election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto)
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@clay you misunderstand. I am both a participant in this discussion and a moderator of the forum. The moderation note concerns your conduct; the rest of my post concerns your argument.
For reference, the Code of Conduct can be found here: https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/16/read-me-code-of-conduct?_=1783225633021
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, [...] You appear to be saying that if a sufficiently large outside population gains enough aggregate utility from controlling policy in Hawaii, then such control is “by definition good,” regardless of Hawaiian self-government, political membership, jurisdiction, or consent.
no. i'm explaining that "good" is relative. to the chinese, the move would be good. to the hawaiians, it would be bad.
and given you have a given population, the best outcome is the one that has the highest sum of utilities. this is just proven.
Is that in fact your position?
it's not a "position", it's just a potential set of preferences, and a mathematical proof.
If so, then your theory does not merely reject territorial weighting within an existing polity. It rejects any independent normative significance for self-determination, sovereignty, jurisdiction, bounded political membership, or consent whenever aggregate external utility points the other way.
this is confusion. "normative" just means "related to subjective preference", and the hawaiians in that example would experience a loss of self-determination/sovereignty/etc. as "lower utility". that's what happens whenever you make group decisions aka "elections". other people in your city will vote on laws that affect you. they will vote to take your money by force (taxes), vote on how late you can buy alcohol, etc. that just affects your utility. we're just talking about preferences. social choice theory 101.
That is a radical substantive political theory, not “trivial basic social choice theory.”
no, it's just basic social choice theory.
https://wonk.blog/ethics
https://rangevoting.net/UtilFoundnsi'm not sure why you refer to learn about this topic, yet continue to confidently make incorrect statements about it.
The same logic would appear to permit a policy such as: “Take all extractable resources from region A and transfer them to region B,” provided that the aggregate utility gain claimed for the population of B exceeded the aggregate utility loss imposed on the population of A. Would that policy therefore be “by definition good” under your framework?
it's not my "framework", it's just mathematically proven.
https://rangevoting.net/UtilFoundnsMore fundamentally, how do you propose to measure utility and make cardinal interpersonal comparisons of it across the affected individuals?
elections.
https://rangevoting.net/WhyNoHumansvoting theory 101.
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@clay, I introduced “normative” to mean questions about what institutions ought to do and what arrangements are justified. That is the standard use in political philosophy. You may argue that normativity reduces to subjective preference, but that is your metaethical theory, and that conclusion has not been established here, nor is it the definition of the term.
You now appear to be defending total utilitarianism: for a given population, the best outcome is the one with the highest sum of utilities. That is a controversial normative principle, not something mathematics proves on its own. A theorem may show what follows from a chosen social-welfare function; it does not prove that summed utility is the uniquely correct standard of justice. Without an independently justified method for specifying and comparing utilities, the framework can be made to rationalize radically different outcomes simply by changing the utility assignments. Your own citation is substantially more cautious about interpersonal utility comparison than your claims here.
Regardless, your framework also seems to give rights, consent, sovereignty, self-determination, and distribution no independent force. They apparently matter only insofar as they affect the utility total. So I will ask again: if a large outside population gains many small benefits by confiscating nearly all resources from a smaller region whose residents suffer catastrophic losses, is that policy “by definition good” whenever the summed utility favors the outsiders?
Nor does “elections” solve the problem of cardinal interpersonal utility comparison. Elections record choices under a particular procedure and produce a collective decision; they do not place different people’s welfare on a common measurable scale.
Furthermore, the veil of ignorance reasoning does not by itself imply that individuals would prefer social positions that maximize their expected utility. A chooser behind the veil may evaluate not only their expected payoff, but also the distribution of benefits and burdens, the condition of the worst-off, exposure to domination, and whether some losses may legitimately be imposed for others’ gains. Treating the veil as a device for maximizing summed expected utility imports the utilitarian conclusion into the assumptions rather than deriving it.
