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Topological Problems in Voting

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Re: Topological Problems in Voting

#51

Post by dataflow »

eru wrote: post #47
dataflow wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Arrow's Theorem only applies to some voting systems Yes, but... https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/14245

Yes, you can extend Arrow's theorem a bit. But again, it doesn't apply to people who can negotiate or compromise or who play repeatedly. And it also only applies to aggregating an ordering of preferences. It doesn't apply to eg filling up a parliament for proportional representation. (Btw, the random dictatorship doesn't sound too bad. As a slightly modified form, I think it would be a good experiment to fill up parl…

> Yes, you can extend Arrow's theorem a bit

I would call it "a lot"!

> But again, it doesn't apply to people who can negotiate or compromise

You want hundreds of millions of people to negotiate and compromise with each other in a way that would eventually produce representatives that reflect the population's resulting preferences somehow? How would that work?

> or who play repeatedly.

I don't see why I should expect that to make the problem easier.

> I think it would be a good experiment to fill up parliament with a few hundred randomly selected people amongst all who are willing

That sounds like it could go incredibly wrong. Everyone who is willing will sell themselves out to the highest "bidder" (maybe bidding via money, maybe promises of future laws...), and the population unwilling or unable to become a member of parliament will have no say in the matter.

Re: Topological Problems in Voting

#52

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jfengel wrote: post #33
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's likely to reduce diverse representation vs. single-member districts. If there are e.g. 8 seats a party could run 8 identical candidates and they'd all get the highest approval ratings for the combined district if one of them would, and other parties wouldn't get any.

List voting might work as an alternative to single member districts. You vote for your favorite party, and they are allocated a proportion of the total seats. You lose the ability to know your local candidate, but how many people really do these days? It's what we set up in Iraq, but we don't do it ourselves. It doesn't solve the problem that there is still exactly one chief executive. You can try making that a commi…

> List voting might work as an alternative to single member districts.

But now you don't have a cardinal voting system and that's even worse than single member districts.

> It doesn't solve the problem that there is still exactly one chief executive. You can try making that a committee but that has other downsides.

Committees are dealing with it the wrong way. The right way to deal with it is to take away all of the executive's power. Constrain the national government from doing hardly anything and instead pass local laws to do whatever you want to do.

Then create elected positions responsible for different portions of the government. Directly elect the Attorney General and the heads of the major government departments. Let the President be like the Queen of England -- a figurehead with minimal responsibilities.

Re: Topological Problems in Voting

#53

Post by eru »

dataflow wrote: post #51
eru wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can extend Arrow's theorem a bit. But again, it doesn't apply to people who can negotiate or compromise or who play repeatedly. And it also only applies to aggregating an ordering of preferences. It doesn't apply to eg filling up a parliament for proportional representation. (Btw, the random dictatorship doesn't sound too bad. As a slightly modified form, I think it would be a good experiment to fill up parl…

> Yes, you can extend Arrow's theorem a bit I would call it "a lot"! > But again, it doesn't apply to people who can negotiate or compromise You want hundreds of millions of people to negotiate and compromise with each other in a way that would eventually produce representatives that reflect the population's resulting preferences somehow? How would that work? > or who play repeatedly. I don't see why I should expect…

> You want hundreds of millions of people to negotiate and compromise with each other in a way that would eventually produce representatives that reflect the population's resulting preferences somehow? How would that work?

Tacit negotiations can work. And in practice, it's often your representatives that do the negotiations with other people's representatives.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logrolling

>> or who play repeatedly. > I don't see why I should expect that to make the problem easier.

Check out the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma for some inspiration for how repeated play can breed cooperation.

> That sounds like it could go incredibly wrong. Everyone who is willing will sell themselves out to the highest "bidder" (maybe bidding via money, maybe promises of future laws...), [...]

How is that different from people selling their vote today?

Just make sure that the legal system does not enforce these contracts, and you are good. (You can also make such contracts illegal completely, just like selling your vote today is illegal in many countries.)

> [...] and the population unwilling or unable to become a member of parliament will have no say in the matter.

You can cook up slightly more complicated versions: every voter nominates a (willing) candidate on their ballot. Nationwide, you collect 600 ballots and fill up parliament with the people named on them. Pick your favourite resolution method, in case the same person gets picked multiple times in your sample.

(Eg you could give that person more weight in parliament, or you could pick the voter's second choice, or you could pick the ballot of the guy who got picked twice to pick a replacement, etc.)

Re: Topological Problems in Voting

#54

Post by johnkpaul »

j16sdiz wrote: post #22
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking that too. Could be -plagiarized- inspired by the birds, since the flow of the article starts out the exact same way

The first paragraph linked to the YouTube video and mentioned > (we’ll take a slightly different approach).

That new line in the first paragraph was added _after_ this comment was written.

