Quadratic Voting (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#131

Post by jacques_chester » Sun, May 03, 2015, 12:45 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #96

jacques_chester wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Judeo-Christian principles It may shock you to learn that legal systems other than the Mosaic law have that "don't kill or steal" stuff. I was thinking of the more tasteless parts of Leviticus. In fact it was worked out and written down thousands of years before anyone was thinking about leaving Egypt. Another name for it is "Judeo-Greco-Persian-Roman-Christian-Celtic principles", given the roots of the western…

> legal systems other than the Mosaic law have that "don't kill or steal" stuff. It wouldn't shock me, but it so happened one that is in force in US and Australia draws largely from Christian law and moral traditions, which borrows a lot from Judaic tradition (not only, Roman too, some Celtic, very little Persian as far as I know). In other countries, it is different, but in those two specific ones that's where the r…

> one that is in force in US and Australia draws largely from Christian law and moral traditions

Nonsense. The Common Law doesn't take the Torah as a source of precedent, neither does it look to the continental law for precedent. The bible is useless as a source of anything other than motherhood statements.

It spends less than a page listing the "ten commandments", of which only 4 (killing, theft, adultery and false witnessing) are actually enforceable laws of social consequence.

It then goes on to spend pages and pages and pages listing interior decoration instructions for the Holy Tabernacle. Even a few scribbled pages of notes about common moral questions ("is killing in self-defence murder?", "do Moses's instructions to commit genocide override the commandments?") would have been helpful. Not a peep. It was left to Rabbis and Churchmen to make any sense of.

What does the Bible say about the common defences to a murder charge? Nothing. About the intricacies of trial law? Not a peep. The bread-and-butter legal issues -- property, trusts, estates, torts, duties, equity -- that occupy 99% of the daily life of the law and most of its positive value to society? Nowhere to be seen.

Any major actually-used legal system utterly ignores the Bible as a source of law. Probably because it was not written by lawyers.

> How you would even compare the governance, on which basis?

Very much a matter of opinion. But if I had to gamble on which country will be bankrupt in 100 years, I'd be asking to settle the bet in Australian dollars.

> Effective doing what? I don't know much about Australian politics, I admit, but I know Australia has no freedom of speech - people were imprisoned or otherwise sanctioned by government for merely expressing various political positions.

Actually, the High Court has consistently found that the Australian Constitution provides freedom of communication on political matters, starting with ACTV v The Commonwealth, proportionate to public safety.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#132

Post by glenweyl » Sun, May 03, 2015, 12:48 PM UTC

bspates wrote: post #91

I may be missing something, but it seems as though QV is associating how passionate a party (specifically a minority) is about a topic with the importance that their view be equally represented against an apathetic opposition. The problem inherent to this is lack of education of topics that will be well know to a minority party but unknown to a majority. The majorities ignorance is not the same as not caring, and the…

As Marty Gillens argues in his book Affluence and Influence (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9836.html), on almost every issue there is a sub group within those who feel a particular way on an issue that is highly informed about that issue and a subgroup that is less informed. 1p1v gives both groups equal weight while QV gives much more weight to the informed. This is much fairer, because the uniformed group will typically be easily swayed by advertising and manipulation to vote the other way, making groups with more uniformed people easily undermined even if there are some members that are informed and who could speak for this group's interests. This is a major problem in American politics: the poor often favor less redistribution than the rich do (again see Gillens)! So I actually think QV would improve the situation precisely along the dimensions you are highlighting.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#133

Post by glenweyl » Sun, May 03, 2015, 12:49 PM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #124

Strilanc wrote: post #19

How does this system deal with the logarithmic value of dollars, and the asymmetry in who has them? When you get ln(X) happiness from X dollars, you are sacrificing 1/X happiness per dollar spent. A billionaire buying a thousand votes is paying ln(10^9 - (10^3)^2) - ln(10^9) ~= 1 milli-utilon, but a thousandaire buying ten votes is paying ln(10^3 - 10^2) - ln(10^3) ~= 100 milli-utilons. It seems like billionaires, wh…

How would you feel about "exponential voting", which would be like quadratic voting but the cost is 2^N instead of N^2?