So the normative question remains: should political institutions be governed solely by aggregate preference satisfaction, or do rights, consent, distribution, non-domination, self-determination, and political membership have independent importance? You have asserted one answer. You have not shown that the question is confused or that your answer is mathematically compulsory rather than a contestable normative commitment.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, I introduced “normative” to mean questions about what institutions ought to do and what arrangements are justified.
"ought" just means "would satisfy my preferences". if you say someone "ought" to do something, that's identical to saying, "i would prefer it if you would do that thing."
similarly, "justified" means "satisfies my preferences". that's it.
That is the standard use in political philosophy.
show me any use of these words that you think constitutes "political philosophy", and i will demonstrate that it just means subjective preference. your lack of familiarity with basic social choice theory is astonishing.
You may argue that normativity reduces to subjective preference, but that is your metaethical theory, and that conclusion has not been established here, nor is it the definition of the term.
yes it has, and i just proved it. and you have zero counterargument.
https://wonk.blog/ethics#isoughtYou now appear to be defending total utilitarianism: for a given population, the best outcome is the one with the highest sum of utilities. That is a controversial normative principle, not something mathematics proves on its own.
you're dead wrong, and this is proven.
A theorem may show what follows from a chosen social-welfare function; it does not prove that summed utility is the uniquely correct standard of justice.
you have this completely backward. the theorem proves what the correct social welfare function is. it does not use the social welfare function as a premise. you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Without an independently justified method for specifying and comparing utilities, the framework can be made to rationalize radically different outcomes simply by changing the utility assignments.
this is a classic novice fallacy, thinking that utilities have to be in a consistent scale to be summed. this is obviously wrong, as harsanyi proved.
it is amazing that you refuse to spend a few minutes learning about this topic before plodding in and making a series of confidently wrong arguments.
Your own citation is substantially more cautious about interpersonal utility comparison than your claims here.
it is not "cautious", it just explains the fact that i just explained to you in even more layman-friendly language with the hope that you might be able to grok it.
Harsanyi's argument "Social Utility" is the average of individual utilities
Let uk(e) denote the utility (according to individual k) of an event e. We want to investigate how to aggregate the individual utilities into a "social utility" saying "how good e is for all of society." For what reason should we claim that social utility is just the average of individual utilities?
J.C.Harsanyi, in a 2-page article involving no mathematics whatever [J.Political Economy 61,5 (1953) 434-435], came up with the following nice idea: "Optimizing social welfare" means "picking the state of the world all individuals would prefer if they were in a state of uncertainty about their identity." I.e. if you are equally likely to be anybody, then your expected utility is the summed utility in the world divided by the number of people in it – i.e. average utility. Then by the linear-lottery property (Lin) of von Neumann utility, it follows that social utility is averaging.Regardless, your framework also seems to give rights, consent, sovereignty, self-determination, and distribution no independent force.
it is not my "framework", it is just obvious factual reality. the only "force" people care about is their utility. preference sovereignty principle.
why do you insist on plodding ahead making these kinds of vacuous statements when you could just spend a few minutes learning basic social choice theory?
They apparently matter only insofar as they affect the utility total.
"matter" literally means "has utility", so this is a lovely tautology.
So I will ask again: if a large outside population gains many small benefits by confiscating nearly all resources from a smaller region whose residents suffer catastrophic losses, is that policy “by definition good” whenever the summed utility favors the outsiders?
and i will repeat, again, that it is good to those who benefit, and bad to those who don't. maybe learn what the word "preference" means.
Nor does “elections” solve the problem of cardinal interpersonal utility comparison.
there is no "problem" of interpersonal utility comparisons, as i have voluminously explained to you. could you please try actually reading anything i sent you instead of repeating confused nonsense? this should only take a few minutes to read, and would save you a lot of time. and it would save me a lot of time, not having to explain second grade level conceptual reasoning to a grown adult.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/understanding-social-utility-through-harsanyis-argument-528ba25241fd
Elections record choices under a particular procedure and produce a collective decision; they do not place different people’s welfare on a common measurable scale.
you DO NOT NEED A COMMON SCALE! the voting method with the highest VSE already has the highest expected utility FOR YOU!!! IN YOUR OWN PERSONAL UTILITY SCALE!!!!
please spend more than 30 seconds studying and trying to understand this before sending me another round of confused nonsense.
