MOD PARENT UP -- golden rule vulnerability patch
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Ethics In IT
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· Score: 1
That's my standard reply to Christian Ethicists -- they got it wrong and it should be how they want to be treated that is important, not how you would want to be treated if you were them. I applaud you on your perfect use of this retort while enlightening the hordes of slashdot.
Yeah, rocket science, the Democratic Party did it! I guess they've finally caught up with the Libertarians and Greens that have been doing this stuff for years.
Seth Woolley Pacific Green Party of Oregon Parliamentarian and past Elections Administrator
In Plurality, you vote for somebody, and the more electable guy loses, and that's who you would have ranked second! Plurality lacks that information, and thus it's unable to convey a vote that would have ended up for the more electable person.
Absolutely right.
That's a non-monotonic property if you convert a rank to just a plurality vote.
Uhh... it's certainly some kind of property, but 'monotonicity' specifically means that what you _do_ put down on the ballot paper can only positively affect your chosen candidate, never hurt them. It doesn't cover what you would have liked to express but couldn't.
We both know that no electoral system can have all the properties you might want (Arrow's incompleteness theorem). Whether monotonicity is less important than 'representativeness' is a matter of opinion. You would however need to mathematically define what you mean by 'representative', since the word means many different things to different people.
Often there's an implicit assumption that 'representative' means 'proportionally representative of first-choice votes cast'. So if 10% of voters pick the green party as their first choice then greens should win roughly 10% of seats. Of course, this ignores second and lower preferences; perhaps the other 90% of voters all put green as their second choice and so the greens deserve to win more than 10%.
A repeat of Condorcet among 100 seats would ensure 100 "general support" candidates get elected, with nobody ensured to represent ANY minority.
For 100 single-seat constituencies this might happen. You can mitigate it a little by having larger, multi-seat constituencies. You seem to be ignoring my main point that representativeness is precisely what people desire out of a multi-seat election and monotonicity is desirable in a single-seat election.
You also seem to think that Condorcet will work well by having a larger, multi-seat constituency. How exactly does Condorcet tell different constituencies apart so as to ensure representative distribution as opposed to the "general malaise" candidate? The guy nobody knows enough about to hate yet. The truth is that it's designed precisely for the single-seat case. It simply can't be generalized to a higher number of seats unless you allow people to rank entire sets of people together, and that quickly leads to a huge jump in algorithmic complexity and ballot size. Voting in multi-seat elections Condorcet style turns out to be an intractable problem.
PR-STV solves the problem with a heuristic: that the first place votes applied to a majority is a reasonable way to ensure that each most important minority gets represented so long as it pushes a candidate. If everybody thinks saving the dolphins is not on the road to their number one spot, but everybody would agree to saving the dolphins, but not importantly, what are we to do?
initiative petitions to enable direct democracy, where the people get to select their own topics, and the people get to make law.
I think the worse sin is the fact that they are measuring amount of carbon. That's simply not complete. They should be measuring the difficulty of replacing the carbon it's supposed to offset and then investing directly in some technology that's supposed to do that.
Buying wind power that's unusable to power an airplane means that. Donating to (not just investing in a company) that will actually promise to develop and give away a technology that enables airplanes to fly for the same miles you flew. Now that would be equal.
Carbon credit buyers are merely trying to use the "amount of carbon" as a proxy for guilt. I'm sorry, but that's not an accurate proxy. Try again.
It's not clear-cut that IRV is better than plurality. One property we would like from voting systems is monotonicity. That is, if you vote for a candidate that makes them more likely to win, or at least it doesn't make them more likely to lose. But in IRV and STV, giving more votes to a candidate can cause them to lose!
At least plurality doesn't have that problem. You vote for someone, they get more votes, they are more likely to win. Approval voting is also monotone and simpler than IRV.
(There are some simulations of this linked from the Wikipedia page 'Instant-runoff voting controversies'.) In Plurality, you vote for somebody, and the more electable guy loses, and that's who you would have ranked second! Plurality lacks that information, and thus it's unable to convey a vote that would have ended up for the more electable person. That's a non-monotonic property if you convert a rank to just a plurality vote. You _would_ have voted for them in a runoff vote, but simply never were able to! Unlike the contrived examples given against IRV, this affects Plurality all the time. Monotonicity is a meaningless criterion. IRV does ensure higher-placed votes are required compared to more monotonic systems. This is what IRV supporters call "core support", and it's precisely what makes PR-STV porportionally representative of classes of people based on pure ranking (keeping parties out of the system).
That's essentially the summary of the "monotonicity is disputed" arguments: depending on what you want out of the system, notably representativeness, monotonicity is a meaningless criterion.
