At 11:21 AM 2/16/2007, Kevin Venzke wrote: >What I mean is, if you create two arbitrary methods, one satisfying >MF and one not, you should expect the first one to have higher utility.
This is weird, actually. It could be the case that there are one thousand different election methods, and there is one which generates maximum utility. I'd guarantee that this method won't satisfy MF in all elections. Yes, the statement is true, but it is completely off the point. We are not comparing "arbitrary methods." It is obvious that MF has a utility. It is unlikely to choose a truly bad candidate. But methods which specifically optimize utility are going to fail MF. That's the point. Question is, how to optimize utility. MF does not optimize utility, it can be *far* from that. Range Ballots, sincere: 51: A, 100 B, 80 C, 0 49: A, 0 B, 80 C, 100 MF winner, A with 51% of the voters favoring A. Sum of expected utilities: A: 5100 B: 8000 C: 4900 I've argued that the majority has the right of decision. In this example, if the majority wants to ensure the election of A so much that it is willing to damage society, overall, it may do so. It simply votes B at a lower rating, sufficiently low that B loses. But, and I've given this argument again and again, this willingness conflicts with an assumption: that the majority values B at 80. No, if they are willing to lower B's rating to very low, which is what it would take, it is necessarily true that they place a higher relative value on the election of A than the supposedly sincere ratings indicate. There is a conflict in the assumptions, if we think that the A voters will vote insincerely. There has to be a motive to vote insincerely, a gain expected, and the gain cannot be trivial. Most people, in my opinion, won't lie on a matter of importance for trivial gain (and especially when their vote is anonymous). If you really think B is quite good -- and 80% is quite good -- then why would you rate B at zero, merely in order to get a slight improvement in personal utility, while at the same time knowing that you are going to be seriously disappointing half the society? This is a basic question, a different view of human nature than is being expressed by some. Are people generally out only for themselves? Will they impoverish their neighbors for a small gain? We know that people can be selfish. But *how* selfish? If you discover that burning your neighbor's house down, and you are sure you can get away with it, will somehow raise your own property value by a few thousand dollars, would you do it? How would most people answer this question, and how would they act if actually faced with the situation. The fact is, as far as I see, that people are generally quite willing to endure small costs in order to provide large benefit to others. We *do* value benefit to others. If it is a matter of *large* costs to ourselves, matters may shift. Indeed, in such a situation, we may expect that others make way for *us*. In the scenarios proposed by some writers, we have some faction organizing a plot to downrate an acceptable opponent in order to gain the election of a favorite. Now, if this is a large faction, and it must be large to have a significant impact on the election, keeping the plot secret would be quite a problem. And there would then be an additional problem: If I knew that a candidate approved of such efforts (and simply knowing about them and doing nothing I would count as approval), I would consider this a major disqualification for public office. Public officials *should* understand that their duties are to the whole of society, not just to the party that elected them. So that candidate, no matter how acceptable he or she was in other respects, would almost certainly lose my vote. They would have shown, *clearly*, that they don't understand the welfare of society as a whole. I don't think I'd be the only voter to react to such a plan so negatively. Believe it or not, I don't want to disenfranchise Republicans, no matter how much they might want to disenfranchise me. (And, of course, many Republicans don't want that either.) I want the winner to represent society. I'm not terribly exercised about losing elections when the process and counting has been fair. Florida was actually a very new experience for me. It wasn't about Bush. It was about partisan politics hijacking the *process*, and blatantly. I felt nothing like that when Bush Sr. won. It was, "Okay, this is what people want. Let's move on." Florida 2000 is what motivated me to get serious about reform. And I decided to focus on root causes and generic solutions, rather than working for this or that specific cause. Lots of people work on specific causes, they get fired up about them, but I noticed that hardly anyone was looking at the root of it all, and about the generic problem of how societies make decisions. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
