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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

#241

Post by pdonis »

bilbo0s wrote: post #237
pdonis wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it worked much better than any of the other approaches. Only if you consider a million lives lost, and many more wounded, "better" than the solution other countries with slavery, like Great Britain, adopted: they paid off the slaveowners and freed their slaves without any violence at all.

> without any violence at all... Excepting, of course, all the violence used to keep the slaves as slaves in the first place I assume? Because, what? That's not real violence? Come on man. It's slavery. There was already grotesque violence. Only question was, what were different nations willing to do to stop it? But where slaves were concerned, every nation involved was already perfectly ok with massive, grotesque, a…

> Excepting, of course, all the violence used to keep the slaves as slaves in the first place I assume? Because, what? That's not real violence?

It's real violence, sure, but it's there in all of the cases, so it drops out of the comparison we're making. We're not talking about the costs of slavery itself; we're talking about the costs to end slavery. A million lives seems to me like a much bigger cost to end slavery then paying off the slaveowners.

Not to mention the fact that all those other countries that didn't have to fight a war to end slavery ended it sooner than the US did; so actually we should be considering the costs of slavery itself--for all the extra years that it existed in the US compared to those other countries. Which just makes the "fight a war to end slavery" option look even worse by comparison.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#242

Post by kazinator »

dvorak365 wrote: post #240
kazinator wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every voter has the same number of tokens, so it is fair. The quadratic progression is per candidate (or issue or whatever object is being voted on). If you have 91 tokens, you can vote once for each of 91 competing choices. Or you can vote 6 times for one option: 1 + 4 + 9 + 16 + 25 + 36 = 91. Or twice each for 22 options, with three tokens left to vote on three more.

But tokens aren't votes. A person whose ideology aligns with 100 options has 10x the ability to influence the outcome of the election towards their preferred outcomes than someone whose ideology aligns with only one option.

You mean, it does what it says on the box?

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#243

Post by pdonis »

bilbo0s wrote: post #237
pdonis wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it worked much better than any of the other approaches. Only if you consider a million lives lost, and many more wounded, "better" than the solution other countries with slavery, like Great Britain, adopted: they paid off the slaveowners and freed their slaves without any violence at all.

> without any violence at all... Excepting, of course, all the violence used to keep the slaves as slaves in the first place I assume? Because, what? That's not real violence? Come on man. It's slavery. There was already grotesque violence. Only question was, what were different nations willing to do to stop it? But where slaves were concerned, every nation involved was already perfectly ok with massive, grotesque, a…

> Only question was, what were different nations willing to do to stop it?

Yes, exactly. Some nations were willing to tell their moralizers to shut up, and just pay off the slaveowners. The US wasn't willing to make that compromise; we let the moralizers drive the process, so we had to fight a war and kill a million people.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#244

Post by newen »

kazinator wrote: post #236

I have a much better, simpler idea: you can't vote for the same candidate twice in the same election, period. Another better algorithm is to have a single ballot with, say, ten blanks on it. You can fill it however you like, possibly with ten duplicates. The blanks are weighted: the top blank carries more weight than the bottom, according to some geometric progression, like: 1> (mapcar (op expt 0.8) (range 0 9)) (1.0…

Do you really think some variant of lisp along with the op function is the best way to communicate with a wide audience? For normal people, that code is printing the result of 0.8^i for i=0..9.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#245

Post by breuleux »

stale2002 wrote: post #231
breuleux wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if you want to be a sociopath about it, that's part of the risk in the system. As long as we can confidently establish that a supermajority of people would take the job seriously and would be happy with the compensation, we can afford a few bad apples. Either way, I can imagine that if you were to pledge to purposefully vote against the population's interests in front of a judge, and the judge bought it, they…

> I mean, if you want to be a sociopath about it Ehh, the sociopaths are the ones who want to force people into slavery, for "civic duty" or whatever. The rest of us might fight back in ways that you don't like.

Voting for policies that hurt people at large isn't "fighting back". What has the public done to you to deserve this? It's like working at a restaurant and spitting in customers' food because the restaurant owner is overworking you, and then saying no, the sociopath is the guy who's forcing me to come in on the weekend. Fuck that noise, you're both sociopaths.

If you're unhappy about being forced into duty, you can abstain from voting at all, or you can focus your energy on changing the system so that it works on a purely voluntary basis. That's perfectly fine. But let's not pretend that voting for bad policies, which will inevitably hurt people who have nothing to do with your predicament, is a proper way to fight back.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#246

Post by stale2002 »

breuleux wrote: post #245
stale2002 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, if you want to be a sociopath about it Ehh, the sociopaths are the ones who want to force people into slavery, for "civic duty" or whatever. The rest of us might fight back in ways that you don't like.