I think monotonicity is important for single-seat elections, and thus prefer methods like Condorcet, however, for multiple seats, representativeness is the desire, not monotonicity. Monotonicity would ensure a lack of representativeness of a multi-seat system. A repeat of Condorcet among 100 seats would ensure 100 "general support" candidates get elected, with nobody ensured to represent ANY minority.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1
My blog tool stores itself in text in a format/markup that looks presentable as raw text, but then prettifies it into xhtml for the web. It displays the latest blog post via finger, even. http://swoolley.org/blog.cgi?get=src. It's text editor friendly and I have a shell script http://swoolley.org/files/editblog I use for doing the actual posting, although I never really bothered finishing it because it was so easy to use. To me, the best content-management or source-code-management system is ssh, a versioned filesystem, screen, and kibitz, unless the project is huge, in which case, probably git.
For a PR system, do you have a better solution? party-list has the same type of issues -- if twenty fringe parties break off of a major party and are all unable to get a single vote in, but are enough to splinter off enough votes for 9 candidates from that party, then you really don't get what you want.
I love PR systems for how truly representative they are, but what would you have replace it? MOEP, STV, party-list, etc., all have similar flaws, and they have to do with how many seats there are. The more seats, the more accurate it can be. That's just nature. You'll always end up with SOME aliasing artifacts.
Any range voting system rapidly collapses into first-past-the-post, once voters realize that the best way to influence the result in their favour is to give all their votes to one candidate. You need to find a system that not only _lets_ voters express their different preferences among the candidates, but _rewards_ them for doing that. Range voting tends to punish you if you try to play fair and share your votes among candidates.
But if you do vote that way, then it's possible that a dark horse candidate that you really, really don't want could come back and bite you in the ass because, well, you really did like the other guy better. By not giving a proper amount to everybody, the system is unable to work in your own interest. How is that not punishment? Furthermore, if this punishment weren't enough, why would I want to share my votes among candidates? I really don't like them. If everybody decides to _try_ to game it, they have to game it together, and at that point, they're not really able to game it, since their power is limited to the high amount in the range.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 4, Funny
Amen, brother. That's why I like to use sed and shell echos, pipes, and redirects to do my word processing. See ? I'm not the only one who doesn't like ed ! But I use sed only because the installed base is much higher compared to ed and document portability is critical in my line of work.
Since all of Arrow's criteria are also immediate criteria derivable from the results only...
But they go way beyond just summing up the utilities and saying "the one with the maximum is the best". That is my complaint about the whole Baysian regret thing.
I'll give you one thing, you acknowledge it is opinion that Baysian regret is the end all and be all. Most of the range voting people do not, they insist it, and if you disagree, you are wrong. They will go so far as to say that if you say that you don't want range voting, you are a liar. Seriously, they say this. Crazy.
If you want to take into account long-term, downstream consequences, please find a way to read into the future of the results.
Well, take a look at Duverger's law. A plurality system will result in two party domination. That is a predictable downstream consequence of a voting method. I totally agree, and my main beef with plurality is based on Duverger's law. After all, the ends are just as important than the means.
My point, and the reason for my example, is that in related fields (economics and game theory), there is a ton of applicable theory. The main one being that the more a system puts people in conflict between what is best for society, and what is best for one's self, the worse that system acheives long term "utility" i.e. happiness for all. That's why they pay the engineer more...to provide incentive to go to school and work real hard to learn a skilled profession. Long term it makes sense, even if the short term result is "less utility".
Range voting people (and I assure you, I know their arguments inside and out from the election methods mailing list) seem to ignore this basic concept. They hate condorcet systems, while ignoring the fact that any Nash equilibrium of Range voting is effectively condorcet. But if it takes equilibrium to get there, wouldn't you want the system that is both long-term and short-term better in most cases?
I don't really see why condorcet systems and range voting systems both have ardent defenders of everything holy. IRV has it too.
Personally, IRV is really bad for single seat elections. It tends to select the most polarized majority candidate that barely scratches the majority threshold. STV for multi-seats at least uses that very artifact expanded to many seats to ensure proportional representation, which is one reason I really like PR-STV.
Yet, I see IRV in the US only advocated for single-seat elections. Huh?
For a single-seat election, I'd be fine with either Condorcet or Score voting. Condorcet is in my mind the best rank voting system for single seat elections (such as president or a single-seat executive). Expand to more than one seat, and you really shouldn't be using Condorcet, or you eliminate all minority opinion.
And as I say, the reasons I give are subjective (do we even want to preserve minority rights?) Election methods are a highly politicized topics, and any voting method will change results. We MUST remember that. Election outcomes (other than campaigning) don't just begin on election day, they begin with how the votes will be counted!
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 4, Funny
Amen, brother. That's why I like to use sed and shell echos, pipes, and redirects to do my word processing.
