Topics created by SaraWolk

@sarawolk said in The dangers of analysis paralysis in voting reform:

Our paper found that burial is strongly disincentivized in STAR.

Yes, that's exactly the problem. We're talking about the same issue from two different perspectives. The issue is that burial is so strongly disincentivized that it's catastrophic. (Much like how the death penalty for littering would be very good at disincentivizing littering, but very bad for society.)

STAR punishes burial by blowing up the country, which creates a game of chicken. The mixed Nash equilibrium of chicken involves blowing up the country with some small (but positive) probability.

The example given isn't a "strategic" vote in any way. That would be an extremely risky vote that would be as likely to elect Hitler as it would be to help ensure your favorite won the runoff. By definition if the turkey candidate is strong enough to make the runoff then it's strong enough to be a real threat to your favorite.

Risky? Yes. But it's still plausibly strategic, if you think Bush will back down.

This is especially bad since it's the kind of strategy I think candidates and campaigns will try to encourage (regardless of how bad the outcomes are). Candidates coordinate strategy; voters take cues from campaigns and political elites (which is why the two major-party nominees are always the top-2 winners). If voters were individually strategic and self-interested, the low probability of a tie means nobody would vote.

The strategy I showed above would probably be bad for society or even for individual voters, because it has a good shot at backfiring and electing Hitler. However, it can be good for Gore's probability of winning, if Gore thinks Bush will back down.

Empirically, this happens all the time. Adam Schiff spent millions trying to boost the Republican in California over Katie Porter. The DNC keeps intervening in Republican primaries to try and get them to nominate extremists. They keep doing this because they think it's good for their own personal chances of winning the election, not because they think it's good for the country overall. And generally, they're right—even though it risks electing Hitlers, it still helps them win seats.

Interestingly, the KP Transformation, which is a way of converting approval methods to score methods, does not work on the basis that you can simply add up a voter's score for each elected candidate to see how satisfied they are. If scores are out of e.g. 5, then each voter essentially has 5 utility slots and the top one will only be satisfied by a score of 5. So two candidates with scores of 2 and 3 being elected will mean that 40% of the voter's utility slots will be untouched. A 0 and a 5 mean that all slots will be satisfied to some extent but none more than once.

I think the KP transformation is generally good because it gives maintains good criterion compliance when added to an approval method without adding nasty surprises. And it's simple. Essentially all of the debate between Allocated Score, Method of Equal Shares, TEA etc., are about what to do with these messy scores that are hard to deal with when you use a score method rather than an approval method. KP sorts that out simply with generally better criterion compliance. So the consideration of TEA versus those other methods then becomes irrelevant.

And as I mentioned in this thread, all the subtractive quota methods are really just weak approximations of Phragmén-based methods. So I'd use Phragmén + KP as the basic starting point of a method you have to do better than. If determinism isn't essential, you can do better still.

@toby-pereira said in Israel, Proportional Representation, Polarization, and Accountability:

A candidate-based system, with presumably smaller regions, would be preferable in my opinion, and there would be no need for a discussion about whether a minimum threshold was good or bad.

I personally prefer candidate based PR to party list in general, but I haven't really thought that through in a Israeli/Palestinian context. In terms of Israel they currently are at one extreme of the spectrum where voters have as little say over parties candidates as possible. I definitely think any change in the opposite direction would help, even just going from Closed list to Open List. That would allow every party to ideally veto any of their candidates and leaders parroting genocidal war crime type talking points without turning their back on the party platform entirely. This seems like an easy change to start with since it would probably be less controversial than other ideas I support.

So really, under a system of PR that works and a parliamentary system that works, a stable government would have to be around the centre of public opinion. Whether that is in fact the case in Israel, I'm not really in a position to say.

My very limited understanding of Israeli politics leads me to believe that Netanyahu has been wildly unpopular most of my life, but he maintains power because nobody has been able to successfully challenge him and hold the position. I see Israel as not stable, but stagnant. I'd love to see actual Israeli citizens chime in here with some lived experience on the ground.

I'm not saying NodeBB can't be reverse engineered, but it might not be the easiest program to do that to. It uses some kind of abstraction layer on top of the DBMS.

@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.

Thanks to everyone who came to today's council meeting!