Furthermore, the veil of ignorance reasoning does not by itself imply that individuals would prefer social positions that maximize their expected utility.
utility is a measure of how much you want something or prefer it, so of course you by definition want that which maximizes your expected utility.
A chooser behind the veil may evaluate not only their expected payoff, but also the distribution of benefits and burdens, the condition of the worst-off, exposure to domination, and whether some losses may legitimately be imposed for others’ gains.
this is sheer confusion. behind the veil of ignorance, you do not need to think about anyone else. you can think purely selfishly and that will be identical to being "altrustic" toward everyone else because they are ALSO uncertain of their identity. selfishness and altruism become the same thing. you may already BE the worst off—there is some probability of that. so you've already taken that into account.
you. are. confused. wake up.
Treating the veil as a device for maximizing summed expected utility imports the utilitarian conclusion into the assumptions rather than deriving it.
no, it does not use summed expected utility as an axiom whatsoever. you're just wrong and clearly confused.
So the normative question remains: should political institutions be governed solely by aggregate preference satisfaction, or do rights, consent, distribution, non-domination, self-determination, and political membership have independent importance?
- there is no such thing as a "normative question". there's just utility/preference. those things you just listed, to the extent they are even meaningful concepts, are just "things which affect your utility". specifically, there is no such thing as "consent" in group decisions. consent only applies to personal decisions made by a single individual. you only "consent" to having your favorite option selected, but some option is going to happen regardless, and the only thing we can optimize is how well off you are. many/most people will not get their favorite option. this is just reality.
the amount of confusion in your words is staggering.
You have asserted one answer. You have not shown that the question is confused or that your answer is mathematically compulsory rather than a contestable normative commitment.
i have absolutely shown those things. the fact that you are confused is not an argument.
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@clay, there is no purpose in continuing this discussion with you. Your approach to discourse is unlikely to convince others, and it is not because you are right while everyone else is wrong. A good-faith response to a serious objection is to examine the premise and answer the question—not repeatedly declare the questioner confused. If you continue engaging with others on this forum in this manner, I expect you will receive responses similar to mine, and if you continue not to adhere to the Code of Conduct, you may eventually face moderation action, including a ban.
Regarding reading material, I linked you to the Code of Conduct, and I strongly advise that you read it before continuing to participate here. I would also suggest consulting a standard dictionary entry for “normative,” since the term does not mean “whatever satisfies my preferences.”
Readers can judge this exchange for themselves. You repeatedly cite your own writings as authority, refuse to engage reasonable objections in good faith, and do not answer basic questions put to you. The external citations you provide are themselves significantly more measured than your presentation of them suggests. Harsanyi, for example, explicitly presented his conclusions as conditional on particular ethical postulates and assumptions about rational choice and interpersonal comparison; he did not claim to have mathematically proved the uniquely correct theory of justice. I see no value for me, for you, for this forum, or for the broader reform movement in continuing this exchange. Best of luck to you.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, there is no purpose in continuing this discussion with you. Your approach to discourse is unlikely to convince others, and it is not because you are right while everyone else is wrong. A good-faith response to a serious objection is to examine the premise and answer the question—not repeatedly declare the questioner confused.
I have meticulously dismantled your arguments point by point.
for example, you made the classic fallacy of thinking my arguments require interpersonal utility comparisons. but harsanyi's observation is that you don't need this at all. The outcome with the highest group utility will also have the highest expected utility for you in your own utility scale without any need to have the different utilities in common units.
when you think about it for a second this is trivially obvious from grade school level mathematics. but I actually cited a voluminous link about it written by a math PhD who is widely regarded as the foremost expert in this field and you STILL just ignored it.