Bayesian regret is a term they invented to disguise that they toss away the concept of "fairness" and replace it with "maximum short term happiness with results only". Since all of Arrow's criteria are also immediate criteria derivable from the results only, a real comparison is "Arrow's ideas of fairness" of results and "maximum average happiness" of results. Maximum average happiness is a conception of fairness to the authors of the paper, just as Arrow contributed four different criteria he thought all should be met. Not everybody agrees with Arrow's theorem, and Bayesian regret does measure something more directly than Arrow's often arbitrary criteria. It's a valid argument to make that Bayesian regret is thus better than Arrow's concept of fairness. Whether or not that's true or not is a personal judgement, but at least it's a point that's legitimate.
Which is broken, in so many ways. If is like saying that it is better to pay the janitor the same as the chief engineer, because that will create more happiness than paying the engineer more. Of course it doesn't take into account the long term, downstream consequences. If you want to take into account long-term, downstream consequences, please find a way to read into the future of the results. Arrow's not figured out a way to do it, and neither has anybody else.
The paper referred in the article is next to worthless, too. It goes to great lengths to say that "range voting is the best, because it represents the voters' wishes the best".
Except, they assume that people will agree to throw away their vote just because they're don't agree with one side entirely. Range voting is nothing but approval voting with a possibility of casting only a fraction of a vote. This is what the paper refers to as "strategic range voting".
The whole reasoning is busted, because it assumes people will agree to waste most of their vote just to make someone else more happy. WTF? Rational people vote the way which gives the best chance of getting results _they_ want.
The paper also compares range voting to systems which are pretty bad but have been used historically, disregarding serious contenders like Condorcet. fractional voting doesn't screw anybody's vote up. It just allows you to better express your preferences, which, despite what you say, gets the results that they want.
Let's say there are three people running, A, B, and C.
You don't mind B(6) and C(10), but you hate A(0).
They don't mind A(10) and B(6), but they hate C(0).
B wins with A(10),B(12),C(10) as the final tally.
That election couldn't have been done with binary voting, and everybody wins.
If it were binary, B would have won as well, but in a more complicated case, let's say B got rated 4 by both parties. In range voting, the contest would be between A and C. B wasn't good enough for either of them to even be considered. Yes, in this extremely small case, one loses out more, but at least, neither would be forced to vote for the lesser of two evils. The lesser of two evils has to at least be good enough to get past a certain point in the range, which is a pretty effective improvement over regular approval voting not least horrible plurality voting.
The point of the paper is that the assertion that everybody wins is accurately modeled by this calculation, and they use Bayesian regret in support. If you disagree with it, then point out why, but your reasoning here doesn't make any sense.
Does that whole summary reek of smug? Or is that troll that I smell?
The number of links in the summary should give you a tip. Plenty of theories, most of them without real proof.
No voting system will be perfect while we keep voting for people instead of issues. Instead of inventing ever more complicated systems for choosing representatives, why not develop a system where every person is allowed to give an opinion on the law articles themselves?
I provided all those links for a reason. Not the point you are trying to make...
But, you do bring up a valid point, however such a system does exist: The Green Party's system of "modified consensus process". It's quite complicated and can make issues drag on for a while, but the modifications allow the consensus process to fall back once all dissenting comments have been heard. It also requires facilitation to integrate compromise proposals so that real consensus can often be reached without polarizing a majority vs a minority. In modified consensus, the majority still is able to win (depending on the election threshold the particular group uses as its modified fallback percentage), but the minority will get heard and allow the process to drag on until all their issues are out in the open. I'm the appointed Parliamentarian for the Oregon Pacific Green Party, and this is the process we use.
Also, ballot measure initiatives are very popular in the Pacific Northwest (where I live, if you didn't know where Oregon was, exactly). Anybody can bypass the legislature completely for either statutory or constitutional measures (but the courts can still declare them unconstitutional, as has happened frequently). Assisted suicide and medical marijuana legalizatoin in Oregon, for example, came about through the initiative process. However, there are still the majority of cases that can be resolved by professional representatives. The major problem with direct democracy is that it can take a lot of time. Sometimes it's effective to not use direct democracy for everything. It's still important to have direct democracy as a fallback in case the legislature abrogates its responsibilities.
Depending on the circumstances, either of those two methods would work well. The first in small groups, and the second in much larger groups.
It's not a dupe. The article is new, the article talks about voting methods not considered in the article you think it's a dupe of.
Since I submitted the article, I'd like to clarify some things as well.
1) I didn't make the headline, but I did lead it on with my last sentence. Plurality voting is fundamentally a western concept. That some parts of the west have moved on doesn't mean that it's not western.
2) The article doesn't discuss multi-seat/plurality elections. Range voting doesn't work well for proportional representation compared to single-transferable-voting, for example, or even the method-of-equal-proportions. The context of its discussion is in single-seat elections. I actually think Condorcet voting works better than IRV for single seat elections, but for multi-seat elections, I prefer STV (the general, multi-seat method for IRV) because STV distributes minority opinions better. I'm not a big fan of party-list elections, because it's less direct than STV, but I think even that's better than plurality voting. In the US, the Congressional House of Representatives is primarily a regional-based Proportional Representation, so it IS a form of PR, but regional PR is not very effective at representing broadly held minority opinions.
