On Jan 28, 2010, at 3:12 PM, Juho wrote:
On Jan 28, 2010, at 8:20 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
...
no, i think that if i can think up a negative number with greater
magnitude than anyone else, i should be able to single-handedly
scuttle a popular candidate.
Ok, you seem to think that one can not get rid of strategic voting
in typical (political I guess) elections.
i think there are ways of not encouraging strategic voting by not
punishing sincere voting. i'll defer to Arrow and the common wisdom
here that ultimately no system completely ditches strategic voting
under all conceivable conditions.
Is the sum of votes (or average) really what one wants or should
one aim at providing about equal results to all, or maybe try to
keep the worst results to individual voters as high as possible
(40,40,40 vs. 0,60,60)?
Would there still be electons where we would want to decide based
on majority and breadth of opposition, or should all elections
follow the "sum of utilities" pholosophy?
maybe if we changed it from "sum of utility" (which is just a
scaled version of "mean of utility") to "median of utility". that
might help prevent skewing by extremists that will plug their
candidate with 99 and every opponent with 0. but if people all do
that, Range becomes Plurality.
That would be a good approach in a situation where most voters are
sincere but we are afraid that some (small subset) of them might be
strategic.
i actually don't think it's so good. i was just trying to point out
one of the main problems i see with Range.
this is the strategy problem of Olympic judges (say of figure
skating or gymnastics or something with 8 judges holding up cards
rating the performance). there is a problem with adding sincere
ratings to insincere and exaggerated ratings. *especially* with a
secret ballot where no one needs to own up to and justify their
exaggerated rating.
In ski jumping the practice is that the highest and lowest score
will not be included in the sum of votes. This approach is
somewhere between mean and median. Maybe it has some benefits of
both. Judges come from different major ski jumping countries so
often one of the judges has a temptation to vote strategically.
Votes are public, so a strong bias will be visible.
and, again, my point is that with my secret ballot, and my suspicion
that political opponents may well be voting with exaggerated ratings,
that *i* would feel pressured to exaggerate *my* preferences and that
i might expect *any* savvy voter to do the same. then, if everyone
does that, the continuous gradation of Range loses its meaning.
My point is maybe that if we would get rid of the strategy
related problems we would be well off but we might then move
towards solving more detailed problems, performance with sincere
votes and other problems that are just noise today. On the other
hand we do have also (almost) strategy free environments/
elections/polls today,
Strategy free elections are typically non-political. For example if
I go to restaurant with some of my friends and we will vote what
kind of giant pizza to order (using Range) then the votes might be
sincere. One additional reason is that some of my friends might get
angry to me and leave if my strategic voting gets too obvious. In
politics the strength of this sincerity encouraging phenomenon is
btw quite different in different societies.
i think that we should expect political opponents to strategize on
how to defeat their opponents in any society.
with the exception of the strategy called "compromising". that
happens quite a bit when there are more than two candidates and
there are at least two candidates that go into the election nearly
evenly matched in pre-election polls.
it's amazing that anyone touts Range as the most strategy free.
the more handles one finds on a control device (think of the
ballot as such) or the more positions one can set the knobs to,
the more one has to strategize on how to control it to one's intent.
The basic Range strategy is unfortunately present in almost all
elections,
i don't see how it would be with a simple ranked-order ballot.
especially, if decided by Condorcet, you cannot exaggerate your
rankings. if you like A better than anyone and you like B better
than C, then there is nothing to be gained by any other ranking than
A>B>C. if you really hate C, you can rank a bunch of other
candidates you don't care about between B and C. but it doesn't
change how the election would work between the candidates A, B, and C.
available to almost all voters and is easy to apply (if we see
Range as a method where voters are supposed to give their sincere
(non-normalized or normalized) opinions).
and again, in a response i made long ago to Warren Smith, i think the
best system is one that assumes that, if there is anything to be
gained by voting strategically, that voters will be doing that, and
the best system would not predictably reward such strategic voting.
then there is nothing to gain by not voting sincerely.
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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