My point here was not just "convincing", it is trivially obviously true. and you're in a forum that is literally called "voting theory"—yet you have chosen to not just spend a little time reading about the foundational principles of the field that literally any expert in the field is familiar with. you should really reflect on this. this would be like going into a climate change debate and saying climate change isn't happening because there was an unusually bad winter storm somewhere. anybody familiar with the topic would absolutely roast you for failing to grasp a multitude of basic scientific concepts that anybody up for a debate should have invested the time learning about.
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There are some interesting discussion points here, and I might post again later, but it probably won't be a for a few days because I'll need some time to get through the volume of stuff!
But before that, it has been brought to my attention (and I somehow ended up as a moderator on here) @clay that the tone in some of your posts may have overstepped the mark. I understand that this is just how you post, having posted on the same forums as you over the years, but it would be just as easy to make the same points without this abruptness, which can be perceived as hostility, regardless of how wrong-headed you think the other poster's arguments are.
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@toby-pereira ok toby, sure.
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@clay A couple of points on the actual idea (I may address some of the points from the ensuing discussion between you two later):
When I said about keeping people in a bubble, you quickly corrected me. I just had another look, and I think it was this bit that made me think of a bubble:
A controlled environment that protects jurors from external influence and manipulation
I presume then that this doesn't refer to their environment the whole time, but just when they're involved in the process - e.g. interrogating the candidates.
In any case, I think that while being able to directly interrogate candidates, rather than just getting stuff from a potentially biased media, is a good thing, I do also think it would be bad to stop them getting information from other sources, even if some or all of those sources may be biased. Some candidates will simply be better at presenting themselves, and being a slick speaker does not necessarily translate into being a good representative.
The manifesto does actually talk about expert testimony, but I can't see this being given more detail in terms of how that would work.
On sampling - random sampling obviously makes the most sense on the surface, but given the discussion that has taken place, I might address that in a separate post.
As for the idea as a whole, it's clear that informed representative sample of voters should make a better decision than the population as a whole.
However, you might consider this to be to be a slightly "philosophical" or "meta" point, but does educating and making competent the sample change its nature and stop it from being representative? The manifesto made it clear that selecting people based on competence would create a biased sample. But what are competent people other than people who were once incompetent and educated out of it?
Finally for this post, while this might give a better result within the landscape of a given election, it changes the landscape itself, which could lead to unintended consequences. The vast majority of people would never vote in an election, and they might view that negatively, with further consequences from that. Perhaps you would argue that it doesn't matter if they disengage from politics because we only need to jury to be engaged, but I think there's something a bit degenerate about a wider public that takes no interest in what their elected representatives are doing.
I have previously discussed advantages of lottery-based methods (variations on random ballot, essentially), but at least in these methods everyone gets to vote, even if most of those votes don't do anything. (This is specifically on the subject of disengagement.)
(Edit - This isn't to say I necessarily disagree with the proposal, but I'd need to play around with the arguments first.)
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being a better speaker is already an advantage in our present system. "I don't know what he said. I don't think he does either."
having hours upon hours and days upon days of adversarial interrogation by the other candidates Will take us as far as is physically possible toward minimizing The impact of that bias relative to the impact of the bare facts.
Will this change people? absolutely that's the whole point. we want them to be statistically representative in terms of their intrinsic preferences, not their instrumental preferences. we want the electorate to get what they would have gotten if they had all gone through the same process.
Will this make people tune out of politics? God willing. why should anybody have to care about how their computer operating system is working? they just want it to work. and an ideal world we barely even talk about political issues. we know we have a process that matches policy to our collective well-being as accurately as is humanly possible and we pity all those countries using democracy and getting the kind of chaos we have now. we don't have anti-vaxxers running HHS.
it's hard to say whether the public would react negatively. I haven't been able to find any negative public commentary about election by jury in Georgia. maybe we need to give people a few things they still vote on to address this. kind of like giving your kid a toy steering wheel dor the car.