Re: [EM] High Resolution Inferred Approval version of ASM
The error comes when you make inferences.
The great purported benefit of score systems is that more voters can rank A
over B, yet due to the scores score can elect B:
A:1.0 B:0.9 C:0.1
C:1.0 A:0.5 B:0.4
B:1.0 A:0.2 C:0.1
A=1.7, B=2.3, C=2.2
Both B and C defeat A, despite A defeating both ranked.
If the first voter scores B as 0.7, C wins.
Whenever a system attempts to use score or its low-resolution Approval
variant, it is relying on this information.
So why does this matter?
The voters are 100% certain and precise that these are their votes:
A>B>C
C>A>B
B>A>C
We know A defeats B, A defeats C, and B defeats C. A is the Condorcet
winner.
For score votes, 1.0 is always 1.0. It's the first rank, the measure.
This is of course another source of information distortion in cardinal
systems: how is the information meaningful as a comparison between two
voters?
How do you know 10 voters voting A first at 1.0 aren't half as invested in
A as 6 voters voting B 1.0, this really A=5 B=6?
Ten of us prefer strawberry to peanut butter.
Six of us WILL DIE IF YOU OPEN A JAR OF PEANUT BUTTER HERE.
Score systems claim to represent this and capture this information, but
they can't.
(Notice I used the negative: that 1.0 vote is an expression of the damage
of their 0.0-scored alternative.)
Even setting that aside, however, you have a problem where an individual
might put down 0.7 or 0.9 or 0.5 for the SAME candidate in the SAME
election, solely based on how bad they are at creating a cardinal
comparison. Humans are universally bad at cardinal comparison.
So now you can actually elect A, B, or C based on how well-rested people
are, how hungry they are, or anything else that impacts their mood and thus
the sharpness or softness by which they critically compare candidates.
It's a sort of random number generator.
Wrapping it in a better system and using that information to make auxiliary
decisions is still incorporating bad data. Bad data is worse than no data.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 7:27 PM Felix Sargent felix.sargent@gmail.com wrote:
I don't know how you can think that blurrier data would end up with a more
precise result.
No matter how you cut it, if you rank ABCD then it translates into a score
of
A: 1.0
B: .75
C: 0.5
D: 0.25
There's no way of describing differences between candidates beyond a
straight line between first place and last place.
Even if the voter is imprecise in the difference between A and B they will
never make the error of rating B more than A, whereas the error between a
voter's actual preferences and the preferences that are recorded with an
ordinal ballot has the liability of being massive. Consider I like A and B
but HATE C. ABC does not tell you that.
That's not even going into what happens when a voter ranks an ordinal
ballot strategically, placing "guaranteed losers" to 2nd and 3rd places in
order to improve the chances of their first choice candidate (in IRV at
least).
Your analysis depends on the question of how intelligent you believe the
average voter to be.
If voters can use Amazon and Yelp star ratings, they can do score voting.
Felix Sargent https://felixsargent.com
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 2:14 PM John john.r.moser@gmail.com wrote:
Cardinal voting collects higher-resolution data, but not necessarily
precise data.
Let's say you score candidates:
A: 1.0
B: 0.5
C: 0.25
D: 0.1
In reality, B is 90% as favored as A. C is 70% as favored as B. The real
numbers would be:
A: 1.0
B: 0.9
C: 0.63
D: etc.
How would this happen?
Cardinal: I approve of A 90% as much as B.
Natural and honest: I prefer A to win, and I am not just as happy with B
winning, or close to it. I feel maybe half as good about that? B is
between C and D and I don't like C, but I like D less.
Strategic: even voting 0.5 for B means possibly helping B beat A, but
what if C wins...
The strategic nightmare is inherent to score and approval systems. When
approvals aren't used to elect but only for data, people are not naturally
inclined to analyze a score representing their actual approval.
Why?
Because people decide by simulation. Simulation of ordinal preference is
easy: I like A over B. Even then, sometimes you can't seem to decide who
is better.
Working out precisely how much I approve of A versus B is harder. It
takes a lot of effort and the basic simulation approach responds heavily to
how good you feel about A losing to B, not about how much B satisfies you
on a scale of 0 to A.
Score and approval voting source a high-error, low-confidence sample.
It's like recording climate data by licking your finger and holding it in
the wind each day, then writing down what you think is the temperature.