Cliff's Notes:

We had nine people total and three of the four council members present. We were able to get through everything on the agenda, and we added a number of new people to leadership positions! We also made some plans and set some good intentions going forward. This meeting followed the trend of our previous council meetings, and all discussions passed were unanimous (with some abstentions.) We had general consensus to simplify our categories list, but didn't have agreement on a specific proposal, so we decided to continue the discussion here on the forum and then vote when we're ready.

Here's to a great next era of the Voting Theory Forum!

To everyone who RSVPed, attended, volunteered, gave input, or stepped up to serve in a leadership position. Thank you!!!

Azure (Microsoft) does in fact support Linux.

Notes remind me that the distro I used on Linode (now merged with Akamai) is Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS (bionic).

@sarawolk said in Reddit: Reconsidering the r/EndFPTP Rules:

I agree with you that some well done moderation there would have likely kept @Andy-Dienes and others more engaged and made them feel more respected.

Well if you read the thread you'll see there was moderation, by me. I jumped in and smoothed things out. When I called rbj out for being aggressive and told him why it's not ok, he said "Yes. You are exactly correct, @rob."

I've been doing a fair amount of that here, even though I am not in any official sense a moderator. I've had admin power for some time, and here and there use it to deal with spammers and such. But mostly, I just jumping in as a regular user when someone goes out of line and trying to bring it back.

In the course of the thread above (which you really should read if you want to know how I handle moderation here), rb-j "doxxed" Andy by posting screenshots showing proof that Andy had used some particular identity at Reddit that he doesn't use now. Or something like that. Doxxing. I dealt with that like this:
Screenshot 2023-03-28 180710.jpg

I thought that was moderated about as well as it could have been, although I probably would have DM'd rbj right off the bat if I felt like I was an official moderator. RBJ is very cantankerous (he's always getting banned at EndFPTP and other places and seems proud of it), but he is also really smart and makes good contributions on the legislative side.

I'm curious how you think moderation should be done. Clear rules are nice to have, but there are always gray areas. More importantly, you need someone with good judgement to enforce them in a way that doesn't unnecessarily drive people away. Would you disagree with any of that?

@sarawolk

I seem to be getting e-mails now.

The next question is whether @Jameson-Quinn can log in. So far, he hasn't responded to me. Maybe he is busy on other activities and can't put priority on getting reconnected here.

Meeting scheduled!:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/357/attn-forum-council-meeting-scheduled

Our Internet Domains

We are holding:

votingtheory.org ($14/yr)
votingtheory.com ($9/yr)
votingtheory.net ($12/yr)
voting-theory.com ($9/yr)

Obviously, we have to keep votingtheory.org, because that's our official domain. So I will renew that right after the meeting.

During our founding meeting, I grabbed voting-theory.com (note the hyphen) by mistake. So I'm planning to cancel that.

A user of the old forum advised we grab the .com and .net names to avoid being impersonated by any unfriendly agents who could turn up. I don't know how important this is. If the council decides to keep them and can raise the money other than from me, I will cooperate with the decision. Otherwise, I am inclined to drop them.

Our other money expense is $60/yr. for the server. This could reasonably double if we get a second server in a different city to hold backup data. Currently, my personal server, which I am paying for anyway for other purposes, is holding the backups. I should double check whether the backup mechanism I set up is really working.

As I mentioned, I hope we can recruit someone as treasurer.

As I have also mentioned, in regard to tech support, we are in a more vulnerable position than would be ideal, because it all currently depends on one person (me). I don't mind doing it, but something could always happen to me (as something could happen to any single individual person). If someone can offer back-up support, they should submit their SSH public key.

In solidarity for a better tomorrow (or at least, a tomorrow),

@Jack-Waugh I found the setting and just did it! I can and will change it back though. This can be something we talk about at the next meeting since it's not an urgent need. I can see pros and cons both ways.

It always blows my mind how little effort the people in charge put into the final details of picking systems.

@Jack-Waugh @Marylander
Sounds good to me.
Thanks for looking into it. I don't think it's time sensitive or anything, just thought I'd flag it here as a feature request.

Nice to have our categories all sorted out so clearly with a spot for these types of questions. 🙂

I haven't had much time to engage here on the forum since we launched, but I've been sending people over and it seems like there are conversations happening!

Looking forward to having more time to invest here soon.