Re: Topological Problems in Voting

#55

Post by dataflow »

eru wrote: post #53
dataflow wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, you can extend Arrow's theorem a bit I would call it "a lot"! > But again, it doesn't apply to people who can negotiate or compromise You want hundreds of millions of people to negotiate and compromise with each other in a way that would eventually produce representatives that reflect the population's resulting preferences somehow? How would that work? > or who play repeatedly. I don't see why I should expect…

> You want hundreds of millions of people to negotiate and compromise with each other in a way that would eventually produce representatives that reflect the population's resulting preferences somehow? How would that work? Tacit negotiations can work. And in practice, it's often your representatives that do the negotiations with other people's representatives. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logrolling >> or who pl…

> Tacit negotiations can work. And in practice, it's often your representatives that do the negotiations with other people's representatives.

And now you're back to square one? How do you choose those representatives in a way that represents their constituents' views? That was literally the original problem.

> Check out the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma for some inspiration for how repeated play can breed cooperation.

Have you seen literature on this somewhere? On its face iterated prisoner's dilemma being more cooperative does not in any way suggest that iterates voting somehow admits an easier solution for finding collective preferences than non-repeated voting. The problems are drastically different so far as I can tell. If you've seen literature suggesting otherwise I would love a link or two.

> How is that different from people selling their vote today? Just make sure that the legal system does not enforce these contracts

You seem confused? The reason you can't sell your vote today isn't that it's illegal to sell your vote, but rather the fact that there's no way to prove how you voted, so you could just lie with no incriminating evidence.

Whereas it's pretty darn easy to see how the candidate who promised you tax breaks suddenly voted to raise them when he came into office.

> slightly more complicated version

I see nothing obvious suggesting that your (homemade?) scheme is better, so I'm gonna put the onus on you to explain it wouldn't suffer from similar problems...

Note that "theorem assumptions don't apply" doesn't imply "conclusion doesn't hold".

Re: Topological Problems in Voting

#56

Post by eru »

dataflow wrote: post #55
eru wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You want hundreds of millions of people to negotiate and compromise with each other in a way that would eventually produce representatives that reflect the population's resulting preferences somehow? How would that work? Tacit negotiations can work. And in practice, it's often your representatives that do the negotiations with other people's representatives. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logrolling >> or who pl…

> Tacit negotiations can work. And in practice, it's often your representatives that do the negotiations with other people's representatives. And now you're back to square one? How do you choose those representatives in a way that represents their constituents' views? That was literally the original problem. > Check out the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma for some inspiration for how repeated play can breed cooperation.…

> And now you're back to square one? How do you choose those representatives in a way that represents their constituents' views? That was literally the original problem.

No, why? Arrow's Theorem eg has nothing to say about proportional representation. And Arrow's Theorem only applies to aggregating orderings of a finite list of preferences. But the methods under investigation need to be 'generic', ie can't make use of any special properties of those preferences, either. (See eg https://people.mpi-sws.org/~dreyer/tor/papers/wadler.pdf for how being 'generic' limits what your methods can do.)

And to come back to iterated games: almost no matter how the representative was chosen in the first period, if she's standing for re-election, she has an incentive for keeping her represented happy.

Arrow's theorem just applies to a list of static choices; not to how the chosen might behave when trying to get re-elected.

> Have you seen literature on this somewhere?

I don't remember right now. But I think 'The Myth of the Rational Voter' might mention some research somewhere. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter) That book mostly mentions this when it argues that the problem with democracy ain't that voters don't get their wishes, but the problem is that voters do get their wishes.

> Whereas it's pretty darn easy to see how the candidate who promised you tax breaks suddenly voted to raise them when he came into office.

Sure. But if millions of people are eligible to be drafted at random, you are going to have a hard time pre-emptively bribing them. That's equivalent to doing something nice for the entire country.

> I see nothing obvious suggesting that your (homemade?) scheme is better, so I'm gonna put the onus on you to explain it wouldn't suffer from similar problems...

Because eg people who don't want to stand for parliament still have a say? That was exactly one of the problem you brought up with naive sortition. Remember?

> Note that "theorem assumptions don't apply" doesn't imply "conclusion doesn't hold".

Well, if your theorem says A implies B; if A doesn't hold, your theorem doesn't apply, but B could still be true for other reasons. But you need a different argument or empirical data to convince people of B.

Re: Topological Problems in Voting

#57

Post by ClayShentrup »

jfengel wrote: post #30
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or they can approve of only one, and almost certainly lose if it's not one of the two most popular parties. "They can only approve of one" is FPTP, the existing system. Everybody knows that sucks. The whole point of approval or score voting is to avoid that. Right now if you favor candidate C but they have 5% of the vote and candidate A and B each have 45%, your preferred candidate has no chance and your vote can o…

I phrased that badly. I meant that they may choose to vote for only their favorite, as tactical voting. It says they don't approve of any other, to send a message. But it's not clear they will feel the message is sent if their candidate loses, and they are stuck with least favorite choice because they didn't select an alternative.

tactical voting is normally what we call it when you DON'T vote for your favorite, e.g. a green party supporter votes democrat.

with approval voting they'd obviously vote for green too.

some of the people who normally vote green under the current system might _still_ only vote green with approval voting, but very few would do it unless green actually had a chance to win.

https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletVoting

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