Woops, it looks like some of the emails have been getting sent to my spam box. Sorry for missing these.

@robert and daniel
Given how niche most voting theory methods still are, I don't think my site is aiming to single-handedly boost some of these methods into legislature. The goal of my site is simply to spark the curiosity of people that might listen and enjoy the visual comparisons. In addition, I did try to include short "explanations" underneath each method that provides a very generally intelligible description of each method and the intuition behind it. I'll continue to provide these explanations. 

The animosity in the voting theory community towards IRV reminds me of how those in the cryptocurrency community hate Bitcoin. I think eventually though they realized that the fate of the entire community is kinda dependent on the success of Bitcoin and they, begrudgingly, came to gradually accept that. I feel this community is in a similar position. You might not like it, but FairVote's success with popularizing IRV might be the thing necessary to push these more niche debates into a wider audience. My own introduction to this field came from that one CGP Grey video that explained IRV. The discussions about the various ways to handle ties or alternative systems sparked an interest in me to dig deeper and keep finding alternatives. Eventually I got to take a course with professor Marek Kaminski that finally let me dive into the mathematical foundations of all these methods and now, here I am, working a website to bring these discussions to a wider audience. But it all started with IRV and watching those pretty animated bar graphs for me. 

All that being said, I totally agree there are major shortcomings of IRV and would definitely love to someday see a widespread adoption of a Condorcet method. I really respect what Robert's doing and I really hope the phobia politicians have of mathematics doesn't end up overcoming the arguments Robert makes. I'm looking forward to the possibility of these narratives being pushed forward and wish you the best of luck!
Regarding the complexity of ranked pairs and the number of candidates. Yes, actually. Since, I am building a toy, I would like to support the users who, like myself, like to break things. So if someone wants to see what would happen with ranked pairs if they added 50 candidates, I'd very much like them to be able to try it out.

Again, thanks so much for your feedback and discussions! 
-culi
Jan 22, 2022, 7:48 PM by election-methods-request@lists.electorama.com:

On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 3:39 PM culitif@tuta.io wrote:

That's really interesting. I'm not into crypto at all (bewildered by it
really) so I had no idea that Bitcoin was disliked like that. What are the
issues with Bitcoin from the point of view of the crypto community? What
did they do?

I feel this community is in a similar position. You might not like it, but

My goal is to replace FPTP with "anything". My goal is to replace FPTP with
something better. IRV is not better. But for me personally my animosity
toward FairVote is because they conflated the ballot "ranked choice" with
their preferred method. That really rubbed me the wrong way.

CGP Grey is great. Note that he doesn't specifically advocate IRV; he just
likes voting methods. He has videos on Approval, MMP, gerrymandering, the
electoral college, etc. He is a big fan of STV, but that's in part because
he is a big fan of PR (yay!).

The discussions about the various ways to handle ties or alternative

Yeah, I see your point. I honestly can't remember how I got into voting
theory. It was a long time ago. It wouldn't surprise me if IRV was the
first method I discovered.

Cheers,

Dr. Daniel Carrera
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Iowa State University

I'm not too into it either, but there's a couple of different divisions. First of all Bitcoin is like the first generation of the blockchain technologies and has a lot of downsides and technical limitations. Some of which are manifesting as massive usage of energy (some estimates put that 10% of all electricity is now used to mine Bitcoin). There's a couple of suggested solutions to their issues, but they all kinda feel like duck tape solutions and nobody wants yet another hard fork of it so we're kinda stuck even though most people recognized we should've dropped it a long time ago. Then there's also the community of cryptography academics who, besides being mad about "crypto" now referring to crypto currencies instead of their field, also have a lot of technical critiques of it being a really inefficient system that didn't even leverage the cutting edge systems that were available when it was created. To be fair, their entire field kinda rests on a few hypotheses that we're pretty sure are true, but have not yet proved. So there's always a lot of new stuff coming from there

And ah yes I do remember digging into his other videos eventually as well. His videos and, later on, Nicky Case's explorable interactive on the matter really gave me the tetris effect about comparing these systems.

Regardless, I appreciate your work and advocacy. Although I can't say I fully agree that IRV isn't better than FPTP, I would certainly like to someday contribute to an effort to get a Condorcet method in widespread use in the US. 

When will you be advocating to the Burlington council? Is there a place I could read up more about your proposed alternative? 

Best,
Culi

Jan 28, 2022, 2:17 PM by dcarrera@gmail.com:

On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 6:32 PM culitif@tuta.io wrote:

Well, but this isn't about Bitcoin specifically and it's not clear why that
would create animosity. But I do list proof-of-work as one of my annoyances
with crypto. I can't believe anyone thought it would make a good payment
system. It is not merely that it is inefficient --- the core problem is
that it is intended to be inefficient and its core features depend on
that inefficiency. What were they thinking? Well, I guess they weren't
thinking. Bitcoin was made by people who know a lot about algorithms but
little about economics. Modern day gold bugs.

I remember the original proof-of-work paper. Did you know it was initially
about email? This is from back in the day when spam filters were much worse
than they are today, so I actually had a lot more spam in the 2000's than
today. So anyway, the idea was that you'd have to solve the hash in order
to send an email, to prove that you had put a minimal amount of effort into
sending it (like 1s of work). It was designed so you'd need a different
hash for each recipient, so the goal was to put a price on sending an
email, analogous to buying a stamp.

