There are a lot of anti-Ruby/Rails memes out there, but I rarely see any evidence to support them. One of the most curious claims is that Rails has scaling problems. The oft-cited example is Twitter, though their scaling problems have nothing to do with Rails.
DHH (creator of Rails, so admittedly biased) has a pretty compelling response to this:
http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000479.html
My sense is that the Ruby/agile community has made critical insights into the fundamentals of development, which allow them to be substantially more productive then their counterparts in e.g. Java. I actually work at a PHP/XSLT shop, and while I think we've built a really nice platform, I often feel that we make huge fundamental mis-assessments of the relative importance of things like ease-of-development vs. "performance". Whenever I read Ruby/Rails blogs or books, I just feel overcome with the sense that these guys "get it", and understand the the human cost of development is so much larger than the mechanical cost (servers, bandwidth, etc.)
I agree there's no magic bullet, and there's no framework or language that can stop developers from implementing bad solutions. But I think the typical warnings against Ruby are badly misinformed.
Every problem I've heard Paul talk about is real, and has occurred to other societies before ours, over and over and over again. Paul is one of those people trying to bring a little untruth to the phrase "the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn". It's the wisdom you can't give away, unfortunately.
Exactly what I was going to point out. I'm disgusted at how the Mainstream Media and others are creating this self-fulfilling prophecy by declaring Paul unelectable, and failing to cover him. For instance, the other day they were talking on CNN about fund raising, and completely ignored the fact that Ron Paul led all candidates in both parties last quarter in fund raising. They showed the GOP candidates and had Romney, McCain, and Huckabee in a 3-pane view -- and LEFT OUT the one candidate who beat them all.
I hate to sound paranoid, but that is overt and clearly purposeful.
Thank you for pointing this out to the naive.
There is no such thing as "secure" electronic voting, unless you use some kind of verifiability system, like David Chaum's Punchscan.
Forget what a candidate says he supports on his web site. Look at his voting record.
Ron Paul is so far and away superior to Barack Obama, it's hardly a real comparison. During his 10 terms in Congress, he has consistently voted according to a strict pro-freedom Constitutional framework. He voted against the Patriot Act, and against the war (and it's continued funding), and he has taken stronger more firm views against excessive government regulation over technology. No wonder he drew a larger crowd when he spoke at Google.
He also came in first in fund raising last quarter, beating out every other candidate in both parties. But the media ignores him, and creates this air of unelectability, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy -- because no one wants to waste his vote.
We should have Range Voting or Approval Voting so that wouldn't be a problem. But until we do, we've got to vote our conscience. The odds your vote will break a tie are so tiny anyway, that you might as well cast a vote for your favorite candidate.
Well, no. Arrow's theorem says that no rank-order method can pass a set of criteria. It does not apply to Range Voting, because Range Voting is cardinal, not ordinal.
Also Reweighted Range Voting and Asset Voting are better than STV.
Range Voting is a single-winner voting method, for things like mayor, governor, president, senator, etc. Those are seats where proportional representation is irrelevant.
For proportional representation, there are better methods than STV, such as Reweighted Range Voting and Asset Voting -- but since this book is primarily about the more common, single-winner elections, it focuses on single-winner methods.
The fact is, lots of people will be honest when using Range Voting, and will not strategically exaggerate into Approval Voting. And that's not a big deal since honest Range Voting is about 91% as effective as strategic Range Voting.
You have to consider that around 1/3 of people weaken their vote power by not registering in a major party in states where you have to if you want to vote in a major party primary. They prefer honesty to power.
Ever been to a site that allows people to vote on articles on a scale of 1-10? It rapidly degenerates into everyone either voting 10 or 0
1. Even if everyone does that, then you have "Approval Voting", which is still exceptionally good.
2. We've done a lot of research that indicates A LOT of people will choose to be expressive and use their full range of values instead of min/max, especially since it has about 91% as much effectiveness as perfectly strategizing (which is hard to do since it requires probability analysis). (e.g. You might consider that around 1/3 of voters don't register with a major party, even in areas where that prevents them from voting in the primaries, and thus diminishes their vote power.)
http://rangevoting.org/HonStrat.html
3. That extra honesty means much better election outcomes, so Range Voting is much more "effective" than Approval Voting.
http://rangevoting.org/ShExpRes.html
4. Range Voting can help with problems like the Burr dilemma, and is experimentally shown to be "easier" in the sense that voters will sometimes have a hard time making a yes/no binary decision for a candidate who is right on the line, but will have an easier time scoring (which is why HotOrNot's creators preferred scores to hot?/not? approval voting -- faster scoring is good for their "business model").
