At 04:09 PM 8/9/2007, Juho wrote: >In this discussion I'm quite sensitive to different wordings that are >used when describing Range. > >[...] > >I used term "sincere" roughly to refer to voters marking their >personal candidate utility values in the ballots. Or if you don't >like the word "utility" then we can just talk about putting >candidates on the value axis without putting any special emphasis on >the min and max values.
"Roughly." What is a "personal candidate utility value"? What Juho did was to simply use a different set of words, without describing the *meaning*, i.e., how the voter is to arrive at this set of values. How do I put the candidate values "on the value axis"? What determines what I call the "magnification"? Suppose that I try to estimate candidate values by the following procedure: I consider the payment that I would want to personally receive in order to allow the election of a candidate, or pay in order to guarantee that election. This would establish what are reasonably called "absolute utilities." It doesn't matter if I'm rich or poor, we would only need to consider that if we are trying to make my utilities commensurable with those of others. Now, I have absolute utilities. They measure and compare the value of the candidates to me. If I wouldn't pay a nickel to elect so-and-so over his opponent, I must not have much of a preference. Unless I don't have a dime to my name. In which case I'd simply measure the utilities in terms of how many minutes I'd spend for the cause, or any other measure. Now, I am faced with a specific election, Range 100. Do I consider who is actually *in* the election when I vote? From what Juho has written, I'd have to assume that to be "sincere," I would not. So; none of the present candidates are anywhere as near as good as the Messiah, and none of them are anywhere as bad as the Antichrist. For the Messiah, I'd spend everything I have and might even borrow, for the Antichrist you couldn't offer me enough. Let's see, maybe I could scrape together a couple of hundred thousand dollars, pulling out all the stops. So we have at one end, the Messiah, $200,000. At the other, negative infinity! (Yes, this is correct. I wouldn't do it for the world.) For the election of Al Gore, in 2000, I'd have paid easily $1000, if I knew it would have been effective. Possibly more. (The rules have to be that nobody will help me....) (I would now pay more.) To accept the election of Bush, $5000 might have been enough. (It would be a *lot* more expensive now that we know the man better.) Let's see. If we use an absolute scale, linear, everything ends up at negative infinity. However, there is another procedure. I could decide to fix the midpoint at 50%. Then I scale positive utilities in the range of 50% to 100%, and I proceed down an equal amount. This, then, truncates at -$200,000. Anything that low or lower is zero. So what do I come up with as so-called "sincere" non-normalized Range Votes? Range 100, 50.25% for Gore. Bush is below 50% by five times as much as Gore is above it, so Bush is 48.75%. Rounding off for Range 100, it is Gore 50%, Bush 49%. My sincere votes. If this is not what "sincere" vote means, please explain what is! *Everybody will normalize, at least to some degree!* And many will "truncate," which means that they place the ends of the Range Voting scale on their absolute scale *within* the candidate set such that more than one candidate is at an end point. And there is nothing "insincere" about this. If I give a candidate more than zero, I am contributing something to the possible election of that candidate. It is easily possible that I would not care to do that for more than one candidate. Or am I *forced* to make a choice, to assign a higher utility to Adolf Hitler than to Genghis Khan -- or the reverse? Let me repeat this: there is no clear definition of a "sincere" vote in Range. Indeed, the whole concept is suspect. If the Republican supporters of R2 in the example given by Juho previously did not have a strong preference for R2 over R1, why did they vote max strength for R2 over R1? Juho, following others, will give the reason as "they wanted their favorite to win." But *how much* did they want their favorite to win. If this is the most important thing to them, they voted sincerely! Their vote, as an action, abstained from the election between D and R1. It is as if they were saying, "R2 or I don't care." And if that is how they feel, who are we to called it "strategic"? What Juho and others do is to posit a weak preference that is expressed as a strong one, but ignored is the *motivation.* I have *never* seen a critic of Range present the reason why they might do this, it is passed off as "they wanted to win." Okay, they wanted to win, that is, they wanted R2 to win. How badly? One full vote. So that is what they cast. What's the problem? They expressed what they wanted, and how much they wanted it. If you lie about this, you might get what you ask for. By abstaining from the D/R1 election, these voters have informed the system that they don't care about it. So it will not consider them *at all* in that pairwise election. And if that turns out to be the relevant one ... they get a much worse outcome than if they had voted "sincerely," which in this case means with the supposed "real" preference that they have. They *actually*, it is posited, would greatly prefer R1 to D. But all this is concealed under the hood, the critic just posits the contradiction, knowing -- or he should know by now -- that most will not notice that two opposites are being presumed. >The voters could be harmed considerably in some cases. There have >been several examples. None so far that show "considerable" harm. Indeed, none that show harm at all, only less benefit, possibly. > One could e.g. translate utility values 1 >A=90, B=80 and 1 B=90, A=70 to actual votes 1 A=100, B=0 and 1 B=90, >A=70. You can translate them how you choose, as can the voter. But you are assuming utilities that have already been translated, and you are translating them again, arbitrarily, but making assumptions about what they mean. Juho has never addressed what absolute utilities might be, but he seems to assume that they exist. Yet absolute utilities as shown are percentages of what? Are they dollars? What are they? Generally, we look at relative preference, but there is nothing to tie these preferences to the endpoints of the scale. I have no idea if the translations Juho mentions above are reasonable or not, no clue. The translated votes could be normalized and fully sincere. There may be other candidates present who affect the translated utilities, plus the voter may be considering election probabilities. Consider this election. Shall we: (1) Build a new public safety complex. (2) Continue with the old one. (3) End all local taxation and refund the entire accumulated taxes to the citizens, proportionally to taxes paid. Range Voting. Now, #3, under some conditions, sounds nice. If I want a public safety complex, I could donate to it. However, I happen to know that option 3 got on the ballot by a fluke, and it hasn't a prayer of passing. So should I consider it in determining how I vote? If I think (3) desirable, should I downrate my favorite of the others to be "sincere."