Exponential voting would be too close to 1p1v in effect, as we argue in the paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#134

Post by glenweyl » Sun, May 03, 2015, 12:50 PM UTC

nullc wrote: post #108

glenweyl wrote: post #89

pas on vote buying, linear vote buying is bad according to the same theory that predicts QV is good. The only equilibrium under linear vote buying is that the single most intense (or wealthiest) individual has her way at everyone else's expense. This intuition seems to underly much of the discussion here, but only applies when vote buying is linear. The logic, as cwp pointed out, is Tullock's. So while QV is much bet…

This is assuming that quadratic voting isn't really linear voting. Participants in a process like this aren't "honest" they can't be counted on to follow the rules. In a QV system one can bypass the quadratic penalty by buying people's votes directly for a small premium.

Look above; I address this extensively in the paper.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#135

Post by glenweyl » Sun, May 03, 2015, 12:55 PM UTC

beefield wrote: post #109

pdonis wrote: post #99

How does quadratic voting get around Arrow's Theorem?

Arrow's Theorem applies only for voting on ordinal scale. QV allows degrees of preferences in voting so Arrow should not apply. (This actually is why I do not understand all the fuss about Arrow)

For a long time I thought this too. But then Ken Arrow started working on QV and while he agrees that in spirit QV gets around the theorem, it does not to the letter. The reason is that there can be multiple equilibria given income effects if you had a whole society governed by QV. All equilibria would be pareto-efficient and any pareto-efficient outcome could be implemented by QV, just as in the market economy, but in the market economy as well there may be multiple equilibria with income effects. This has little impact in a small vote in the short-term, but in the long-term taking everything into account, prices changing can impact effective budgets and lead to multiple equilibria. As soon as there are multiple equilibria effectively the system is not transitive because different equilibria are simultaneously preferred and dispreffered by the social ranking to one another. But this does not stop us thinking that the market is a good system because of its efficiency properties. So I think Arrow's theorem has been misunderstood.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#136

Post by Confusion » Sun, May 03, 2015, 1:06 PM UTC

xnull2guest wrote: post #56

Quadratic, exponential, or Ackermann - it's a terrible idea to exchange votes for money.

'Money' does not necessarily mean the same thing you're currently using daily. You could also simply be dealt a finite amount of 'voting tokens' per time unit.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#137

Post by McDoku » Sun, May 03, 2015, 1:18 PM UTC

glenweyl wrote: post #132

bspates wrote: post #91

I may be missing something, but it seems as though QV is associating how passionate a party (specifically a minority) is about a topic with the importance that their view be equally represented against an apathetic opposition. The problem inherent to this is lack of education of topics that will be well know to a minority party but unknown to a majority. The majorities ignorance is not the same as not caring, and the…

As Marty Gillens argues in his book Affluence and Influence ( http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9836.html ), on almost every issue there is a sub group within those who feel a particular way on an issue that is highly informed about that issue and a subgroup that is less informed. 1p1v gives both groups equal weight while QV gives much more weight to the informed. This is much fairer, because the uniformed group will…

Part of the real issue is identity politics and the black box thinking it generated.

Rethorical devices would still maintain the greatest power. You don't need information just conviction and resources.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#138

Post by notahacker » Sun, May 03, 2015, 2:01 PM UTC

glenweyl wrote: post #123

notahacker wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "artificial currency" would ensure votes accurately reflect the importance an individual attaches to an issue relative to other votes , but in practice this gives significantly more "voting power" to groups which seldom participate in votes, even where it is difficult to believe the intensity of their preferences are stronger. Given a fixed budget to be used over a number of votes, an essentially apolitical perso…

I cannot completely follow this scenario, but if you can write it up as an actual equilibrium analysis I would be fascinated to see this. I have worked very hard to come up with cases where QV does worse than one-person-one-vote and have never found a case where it occurred by a significant margin. But your basic point, that allowing exchange with a broader set of goods to make sure that if all voting is more valued…

To be honest the premise of my argument is that a static equilibrium wouldn't be reached given uncertainty about others' preferences, risk aversion and a multi-stage game, but here's a simple edge case scenario

