Posts made by micahscopes

Wow, this is wild... I hadn't heard actually. Glad the governor vetoed, but the audacity of it just goes to show how much power the choice of voting system carries.

@sarawolk maybe we can have a "Voting Theory" category with two subcategories, "The big picture", for discussing the more social and connective aspects of voting theory and "Down to the details" for getting into more technical theories and problems.

This could provide space for people to really theorize and make connections about collective decision making in general, whether that's in institutional, government or informal settings.

Actually it could be nice to have a "beyond categories" space too, similar to the watercooler but more geared as a catch all for voting/collective decision making discussion that's multidisciplinary or defies categories.

@toby-pereira thanks for the "lumpers vs. splitters" description, made me chuckle. It'd be nice if there was an interface that both lumpers and splitters could appreciate, like something that kept the tags and categories collapsed or expanded based on how you last set it.

In the context of this forum, maybe it could make sense to keep the most "general" categories and move everything else to tags? People would still need to agree on what counts as general though.

Some issues with tags though: they have a length limit, and the interface for browsing them and adding them isn't as organized or alluring (colorful) as the category browser.

Hello, my name is Micah and I'm from Minneapolis. I'm excited about this forum, and about the potential for various alternative voting systems to facilitate more equitable collective decision making processes in all kinds of different contexts.

For the record, I recently found myself joining the board for this forum, so that's exciting! Even so, I'm still very new to the forum. This is my first post!

Stuff about myself: I'm a creative person and musician, I love to study math and I know a thing or two about computers. I tend to think poetically and love to look at the big picture and how things are connected. My most recent day job was as a software developer for an ed tech non-profit, but I recently left to work on the soundtrack for a friend's video game.

I believe in my heart that everyone has the ability to understand "voting theory", and to realize the stakes. Sadly, a lot of the language involved is tricky and inaccessible. How can we open up conversations about voting systems, and how can we better communicate what's at stake?

With regard to voting systems themselves... I'm especially excited about "cardinal voting systems". I'll share why in another post.

Some misc. dreams and imaginations for what I might hopefully get to be a part of with you all on this forum:

• coming up with new ways to tap into peoples' existing intuition, awareness, language, motivation and natural intelligence around collective decision making, translating voting theory into more accessible language
• creating some interactive tools or games (digital and/or IRL) for understanding voting systems, their unique qualities and limitations
• figuring out some more accessible, potent language for understanding and talking about voting systems, the stakes and the kinds of strategic manipulations involved
• learning more about game theoretic analysis of voting systems
• participating in AMAs with serious researchers!
• learning about how hard different voting systems are to control... maybe from a computational complexity or dynamical systems perspective? Ever since hearing about Cambridge Analytica, I've been very curious about the kinds of math tools that are being used in attempts to control elections. What are the limits of these tools? I think there is some serious work being done around these kinds of questions in the realm of distributed systems (computer science), but I'm not sure to what extent political scientists have picked up on this.

I'm starting to ramble so I'm gonna cut myself off. It's nice to be here!

Let me know if any of the topics above also interest you and I'll make a new post.