That still doesn't seem like an example of cryptocurrency advocates feeling
animosity toward Bitcoin. Cryptography academics probably have very little
overlap with cryptocurrency advocates.

Well, let me put it this way. What exactly does IRV do better than FPTP?
Ok, it lets you list minor parties, but it doesn't elect them and it might
possibly exacerbate a 2-party system.

My view is a little bit biased because I am Canadian. Before Justin Trudeau
was elected one of his campaign promises was to reform Canada's electoral
system. So he got elected. They convened a group of experts and so on who
testified, presented information, etc. The experts basically said that a PR
system would be great. Trudeau realized that a more fair (i.e. PR) system
would take away power from his party (the Liberal party) since his party
benefits enormously from the crappiness of FPTP. They are constantly
winning majorities in parliament with a minority of voters, and he realized
that PR would end his party's unearned dominance. So he decided to ignore
the experts and push for IRV. Because IRV would not make Canada's
parliament more proportional and in fact, based on the most recent
elections, it would actually exacerbate the inequity and the unearned
advantage for the Liberal party. Since he is obviously motivated to pick a
system that would entrench his party even more, that's what he pushed for.
There was a lot of pushback, and so he decided that campaign promises
didn't matter and decided to just forget about the whole thing. His
reasons? "Because Canadians wanted reform before because they were not
happy with their government; but now they are happy with the government, so
now reform is not needed". I wish I was joking, but that's only a very
slight paraphrase from what he said. I swear I hope the man steps on a lego.

So... the whole IRV thing hits a little close to home for me. But I don't
think that that should count against me very much. I think that this is
just a real world example of why IRV is not better.

Cheers,

Dr. Daniel Carrera
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Iowa State University

Hey Daniel,

Regarding actual critiques of the Bitcoin protocol, besides the proof-of-work protocol you pointed out, most of the concerns have to do with scalability. Solutions to this problem usually rely on a tradeoff between security and increased speed (like increasing the block sizes) and are often not long term solutions. Bitcoin has already had nearly 100 hard forks mostly related to issues like this. There's more long-term solutions like the Lightning Network happening (which allows transactions outside of the blockchain), but those have major issues with adoption. There's also many concerns about the centralization of it. Centralization is a major problem amongst most blockchain protocols and to date there's no foolproof solution most people agree on. The proof-of-work protocol is susceptible to centralization of the miners (as seen when a single coal mine in China flooded and the hash rate plunged 35%) and also rely on a small number of nodes. In general, most crypto enthusiasts agree that proof-of-work is fundamentally flawed and few newer protocols rely on PoW. 

Your points are well-taken. I suppose my view of the issue changes when talking about the national vs local level. I agree that IRV as a compromise that doesn't challenge the predominant power structure is a major problem. I suppose most of my support for it just comes from a commitment to breaking down the monopoly of legitimacy that FPTP seems to have with most Americans

-culi

Jan 28, 2022, 9:03 PM by dcarrera@gmail.com:

On Sat, Jan 29, 2022 at 12:43 PM culitif@tuta.io wrote:

Yeah. This one is particularly ironic considering the raison d'etre of
Bitcoin. Bitcoin is more centralized than the system it seeks to replace.
I recall reading that just 3 mining pools are responsible for > 50% of
transactions so they could band together and do a 51% attack. The banking
system is waaaay less centralized than that. And none of this even
addresses the more fundamental issue that blockchain is a solution in
search of a problem. It's a public append-only database. Yes, it's a very
clever way to implement a public append-only database. But there has never
been a problem in the history of the world where someone said "you know...
to fix this problem what I really need is a public append-only database."

Cheers,

Dr. Daniel Carrera
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Iowa State University

On 29.01.2022 19:43, culitif@tuta.io wrote:

As the perennial wet blanket guy here, it probably comes as little
surprise that I'm pretty opposed to Bitcoin too. I think there are
serious, possibly even fundamental limits to the cryptocurrency concept
itself.

The core innovation is based on the idea on using some sort of costly
competition to keep people honest. This competition is either one of
resources (proof of work, time-space, disk, etc), or one of previous
investment (proof of stake).

If it's the former, then the mechanism will waste materials and/or
energy. This is a great loss as that energy could be used for other more
productive things; and if whatever it uses has economies of scale, then
there will be an implicit centralization anyway, as a few big operators
will be better at running miners than a large number of smaller ones.

If it's the latter, then the centralization is even more direct, as
those who already have power gain more power.

Beyond this, blockchains are essentially signed append-only data
structures, except the digital signature is replaced with a proof of
some sort. This structure can't be pruned. This means that for any
serious transaction rate, the log will grow very quickly and soon become
difficult to maintain. Either you have a low transaction rate (and the
system is not a good currency) or you have a high transaction rate (and
disk space becomes a problem).

But ultimately, I think my issue with cryptocurrencies is political. I
won't go into specifics about that as I don't want the more ardent
enthusiasts to stumble across this post, but I could explain in private.
But it's something that even fixing all of the above would not fix.

-km