3) Since Range Voting hasn't been supported by as many as IRV or Condorcet, I thought it was good to promote it in a submission to slashdot for discussion. We should consider whatever method works best for the situation at-hand. In terms of Bayesian Regret, Range Voting looks interesting, so I thought it had something going for it beyond the typical Arrow's Theorem cluster of discussions that dominated discussion of the other methods.
If we consider the algorithm to include inefficient memory allocations, then that also changes whether or not the algorithm can be considered P (i think you meant P, not N) or NP, so the changed algorithm cannot be used to prove P=NP, since if it would, they'd both be NP, and neither one would be P.
It's like a computer scientists claiming their new algorithm is always superior as it runs in O(n) times compared to O(n^2) but not realizing that his memory usage is O(n^5) compared to O(n).
Um, no. If mem usage is O(n^5), by definition, the algorithm runs in no better than O(n^5) time. I tried thinking about this with a thought experiment. Allocating a block of N size can be done in near-constant (often log N) time. Memory usage doesn't imply that all allocated memory be copied into.
An efficiently-allocating algorithm that was also an efficient user of its resource allocation would have its operation complexity constrained by its memory-use complexity, but that's an assumption on top of the definition of big-oh complexity. There was a point to be made, and you got close, but I think you just muddied up the waters.
In fact, I ran into such code today where allocations were out of line with necessary complexity, although it was merely off by an unreasonably large constant factor, not polynomially off. Such a situation would be rare.
DRM can be implemented in ANY operating system with or without cooperation from the authors of the OS But on an OS to which I have the code, I can dump any data that flows to my video or sound card and reencode it as I wish, rendering the DRM useless. If everyone used such open source OS systems, companies would not bother implementing DRM. Not if the hardware is doing the decrypting in-silicon. "Trusted Computing" -- that is, you used to be able to trust your computer.
Having an open algorithm is good, as non-disclosure isn't security, but the issue is allowing people to rank searches and such. Having that public is asking for people to abuse the system, and as noted before, a lot of malicious parties could seemingly legitimately rank their sites (porn sites, etc) higher, leading to ranking battles by bots. Of course, the issue of vandalism occurs with Wikipedia, however when people are looking to make money off of it they'll likely be more persistent. With the criteria publicly accessible, yes, porn sites may be able to try to game it, but all the somewhat large producers will also be able to game it as well. Any engine with a flaw that allows it to be "gamed" is not a robust engine at all. If anybody spends a few weeks on the problem they can investigate any system and reverse-engineer it. Google is no different in this regard. A lot of what you don't realize is that a lot of google's processes are actually very manual. What do you think they are doing with all those employees, having them code? I think not, otherwise we'd see a lot more out of Google. They are actually doing a lot of manual tweaking to the most common results, as you can see by looking at their continual problem with getting spammed. Nowadays it's particularly bad in their sponsored links, probably because they haven't figured out a way to filter out the spammers from their advertising subsystem yet. I guess it's hard to tell the difference between good spam and bad spam though, as all the sponsored links are unsolicited and commercial unless they actually show up in the results listing, too.
The truth is that if they published it, somebody could make an improvement to it and make a better one. Pagerank is actually a very simple algorithm in and of itself. All the rest of the Google query interface is lots of evolved fine-tuning. Additionally, there isn't that much information you can request through the Google API that is geared toward a particular field or semantic structure. Intelligence can't be encapsulated into a boolean manifold. You can't ask Google, for example, "given my entire set of financial purchases and my desired outcomes, where should I be investing?" You PAY somebody else to do that for you. Now if you just want some dirty unfiltered info on a topic, you can Google, and you'll likely just get the Wikipedia page as the first hit. I usually just go straight to Wikipedia instead of Google. For more detail, usually Google is just good for finding a good specialist site and then using them, like dpreview.com for digital photography. Google isn't quite there for scientific or journalistic research either. Paid searches are always more fruitful. I guess Google just isn't doing well.
In fact, the whole Knol thing seems redundant since Citizendium seems to be doing a system that'll be more effective.
Let's see, mail, mapping, videos, too, they aren't dominating the market like they should be doing. Youtube videos are still low quality, and google native video's service is even better. But now myspace even has video hosting. People are learning how to publish videos on their own, without youtube. Things aren't looking all that good for Google lately. Even for news, you can get much better results out of indymedia.org, reuters.com, ap.org directly. All the aggregation at google news is just reworked wire feeds anyways. They just display the echo chamber.