5. Range Voting has a powerful "nursery effect" that gives fair representation of minor candidates/parties/viewpoints until they become competitive, so a candidate who may get very few approvals with approval voting can maybe get a 35% average, and that can help society gauge itself -- it can work like a windsock to let us get a better sense of the political winds. That's abstract but plausibly very beneficial to society.
Approval is definitely simpler, and is a great voting method that we can implement RIGHT NOW with virtually no changes. From there we could upgrade to Range Voting if possible. Hence:
http://rangevoting.org/Approval.html
Here's a head-to-head comparison/apologetics piece: http://rangevoting.org/AppExec.html
Well, for your Senate you use proportional STV, which is a pretty decent voting method, although rather "archaic" in the sense that simpler methods have come about that are mathematically superior in terms of proportionality and criteria like monotonicity. E.g. Reweighted Range Voting and Asset Voting (the latter was originally invented by Lewis Carroll).
But for your House elections you use the single-winner form of STV, called "Instant Runoff Voting", and it is a rather horrible voting method, according to Smith's Bayesian regret studies. Especially when voters are strategic:
http://rangevoting.org/StratHonMix.html
You are absolutely right. We can't continue secret ballot under the auspices of preventing vote-selling by individuals. Because the secret ballots allows far worse -- wholesale vote selling to the ones with the right connections.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of anti-Ruby/Rails memes out there, but I rarely see any evidence to support them. One of the most curious claims is that Rails has scaling problems. The oft-cited example is Twitter, though their scaling problems have nothing to do with Rails. DHH (creator of Rails, so admittedly biased) has a pretty compelling response to this: http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000479.html My sense is that the Ruby/agile community has made critical insights into the fundamentals of development, which allow them to be substantially more productive then their counterparts in e.g. Java. I actually work at a PHP/XSLT shop, and while I think we've built a really nice platform, I often feel that we make huge fundamental mis-assessments of the relative importance of things like ease-of-development vs. "performance". Whenever I read Ruby/Rails blogs or books, I just feel overcome with the sense that these guys "get it", and understand the the human cost of development is so much larger than the mechanical cost (servers, bandwidth, etc.) I agree there's no magic bullet, and there's no framework or language that can stop developers from implementing bad solutions. But I think the typical warnings against Ruby are badly misinformed.
Every problem I've heard Paul talk about is real, and has occurred to other societies before ours, over and over and over again. Paul is one of those people trying to bring a little untruth to the phrase "the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn". It's the wisdom you can't give away, unfortunately.
He's still running, don't forget.
Exactly what I was going to point out. I'm disgusted at how the Mainstream Media and others are creating this self-fulfilling prophecy by declaring Paul unelectable, and failing to cover him. For instance, the other day they were talking on CNN about fund raising, and completely ignored the fact that Ron Paul led all candidates in both parties last quarter in fund raising. They showed the GOP candidates and had Romney, McCain, and Huckabee in a 3-pane view -- and LEFT OUT the one candidate who beat them all. I hate to sound paranoid, but that is overt and clearly purposeful.
Thank you for pointing this out to the naive. There is no such thing as "secure" electronic voting, unless you use some kind of verifiability system, like David Chaum's Punchscan.
Electing Ron Paul would do even more.
