I pointed out on SodaHead that the "thumbs-up" on the upper right of
each post was an example of Approval voting, and those who think
Approval is too complicated or undemocratic were free to restrict their
votes to a single post. :)
Mike
On 3/21/2012 6:09 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
What strikes me most about the comments is how many of them are
positively proud of their loudmouth know-nothingism. The same people
who think it's a liberal plot seem to enjoy showing off their
closed-mindedness. That is, they see it not as a rational argument,
but as a tribal counting-coup on those egghead liberals.
Finding better rational arguments is not going to change such people's
minds. I'm not really sure what would. It seems that they make up
their minds pretty quickly and reflexively. Now I know that such
blowhards are overrepresented on the internet, but the truth is they
tend to make more than their share of noise in any context, so it's
important to have some strategy to deal with them.
... Separately, I think your point about the demographics is a good
one. Obviously, the sample sizes are small and so basically none of it
is reliable (statistically significant), but still, it can give some
clues. As far as I can see states on that map which have the
most-significant (not largest) advantages for "Yes, approval" are New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, South Carolina, Oregon, and Florida.
Smaller states would be unlikely to show significance even if there
were an advantage, but the small New England states might be promising
too.
Jameson
2012/3/21 Kristofer Munsterhjelm <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
On 03/20/2012 01:51 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
I know that online polls are silly. But thousands of people
see them,
and if they see that the idea actually has support, some of
them will be
more open to consider if it has merit.
While the poll has comments of low quality, and the users seem to
be against Approval at the moment, I do think even those
low-quality comments can be useful.
Namely, they give us insight into the objections, fair or not, to
Approval itself. There are partisan arguments ("this is a liberal
plot to deny conservatives their voting power"), what can be done
about them? Can we point out places where conservatives are being
hurt by vote-splitting? Can we point at Ron Paul when responding
to a libertarian?
Then there are method centric arguments. Some are just confused
about what the thing means, as one can see by the "oh, and let the
voters vote for a single candidate many times" type of posts.
Others think it violates one-man one-vote. How can we clear that
up? Perhaps by rephrasing it in terms of thumbs-up/thumbs-down? If
each voter gets ten options to either do thumbs-up (approve) or
not (don't approve), then the voting power is the same for each.
Maybe that is a better phrasing than approve/not in any case, and
maybe it's a better format, too, because it clears up the
confusion between "haven't made a choice about X" (no approval)
and "have voted, but didn't like X" (also no approval).
And so on...
The demographics, if representative, may also give some idea as to
where it will be hard to sell. What kinds of people like Approval
the least? Why?
I do note that there are very few arguments about chicken dilemma
situations. If there are barriers to Approval being adopted, that
isn't it - at least not yet. Though one could of course say that
the reason nobody objects using the chicken dilemma is that they
haven't studied the thing enough to know there actually *is* a
chicken dilemma problem.
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