Topics created by Psephomancy

@psephomancy "Most representative" is good. I also use "best represents the will of the people". The "center of public opinion" works.

"Centrist" and "moderate" are definitely to be avoided because they are loaded, turn people off who don't identify that way, and imply that the system has a centrist bias or center expansion effect.

@psephomancy said in GPT and I invented a new voting system metric?:

@toby-pereira said in GPT and I invented a new voting system metric?:

I think if a measure isn't cloneproof it's probably not a good measure.

Why would that matter for a measure?

Because you can have a candidate that is the closest to being the Condorcet winner but not the Copeland winner. E.g.

14: A>B>C
4: B>C>A
12: C>A>B

A>B - 26:4
B>C - 18:12
C>A - 16:14

A has the biggest winning margin and smallest defeat, and is the nearest to a Condorcet winner by any reasonable measure. But then you can clone C and have a C1 and C2 but where C1 is always ranked above C2.

In this case A now has two defeats (against C1 and C2) so loses to both B and C1 in Copeland. But A is still the nearest to a Condorcet winner in terms of defeat sizes, so I would say they are still the "most Condorcet" winner.

(Also remember that in the real world, very few people vote honestly under FPTP with more than two candidates, so with party primaries eliminating all but the "two evils", and tactical voting for the "lesser of the two" factored in, it would likely look more like the Top-Two Runoff plot.)

Let's say there are 5 candidates and a voter bullet votes for their favourite. According to the m-rule (the "good" way), the points would be 1, 0, 0, 0, 0. According to the n-rule (the "bad" way) it would be 4, 0, 0, 0, 0 (or equivalently 5, 1, 1, 1, 1).

But 1, 0, 0, 0, 0 would also be equivalent to 5, 4, 4, 4, 4, which doesn't really seem that good either and is biased against voters choosing not to rank all candidates (rather than being unbiased as claimed by the article).

I've always thought the most logical way is to average the ranks. So if 5 ranked candidates would get 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, then bullet voting should give 5, 2.5, 2.5, 2.5, 2.5.

@jack-waugh said in Waterfox:

@psephomancy, do you still love Waterfox Classic?

I switched to regular Firefox about a year ago, sadly. I still have Waterfox for occasional use of the add-ons that aren't supported anywhere else anymore, but I don't use it regularly; it's just not viable anymore. 😞

Kristofer set up a browseable archive:

https://munsterhjelm.no/km/yahoo_lists_archive/

The forums I've archived have at least one message with at least one of
the terms "center squeeze", "Condorcet", "d'Hondt", "favorite betrayal",
"monotonicity", "Range voting", "Ranked Pairs", Sainte Lague", "Schulze
method" or "Score voting".

The browseable parts have the /web/ foldername:

https://munsterhjelm.no/km/yahoo_lists_archive/sd-2/web/2005-April/by-date.html

https://munsterhjelm.no/km/yahoo_lists_archive/sd-2/web/2005-April/msg00013.html

So I noticed a discrepancy while reproducing these statistically. Vote-for-1 tends to be too high, and Vote-for-(n-1) tends to be too low:

fptp has same problem Effectiveness,_1000_voters,_100000_iterations.png

(Vote-for-(n-1) is essentially Anti-plurality voting. )

These should be the same, according to him:

It is interesting to observe that the vote-for-k and vote-for-(n-k) voting systems are equally effective.

Plotting just those two, it seems to just be a consequence of Weber calculating for infinite voters vs me simulating finite numbers of voters:

10 voters, 100,000 iterations:

Effectiveness,_10_voters,_100000_iterations.png

100 voters, 100,000 iterations:

Effectiveness,_100_voters,_100000_iterations.png

1,000 voters, 100,000 iterations:

Effectiveness,_1000_voters,_100000_iterations.png

100,000 voters, 100,000 iterations (took 3 hours):

Effectiveness,_100000_voters,_100000_iterations.png

(Standard and Vote-for-1 are the same thing, but implemented differently, so I was plotting both to make sure there wasn't a bug in one.)

I don't really understand why this happens, but good to keep in mind that number of voters does matter in these kinds of simulations.

@Psephomancy Yeah, maybe I should try installing those plugins. I guess they won't break it.