Forget what a candidate says he supports on his web site. Look at his voting record. Ron Paul is so far and away superior to Barack Obama, it's hardly a real comparison. During his 10 terms in Congress, he has consistently voted according to a strict pro-freedom Constitutional framework. He voted against the Patriot Act, and against the war (and it's continued funding), and he has taken stronger more firm views against excessive government regulation over technology. No wonder he drew a larger crowd when he spoke at Google. He also came in first in fund raising last quarter, beating out every other candidate in both parties. But the media ignores him, and creates this air of unelectability, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy -- because no one wants to waste his vote. We should have Range Voting or Approval Voting so that wouldn't be a problem. But until we do, we've got to vote our conscience. The odds your vote will break a tie are so tiny anyway, that you might as well cast a vote for your favorite candidate.
Well, no. Arrow's theorem says that no rank-order method can pass a set of criteria. It does not apply to Range Voting, because Range Voting is cardinal, not ordinal. Also Reweighted Range Voting and Asset Voting are better than STV.
Range Voting is a single-winner voting method, for things like mayor, governor, president, senator, etc. Those are seats where proportional representation is irrelevant.
For proportional representation, there are better methods than STV, such as Reweighted Range Voting and Asset Voting -- but since this book is primarily about the more common, single-winner elections, it focuses on single-winner methods.
The fact is, lots of people will be honest when using Range Voting, and will not strategically exaggerate into Approval Voting. And that's not a big deal since honest Range Voting is about 91% as effective as strategic Range Voting.
You have to consider that around 1/3 of people weaken their vote power by not registering in a major party in states where you have to if you want to vote in a major party primary. They prefer honesty to power.
You should check out:
http://rangevoting.org/HonStrat.html
http://rangevoting.org/ShExpRes.html
and lots of other stuff on RangeVoting.org
Your arguments are not novel, and they have been rigorously addressed by Range Voting proponents.
Ever been to a site that allows people to vote on articles on a scale of 1-10? It rapidly degenerates into everyone either voting 10 or 0 1. Even if everyone does that, then you have "Approval Voting", which is still exceptionally good. 2. We've done a lot of research that indicates A LOT of people will choose to be expressive and use their full range of values instead of min/max, especially since it has about 91% as much effectiveness as perfectly strategizing (which is hard to do since it requires probability analysis). (e.g. You might consider that around 1/3 of voters don't register with a major party, even in areas where that prevents them from voting in the primaries, and thus diminishes their vote power.) http://rangevoting.org/HonStrat.html 3. That extra honesty means much better election outcomes, so Range Voting is much more "effective" than Approval Voting. http://rangevoting.org/ShExpRes.html 4. Range Voting can help with problems like the Burr dilemma, and is experimentally shown to be "easier" in the sense that voters will sometimes have a hard time making a yes/no binary decision for a candidate who is right on the line, but will have an easier time scoring (which is why HotOrNot's creators preferred scores to hot?/not? approval voting -- faster scoring is good for their "business model"). 5. Range Voting has a powerful "nursery effect" that gives fair representation of minor candidates/parties/viewpoints until they become competitive, so a candidate who may get very few approvals with approval voting can maybe get a 35% average, and that can help society gauge itself -- it can work like a windsock to let us get a better sense of the political winds. That's abstract but plausibly very beneficial to society. Approval is definitely simpler, and is a great voting method that we can implement RIGHT NOW with virtually no changes. From there we could upgrade to Range Voting if possible. Hence: http://rangevoting.org/Approval.html Here's a head-to-head comparison/apologetics piece: http://rangevoting.org/AppExec.html
Well, for your Senate you use proportional STV, which is a pretty decent voting method, although rather "archaic" in the sense that simpler methods have come about that are mathematically superior in terms of proportionality and criteria like monotonicity. E.g. Reweighted Range Voting and Asset Voting (the latter was originally invented by Lewis Carroll). But for your House elections you use the single-winner form of STV, called "Instant Runoff Voting", and it is a rather horrible voting method, according to Smith's Bayesian regret studies. Especially when voters are strategic: http://rangevoting.org/StratHonMix.html
You are absolutely right. We can't continue secret ballot under the auspices of preventing vote-selling by individuals. Because the secret ballots allows far worse -- wholesale vote selling to the ones with the right connections.
Warren D. Smith, the Princeton math Ph.D. who was featured in a recent article on Range Voting, has looked at this issue. http://rangevoting.org/Apportion.html http://rangevoting.org/SplitLR.html