One of the most delightful things I learned while on LessWrong was the Solomonoff/Kolmogorov formalization of Occam's Razor. Added to what had previously been only an aesthetic heuristic to me were mathematical rigor, proofs of optimality of certain kinds, and demonstrations of utility. For several months I was quite taken...
Regarding the title problem,
I have historically been too hasty to go from “other people seem very wrong on this topic” to “I am right on this topic”
I think it's helpful here to switch from binary wrong/right language to continuous language. We can talk of degrees of wrongness and rightness.
Consider people who are smarter than those they usually argue with, in the specific sense of "smarter" where we mean they produce more-correct, better-informed, or more-logical arguments and objections. These people probably have some (binarily) wrong ideas. The people they usually argue with, however, are likely to be (by degrees) wronger.
When the other people are wronger, the smart person is in fact
Yes. Page 287 of the paper affirms your interpretation: "REMORSE does not exploit suckers, i.e. AllC players, whereas PAVLOV does."
The OP has a mistake:
Remorse is more aggressive; unlike cTFT, it can attack cooperators
Neither Remorse nor cTFT will attack cooperators.
If Pavlov accidentally defects against TFTWF, the result is
D/C -> D/C -> D/D -> C/D -> D/D -> C/C,
Can you explain this sequence? I'm puzzled by it as it doesn't follow the definitions that I know about. My understanding of TFTWF is that it is "Tit for Tat with a small randomised possibility of forgiving a defaulter by cooperating anyway." What seems to be happening in the above sequence is Pavlov on the left and, on the right, TFT with a delay of 1.
in Critch's framework, agents bet their voting stake rather than money! The more bets you win, the more control you have over the system; the more bets you lose, the less your preferences will be taken into account.
If I may be a one-note piano (as it's all I've talked about lately on LW), this sounds extremely similar to the "ophelimist democracy" I was pushing. I've since streamlined the design and will try to publish a functional tool for it online next year, and then aim to get some small organizations to test it out.
In brief, the goal was to design a voting system with a feedback loop... (read more)
score voting is immune to the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem
I was basing this off the description in Wikipedia; please correct that entry if you think I was in error. As of this time it still explicitly states, "While the scope of this theorem is limited to ordinal voting, Gibbard's theorem is more general, in that it deals with processes of collective decision that may not be ordinal: for example, voting systems where voters assign grades to candidates."
any proportional method is subject to free riding strategy. And since this system is designed to be proportional across time as well as seats, free riding strategy would be absolutely pervasive, and I suspect it would take... (read more)
Regarding exploitability by well-funded and well-connected entities - I'm not sure how to tell without an empirical test. My understanding is that research into funding of electoral campaigns doesn't show the funding as having any effect on vote totals. If that is accurate, then I'd expect it's still true under alternate voting methods.
Fully agreed - the intention is to start with small-scale clubs and parts of private organizations that are open to experimenting.
increased voting power given to those whose bills are not passed risks giving undue power to stupid or inhumane voters.
True. Equalizing the influence of all parties (over the long term at least) doesn't just risk giving such people power; it outright does give them power. At the time of the design, I justified it on the grounds that (1) it forces either compromise or power-sharing, (2) I haven't found a good way to technocratically distinguish humane-but-dumb voters from inhumane-but-smart ones, or rightly-reviled inhumane minorities from wrongly-reviled humane minorities, and (3) the worry that if a group's interests are excluded, then they have no stake in the system, and so they... (read more)
Thanks for your thoughts. Your questions are quite valid but I'm inclined to punt on them, as you'll see:
For #3, it depends on the group. If a government were to use it, they could provide access via terminals in public libraries, schools, and other government facilities. If a private group were to use it, they'd probably just exclude the poor.
For #4, 6, 7, 8: It's intended for use in any democratic organization for the equivalent of ordinary legislation and bylaws, but not intended to replace their constitutions or founding documents. If there are some laws/bylaws that the group doesn't have authority to make or change (like on citizenship/membership), they would... (read more)
One of the most delightful things I learned while on LessWrong was the Solomonoff/Kolmogorov formalization of Occam's Razor. Added to what had previously been only an aesthetic heuristic to me were mathematical rigor, proofs of optimality of certain kinds, and demonstrations of utility. For several months I was quite taken with it in what now appears to me to be a rather uncritical way. In doing some personal research (comparing and contrasting Marian apparitions with UFO sightings), I encountered for the first time people who explicity rejected Occam's Razor. They didn't have anything to replace it with, but it set off a search for me to find some justification for Occam's Razor... (read 684 more words →)
The r/achipelago subreddit is quite small but exists for hobbyists to share designs for alternative political systems and to consider the effects the alternatives would have. Most of what's there right now is about electoral systems rather than full institutional structures. Some posts include links to resources, such as one of my favorites, The Electoral System Design Handbook, which describes case studies of several countries and the typical good and bad effects of different design decisions.
"Ideal governance" depends on what ideals you're aiming for, of course. There have been proposed improvements to futarchy such as this one, which picks utilitarianism as its explicit ideal. An explicitly virtue theorist option could be to modernize Plato's Republic instead. Granted, these are extreme examples. For more sober-minded investigation into ideal governance, you'd of course want to start with criteria that are well-defined and pragmatic, rather than broad philosophical or ideological traditions.