Quadratic Voting (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#151

Post by cwp » Sun, May 03, 2015, 10:34 PM UTC

glenweyl wrote: post #85

kybernetikos wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spent about $57M. I have no idea how many votes they were able to get for that money. With Quadratic Voting, they'd get 7,550. Doesn't that make it seem likely that they would prefer to continue with their current strategy rather than use the money to buy votes then? It seems likely that they ended up with more than 7550 votes for their 57M, especially considering that 7550 votes would be a smaller proportion of to…

This is a great point. We address it in great depth in the paper with Posner, Voting Squared ( http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956 ). QV helps here, a lot we hope, because most current expenditure on advertising is useful because it targets very indifferent swing voters who feel a duty to vote but do not care one way or the other. They can easily be swayed by noisy and wasteful advertising. But…

Here's another interesting thought: QV might reduce the influence of PACs by solving the principal-agent problem. PACs like Crossroads are not, in fact, wealthy people. They're pools of donations from many politically sympathetic individuals. People donate to PACs because they want to do more than cast their one vote on a particular issue.

But donating to a PAC is a really inefficient way to have a political effect. The rules governing PACs are so loose that the people controlling them can do anything they want with the money, including flying a private jet to Tahiti and drinking MaiTais during the election. Even more responsible PACs will probably not spend the money exactly the way the donor would. They might, for example, concentrate their spending on certain "key" elections and ignore the donor's favourite candidate. Or they might support all the candidates from a given party, when the donor only really cares about one of them.

With QV, the donor can put his money to work in exactly the way he wants. That might leave PACs with much less money to spend.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#152

Post by Frozenlock » Mon, May 04, 2015, 1:18 AM UTC

thomasahle wrote: post #115

sytelus wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people, who are new to HN, do not use downvotes to express your disagreement with author. Use them if the comment was off track, spam, bad mannered or in general not adding any value whatsoever.

That is what I thought as well, until this thread happened https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9237644 Apparently it is the official HN policy that up/down voting is for agreement/disagreement. :-(

And downvoted posts become impossible to read unless you use a custom CSS.

Nice.

Then I wonder why HN sounds like a cult on some subjects...

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#153

Post by xnull2guest » Mon, May 04, 2015, 3:37 AM UTC

Confusion wrote: post #136

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.

Can you expound on what this would look like? (I don't think that is what the paper is recommending.)

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#154

Post by kybernetikos » Tue, May 05, 2015, 10:15 AM UTC

cwp wrote: post #151

glenweyl wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point. We address it in great depth in the paper with Posner, Voting Squared ( http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956 ). QV helps here, a lot we hope, because most current expenditure on advertising is useful because it targets very indifferent swing voters who feel a duty to vote but do not care one way or the other. They can easily be swayed by noisy and wasteful advertising. But…

Here's another interesting thought: QV might reduce the influence of PACs by solving the principal-agent problem. PACs like Crossroads are not, in fact, wealthy people. They're pools of donations from many politically sympathetic individuals. People donate to PACs because they want to do more than cast their one vote on a particular issue. But donating to a PAC is a really inefficient way to have a political effect.…

> With QV, the donor can put his money to work in exactly the way he wants. That might leave PACs with much less money to spend.

We can hope. I expect though that in general having your dollars have - by design - a quadratically decreasing power in vote purchasing is quickly going to give you less bang for your buck than spending it on manipulating the perceptions of others. There'll be some cross over position in value, and people will spend $x on votes and the rest on manipulating/persuading others which is what PACs are for.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#155

Post by ClayShentrup » Wed, May 06, 2015, 5:18 AM UTC

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…

That Spectator piece is basically 100% false. Here's an explanation from a Princeton math PhD with expertise in voting system design.

http://scorevoting.net/BogusBeeQV.html

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#156

Post by rattray » Wed, May 06, 2015, 8:12 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #100

sytelus wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For people, who are new to HN, do not use downvotes to express your disagreement with author. Use them if the comment was off track, spam, bad mannered or in general not adding any value whatsoever.

@dang, if you're listening, I think this may be the majority perception (it was certainly mine). At the risk of a giant, raging debate, it may be worth starting a long-running discussion on this amongst the HN community. Possibly with real voting and everything. Dare I suggest - quadratic voting?