Someone will say, "it's more data than warmer/colder trends!" While
ignoring that you are not Mercury in a graduated cylinder.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 3:10 PM Felix Sargent felix.sargent@gmail.com
wrote:
Valuation can be ordinal, in that you can know that 3 is more than 2.
There are two questions before us: Which voting method collects more
data? Which tabulation method picks the best winner from that data?
Which voting method collects more data?
Cardinal voting collects higher resolution data than ordinal voting.
Consider this thought experiment. If I give you a rating of A:5 B:2 C:1 D:3
E:5 F:2 you should create an ordered list from that -- AEDFBC. If I gave
you AEDFBC you couldn't convert that back into its cardinal data.
Which tabulation picks a better winner from the data?
Both Score and Approval voting pick the person with the highest votes.
Summing ordinal data, on the other hand, is very complicated, as to
avoid loops. Methods like Condorcet or IRV have been proposed to eliminate
those but ultimately they're hacks for dealing with incomplete information.
Felix Sargent https://felixsargent.com
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 5:23 AM John john.r.moser@gmail.com wrote:
Voters can't readily provide meaningful information as score voting.
It's highly-strategic and the comparison of cardinal values is not natural.
All valuation is ordinal. Prices are based from cost; but what people
WILL pay, given no option to pay less, is based on ordinal comparison.
Is X worth 2 Y?
For the $1,000 iPhone I could have a OnePlus 6t and a Chromebook. The
6t...I can get a cheaper smartphone, but I prefer the 6t to that phone plus
whatever else I buy.
I have a higher paying job, so each dollar is worth fewer hours, so the
ordinal value of a dollar to me is lower. $600 of my dollars is fewer
hours than $600 minimum wage dollars. I have access to my
most-preferred purchases and can buy way down into my less-preferred
purchases.
Information about this is difficult to pin down by voter. Prices in
the stock market set by a constant, public auction among millions of buyers
and sellers. A single buyer can hardly price one stock against another,
and prices against what they think their gains will be relative to current
price.
When pricing candidates, you'll see a lot like Mohs hardness: 2 is 200,
3 is 500, 4 is 1,500; but we label things that are 250 or 450 as 2.5,
likewise between 500 and 1,500 is 3.5. Being between X and Y is always
immediately HALFWAY between X and Y, most intuitively.
The rated system sucks even before you factor in strategic concerns
(which only matter if actually using a score-driven method).
Approval is just low-resolution (1 bit) score voting.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 12:01 AM C.Benham cbenham@adam.com.au wrote:
Forest,
With paper and pencil ballots and the voters only writing in their
numerical scores it probably isn't very practical for the Australian
Electoral Commission
hand vote-counters.
But if it isn't compulsory to mark each candidate and the default
score is zero, I'm sure the voters could quickly adapt.
In the US I gather that there is at least one reform proposal to use
these type of ballots. One of these, "Score Voting" aka "Range Voting",
proposes to just use Average Ratings with I gather the default score
being "no opinion" rather than zero and some tweak to prevent an unknown
candidate from winning.
So it struck me that if we can collect such a large amount of detailed
information from the voters then we could do a lot more with it, and if we
want something that meets the Condorcet criterion this is my
suggestion.
Chris Benham
How score voting works:
1. Each vote <https://rangevoting.org/MeaningOfVote.html> consists
of a numerical score within some range (say 0 to 99
<https://rangevoting.org/Why99.html>) for each candidate. Simpler
is 0 to 9 ("single digit score voting").
On 21/06/2019 5:33 am, Forest Simmons wrote:
Chris, I like it especially the part about naive voters voting
sincerely being at no appreciable disadvantage while resisting burial and
complying with the CD criterion.
From your experience in Australia where full rankings are required (as
I understand it) what do you think about the practicality of rating on a
scale of zero to 99, as compared with ranking a long list of candidates?
Is it a big obstacle?
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info
Also it's well-understood ratings are of poor quality in online reviews.
There is a lot of research into how people overemphasize bad experiences as
low ratings, and give inflated good ratings. A lot of products have more 5
and 1 star ratings than 3 star ratings.
That's not the same thing as comparatively scaling things, which is even
harder. There's a reason we have a lot of top 10 lists and a lot of
rankings for things.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 7:45 PM John john.r.moser@gmail.com wrote:
The error comes when you make inferences.