From the RIAA threads we learn people don't want to pay as endusers for their content. Great post, except this part doesn't make any sense. I pay as an end user for content all the time, and not just for high-end data: Magazine subscriptions, membership in various societies (and their publications), newspapers, my ISP, government funding (I pay through taxes), direct donations to non-profits, contributions to wikipedia and other open content systems directly. While some of them are for high-end data, a lot of it is not.
Is content going to ever be totally free? It will be if people understand the inherent rewards of an open society. Information's negligible cost of duplication is the revolutionary model is the thing that is shattering the old models (c.f. http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/EconomyOfIdeas.html). Wikipedia is already doing that. As much as I'm a critic of Jimmy Wales, citizendium, etc. (with their NPOV lunacy), the system he's helped build is saving people's lives and improving quality of life in ways the old world just doesn't understand yet.
Personally, I'm hopeful that as long as we still have the Right to Read (c.f. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html), we're on the path to freedom and salvation. A corporation who makes up a new "model" to take advantage of content producers isn't going to take hold anymore. There's just not a point anymore. The price of content is already quite low for common knowledge. Even if the arbiters of knowledge try to keep it from common knowledge, we can paraphrase it. The greatest risk to real productive use of our knowledge still remains Patents. Information may finally be free, but the freedom to tinker is not.
I know/.'ers hate it when people reply and just say "yeah, I agree!"
But, all I gotta say to this is, I wish I were this brave (I'm just a lowly boycotter). If you can get away with it, more power to you!
My wife wants me to steal music for her so she can figure out what to buy, (although she bought ten times more CDs than I have). I have been reluctant to help (I have static IPs at home that would be easy to trace and don't have the time to spend time keeping updated a TOR router).
Should I spend the effort to help her out?
(here's the quoted post, just to show my agreement and pull it out of the anonymous coward bins of most people:)
I don't care if they call it stealing or what it really is. copyright enfringment.
I'm still going to STEAL every damm song i want. And never ever buy another ANYTHING they sell.
ever.
and i will continue to help other people STEAL music.
I dont care what they say. be it that it's wrong, illegal, immoral. ect. I still havent been busted for price fixing and i dont screw the artists out of cash no matter what they claim. the music mafia still has a lock on being that immoral, illegal, and wrong.
fuck em. they can never get me back as a customer. ever. i want to see them all broke and have to get real jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
That's my standard reply to Christian Ethicists -- they got it wrong and it should be how they want to be treated that is important, not how you would want to be treated if you were them. I applaud you on your perfect use of this retort while enlightening the hordes of slashdot.
Yeah, rocket science, the Democratic Party did it! I guess they've finally caught up with the Libertarians and Greens that have been doing this stuff for years.
Seth Woolley
Pacific Green Party of Oregon Parliamentarian and past Elections Administrator
Come on guys, didn't you notice this one a couple days ago?
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/09/0027229
We both know that no electoral system can have all the properties you might want (Arrow's incompleteness theorem). Whether monotonicity is less important than 'representativeness' is a matter of opinion. You would however need to mathematically define what you mean by 'representative', since the word means many different things to different people.
Often there's an implicit assumption that 'representative' means 'proportionally representative of first-choice votes cast'. So if 10% of voters pick the green party as their first choice then greens should win roughly 10% of seats. Of course, this ignores second and lower preferences; perhaps the other 90% of voters all put green as their second choice and so the greens deserve to win more than 10%.For 100 single-seat constituencies this might happen. You can mitigate it a little by having larger, multi-seat constituencies. You seem to be ignoring my main point that representativeness is precisely what people desire out of a multi-seat election and monotonicity is desirable in a single-seat election.
You also seem to think that Condorcet will work well by having a larger, multi-seat constituency. How exactly does Condorcet tell different constituencies apart so as to ensure representative distribution as opposed to the "general malaise" candidate? The guy nobody knows enough about to hate yet. The truth is that it's designed precisely for the single-seat case. It simply can't be generalized to a higher number of seats unless you allow people to rank entire sets of people together, and that quickly leads to a huge jump in algorithmic complexity and ballot size. Voting in multi-seat elections Condorcet style turns out to be an intractable problem.
PR-STV solves the problem with a heuristic: that the first place votes applied to a majority is a reasonable way to ensure that each most important minority gets represented so long as it pushes a candidate. If everybody thinks saving the dolphins is not on the road to their number one spot, but everybody would agree to saving the dolphins, but not importantly, what are we to do?
initiative petitions to enable direct democracy, where the people get to select their own topics, and the people get to make law.
I agree, but I'd go a bit further.
I think the worse sin is the fact that they are measuring amount of carbon. That's simply not complete. They should be measuring the difficulty of replacing the carbon it's supposed to offset and then investing directly in some technology that's supposed to do that.
Buying wind power that's unusable to power an airplane means that. Donating to (not just investing in a company) that will actually promise to develop and give away a technology that enables airplanes to fly for the same miles you flew. Now that would be equal.
