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A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

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Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#21

Post by jimhefferon »

crazygringo wrote: post #9

It's clever, but it doesn't solve the problem. Because the problem isn't with strong preferences -- it's with extreme preferences. If there were 7 versions of a bill (A,B,C,D,E,F,G) ranging from ultra-conservative (a "A") to ultra-liberal (a "G"), in a polarized community people could still be spending the minimum 1 point each on the A's or G's and none on B-F. The problem with politics today isn't that people are si…

> the natural evolution of the two-party system

The US has a long history, almost all of it with a two-party system. Only sometimes is there extremity. To my mind, 1860 is even more extreme than today.

(My opinion is that an important common thread between then and today is a class of people with a great deal of money who are deliberately driving the political atmosphere. But in any event a claim that it is a natural outcome of a two-party system needs to account for the historical fact that the US experience is typically not extreme.)

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#22

Post by [deleted] »

lhopki01 wrote: post #15
cabalamat wrote: post #13

Let's say Alice only cares about proposition A. And Bob only cares about B. Alice can spend all her 100 tokens on A, and she gets 10 votes on A. Ditto Bob can spend all his 100 tokens on B, and he gets 10 votes on B. But if each of them spends 50 on A and 50 on B, then A and B both get 2*sqrt(50) ~= 14 votes, so both Alice and Bob win by colluding. What's to stop them doing this?

Oh no lawmakers actually cooperating to achieve their goals. What a tragedy!

[deleted]

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#23

Post by kitsy »

crazygringo wrote: post #9

It's clever, but it doesn't solve the problem. Because the problem isn't with strong preferences -- it's with extreme preferences. If there were 7 versions of a bill (A,B,C,D,E,F,G) ranging from ultra-conservative (a "A") to ultra-liberal (a "G"), in a polarized community people could still be spending the minimum 1 point each on the A's or G's and none on B-F. The problem with politics today isn't that people are si…

I disagree. Many bills are written with compromises in place, so they appeal to enough voters. I would rank the American ACA bill as E on the A to G scale.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#25

Post by naasking »

Does a fixed token count work when the voting is iterated and future bills are not yet known? It seems challenging.

For instance, you could incentivize your opponents to spend their tokens early on things they care about, and reserve your voting block for a later bill. So while it does cost you considerably more to spend your tokens this way, you've already weakened your opposition so that you might be able to pull it off.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#26

Post by C1sc0cat »

This is just deciding the order of business - not voting in the sense a civilian understands it.

The other way this can be done in parliamentary systems is to have a lay member body sort through and produce a draft order of business.

This body also decides which motions are in order which are duplicates and which need to be composited (ie a merge in tech speak) and also works out any conseqensionals (eg if Motion A passes then Motions G X and Y fall)

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#27

Post by kitsy »

lhopki01 wrote: post #15
cabalamat wrote: post #13

Let's say Alice only cares about proposition A. And Bob only cares about B. Alice can spend all her 100 tokens on A, and she gets 10 votes on A. Ditto Bob can spend all his 100 tokens on B, and he gets 10 votes on B. But if each of them spends 50 on A and 50 on B, then A and B both get 2*sqrt(50) ~= 14 votes, so both Alice and Bob win by colluding. What's to stop them doing this?

Oh no lawmakers actually cooperating to achieve their goals. What a tragedy!

But does not support "across the aisle" cooperation, which is where the concern is.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#28

Post by roenxi »

crazygringo wrote: post #9

It's clever, but it doesn't solve the problem. Because the problem isn't with strong preferences -- it's with extreme preferences. If there were 7 versions of a bill (A,B,C,D,E,F,G) ranging from ultra-conservative (a "A") to ultra-liberal (a "G"), in a polarized community people could still be spending the minimum 1 point each on the A's or G's and none on B-F. The problem with politics today isn't that people are si…

This is an interesting debating point in itself. The problem isn't extreme preferences - the extremist wing of any political party tends to be motivated, visible and small. The problem is that the extreme wing wields a lot of power through their persistent and single minded effort.

Quadratic voting weights power away from my-way-or-highway voters towards voters who are willing to consider more than one option. Without thinking too deeply, it would make it easy to tease apart large and awkward alliances. Even if it didn't formally fracture the major parties, it would de-facto moderate politics by increasing the risk of holding extreme positions.

Basically any other form of voting is an improvement over the US FPTP system; FPTP's only advantage is that it is very obvious how it works. Nothing to sneeze at, but not mathematically satisfying.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#29

Post by elliekelly »

chapium wrote: post #7

"Success" seems to be defined unclearly here. "Held and election and got a result" seems to be the only outcome. "Quadratic voting was invented not by political scientists but by economists and others..." Not much of a point here, this is clearly within the domain of economics. It worked with 41 lawmakers, it seems like an interesting voting method for small scale. Can it scale up?

> Can it scale up?

A long while ago when I was in college we attempted to implement a less complicated version of this system for allocating budgets to student organizations and it was nothing short of a shit show. I'm not confident in the voting public's ability to understand the process.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#30

Post by onychomys »

kitsy wrote: post #23
crazygringo wrote: post #9

It's clever, but it doesn't solve the problem. Because the problem isn't with strong preferences -- it's with extreme preferences. If there were 7 versions of a bill (A,B,C,D,E,F,G) ranging from ultra-conservative (a "A") to ultra-liberal (a "G"), in a polarized community people could still be spending the minimum 1 point each on the A's or G's and none on B-F. The problem with politics today isn't that people are si…

I disagree. Many bills are written with compromises in place, so they appeal to enough voters. I would rank the American ACA bill as E on the A to G scale.

Even if that was true of the bill itself, it's certainly not true of how it was (and is) portrayed in the media. On the right wing channels, you hear that it's a G, or maybe a letter even further down the alphabet. On the left wing channels, you hear that it was so watered down that it was basically a B and that we have to do more etc etc etc.
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