The great purported benefit of score systems is that more voters can rank
A over B, yet due to the scores score can elect B:
A:1.0 B:0.9 C:0.1
C:1.0 A:0.5 B:0.4
B:1.0 A:0.2 C:0.1
A=1.7, B=2.3, C=2.2
Both B and C defeat A, despite A defeating both ranked.
If the first voter scores B as 0.7, C wins.
Whenever a system attempts to use score or its low-resolution Approval
variant, it is relying on this information.
So why does this matter?
The voters are 100% certain and precise that these are their votes:
A>B>C
C>A>B
B>A>C
We know A defeats B, A defeats C, and B defeats C. A is the Condorcet
winner.
For score votes, 1.0 is always 1.0. It's the first rank, the measure.
This is of course another source of information distortion in cardinal
systems: how is the information meaningful as a comparison between two
voters?
How do you know 10 voters voting A first at 1.0 aren't half as invested in
A as 6 voters voting B 1.0, this really A=5 B=6?
Ten of us prefer strawberry to peanut butter.
Six of us WILL DIE IF YOU OPEN A JAR OF PEANUT BUTTER HERE.
Score systems claim to represent this and capture this information, but
they can't.
(Notice I used the negative: that 1.0 vote is an expression of the damage
of their 0.0-scored alternative.)
Even setting that aside, however, you have a problem where an individual
might put down 0.7 or 0.9 or 0.5 for the SAME candidate in the SAME
election, solely based on how bad they are at creating a cardinal
comparison. Humans are universally bad at cardinal comparison.
So now you can actually elect A, B, or C based on how well-rested people
are, how hungry they are, or anything else that impacts their mood and thus
the sharpness or softness by which they critically compare candidates.
It's a sort of random number generator.
Wrapping it in a better system and using that information to make
auxiliary decisions is still incorporating bad data. Bad data is worse
than no data.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 7:27 PM Felix Sargent felix.sargent@gmail.com
wrote:
I don't know how you can think that blurrier data would end up with a
more precise result.
No matter how you cut it, if you rank ABCD then it translates into a
score of
A: 1.0
B: .75
C: 0.5
D: 0.25
There's no way of describing differences between candidates beyond a
straight line between first place and last place.
Even if the voter is imprecise in the difference between A and B they
will never make the error of rating B more than A, whereas the error
between a voter's actual preferences and the preferences that are recorded
with an ordinal ballot has the liability of being massive. Consider I like
A and B but HATE C. ABC does not tell you that.
That's not even going into what happens when a voter ranks an ordinal
ballot strategically, placing "guaranteed losers" to 2nd and 3rd places in
order to improve the chances of their first choice candidate (in IRV at
least).
Your analysis depends on the question of how intelligent you believe the
average voter to be.
If voters can use Amazon and Yelp star ratings, they can do score voting.
Felix Sargent https://felixsargent.com
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 2:14 PM John john.r.moser@gmail.com wrote:
Cardinal voting collects higher-resolution data, but not necessarily
precise data.
Let's say you score candidates:
A: 1.0
B: 0.5
C: 0.25
D: 0.1
In reality, B is 90% as favored as A. C is 70% as favored as B. The
real numbers would be:
A: 1.0
B: 0.9
C: 0.63
D: etc.
How would this happen?
Cardinal: I approve of A 90% as much as B.
Natural and honest: I prefer A to win, and I am not just as happy with B
winning, or close to it. I feel maybe half as good about that? B is
between C and D and I don't like C, but I like D less.
Strategic: even voting 0.5 for B means possibly helping B beat A, but
what if C wins...
The strategic nightmare is inherent to score and approval systems. When
approvals aren't used to elect but only for data, people are not naturally
inclined to analyze a score representing their actual approval.
Why?
Because people decide by simulation. Simulation of ordinal preference is
easy: I like A over B. Even then, sometimes you can't seem to decide who
is better.
Working out precisely how much I approve of A versus B is harder. It
takes a lot of effort and the basic simulation approach responds heavily to
how good you feel about A losing to B, not about how much B satisfies you
on a scale of 0 to A.
Score and approval voting source a high-error, low-confidence sample.
It's like recording climate data by licking your finger and holding it in
the wind each day, then writing down what you think is the temperature.
Someone will say, "it's more data than warmer/colder trends!" While
ignoring that you are not Mercury in a graduated cylinder.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 3:10 PM Felix Sargent felix.sargent@gmail.com
wrote:
Valuation can be ordinal, in that you can know that 3 is more than 2.