? I'd say not. I'd say that in any election where there are only two reasonably possible outcomes, the sincere vote, normally, *in competitive public elections*, is to pick one and vote fully for it. Only if you really don't care would you vote something else. In which case *you don't care*, so you will hardly be harmed no matter what the outcome is. If I want 3, fine, I can vote 100% for it. And 100% for my favorite of the *real* options, and zero percent for the other. There is nothing "insincere" about this. And, indeed, this is how most people presently vote, and I see no reason for them *at all* to discontinue it. Range Voting gives them some more options, most notably it gives these options to two classes of people: those who prefer a third party candidate, and those who prefer one of the major party candidates, but would like to show some support for a third party. (The latter might be because they want to influence their own party to move in that direction.) >The effect on the society could be e.g. bad election results (e.g. >worse candidate A elected due to strategic voting) or Range becoming >Approval in practice. First of all, the possibility of "bad election results" has been brought up again and again, in the face of requests to show a "bad" example, and none has been forthcoming, so far. That A is "worse" is *assumed,* not shown. In the example given, the candidate elected isn't clearly worse, and that candidate was only elected because the majority actually gave the candidate a high rating. They like him! So how is this a "bad result"? >I think we have covered all this before. Let's try to avoid repeating >the cycle. > > > "Insincere" refers to reversing a preference; > >That's one option. In natural language I'd include also other cases. Failing to give the last intimate detail of preference? Like I'd probably prefer cyanide to being torn from limb to limb? Do I get to vote zero for those two without being "insincere"? Juho has consistently failed to address the issue. He has not defined what a sincere vote is, beyond saying that it is some kind of expression of "personal utility," which simply begs the question. What is a "personal utility" and what does it have to do with Range Voting? Range Voting is a *voting method*, whereby the votes of voters are aggregated to produce a result. It happens to be that if voters vote what might be called "relative expected satisfaction," generally, Range Voting maximizes it. But there is no clear standard for what the actual numbers would be. If somehow voters can vote *absolute* utilities, and they actually do it, Range would truly choose the overall best candidate. But this is extremely difficult to arrange, and it really has nothing to do with the question before us, which is the effect of so-called "strategic voting" in Range. By refusing to confront the basic issues -- what is a "sincere" Range vote -- Juho is simply stirring the pot, over and over, without adding anything to the soup. He keeps asserting that "strategic" voting harms the "sincere" voters, but he hasn't defined sincere in any clear way, nor strategic, nor shown harm. >(sincere votes) > >> You seem to be recommending the voters to primarily do so, > > > > I do recommend not reversing preferences. As to the expression of > > so-called sincere ratings -- what is that? > >Defined above. (I didn't refer to reversals specifically.) It was not defined above. A putative synonym was given. I gave some hints as to how it might be done, but it is far more complex than Juho seems to imagine. Suppose I've decided that to be "sincere" is cool. I want to vote "sincerely." So how do I do it. How do I decide, exactly, what my "sincere votes" would be. I gave an example using absolute utilities. It resulted in me voting 50 for Gore and 49 for Bush. There is something obviously wrong with this. But what would Juho propose in its place? Everyone writing on Range, who understands the method, recommends that voters normalize to the real election set, *unless* conditions are such that some broader scale be used, in which case you would see votes like Juho posits. But those conditions are that there is some agreed-upon measure, some way of making utilities commensurable, so people know what 100% is and 0% is. In the pizza election, the common understanding is that 100% means "this is my absolute favorite variety ever." and 0% means "I can't eat it." So in that context, sincere people know how to vote, and they may very well not vote the extremes in a particular situation, looking at the menu. Those pizzas may not be on the menu, so they would not vote the full range. But what is the standard for public elections? Establish one, we can talk about not normalizing! Until then, very, very few people will not normalize. So, please, forget about these examples where 50% of the voters are Democrats, and they vote 80% for one Republican and 70% for the other Republican! I showed how they would vote, in reality.... >It seems you recommend not to normalize the estimated frontrunners to >min and max. This did not follow from what I wrote. With pure Range, and no public ballot imaging, I'd recommend normalizing the frontrunners, period. Vote the rest how you like, it doesn't matter! But if you were wrong in your estimation of who the frontrunners are, you are less likely to regret the vote if you vote intermediate votes if they are appropriate. Mean-based Approval is quite a reasonable strategy. In practice, it tends to average out over many voters. However, the presence of even a few voters who vote intermediate votes, it appears, improves the outcome *for the Approval Voters and the "Sincere" Voters.