On 12/09/2012 07:25 PM, Richard Fobes wrote:
On 12/9/2012 9:12 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
> ...
> 2012/12/8 ⸘Ŭalabio‽ <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
> ...
> ¡That is so last week! I wish to find a way to merge
> Score-Voting and Majority-Judgement into something even better.
>
> In order to find something better, we would at least need to know what's
> wrong with what we have. There seems to be a lot of disagreement about
> that point; smart people can't agree on whether Score or MJ is better.
> So I think research is in order before we tear off and design 15 new
> systems.
As I see it:
* Advantage of Majority-Judgement (MJ): Makes it (relatively compared to
score and approval methods) more difficult to vote strategically.
* Advantage of score ballots: Collect the greatest amount of information
from the voter.
Combining those two advantages could yield a better method. I encourage
Ŭalabio to explore that possibility.
Yet I would recommend adding yet another advantage, namely the ability
to fully rank all the choices. As I've said before, credibility for the
correctness of the most popular choice is undermined if the method
cannot also identify the second-most popular choice, and so on down to
the least-popular choice.
You can fully grade every choice in MJ. It is true that this grading
does not provide a direct relative measure, but Balinski and Laraki
consider that to be an advantage. They say that if you base your method
upon comparisons between candidates (like ranking), then the method will
invariably fail IIA and be subject to Arrow's theorem, but if the method
is based on evaluation, then it may go beyond the limitations given by
Arrow's theorem.
It's a subtle distinction, but important to MJ. In MJ, you're not
supposed to say "do I like this candidate better than that one", but
rather "how good is this candidate, how good is that candidate, on the
scale provided to me with a common meaning to everybody voting".
In the experimental evidence paper whose link I gave to Ualabio, B&L
claim that the data from the exit polls show that the concept of
"favorite" is largely illusory and disappears under MJ. In particular,
the voters grade many candidates at the same highest grade on their
ballot, and the voters don't all make use of the greatest absolute grade
("Excellent").
If the voters feel evaluating in the manner above is a good approach,
then I think MJ is a method that works well. If, on the other hand,
making relative comparisons comes much more naturally to them, then some
sort of ranked method is the best approach (again in my opinion). In the
latter case, (if B&L are right,) we have to contend with IIA one way or
the other, so we might try to find a Pareto-optimal ranked (or
relatively rated) method.
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