There are two questions before us: Which voting method collects more
data? Which tabulation method picks the best winner from that data?
Which voting method collects more data?
Cardinal voting collects higher resolution data than ordinal voting.
Consider this thought experiment. If I give you a rating of A:5 B:2 C:1 D:3
E:5 F:2 you should create an ordered list from that -- AEDFBC. If I gave
you AEDFBC you couldn't convert that back into its cardinal data.
Which tabulation picks a better winner from the data?
Both Score and Approval voting pick the person with the highest votes.
Summing ordinal data, on the other hand, is very complicated, as to
avoid loops. Methods like Condorcet or IRV have been proposed to eliminate
those but ultimately they're hacks for dealing with incomplete information.
Felix Sargent https://felixsargent.com
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 5:23 AM John john.r.moser@gmail.com wrote:
Voters can't readily provide meaningful information as score voting.
It's highly-strategic and the comparison of cardinal values is not natural.
All valuation is ordinal. Prices are based from cost; but what people
WILL pay, given no option to pay less, is based on ordinal comparison.
Is X worth 2 Y?
For the $1,000 iPhone I could have a OnePlus 6t and a Chromebook. The
6t...I can get a cheaper smartphone, but I prefer the 6t to that phone plus
whatever else I buy.
I have a higher paying job, so each dollar is worth fewer hours, so
the ordinal value of a dollar to me is lower. $600 of my dollars is
fewer hours than $600 minimum wage dollars. I have access to my
most-preferred purchases and can buy way down into my less-preferred
purchases.
Information about this is difficult to pin down by voter. Prices in
the stock market set by a constant, public auction among millions of buyers
and sellers. A single buyer can hardly price one stock against another,
and prices against what they think their gains will be relative to current
price.
When pricing candidates, you'll see a lot like Mohs hardness: 2 is
200, 3 is 500, 4 is 1,500; but we label things that are 250 or 450 as 2.5,
likewise between 500 and 1,500 is 3.5. Being between X and Y is always
immediately HALFWAY between X and Y, most intuitively.
The rated system sucks even before you factor in strategic concerns
(which only matter if actually using a score-driven method).
Approval is just low-resolution (1 bit) score voting.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 12:01 AM C.Benham cbenham@adam.com.au wrote:
Forest,
With paper and pencil ballots and the voters only writing in their
numerical scores it probably isn't very practical for the Australian
Electoral Commission
hand vote-counters.
But if it isn't compulsory to mark each candidate and the default
score is zero, I'm sure the voters could quickly adapt.
In the US I gather that there is at least one reform proposal to use
these type of ballots. One of these, "Score Voting" aka "Range Voting",
proposes to just use Average Ratings with I gather the default score
being "no opinion" rather than zero and some tweak to prevent an unknown
candidate from winning.
So it struck me that if we can collect such a large amount of
detailed information from the voters then we could do a lot more with it,
and if we
want something that meets the Condorcet criterion this is my
suggestion.
Chris Benham
How score voting works:
1. Each vote <https://rangevoting.org/MeaningOfVote.html> consists
of a numerical score within some range (say 0 to 99
<https://rangevoting.org/Why99.html>) for each candidate. Simpler
is 0 to 9 ("single digit score voting").
On 21/06/2019 5:33 am, Forest Simmons wrote:
Chris, I like it especially the part about naive voters voting
sincerely being at no appreciable disadvantage while resisting burial and
complying with the CD criterion.
From your experience in Australia where full rankings are required
(as I understand it) what do you think about the practicality of rating on
a scale of zero to 99, as compared with ranking a long list of candidates?
Is it a big obstacle?
http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient&utm_term=oa-4885-b Virus-free.
www.avg.com
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Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for
list info
Hah. I should have researched more.
It turns out online reviews are superior to a coin flip at most 20% of the
time. With a 2-star difference, a coin flip will pick the superior product
50% of the time, but the reviews might favor the better product as much as
70% of the time. That means you'll get 20% more outcomes selecting the
better product from using the reviews than you will by flipping a coin to
decide between a 5-star product and a 3-star product.
Yes, that means cardinal rating reviews are kind of useless about 80% of
the time, as people have trouble determining precisely how good or bad
something is—although given two alternatives, they're really good at
identifying the better one.
