FPTP.

In other contexts, sure, good systems reward (some) cooperative behavior by aligning it with selfish behavior.

Not sure where you are going here, or how it fits with the topic of the thread, which is why don't we use our voting methods to vote on preferred voting methods.

[Jack Waugh]

Here is how it is on topic. You proposed that we vote for what voting system we think is best. Tony P. responded that there is no one best and that it depends on circumstances. I responded to his position on that by saying that there is one set of circumstances that is 100 times as important as the others, and that is public political elections in a large country.

[rob]

@jack-waugh Ok.

Well with regard to @Toby-Pereira 's issue, you know, we can have multiple votes where different scenarios are suggested. An important distinction is single winner and multiple winners, although I am far more interested in the former as it is most directly relevant to current US politics)

But I'd think that you are right is the default is public political elections. Most of the methods I'd advocate are perfectly good for things outside of that, though.

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

I'm asking you to edit the link back in, because otherwise you are misquoting me.

You can't be serious. I didn't take it out, the designers of our forum determined that was how embedded links should be handled when quoting. I'm certainly not going to hassle with rebuilding your special presentation. No. Not happening. That's absurd....

[Jack Waugh]

@rob should have said in Why isn't anyone talking about the elephant in the room?:

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

Problem #1 is that an interest that is alien to human need or compassion or equity or justice or love or survival, namely capital itself, displaces almost all control by the public at large over the government.

I don't really agree, but more importantly, I find that to be way outside of the scope of what this community is trying to address. I mean you might was well blame "wokeism" or something. All you are doing is inviting political divisiveness which I don't think is helpful.

And if you are speaking of the problems I'm seeing in the US, e.g. polarization and radicalization surrounding politics, I think the other main cause is social media. Which is actually closer to the scope of this community, given that the algorithms behind "likes" and "dislikes" and follows and views, and how they shape the public discourse, has a lot of overlap.

It wants to bury the corrected quote from me, so let's bring it out:

Problem #1 is that an interest that is alien to human need or compassion or equity or justice or love or survival, namely capital itself, displaces almost all control by the public at large over the government.

The link word is "displaces" and it leads to http://rangevoting.org/Cash3.html by Warren D. Smith, Ph.D. (math).

[rob]

@jack-waugh

Well I certainly don't want to be thought of as "burying" part of your quote.

Just in case anyone thinks I was burying the link because I didn't want to futz around with putting the link back in there (when NodeBB's normal quoting process automatically strips such links), I'll help you make sure that no one misses the link:

Please read this ridiculous article where Warren Smith, in full crackpot mode, argues that the main reason candidates need money is to convince people they are a front runner as opposed to a spoiler. If that was corrected, candidates would have no need to advertise I guess. With the implication that score does this better than RCV or condorcet (etc) because .... ummm.... well just because....

[Jack Waugh]

I have been saying that I need a better-worded article to promote what I consider to be Dr. Smith's main point in that article. And one of the shortcomings of his is that it promotes Score as the only solution, even though I think that is not implied by the point that vote splitting leads the voters to obey the money signal, thereby empowering money.

[rob]

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

vote splitting leads the voters to obey the money signal

This I don't get. Isn't that a pretty minor issue in terms of what candidates spend money on? He says this:

Instead, voters can, .... just score the good candidates high, not caring one whit about how much money they have ....

But wait, he says voters just "score the good candidates high." He completely ignores the fact that candidates still need to convince voters that they are "good", so there is still a need for money for advertising etc.

No method fixes that problem, it is simply a different problem.

Bizarre little article.

Anyway, final point, I think this community would make better progress if we tried harder not to be a place for people to vent about other random things they don't like about the way the world works. This thread was about "why aren't we voting on our favorite voting methods" and once again it gets derailed and has now become about the influence of money on politics.

[Jack Waugh]

Again, the reason a description of the severity of the problem with public political elections is in here is in response to the suggestion that there are many different circumstances for voting, and the "best" system depends on the circumstances.

Actually, as Sass has been saying, even in public political elections in the United States of America, circumstances differ from State to State. In some States, plain Score would not meet State constitutional requirements for a "majority", but STAR might. In some cities, there might not be enough money to change voting machines, so Approval might be the only viable reform.

I will seek the correct category in which to respond to your pooh-poohing of the link between vote splitting and absolute control by money.

Which reminds me that there is a proposal to simplify the category hierarchy and the holdup on that is my putting up a node at which the council members can register when they are available to meet. I have never set up something like that in any of the tools that do that, so I guess I have to choose at random from among the available tools.

[rob]

@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.