* I've been saying this over and over, Juho hasn't, so far, acknowledged it. I'm not sure that he understands it. The claim is based on actual calculation in a large Range 2 election, by comparing the relative expected outcome for optimal votes in the Range election, and then the relative expected outcome if *all* votes are limited to Approval style. With the assumption that the single intermediate vote available in a Range 2 election (0,1,2) is an accurate expression of voter preferences, the expected utility for the "sincere" voter is 1.40. This is a relative utility, not an absolute one; it assumes that the voter's vote can affect the outcome. All other initial conditions (the votes without this voter) obviously leave the voter's vote moot, so they cannot affect expected outcome. If the voter votes Approval style, in large elections, the vote of 200 and 220 have the same expected utility, also 1.40. However, if we remove the possibility that *anyone* votes an intermediate vote, the expected utility is 1.33. By eliminating the possibility that others could cast intermediate votes, we have lowered the expectation for the *Approval Voter* and we have lowered it for *every* voter, since now all voters must vote Approval style. Do the math! I find it quite interesting! > >> With this I think we are back in the > >> original claim that Range may create a mess if some voters vote > >> sincerely (and maybe are guided to do so) and some strategically. > > > > No such mess has been alleged specifically. Rather, Juho and others > > continue to claim that a mess is created, but not *specific* > > scenario that deserves the name is mentioned. > >There have been examples. See e.g. the example I gave above. No example of "mess" has been given. What Juho does is to posit some votes and assert that the outcome is a "mess" or a bad outcome, but the votes don't show that. Nor have any reasonable conditions underlying the votes show that. I'll note that if a majority of voters vote stupidly, you can certainly get bad outcomes! So it is remarkable that Juho has not yet asserted anything like what he claims! > > It balances out. And I expect the same with elections. > >Do you mean in the first election the strategists might win but in >the second election most voters would vote in Approval style? No. I mean that if everyone votes sincerely, in one election it might seem that I lose something, but it will be small, and in return someone else gains something more than I lost. Next election, I'm the one who gains more than someone else gave up. Elections are not a zero-sum game. If they were, the situation would be quite different. In the elections that Juho posited, everyone gained something, most likely, no matter which candidate won. But Juho asserted that it would be a "mess" if one of the candidates won. What appears to me is that in some elections, those who vote Approval style may possibly gain some advantage for themselves, but at little cost to everyone else. If any! (Usually not!) In other elections, those who vote Approval style when a different vote would have been truer to their relative preferences may regret the vote. Overall, it looks like these two effects, in a way, balance each other out, but the Approval approach, as we might expect from the extremity of the vote, swings wider. The more accurate vote is less likely to help the voter personally, but also less likely to harm. I'd suggest to Juho that looking at the study previously published here (I post very few original subjects, this was one of them), in detail, could reveal a lot. Read the thread, there were errors in the original spreadsheets, and some conclusions were reversed. (One fascinating conclusion was that with utilities of 2, 1, 0, for the candidates, Range 2, the Approval vote of 220 and 200 were *not* balanced, the vote of 200 has substantially higher utility *in an election with a small number of voters.) However, in large elections, many voters, the difference becomes vanishingly small. > > In Range the preference of a majority can be passed over for the > > broader satisfaction of the whole electorate, including a minority > > with a stronger expressed preference. > > > > *This is not a problem,* > >Coming voluntarily back from Approval style to sincere votes is not >as bad as starting from and recommending the use of sincere votes to >all. (But it doesn't necessarily work that way either.) *Nobody* has "recommended the use of sincere votes to all." Who did this? I don't even know what a "sincere vote" is, though I can define certain kinds of insincere ones, starting with the obvious: preference reversal. Beyond that, I could define an insincere vote as one where preference strengths are obscured. But this isn't nearly as clear as reversal. *How much* obscuration is involved? It appears that if the voter normalizes, which Range supporters expect for the vast majority, little harm is done by voting intermediate expected satisfaction "accurately," a term I prefer to "sincerely." If the voter normalizes to the frontrunners -- which is what experts recommend, generally -- there is even less harm; indeed, very little, if any. I've never seen one of these supposedly bad outcomes where normalization to the frontrunners was done. Indeed, the issue isn't even considered, and the examples which we have seen don't show normalization *at all*. Range Voting, some argue, is not Independent of Irrelevant Alternatives. But that actually depends on the voter's strategy. With some strategies, it is independent.... The method itself is independent. Only if the voter changes votes does it become dependent.... What happens is that if a voter downrates a formerly max rated candidate because a better one appears, the former one could lose to a third candidate whose supporters were not affected by the introduction. But if that is the environment, the voter would be foolish to downrate that way. Rather, a voter would better max rate both. I've suggested that a method be introduced to indicate preference without changing range rating. It would be used for a number of purposes, including pairwise analysis for a runoff, or assigning campaign funding, or the like. It isn't really necessary with high-res Range, but it could be more important with low-res, like Approval (Range 1) or Range 2. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
