A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

Well then it doesn't matter what I do, so I am not sure why you'd be so angry about it.

> hen I say your behavior in this situation would be sociopathic

It is not sociopathic to retaliate against people who want to force you into temporary slavery. It is instead called justice.

> would turn into madmen

There isn't nothing "mad" about fighting crazies like you who want to force people into slavery.

Instead, the madmen are the ones trying to take away our rights.

Honestly, my actions are fairly tame. I didn't even say that I would engage in violence or anything. I expect that other people might, and I wouldn't blame them.

Violence is a perfectly logical response attempts to force people into slavery. I wouldn't do it, though (because of the other alternatives at my disposal).

I'd prefer to read GP's post as a "live and let live", rather than pursuit of domination.

That said, there's always the risk of "dominating minority is bad" if my in-group is the minority, and "upholding majority preferences is good" if my in-group the majority. :-)

As an abstraction, say we have a group of 400 fairly development-minded people who are mostly indifferent or OK with projects A, B, C, and D, with the exception that each 25% of this group really likes one of these projects (the classic single-issue voter). Without horse-trading we get them spending their 100 points on their pet issue, getting 10 votes per voter, yielding 1,000 for each. With horse trading, they agree to split their votes with all 4 of the cabal's issues, which means that they can each contribute 25 points to 4 different projects, or 4x5 votes per voter, yielding 2,000 total.

So a disciplined party 'bloc' can exert outsized control in this scheme. Of course, the usual problems of maintaining discipline arise, especially with secret ballots where you can't prove that you kept faith with the cabal.

Another element of this (and any scheme where people's ability to express preferences is "rationed") would be the issue of what makes it on to the ballot to begin with - there's obviously some real prospects for mischief and vote-splitting. If you have the resources, the idea of creating a lot of moderately trivial proposals to draw away votes from things that you're opposed to might be effective - so if you want to get some huge development through that's opposed by environmentalists, you might attempt to jam the zone with a gazillion minor environmental proposals (all of which look fairly good) to try to suck away voting power from your political opponents.

I'm curious how you think you can evaluate someone's "anger" in written comments on the Internet. I'm not angry. I'm judging you and listing all the problems I see with what you say you would do, but there's frankly no need to be worked up to do any of that.

> It is not sociopathic to retaliate against people who want to force you into temporary slavery. It is instead called justice.

Okay, so my view is that equating this system to slavery is disingenuous, hysterical and ridiculous for too many reasons to count, and that your "retaliation" is unfocused, ineffective and reckless. Your view is that I'm a sociopathic tyrant.

Okay.

But you know what? Who cares.

I don't need your approval. You don't need mine. The only thing that matters is that I want an unbiased sample, but saboteurs, insofar that they purposefully act contrary to what they think is good, constitute an unwanted bias. In other words, you don't want to be conscripted, and I don't want to conscript you. We can probably work something out.

> Honestly, my actions are fairly tame. I didn't even say that I would engage in violence or anything. I expect that other people might, and I wouldn't blame them.

If by engaging in violence, you mean violent resistance to anyone who tries to force you to go to parliament, I consider this more acceptable than your idea of going and voting for bad policies, and I do not think of it as sociopathic (I also strongly oppose having such an enforcement policy).

If you mean random acts of terrorism, then this is insane and you've lost me completely.