Carbon credit buyers are merely trying to use the "amount of carbon" as a proxy for guilt. I'm sorry, but that's not an accurate proxy. Try again.
Seth
At least plurality doesn't have that problem. You vote for someone, they get more votes, they are more likely to win. Approval voting is also monotone and simpler than IRV.
(There are some simulations of this linked from the Wikipedia page 'Instant-runoff voting controversies'.) In Plurality, you vote for somebody, and the more electable guy loses, and that's who you would have ranked second! Plurality lacks that information, and thus it's unable to convey a vote that would have ended up for the more electable person. That's a non-monotonic property if you convert a rank to just a plurality vote. You _would_ have voted for them in a runoff vote, but simply never were able to! Unlike the contrived examples given against IRV, this affects Plurality all the time. Monotonicity is a meaningless criterion. IRV does ensure higher-placed votes are required compared to more monotonic systems. This is what IRV supporters call "core support", and it's precisely what makes PR-STV porportionally representative of classes of people based on pure ranking (keeping parties out of the system).
That's essentially the summary of the "monotonicity is disputed" arguments: depending on what you want out of the system, notably representativeness, monotonicity is a meaningless criterion.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0554(199106)85%3A2%3C531%3AMIES%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage
I think monotonicity is important for single-seat elections, and thus prefer methods like Condorcet, however, for multiple seats, representativeness is the desire, not monotonicity. Monotonicity would ensure a lack of representativeness of a multi-seat system. A repeat of Condorcet among 100 seats would ensure 100 "general support" candidates get elected, with nobody ensured to represent ANY minority.
method of equal proportions, as on my website:
http://swoolley.org/files/moep.pl
My blog tool stores itself in text in a format/markup that looks presentable as raw text, but then prettifies it into xhtml for the web. It displays the latest blog post via finger, even. http://swoolley.org/blog.cgi?get=src. It's text editor friendly and I have a shell script http://swoolley.org/files/editblog I use for doing the actual posting, although I never really bothered finishing it because it was so easy to use. To me, the best content-management or source-code-management system is ssh, a versioned filesystem, screen, and kibitz, unless the project is huge, in which case, probably git.
For a PR system, do you have a better solution? party-list has the same type of issues -- if twenty fringe parties break off of a major party and are all unable to get a single vote in, but are enough to splinter off enough votes for 9 candidates from that party, then you really don't get what you want.
I love PR systems for how truly representative they are, but what would you have replace it? MOEP, STV, party-list, etc., all have similar flaws, and they have to do with how many seats there are. The more seats, the more accurate it can be. That's just nature. You'll always end up with SOME aliasing artifacts.
Any range voting system rapidly collapses into first-past-the-post, once voters realize that the best way to influence the result in their favour is to give all their votes to one candidate. You need to find a system that not only _lets_ voters express their different preferences among the candidates, but _rewards_ them for doing that. Range voting tends to punish you if you try to play fair and share your votes among candidates.
But if you do vote that way, then it's possible that a dark horse candidate that you really, really don't want could come back and bite you in the ass because, well, you really did like the other guy better. By not giving a proper amount to everybody, the system is unable to work in your own interest. How is that not punishment? Furthermore, if this punishment weren't enough, why would I want to share my votes among candidates? I really don't like them. If everybody decides to _try_ to game it, they have to game it together, and at that point, they're not really able to game it, since their power is limited to the high amount in the range.I'll give you one thing, you acknowledge it is opinion that Baysian regret is the end all and be all. Most of the range voting people do not, they insist it, and if you disagree, you are wrong. They will go so far as to say that if you say that you don't want range voting, you are a liar. Seriously, they say this. Crazy.Well, take a look at Duverger's law. A plurality system will result in two party domination. That is a predictable downstream consequence of a voting method. I totally agree, and my main beef with plurality is based on Duverger's law. After all, the ends are just as important than the means. My point, and the reason for my example, is that in related fields (economics and game theory), there is a ton of applicable theory. The main one being that the more a system puts people in conflict between what is best for society, and what is best for one's self, the worse that system acheives long term "utility" i.e. happiness for all. That's why they pay the engineer more...to provide incentive to go to school and work real hard to learn a skilled profession. Long term it makes sense, even if the short term result is "less utility".
Range voting people (and I assure you, I know their arguments inside and out from the election methods mailing list) seem to ignore this basic concept. They hate condorcet systems, while ignoring the fact that any Nash equilibrium of Range voting is effectively condorcet. But if it takes equilibrium to get there, wouldn't you want the system that is both long-term and short-term better in most cases?
I don't really see why condorcet systems and range voting systems both have ardent defenders of everything holy. IRV has it too.
