Fred Gohlke wrote:
Good Morning, Kristofer
There is so much good material in your message that, instead of
responding to all of it, I'm going to select bits and pieces and comment
on them, one at a time, until I've responded to all of them. I hope
this will help us focus on specific parts of the complex topic we're
discussing. For today, I'm going to concentrate on two of your comments
regarding group (or council) size:
1) "Have a council of seven. Use a PR method like STV to pick
four or five. These go to the next level. That may exclude
opinions held by fewer than two of the seven, but it's better
than 50%-1. If you can handle a larger council, have one of
size 12 that picks 9; if seven is too many, a group of five
that elects two.
For small groups like this, it might be possible to make a
simpler PR method than STV, but I'm not sure how.
2) "It's more like (if we elect three out of nine and it's
always the second who wins -- to make the diagram easier)
e n w Level 2
behknqtwz Level 1
b e h k n q t w z Level 1
abcdefghi jklmnopqr stuvwxyzA Level 0
The horizon for all the subsequent members (behknqtwz) is
wider than would be the case if they were split up into
groups of three. In this example, each person at a level
"represents" three below him, just like what would be the
case if you had groups of two, but, and this is the
important part, they have input from the entire group of
eight instead of just three. Thus some may represent all the
views of less than three, while others represent some of the
views of more than three. The latter type would be excluded,
or at least heavily attenuated, in the triad case."
For convenience, I'll work with a group size of 9 picking 3 by a form of
proportional representation:
Am I correct in imagining the process would function by having each of
the 9 people rank the other 8 in preferential order and then resolve the
preferences to select the 3 people that are most preferred by the 9?
Yes. In a truly unbiased scenario, each of the 9 people could submit a
complete ranking (including himself), but since you've said you don't
want voters ranking themselves first, they would rank all but
themselves. Either the method would consider them equal-first, or have
some sort of special "no opinion" provision (like Warren's Range).
That seems like a really good idea. It is, however, a new idea for me,
so it may take me some time to digest all the ramifications of the
concept. Even so, the first thoughts that leap to mind are:
1) It would allow voting secrecy. In a group size of 3 selecting 1,
secrecy is not possible; a selection can only be made if 2 of the three
agree on the selection. Many people say secrecy is important. For my
part, I'm not sure. It may be important in the kind of electoral
process we have now, but I'm not sure open agreement of free people is
not a better option.
You could weaken that in two ways. The first would be to simply make the
voting public. For instance, each person may need to say "my vote is A,
then B, then C..", and then that is recorded. The second would be to
have a consensus step like I considered in my previous post, where the
proportional representation method is just advisory, and what really
counts is a supermajority vote for who'll go onwards. The second
wouldn't really be PR, though - or rather, it would only be so if the
councilmembers are all good negotiators.
2) It reduces the potential for confrontation that would be likely to
characterize 3-person groups. We can make the argument that, in the
selection of representatives, confrontation is a good thing. Seeing how
individuals react in tense situations gives us great insight into their
ability to represent our interests. We can also make the argument that
a pressure-cooker environment is hard on the participants.
This returns us to the subject of optimal council sizes. I already
talked about Parkinson's coefficient of inefficiency (that committees
degrade significantly above 20 members), but beyond that, I think the
only way to really know or to find answers to your questions - such as
whether confrontation is too intense at three, or if it's too slack at
nine - is to try it. People are people, so not everything can be derived
from models.
There is one thing I will add, though. If we have a very simple concept
of how people negotiate, where each have to know all the others to find
a good compromise, then the collective burden increases as the second
power of the number of members. (For n members, each has n-1 links, so
n*(n-1)). This means, for the simple model at least, that we pay more by
increasing the size from 10 to 17 than from 3 to 10.
3) Each participant's opportunity to evaluate each other participant is
reduced; they must evaluate 8 people in the allotted time instead of two.
That is true, it will either take more time, or be more noisy (if people
are forced to decide before they're fully ready). I don't think you can
avoid this; since the point is to find representatives of a broader
range of ideas, the people will also have to know more of that space or
range before they can decide.
4) There is a greater likelihood that, over an evaluation period of 1 to
4 weeks, the group members will tend to form cliques and will be
influenced by their compatriots instead of relying on their own judgment.
Such problems aren't limited to your method, but to organization of
larger groups in general. Various attempts at discouraging such have
been considered, like having some argue against what they really think
just to expose flaws. Since the councils are temporary (they just pick a
subgroup and then disband), the parallel isn't absolute, but perhaps
such methods could be used to counter these problems. It does make the
method more complex, though, and it seems hard to ensure that the
councils will be using those rules.
I suppose that the closest thing we have in reality (at this time) to
the make-one-decision-and-then-disband group is a jury. Juries are
comparatively large and the cases they attend may take time to run to
completion. On the other hand, juries only have to decide on a single
issue (guilty or not), whereas the councils has to find one answer among
many (which people are to continue to the next level).
Given that, one may then ask: do these artifacts happen among juries?
That is, if the comparison is good enough for the answer to be relevant.
It takes me such a long time to examine new concepts, I'd like to see
what objections are raised to both alternatives to be sure I've
considered all the possibilities.
On re-reading this, I see I haven't addressed your concern; the
propagation of minority sentiment. I'm not sure I can. My problem may
be that I don't see viewpoints as isolated entities. They are part of a
whole, but are not, in and of themselves, the whole. I do not believe
that, just because a viewpoint exists, it is entitled to a role in our
government. To be adopted, a viewpoint must be shown to have merit.
People of judgment will accept different viewpoints if they are
presented in a rational and compelling manner. I think the issues that
should concern us are the integrity and the judgment of the people we
ask to represent us. If we have people of good judgment, we need not
fear that a valid viewpoint will be ignored.
I think the fundamental uncertainty is whether the selected members can
be of sufficiently high quality to not distort opinions from self
interest, and whether they can be of sufficient breadth (capacity to
hold viewpoints) to retain minority ideas and not forget or shed them
later.
Here, you say that you think they can do both ("we need not fear that a
valid viewpoint will be ignored"). I'm not so sure, which leads me to
shift more of these tasks to the method itself; PR election of more than
one so that minority viewpoints don't lose from being at the wrong
council or too thinly spread, and consequent larger councils so that
there are more people to hold the viewpoints.
Ultimately, we don't know the quality of the people, and we don't know
the complexity required to determine who'll sit on the final council(s),
the latter being relevant regarding how many viewpoints a single person
can relate to or draw knowledge from when arguing. What I have is the
simulations that show majority turning to consensus, but those are of
stickmen (as you called them). We also have PR and non-PR parliaments in
the world today, where I think PR ones are better, but you could in turn
argue that partisanship makes the parliaments sufficiently different
that we can't argue based on their results.
I've tried to be neutral here, but I am not perfect, and so my
preference might have crept through. As always, consider that when
reading. Also, I have not covered the other objections against PR that
you mentioned; those are above.
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