Imagine a scenario in which there are N Jews, N neoNazis (for simplicity: example works if the Jews simply believe the number of Nazis is approximately equal) and yN ordinary citizens. Each individual in those groups has an equal budget to distribute between initiatives V(1)...V(X), where X > 2.

neoNazis desire a "yes" vote for both initiatives V(1) and V(2) - let's call them "internment" and "pogroms" - so strongly that they are (or are believed to be) willing to forego all votes on initiatives V(3)...V(X) to pass them

Jews have similarly strong views on not being interned or the victim of pogroms, but in the absence of adequate information on how the neoNazis will use their votes cannot be assured of allocating their voting budget between V(1) and V(2) in a way sufficient to negate the votes of the neoNazis on both issues. (Note also that the existential threat posed by V(1) and V(2) sitting on the [future] referendum list also deters the Jews from using part of their budget to influence votes on V(3)...V(X) in ways which might improve their individual utilities)

If ordinary citizens have a preference for a "no" vote which would be sufficiently strong for them to vote against it in a regular referendum, but insufficiently strong for them to allocate voting budget that could otherwise purchase decisions on initiatives V(3)...V(X) the moderate majority will not provide the same bulwark against extremism as they do under a 1 person 1 vote system. If all or most Jews decide that pogroms are significantly worse than incarceration and are sufficiently risk averse to warrant allocating all their budget to eliminate the possibility of an equal number of Nazis enacting V(2), it's surprisingly easy and inexpensive in terms of voting budget for the Nazis to pass V(1). The only way I can see the Jews avoiding both initiatives being passed is to put the neoNazis on the defensive with an equally vicious anti-Nazi counter-proposal - assuming Nazis can be targeted as effectively as Jews - but I'm not convinced that mutually assured destruction is the ideal way of resolving voting conflicts.

Unfortunately, this also applies to less extreme examples where balloting is secret and intentions uncertain: in order to shift the Nash equilibrium of a particular proposal in your favour you simply raise the spectre of an [additional, and credible] proposal you anticipate your adversaries will like even less.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#139

Post by glenweyl » Sun, May 03, 2015, 2:59 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #138

glenweyl wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot completely follow this scenario, but if you can write it up as an actual equilibrium analysis I would be fascinated to see this. I have worked very hard to come up with cases where QV does worse than one-person-one-vote and have never found a case where it occurred by a significant margin. But your basic point, that allowing exchange with a broader set of goods to make sure that if all voting is more valued…

To be honest the premise of my argument is that a static equilibrium wouldn't be reached given uncertainty about others' preferences, risk aversion and a multi-stage game, but here's a simple edge case scenario Imagine a scenario in which there are N Jews, N neoNazis (for simplicity: example works if the Jews simply believe the number of Nazis is approximately equal) and yN ordinary citizens. Each individual in those…

This is why there is a nominating procedure. I don't think this is a great forum for hashing this all out without a white board, but I would be happy to do it with a whiteboard. I think I could persuade you that there is no case where this can happen in an equilibrium of any model, including with uncertainty about preferences, risk-aversion, etc. to a significant extent and over a reasonable range of cases more than happens in 1p1v. One has to average over a reasonable range of cases to compare different systems. 1p1v can extremely easily lead to a nazi equilibrium as we have seen in practice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#140

Post by ericposner » Sun, May 03, 2015, 4:16 PM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #98

glenweyl wrote: post #22

The equity issues you all are raising are very important, but death with in detail here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956 . The simplest solution is just to use an artificial currency that everyone is given equal amounts of but can spread over the decisions most important to them. In this piece with Rory Sutherland we discuss this: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9512322/humans-are-doing…

There seem to be one big issue with this voting system. It allows variable number of votes per individual but how does an individual choose how much cost to take and exactly how much to vote? I think it is a fallacy to assume that individual would set the number of votes depending on how important they think is the issue. Instead they must speculate how others would vote and optimize their cost accordingly. For examp…

People in each minority group will also care about issues outside their group. Gun owners care about safety net levels. Gay people care about the environment. Family-values types care about crime. So people won't use all their credits or dollars for single issues. That is the logic of the quadratic function; marginal votes even for something you care a lot about will be too expensive unless used for something else.