Voting for policies that hurt people at large isn't "fighting back". What has the public done to you to deserve this? It's like working at a restaurant and spitting in customers' food because the restaurant owner is overworking you, and then saying no, the sociopath is the guy who's forcing me to come in on the weekend. Fuck that noise, you're both sociopaths. If you're unhappy about being forced into duty, you can a…

> What has the public done to you to deserve this?

Well, what they did was force me into temporary slavery.

> It's like working at a restaurant and spitting in customers' food

If the customers were forcing me to work in a restaurant, I think I might do that.

> If you're unhappy about being forced into duty, you can abstain from voting at all

Why would I do that, when a much more effective method of screwing over the people who forced me into this, is by voting for bad policy?

The people who would force me into this want good policy. So I do the opposite of what they want.

This is why you don't do stuff like this. Because the people who you are forcing into slavery aren't going to play "nice" with your plan. They will instead take actions that you don't like, regardless of your complaints about it, or regardless how "immoral" you believe it to be.

I do not have to live by your code of ethics. I will instead live by mine, and screw over your plan in the way that hurts everyone the most.

You don't get to complain about "fairness" or the "right" way for me to protest, when you are forcing me into slavery.

I would engage in this behavior specially because it would very effectively sabotage this plan to force people into the work.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#247

Post by ivanbakel »

dvorak365 wrote: post #240
kazinator wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every voter has the same number of tokens, so it is fair. The quadratic progression is per candidate (or issue or whatever object is being voted on). If you have 91 tokens, you can vote once for each of 91 competing choices. Or you can vote 6 times for one option: 1 + 4 + 9 + 16 + 25 + 36 = 91. Or twice each for 22 options, with three tokens left to vote on three more.

But tokens aren't votes. A person whose ideology aligns with 100 options has 10x the ability to influence the outcome of the election towards their preferred outcomes than someone whose ideology aligns with only one option.

But "votes" with tokens aren't votes either. Claiming that a spread of 100 votes has 10x the effect of 10 votes requires some model of the vote - you don't know that 10 votes on a single issue doesn't have an outsized effect on swinging a decision where 100 single votes just bump a number up across the board.

More than anything, the system just places power in compromise, which is nothing new - in a one-vote system, a person who is willing to vote for a centrist politician has more political power than me, a fringe voter, because their influence on the election result is better-felt.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#248

Post by dvorak365 »

kazinator wrote: post #242
dvorak365 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But tokens aren't votes. A person whose ideology aligns with 100 options has 10x the ability to influence the outcome of the election towards their preferred outcomes than someone whose ideology aligns with only one option.

You mean, it does what it says on the box?

I'm not denying that this is a type of voting system that biases towards certain outcomes. I'm saying that the bias it attempts to accomplish is not desirable as it gives more political power to people with weak opinions than people with strong opinions. I think a good voting system would allow people to express the strength of their feelings on the options, but the system shouldn't reward weak opinions over strong opinions and vice versa. Most traditional cardinal systems accomplish this just fine.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#249

Post by BurningFrog »

mlillie wrote: post #146
BurningFrog wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * what people want does not impact the likelihood of passage of a law* Not that I follow this closely, but last i heard the Median Voter Theorem was still holding up well in the research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem

Isn't the core assumption of MVT that there exists a one dimensional spectrum from which to calculate a median in the first place? Voting for candidates is hardly one-dimensional; even a particular ballot measure may have multiple choices, or another question on the ballot of a related but somewhat conflicting nature.

I think the assumption/result is that even though you only get one out of two candidates to choose from and there are hundreds of independent issues, in aggregate, after all forces and processes have had their effect, resulting policy in most major issues is surprisingly close to what the median voter wants.

Caveat: I'm just some guy who reads web pages, not a voting scientist.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#250

Post by dvorak365 »

ivanbakel wrote: post #247
dvorak365 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But tokens aren't votes. A person whose ideology aligns with 100 options has 10x the ability to influence the outcome of the election towards their preferred outcomes than someone whose ideology aligns with only one option.

But "votes" with tokens aren't votes either. Claiming that a spread of 100 votes has 10x the effect of 10 votes requires some model of the vote - you don't know that 10 votes on a single issue doesn't have an outsized effect on swinging a decision where 100 single votes just bump a number up across the board. More than anything, the system just places power in compromise, which is nothing new - in a one-vote system,…

There are other ways to construct a voting system that places power in compromise without incentivizing weak opinions over strong opinions.
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