Dear Abd-ul Rahman, you wrote: > And the very core of my objection is that "the minority" is not a > fixed group, such that it is deprived by not getting its way.
Raphfrk just gave us a very prominent example that this indeed can happen. So I don't understand you still insist that such a thing was impossible. > The thinking behind this proposal seems to be that every citizen > deserves to "get their way," No, not at all. The thinking behind this is that voting systems that claim to be "democratic", i.e. let "the people rule", cannot be majoritarian since that confuses "the people" with "the majority". If we want everyone to have some (perhaps even equal) power, we cannot use a majoritarian system in which it can easily happen that 49% have no power. That's very simple, isn't it? > yet "getting their way" is not the goal > of electoral choice systems, the goal is maximization of benefit, *Whose* benefit is the main question! We are going in circles, aren't we? How to define "benefit"... > and > benefit is maximized by making choices which actually are the best > for society, Here we have another such term, "best" for society. Why are you so convinced there is such a thing? Of course, we may sometimes see that some option A is "better" for society than some option B in a certain sense. At other times, we may see that some option A is better for some people whereas option B is better for others, and it may be all but clear that any of the two should be considered "better" for society. To me it is obvious that on the social level there are always lots of options neither of which can be said to be strictly better than the others. So, maximization of benefit does not mean to find something which is sterictly better than everything else but to find something for which no other thing is strictly better (which is quite a different thing unless you deal with a total ordering). > The theory is that majority opinion, particularly if > informed, is more likely to be right than wrong. Again such a term: "right" as opposed to "wrong". Do you really believe there is such a thing when it comes to conflicting preferences? That reminds me of Ramon Llulls claim that the "right" (=god-wanted) option will always turn up as the beats-all winner since for each other option at least half the electorate will realize that it's "wrong"... > And the converse of > this is that in the presence of controversy, minority opinion is more > likely to be wrong, so following the opinion of a minority merely > because of the outcome of a random process is more likely to increase > error. That's noise. Minorities being in "error", minority opinion being "noise" -- I get the impression that you have a completely different way of thinking about group decision processes than I have. Living in a culturally and ethnically very diverse society which has learned that there is no unique "right" way to do things, I can't understand such thinking. Yours, Jobst
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