Re: [Election-Methods] Challenge: Elect the comprom ise when there're only 2 factions
Dear Abd ul-Rahman, No. It's an understanding of what utilities mean. If you think so... 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. That's more or less the point I try to make over and over again: A democratic decision system should not reproduce what would happen in an anarchic world such as you describe but should instead protect the weaker parts of society against the majority by giving them their just share of power instead of letting the majority always overrule them. 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. You still assume that their is a loss to the A voters. But that is just wrong: the A voters have no right to the election of A, it is not their property which they can loose. It is a very good deal for the B voters No, they would have to pay for a solution which I think they have a right to! 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 No. Why must I repeat over and over again that I don't believe in measurable utility. I interpret the numbers I gave in the example in the way I describes several times: as representing preferences over lotteries! The actual consequences of the election are irrelevant to him. What do you think you do here? Where did I say such a thing? The actual consequences should of course be that the obvious compromise solution C should be elected without anyone having to pay for it! But this is a democracy. What is the this you are referring to? Sure, one can imagine systems where majority rule is not sufficient for making decisions, I cannot imagine a system where majority rule *is* sufficient for making really *democratic* decisions. Contrary to what Jobst might assume, I have a lot of experience with consensus communities, both positive and negative. I don't assume anything about your experience and have never said so. But please keep in mind that consensus is a much different thing from majority rule. I should think my example makes this very clear: No consensus about A nor about B, only consensus about B being nearly as good! 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. Could you give any evidence for this fact? 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. Therefore I don't consider consensus as a parcticable idea in all situations. 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. You repeat this, but could you give evidence for this claim? 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. I gave a reasoning why C is the better solution than A. Commensurable utilities are nonsense in my opinion. Nice for use in models but no evidence for them. 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. So what unit will it be then if not money? Please be more precise, The assumption that Jobst easily makes, that the C option is more just, is based on an assumption of
Re: [Election-Methods] Elect the Compromise
At 01:07 AM 8/27/2007, rob brown wrote: On 8/26/07, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 02:59 AM 8/26/2007, rob brown wrote: Vote trading generally means the ballots can't be secret, so elections would be inherently corruptible by anyone with money. This is commonly assumed. But it probably is not true. First of all, the ballots don't have to be personally identified, all that is necessary is that the winner be known. Ok, so here you seem to be saying that, it is not necessary to keep ballots secret to prevent buying an election No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that one can buy an election with secret ballots, in fact. It can be done now, there are legal ways to do it. But what you can't do is to buy it *in a corrupt manner* with secret ballots. You have to do it openly. The vote trading mentioned would involve a payment or performance of whatever is agreed upon based on the *result* of the election, not on any specific vote. And, of course, this makes it fair. If expensive. However, given the conditions we were working on, *this kind of fair vote trading or buying would be affordable. *By definition.* The value is there, there are large numbers of voters who presumably see that value -- that's what the ratings must mean if they are other than word salad -- and so it is merely a matter of organizing them to make the offer, and of letting the other side know. And of course, it would be best to *negotiate* the deal, so that you aren't just wasting your time. This is why I'm so interested in Free Associations with Delegable Proxy. They could pull off this kind of trick. It could radically transform politics. And the kicker is that it would work with Plurality. You don't need Range do do it. But you would get Range results, or even better (i.e., the compensatory payments or agreements would more evenly distribute the benefit of social utility maximization). If I'm agreeing to pay $X if A wins, I'm paying for a result, not for a vote. Who do I pay it to? That's a good question, isn't it? Well, the answer is simple...you don't. It doesn't work. You've just shown why, counter to what you suggested above, buying large elections is near impossible when the ballots are secret. No, it's not only not impossible, it is done all the time! But we don't think of it as vote buying. We think of it as convincing the public that something good will happen if they vote a certain way. Shall the Town approve the big shopping center? The developers not only promise jobs and the like, they also offer to fund certain town projects. It moves the voters to approve the project, perhaps. If the measure doesn't pass, they don't fund the project. Simple. Obviously, in a non-secret ballot election, you would pay individuals to vote for your candidate, not pay all of the voters for the final result. *This* only works if your payments are secret. If they are public, it can quite easily backfire, and you end up paying out what you promised -- or defaulting -- and getting nothing. Private payments are graft and corruption. The kind of payments I'm suggesting could be looked at -- and which are legal *now* without changes in law -- would be public, or at least not secret or hidden, nor would they be payments for a vote, as such, but for a result. (And I use payments as a convenient term, here, to cover any kind of compensation.) Private payments in close elections can shift the result toward something desired by the payer, often utilizing the votes of people who would not even bother voting without the payment. The vast majority of voters get nothing. But in this case, if we suppose the initial conditions described, the A voters could, for example, agree to accept a payment from the B voters, collectively. The B voters can afford it! (Unless they are collectively impoverished and not merely somewhat so, seriously so. They receive four times the benefit of the choice of C as do the A voters. There's a lot of room for disparity in ability to pay there. And, indeed, next time it might be other voters paying *them*. Generally, we would be talking about such large numbers of voters that single individuals with great wealth could make a dent, but not dominate. As the old saying goes, God must love the poor because he made so many of them. The poor, collectively, are not all that poor. Consider some of the most impoverished third-world countries in the world, with corrupt leaders extracting great wealth from them. They have to have it for him to extract it! If they could pool their resources, if that were practical, they could outspend him. But they don't have the tools, so they are isolated and thus effectively powerless, except for unintelligent mass movements that are more like riots.) It is up to you to calculate whether or not your payments to individuals would be likely enough to get your candidate elected
