Howard wrote:
Question to Kristofer
do you see the "issues" that you start off with as orthogonal?
i.e. do you see this only working in a world where the issues polled are
independent.
The simulation I wrote assumes this, since it picks the proportion in
favor on each issue independently. The simulation-idea itself could work
with non-orthogonal issues, where one programs the individual issue
profile generator to select true on an issue with a probability that's
correlated (or reversely correlated) with the probability of selecting
true on some other issue.
The concept works with non-orthogonal issues. The implementation doesn't.
also, how it would be decided what issues are polled? even in a
simulation this is important.
I take a best-case approach here: every voter knows the issue profiles
of every candidate. That's not how it would happen in reality, but it
can only make the simulated scores better than in reality, not worse.
Ultimately there are a large election there are wide variety of issues
and it is impossible for any one candidate or voter to be aware of all
of them much less have an opinion on them all.
Perhaps there could be a switch where, if turned on, the simulation only
compares subsets of issue profiles. A noise parameter would determine
how large a subset is compared. One would have to make assumptions as to
the correlation of subsets, though - do voters compare on the same
subsets (what's being advertised, for instance), or do they compare on
different subsets (their special interests)? In hoping that the results
can be generalized, picking random subsets may suffice.
I think the generalization you propose below to a range of values is
probably worth while.
it might then also be able to address not only proportionality on views
of the legislature, but also proportionality on the thrust of the
legislature.
i.e. it is all well and good to say you are for some position but if the
legislature never proposes a new law or regulation around this position
it is of little use to the people.
How would you treat the case where the assembly doesn't care about a
certain issue, but the voters do? Range-style "only count those with an
opinion" would produce an undefined proportion in favor of the issue at
that point (because of a division by zero). I'm not sure what the best
approach would be in that case.
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