A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive • Hacker News Board

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#231

Post by stale2002 » Fri, May 03, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

breuleux wrote: post #226

stale2002 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they are picked, they have to go, except for serious unforeseen circumstances If I was "forced" into a political position, then what I would do is purposefully sabotage the position I was in, out of spite. What are you going to do? Arrest me because I voted a certain way? That doesn't sound easily enforceable. Be careful what kind of slavery you force people into. Those slaves might just fight back (in this case…

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.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#232

Post by ng12 » Fri, May 03, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #229

ng12 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is that a democrat proposed a dead-on-arrival bill to cut military spending while this happened a few years later: https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2017/09/18/91-of-se... See my point?

This logic is completely nonsensical. Her bill was "dead on arrival" because it was opposed by Republicans. Want to change that, then elect Democrats.

My point is that the DOA bill was facetious. None of the current establishment democrats are serious about military spending cuts, so much so that Warren/Bernie have been making waves by suggesting they will be.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#233

Post by ng12 » Fri, May 03, 2019, 9:23 PM UTC

mwfunk wrote: post #227

ng12 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two parties are functionally identical for the handful of issues I really, really care about. Those issues you've mentioned are not among them -- furthermore they are not as black-and-white as you imply. As a relatively high income earner the only significant tax increase I've ever seen was under Trump.

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.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#234

Post by kazinator » Fri, May 03, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

dvorak365 wrote: post #230

What if we took this idea, applied it to wealth instead of votes, and called it something like "progressive marginal tax rates"? Seems like it would be a more effective way to fight zealotry than to attack the democratic principle of all people getting the same amount of votes.

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.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#235

Post by ereyes01 » Fri, May 03, 2019, 9:33 PM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #44

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #4

In the US where the parties cling to stupid and outdated viewpoints and agendas in order to differentiate themselves from the other party. Legislators have to vote with the party if they don't want to find the party funding an opponent in the next election cycle. This is an improvement insofar as it allows legislators to nominally vote with the party while voting more strongly in favor of things they actually care ab…

The more that politics become local the more this all goes away. States need to be at the foreront again

I'd go further and argue that city-states make the most sense in today's world, with a federal government to arbitrate resources and defense. US state boundaries are quite arbitrary with respect to how actual communities are organized on the map.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#236

Post by kazinator » Fri, May 03, 2019, 9:33 PM UTC

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 0.8 0.64 0.512 0.4096 0.32768 0.262144 0.2097152 0.16777216
   0.134217728)

This quadratic concept requires too many tokens. If you actually want people to be able to vote for one candidate half a dozen times, you need to give them 91 tokens. But that then allows people to vote 91 times for different choices. If there aren't anywhere near that many choices, then people have tokens remaining which encourages them to vote for duplicate choices. It's just a mess where people get wrapped up in the token accounting and lose sight of the issues.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#237

Post by bilbo0s » Fri, May 03, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #207

bilbo0s wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we did take a non-incrementalist approach to slavery, and it worked. Sherman smashing through Georgia was not, by any stretch of the imagination, "moderate". And it worked much better than any of the other approaches. Travel to Asia or Africa, and ask who the leader of the US was when the slaves were freed? Then ask who the leader of the British Empire was when their slaves were freed? Or the leader of Brazil? Th…

> 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, and global scale violence. It was kind of a necessity for that kind of thing to work.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#238

Post by neltnerb » Fri, May 03, 2019, 9:35 PM UTC

morley wrote: post #40

erentz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with politics today isn't that people are single-issue voters... The problem is the people have no representation, what people want does not impact the likelihood of passage of a law.[1] People on the left in right have a lot more in common with each other than everyone likes to make out. But even where they agree still nothing happens. I think this “polarization” line is a convenient distraction from t…

I think you're pointing out a different shade of the same problem. People _do_ technically have representation in the form of their Congresspeople and Senators. But those elected officials have to polarize their viewpoints and thus their votes because when they vote out of party, the vocal members of their parties excoriate them as traitors. So the people in the middle feel like their representatives aren't represent…

Is this actually true for local elections? I would think they care far more about the local teachers union than Mitch McConnell, and certainly the prior would have more boots on the ground canvassing. I think local representatives have to cater to the preferences of their district to a pretty large extent, though not perfectly so (a bit of hysteresis?).

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#239

Post by aiyodev » Fri, May 03, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

In a real election, couldn’t you just run multiple candidates with identical positions and then have all but one drop out during the runoff?

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#240

Post by dvorak365 » Fri, May 03, 2019, 9:42 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #234

dvorak365 wrote: post #230

What if we took this idea, applied it to wealth instead of votes, and called it something like "progressive marginal tax rates"? Seems like it would be a more effective way to fight zealotry than to attack the democratic principle of all people getting the same amount of votes.

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.