Personally, IRV is really bad for single seat elections. It tends to select the most polarized majority candidate that barely scratches the majority threshold. STV for multi-seats at least uses that very artifact expanded to many seats to ensure proportional representation, which is one reason I really like PR-STV.
Yet, I see IRV in the US only advocated for single-seat elections. Huh?
For a single-seat election, I'd be fine with either Condorcet or Score voting. Condorcet is in my mind the best rank voting system for single seat elections (such as president or a single-seat executive). Expand to more than one seat, and you really shouldn't be using Condorcet, or you eliminate all minority opinion.
And as I say, the reasons I give are subjective (do we even want to preserve minority rights?) Election methods are a highly politicized topics, and any voting method will change results. We MUST remember that. Election outcomes (other than campaigning) don't just begin on election day, they begin with how the votes will be counted!
Amen, brother. That's why I like to use sed and shell echos, pipes, and redirects to do my word processing.
Except, they assume that people will agree to throw away their vote just because they're don't agree with one side entirely. Range voting is nothing but approval voting with a possibility of casting only a fraction of a vote. This is what the paper refers to as "strategic range voting".
The whole reasoning is busted, because it assumes people will agree to waste most of their vote just to make someone else more happy. WTF? Rational people vote the way which gives the best chance of getting results _they_ want.
The paper also compares range voting to systems which are pretty bad but have been used historically, disregarding serious contenders like Condorcet. fractional voting doesn't screw anybody's vote up. It just allows you to better express your preferences, which, despite what you say, gets the results that they want.
Let's say there are three people running, A, B, and C.
You don't mind B(6) and C(10), but you hate A(0).
They don't mind A(10) and B(6), but they hate C(0).
B wins with A(10),B(12),C(10) as the final tally.
That election couldn't have been done with binary voting, and everybody wins.
If it were binary, B would have won as well, but in a more complicated case, let's say B got rated 4 by both parties. In range voting, the contest would be between A and C. B wasn't good enough for either of them to even be considered. Yes, in this extremely small case, one loses out more, but at least, neither would be forced to vote for the lesser of two evils. The lesser of two evils has to at least be good enough to get past a certain point in the range, which is a pretty effective improvement over regular approval voting not least horrible plurality voting.
The point of the paper is that the assertion that everybody wins is accurately modeled by this calculation, and they use Bayesian regret in support. If you disagree with it, then point out why, but your reasoning here doesn't make any sense.
The number of links in the summary should give you a tip. Plenty of theories, most of them without real proof.
I provided all those links for a reason. Not the point you are trying to make...No voting system will be perfect while we keep voting for people instead of issues. Instead of inventing ever more complicated systems for choosing representatives, why not develop a system where every person is allowed to give an opinion on the law articles themselves?
But, you do bring up a valid point, however such a system does exist: The Green Party's system of "modified consensus process". It's quite complicated and can make issues drag on for a while, but the modifications allow the consensus process to fall back once all dissenting comments have been heard. It also requires facilitation to integrate compromise proposals so that real consensus can often be reached without polarizing a majority vs a minority. In modified consensus, the majority still is able to win (depending on the election threshold the particular group uses as its modified fallback percentage), but the minority will get heard and allow the process to drag on until all their issues are out in the open. I'm the appointed Parliamentarian for the Oregon Pacific Green Party, and this is the process we use.
Also, ballot measure initiatives are very popular in the Pacific Northwest (where I live, if you didn't know where Oregon was, exactly). Anybody can bypass the legislature completely for either statutory or constitutional measures (but the courts can still declare them unconstitutional, as has happened frequently). Assisted suicide and medical marijuana legalizatoin in Oregon, for example, came about through the initiative process. However, there are still the majority of cases that can be resolved by professional representatives. The major problem with direct democracy is that it can take a lot of time. Sometimes it's effective to not use direct democracy for everything. It's still important to have direct democracy as a fallback in case the legislature abrogates its responsibilities.
Depending on the circumstances, either of those two methods would work well. The first in small groups, and the second in much larger groups.
It's not a dupe. The article is new, the article talks about voting methods not considered in the article you think it's a dupe of.
Since I submitted the article, I'd like to clarify some things as well.
1) I didn't make the headline, but I did lead it on with my last sentence. Plurality voting is fundamentally a western concept. That some parts of the west have moved on doesn't mean that it's not western.
2) The article doesn't discuss multi-seat/plurality elections. Range voting doesn't work well for proportional representation compared to single-transferable-voting, for example, or even the method-of-equal-proportions. The context of its discussion is in single-seat elections. I actually think Condorcet voting works better than IRV for single seat elections, but for multi-seat elections, I prefer STV (the general, multi-seat method for IRV) because STV distributes minority opinions better. I'm not a big fan of party-list elections, because it's less direct than STV, but I think even that's better than plurality voting. In the US, the Congressional House of Representatives is primarily a regional-based Proportional Representation, so it IS a form of PR, but regional PR is not very effective at representing broadly held minority opinions.
