At 09:16 AM 8/25/2007, Jobst Heitzig wrote: >I don't think nearly half of the electorate should pay the other >half for getting what is the more just solution in my eyes. Perhaps >that is a difference in culture?
No. It's an understanding of what utilities mean. If A does not win, the supporters of A lose something. They are in the majority. If each of them grabs a B supporter and wrestles with him, or her, I suppose, the excess A supporters can then arrange things the way they like. A drastic picture, but actually part of the theory behind majority rule. If C wins, the B supporters gain 60% utility, that's large. If they pay the A voters the equivalent of the A loss, 20%, they are still way ahead. It is a very good deal for the B voters and, in fact, the A voters might hold out for more, knowing this. Why shouldn't everyone benefit from the improved result? A free negotiation would effectively generate a "bid" based on the *real* utilities, and these have been posited as stated. A free negotiation collapses what might be incommensurable utilities into whatever medium of exchange is used. Money is only one option, others are possible. (And, strictly speaking, if it were a Clarke tax, the "payment" is a reduction in taxes, effectively.) I'm not suggesting that this is practical, but rather pointing out that it is far more fair than we might, with certain knee-jerk responses, assume. We think of plutocracy when proposals like this are floated, but the scale is such that the truly large sums of money that are available to be transferred are mostly contributed by the average person. Jobst regards it as unjust that the majority should be paid by the minority to get an outcome he regards as more just. However, he isn't looking at the utilities, he is simply regarding these numbers as representing, perhaps, some degree of consent. The actual consequences of the election are irrelevant to him. Suppose this is not candidates for office being considered, but actual choices for the community. There are three projects, and it is considered that the community can only afford to build one. Let's even say that there is one project but three *sites*. Which site shall be chosen? If site A is chosen, the majority will find it maximally convenient, site C is almost as good, and site B is terrible. The B faction, the minority faces the reverse situation, Sure, if we have an assumption of equal taxes and all the rest, and if the stated ratings are based, say, on travel cost and value of time spent driving, then site C is the best choice. But this is a democracy. Sure, one can imagine systems where majority rule is not sufficient for making decisions, and many communities use them. Contrary to what Jobst might assume, I have a lot of experience with consensus communities, both positive and negative. My comments about majority rule proceed from that experience, they are not merely theory. However, when you get down to the nuts and bolts of a system, *including how the system is implemented,* majority rule has proven itself to be practical *and* sustainable. Consensus systems get people all excited at first, particularly when they discover that obtaining full consent is not as difficult as many would think, it is exhilarating to sufficiently satisfy *everyone*. However, over years, going through what becomes tedious meeting process to do it gradually exhausts many members of the community, and, further, they start to discover what happens when the status quo favors a minority. Perhaps a decision was made some years back that did not anticipate the full impact it would have. It can't be changed without full consensus. I have seen this be literally oppressive, causing direct harm to a substantial minority (I've never seen it seriously harm the majority, probably because there are certain natural restraints. People can walk away from consensus communities and create standard ones, and sometimes the consensus rules are not legally enforceable. But I'm not aware of any legal tests of that.) Point is, when you don't have majority rule, you have decisions being made by something *other* than the majority, even if it is only the default "decision" to change nothing. And a determined minority can then hold its right to withhold consent over the rest of the community, in order to get what it wants. Again, it would never, in that context, blatantly do this, but it happens, social dynamics do not disappear in consensus communities. There is nothing magic about 50%, it is simply the point where there are more people on one side than another, there are more saying Yes to a motion than No. Or the reverse. In real communities, other than seriously unhealthy ones, the majority is restrained. It does not make decisions based on mere majority, ordinarily, it seeks broader consent, and deliberative process makes this happen. As an example of how majority rule is modified in practice, to close debate under Robert's Rules requires a 2/3 vote. Hence the "filibuster," where a faction, believing that it will lose the vote, and desiring to block legislation, can simply wait and continue to vote no on the motion for the Previous Question, which closes debate and proceeds to vote. The majority *does* have the power to set the rule aside, but it rarely does so, because it knows the hazard of doing this. Truly, if the Previous Question cannot pass without suspending the rules or resorting to other procedures that can bypass it, the community is not read to make a decision. Most sane people know that the community will not always give them their preference, so filibusters are generally reserved for major issues. > > The original conditions assume commensurability of utilities, > >No, definitely not! I would never propose such a thing! I only said >that those who believe in such measures may interpret the given >numbers in that way... If the utilities are not commensurable, then there is no way to know who is the best winner. If Jobst does not understand that, if he does not understand how normalization -- and these are clearly normalized utilities, can distort the results, we could explain it for him. Essentially, the C-election 20% preference loss of the A voters could have an absolute value greater than the 60% gain by the C voters. A negotiation would expose that, because a negotiation, "You give us this in exchange for that" causes the utilities to be translated to commensurable units, the units of the negotiation. As I mentioned, it does not have to be money. Consider the site choice question. There is no doubt about it, if the utilities are accurate as stated, the B voters benefit more greatly by the choice of site C than do the A voters, overall, who lose value. Parity would be at some level of compensation whereby all voters share equally in the benefit of making the optimum choice. The assumption that Jobst easily makes, that the C option is more just, is based on an assumption of commensurability of utilities -- or whatever he wishes to call the ratings. And we aren't talking at all about sincere voting, or the meaning of it. (Normalized utilities are not fully sincere, which is part of the problem, and he clearly has normalized utilities.) Without commensurability, utilities are only expressions of relative satisfaction. Suppose for the B voters, there really is very little difference between all of the sites. Consider this scenario that explains the utilities given: Distance to site, km. A voters: A 0, B 100, C, 20 B voters: A 10, B 0, C, 2. This explains the utilities given. However, the absolute preference strength for the A voters is 20 km in the A/C pair, and for the B voters, it is 10 km in that pair. Let's sum the distances and multiply by the percentages: A B C 0 55 11 for the A voters, 55% of the electorate 4.5 0 0.9 for the C voters, 45% of the electorate ------------------ 4.5 55 11.9 These are inverted utilities, the lowest number is the best outcome. Clearly, the best site, with the information we now have, is site A, it results in less than half of the driving for the whole community as does site C, supposedly the "just compromise" as stated by Jobst. So, to make sense of the conditions of the problem, we must assume that the utilities are commensurable, as I stated. Otherwise we have no basis at all for what he now claims, that C is the "just outcome." The objections to Range and to utility analysis are sometimes based on the commensurability problem. However, there are good reasons for setting that problem aside and assuming that, in large public elections, commensurability will usually average out. Nevertheless, situations like this one, where a minority gains substantial value in its own perception, whereas a majority loses a smaller value, as it seems from what might be sincere Range Votes, can exist where testing the true preference strengths, essentially by asking the consent of the community for the decision, will improve utility. If negotiation between the factions is possible, that negotiation could add in factors that cause the utilities to shift, thus equalizing the situation. Measures can be linked (though usually independent decisions cannot be combined into a single ballot decision, there are ways around this, such as with budgets_, so that, say, the A faction gets something in return for its loss of utility, something that balances it out so that the overall result is fair for both factions. My position is that free people, through standard deliberative process, can work all this out. And they will, and do, given the opportunity. The problem is that when the scale is large, doing directly, as in Town Meeting democracy, becomes impossibly tedious. Hence my great interest in Delegable Proxy, which can theoretically reduce the scale on which negotiations take place. It's not a mere voting method, it is a *communication* method designed to be fully scalable, to any size. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
