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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

#261

Post by breuleux »

stale2002 wrote: post #246
breuleux wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What? The "public" didn't force you to do anything. The public is just people. You're part of the public, for Christ's sake. A representative who would act as you propose wouldn't be screwing some mysterious nefarious entity that likes to enslave people, they'd be screwing you.

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

What about the part of the public who doesn't like this system, doesn't want to force you to do anything, and would like to change the way it works? If you're "sabotaging" the system by voting for "bad policies," you're screwing them over along with everyone else. Can they complain? Because I can guarantee you that they will.

Anyway. Let me put it this way: if 95% of the public supports this system, it doesn't matter how hard you try to sabotage it. It won't do dick. If a significant percentage hates the system, let's say 20%, then 20% of the "enslaved" representatives really want to change the system to work on a voluntary basis. Surely they can bloody negotiate with the remaining 80% to enact a reform, instead of lashing out against the public at large, who can't really do anything about the system because they weren't picked by the lottery.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#262

Post by kazinator »

dvorak365 wrote: post #248
kazinator wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Rather, it entrenches the power to the bland, indistinct body of politics as a whole, which expresses itself through numerous voting choices that are hard to distinguish from one another and are more less the same ideology, which can get large numbers of votes through choices that are only ostensibly distinct. It suppresses votes for choices that stand out from that group.

I don't think that is even necessary because the current voting systems already eliminate the fringes. For instance in many countries there is effectively a persistent two- or three-party system, even though other parties make an appearance.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#263

Post by joerickard »

The book this is from, Radical Markets[0], provides a unique perspective and is worth a read. It contains some very creative solutions to real problems and helped me to realize how small the box is for current policy debates.

[0] https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11222.html

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#264

Post by kazinator »

newen wrote: post #244
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.

I think that, well, HN comments aren't a good platform for someone looking for a wide audience.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#265

Post by fiestaman »

marricks wrote: post #191
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this kind of thinking dangerous, because it falls into the "they're just 2 sides of the same coin" mindset. Not to mention, it is also false. The DoD budget for 2019 is below the budget for 2008, and much lower as a percentage of total expenditures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_... Yes, there are things the parties agree on, but that minimizes the huge, material differences betwe…

Not saying they are the same, just that when centrists come together they get a lot of bad things done. Also not surprised spending is down after the US left Iraq, would be surprised if it wasn’t overall up though. My point is, fighting “zealotry” is just a nice way of saying let’s make it easier for corporate centrism.

https://www.dailysignal.com/wp-content/uploads/BG-defense-sp...

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#266

Post by dfischer »

logfromblammo wrote: post #82
mc32 wrote: post #2

Looks like this would favor highly coordinated groups to have outsized influence over poorly coordinated groups. So people who vote in isolation have less influence than people who organize and vote as a bloc. I think it also means that places where one party predominates would require the minority party to be highly coordinated in order to have any chance with one single silver “bullet” whereas the dominant party ca…

The voting method breaks down entirely when you consider strategic voting by groups, and multiple-repetitions game strategies. 100 players would form a voting cartel, and each member would spread their votes out among all the members' favorite issues. Reneging on the cartel's rules means that the entire cartel retaliates on the next vote. So each party has exactly 100 issues in their platform, and no individual voter…

I like the idea of voting quadratically with money. Every vote scales with cost. Instead of hiding the reality, just expose it and limit it with quadratic scaling.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#267

Post by marricks »

fiestaman wrote: post #265
marricks wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying they are the same, just that when centrists come together they get a lot of bad things done. Also not surprised spending is down after the US left Iraq, would be surprised if it wasn’t overall up though. My point is, fighting “zealotry” is just a nice way of saying let’s make it easier for corporate centrism.

https://www.dailysignal.com/wp-content/uploads/BG-defense-sp...

The Heritage foundation sure knows how to frame things! Overall the military budget has increased steeply since the 90s

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Defense_spending.p...

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#268

Post by typest »

dfischer wrote: post #266
logfromblammo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The voting method breaks down entirely when you consider strategic voting by groups, and multiple-repetitions game strategies. 100 players would form a voting cartel, and each member would spread their votes out among all the members' favorite issues. Reneging on the cartel's rules means that the entire cartel retaliates on the next vote. So each party has exactly 100 issues in their platform, and no individual voter…

I like the idea of voting quadratically with money. Every vote scales with cost. Instead of hiding the reality, just expose it and limit it with quadratic scaling.

That’s actually Glen Weyl’s original idea behind quadratic voting — I think the intermediate token they are proposing now is to make the reform more palatable. In their book, they propose several solutions to taxation that would help with wealth inequality, and then propose to do quadratic voting with money, rather than an intermediate token.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#269

Post by typest »

joerickard wrote: post #263

The book this is from, Radical Markets[0], provides a unique perspective and is worth a read. It contains some very creative solutions to real problems and helped me to realize how small the box is for current policy debates. [0] https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11222.html

Radical markets is fantastic. In light of some comments on this thread, I feel they did not explore enough the potential downsides of the mechanisms they proposed. Nevertheless, I still love the book..

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#270

Post by jkubicek »

ng12 wrote: post #233
mwfunk wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that’s telling everyone is that you are not caring about a lot of very important stuff and caring way too deeply about the wrong things. When one party is blatantly anti-science, doesn’t believe in the value of professional expertise, and 2/3s of their voters believe the world is 6000 years old (10 years ago- if anything its much worse now), the two parties couldn’t be more different. If none of that stuff matter…

Socially I don't align myself with either party, so I vote based on outcome. In fact, this is my chief complaint about the democrats. It's membership is defined increasingly by being "not Republican" rather than supporting and advancing worthy causes.

That's an interesting perspective that I just don't understand, and I would claim that exact opposite is true. Just look at the debate over healthcare. As a group, the democrats created a clear vision for US healthcare reform. At an individual level there's not a clear consensus on what the path forward is, but you can't claim that mainstream D candidates aren't presenting concrete and actionable plans.

Contrast that with the Republican healthcare plans, which consist of nothing more than "not obamacare"

Republicans have the same stance on gun violence and climate change.

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