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Lumifer comments on Democracy and rationality - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: homunq 30 October 2013 12:07PM

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Tags: condorcet rationality altruism politics theorem systems game strategy choice arrow's gibbard-satterthwaite social collective effective theory voting

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Comment author: Lumifer 30 October 2013 03:33:12PM 11 points [-]

Summary: You want to find the truth? You want to win? You're gonna have to learn the right way to vote.

That seems to be a wrong summary.

The post talks about a variety of voting systems and their theoretical underpinnings, pointing out the failure modes of each and how do attempts to fix them turn out.

Significant changes in the real-life voting system in the US look very low-probability to me (barring a revolution or something equally cataclysmic). Thus the post doesn't tell me how to find the truth, doesn't tell me how to win (in real life) and doesn't tell me how to vote (thank goodness).

Comment author: homunq 30 October 2013 04:15:11PM 3 points [-]

This is still in-progress, and I'm going to get to some of that later. Here's my defense of the current summary:

  • First, it's just a summary. If it could include all the subtleties of the article, I wouldn't need to write the article.
  • Second, even if the public voting systems (muni, state, and national) wherever you happen to live continue to be stupid ones, understanding voting systems better is useful knowledge. You should understand bad voting systems if they affect you, and good voting systems if you're in organizations that could use them.
  • Third, I don't agree that changing voting systems is a negligible priority. For instance: various cities nationwide, including most of the SF bay area, use IRV for city elections (though this isn't actually the best system, it is certainly a change from 15 years ago.) A number of states (at least 10 to my knowledge) have revamped their primary systems in this time. An approval voting initiative for primaries is currently in the signature stage in Oregon, and legislative study commissions of approval voting are underway in Rhode Island and Arizona, with Colorado considering one. States representing 136 electoral votes have signed the National Popular Vote interstate compact, which is about halfway to it taking effect. Obviously, these various facts affect a small minority of Americans, but that small minority is still millions of people. So I'd estimate that a nationwide change (accomplished at the state-by-state level and NOT through a constitutional amendment) is an outside chance but not a negligible one.

As to telling you how to find truth, how to win, and how to vote: obviously the goal here is not to tell you which way to vote, but to help deepen your understanding of the utility of voting mechanisms, both at the public scale and in private contexts.

....

On the other hand, I understand that you're telling me that this sounds grating to you, like overblown rhetoric. I'll see what I can do to improve that while keeping it succinct and intriguing. So thank you.

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