Ian Clarke writes: > Since you admit that the alternatives you are proposing aren't better than > using > mean, which is the obvious choice,
The mean is prone to strategic voting, except for single yes/no decisions. Just assume I had given 700 points to a single task. No one voting honestly could have pushed this point out of the first position. Imagine a single Frost user giving 1000 points to "implement a Frost-like system" because he/she deems all the rest irrelevant. That would not actually need to be dishonest (so we could not reject the vote), but it would decide the outcome if all other people at most doubled or removed values. Condorcet voting gets rid of that option, but has the disadvantage that the values compared are not exactly estimated value/cost. The alternatives are not better, but DIFFERENT: They make different tradeoffs. > I really don't understand what your purpose > is here except to unnecessarily complicate the process and/or provoke > pointless > debate. I described my purpose clearly: Showing what can be found from the results and *what cannot*. You officially and publicly promised a democratic process to everyone visiting the webside, and this process currently is not. However it can be salvaged to some degree so that not all the effort which went into it is wasted. This is very much necessary. Without checking what can actually be found and what cannot, using the poll to support decisions is a mere fraud. Do you want Freenet to be known as the project which fails at even basic democratic process? And that’s the deeper reason why I got involved: Anyone who does simplistic pseudo-democracy and then uses it as force amplifier for pushing decisions (regardless of whether they are good or bad) tramples on actual democratic decision-making. I believe in democracy and the farce we did wasn’t democracy. By showing how uncertain the results are (see the differences in ranking between the different methods) I can at least turn it into somewhat more of a democratic process. It’s not the idea behind the process which is problematic (what was promised on the website sounded good), but the implementation - from unclear descriptions of the process over not defining the scope beforehand (what does it actually decide? Spending the 25k, a part of the 25k or creating a fourth iteration of the Freenet roadmap?), not defining the groups eligible for voting (and how their votes contribute to the decision) and not defining how exactly the poll would be evaluated. To make the process robust, a program like the one I wrote would have had to be available *before* the poll (or at least the chosen way to evaluate). But for that someone would have had to actually read up on voting methods before describing the process. A good voting method is robust against most trickery (strategic voting) when the evaluation method is known beforehand. This is not true at all for the mean (except for a single yes/no vote). It is slightly better for the median. And it is best for Condorcet. By screening the results for tasks ranked badly by Condorcet, we can reduce the problems of using the mean. Best wishes, Arne -- Unpolitisch sein heißt politisch sein ohne es zu merken
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