3) Since Range Voting hasn't been supported by as many as IRV or Condorcet, I thought it was good to promote it in a submission to slashdot for discussion. We should consider whatever method works best for the situation at-hand. In terms of Bayesian Regret, Range Voting looks interesting, so I thought it had something going for it beyond the typical Arrow's Theorem cluster of discussions that dominated discussion of the other methods.
If we consider the algorithm to include inefficient memory allocations, then that also changes whether or not the algorithm can be considered P (i think you meant P, not N) or NP, so the changed algorithm cannot be used to prove P=NP, since if it would, they'd both be NP, and neither one would be P.
It is a rather small nit, I think, anyways.
Um, no. If mem usage is O(n^5), by definition, the algorithm runs in no better than O(n^5) time. I tried thinking about this with a thought experiment. Allocating a block of N size can be done in near-constant (often log N) time. Memory usage doesn't imply that all allocated memory be copied into.
An efficiently-allocating algorithm that was also an efficient user of its resource allocation would have its operation complexity constrained by its memory-use complexity, but that's an assumption on top of the definition of big-oh complexity. There was a point to be made, and you got close, but I think you just muddied up the waters.
In fact, I ran into such code today where allocations were out of line with necessary complexity, although it was merely off by an unreasonably large constant factor, not polynomially off. Such a situation would be rare.
The truth is that if they published it, somebody could make an improvement to it and make a better one. Pagerank is actually a very simple algorithm in and of itself. All the rest of the Google query interface is lots of evolved fine-tuning. Additionally, there isn't that much information you can request through the Google API that is geared toward a particular field or semantic structure. Intelligence can't be encapsulated into a boolean manifold. You can't ask Google, for example, "given my entire set of financial purchases and my desired outcomes, where should I be investing?" You PAY somebody else to do that for you. Now if you just want some dirty unfiltered info on a topic, you can Google, and you'll likely just get the Wikipedia page as the first hit. I usually just go straight to Wikipedia instead of Google. For more detail, usually Google is just good for finding a good specialist site and then using them, like dpreview.com for digital photography. Google isn't quite there for scientific or journalistic research either. Paid searches are always more fruitful. I guess Google just isn't doing well.
In fact, the whole Knol thing seems redundant since Citizendium seems to be doing a system that'll be more effective.
Let's see, mail, mapping, videos, too, they aren't dominating the market like they should be doing. Youtube videos are still low quality, and google native video's service is even better. But now myspace even has video hosting. People are learning how to publish videos on their own, without youtube. Things aren't looking all that good for Google lately. Even for news, you can get much better results out of indymedia.org, reuters.com, ap.org directly. All the aggregation at google news is just reworked wire feeds anyways. They just display the echo chamber.
Is content going to ever be totally free? It will be if people understand the inherent rewards of an open society. Information's negligible cost of duplication is the revolutionary model is the thing that is shattering the old models (c.f. http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/EconomyOfIdeas.html). Wikipedia is already doing that. As much as I'm a critic of Jimmy Wales, citizendium, etc. (with their NPOV lunacy), the system he's helped build is saving people's lives and improving quality of life in ways the old world just doesn't understand yet.
Personally, I'm hopeful that as long as we still have the Right to Read (c.f. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html), we're on the path to freedom and salvation. A corporation who makes up a new "model" to take advantage of content producers isn't going to take hold anymore. There's just not a point anymore. The price of content is already quite low for common knowledge. Even if the arbiters of knowledge try to keep it from common knowledge, we can paraphrase it. The greatest risk to real productive use of our knowledge still remains Patents. Information may finally be free, but the freedom to tinker is not.
Why? After all nothing was taken... It shouldn't be illegal, either.
But, all I gotta say to this is, I wish I were this brave (I'm just a lowly boycotter). If you can get away with it, more power to you!
My wife wants me to steal music for her so she can figure out what to buy, (although she bought ten times more CDs than I have). I have been reluctant to help (I have static IPs at home that would be easy to trace and don't have the time to spend time keeping updated a TOR router).
Should I spend the effort to help her out?
(here's the quoted post, just to show my agreement and pull it out of the anonymous coward bins of most people:) I don't care if they call it stealing or what it really is. copyright enfringment.
I'm still going to STEAL every damm song i want. And never ever buy another ANYTHING they sell.
ever.
and i will continue to help other people STEAL music.
I dont care what they say. be it that it's wrong, illegal, immoral. ect. I still havent been busted for price fixing and i dont screw the artists out of cash no matter what they claim. the music mafia still has a lock on being that immoral, illegal, and wrong.
fuck em. they can never get me back as a customer. ever. i want to see them all broke and have to get real jobs.
Arista always shows up as the bad guy. Remember, it's all the big industry shops that are suing, boycott them all!