[image: image.png]
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 7:48 PM John john.r.moser@gmail.com wrote:
Also it's well-understood ratings are of poor quality in online reviews.
There is a lot of research into how people overemphasize bad experiences as
low ratings, and give inflated good ratings. A lot of products have more 5
and 1 star ratings than 3 star ratings.
That's not the same thing as comparatively scaling things, which is even
harder. There's a reason we have a lot of top 10 lists and a lot of
rankings for things.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 7:45 PM John john.r.moser@gmail.com wrote:
The error comes when you make inferences.
The great purported benefit of score systems is that more voters can rank
A over B, yet due to the scores score can elect B:
A:1.0 B:0.9 C:0.1
C:1.0 A:0.5 B:0.4
B:1.0 A:0.2 C:0.1
A=1.7, B=2.3, C=2.2
Both B and C defeat A, despite A defeating both ranked.
If the first voter scores B as 0.7, C wins.
Whenever a system attempts to use score or its low-resolution Approval
variant, it is relying on this information.
So why does this matter?
The voters are 100% certain and precise that these are their votes:
A>B>C
C>A>B
B>A>C
We know A defeats B, A defeats C, and B defeats C. A is the Condorcet
winner.
For score votes, 1.0 is always 1.0. It's the first rank, the measure.
This is of course another source of information distortion in cardinal
systems: how is the information meaningful as a comparison between two
voters?
How do you know 10 voters voting A first at 1.0 aren't half as invested
in A as 6 voters voting B 1.0, this really A=5 B=6?
Ten of us prefer strawberry to peanut butter.
Six of us WILL DIE IF YOU OPEN A JAR OF PEANUT BUTTER HERE.
Score systems claim to represent this and capture this information, but
they can't.
(Notice I used the negative: that 1.0 vote is an expression of the damage
of their 0.0-scored alternative.)
Even setting that aside, however, you have a problem where an individual
might put down 0.7 or 0.9 or 0.5 for the SAME candidate in the SAME
election, solely based on how bad they are at creating a cardinal
comparison. Humans are universally bad at cardinal comparison.
So now you can actually elect A, B, or C based on how well-rested people
are, how hungry they are, or anything else that impacts their mood and thus
the sharpness or softness by which they critically compare candidates.
It's a sort of random number generator.
Wrapping it in a better system and using that information to make
auxiliary decisions is still incorporating bad data. Bad data is worse
than no data.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 7:27 PM Felix Sargent felix.sargent@gmail.com
wrote:
I don't know how you can think that blurrier data would end up with a
more precise result.
No matter how you cut it, if you rank ABCD then it translates into a
score of
A: 1.0
B: .75
C: 0.5
D: 0.25
There's no way of describing differences between candidates beyond a
straight line between first place and last place.
Even if the voter is imprecise in the difference between A and B they
will never make the error of rating B more than A, whereas the error
between a voter's actual preferences and the preferences that are recorded
with an ordinal ballot has the liability of being massive. Consider I like
A and B but HATE C. ABC does not tell you that.
That's not even going into what happens when a voter ranks an ordinal
ballot strategically, placing "guaranteed losers" to 2nd and 3rd places in
order to improve the chances of their first choice candidate (in IRV at
least).
Your analysis depends on the question of how intelligent you believe the
average voter to be.
If voters can use Amazon and Yelp star ratings, they can do score voting.
Felix Sargent https://felixsargent.com
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 2:14 PM John john.r.moser@gmail.com wrote:
Cardinal voting collects higher-resolution data, but not necessarily
precise data.
Let's say you score candidates:
A: 1.0
B: 0.5
C: 0.25
D: 0.1
In reality, B is 90% as favored as A. C is 70% as favored as B. The
real numbers would be:
A: 1.0
B: 0.9
C: 0.63
D: etc.
How would this happen?
Cardinal: I approve of A 90% as much as B.
Natural and honest: I prefer A to win, and I am not just as happy with
B winning, or close to it. I feel maybe half as good about that? B is
between C and D and I don't like C, but I like D less.
Strategic: even voting 0.5 for B means possibly helping B beat A, but
what if C wins...
The strategic nightmare is inherent to score and approval systems.
When approvals aren't used to elect but only for data, people are not
naturally inclined to analyze a score representing their actual approval.
Why?
Because people decide by simulation. Simulation of ordinal preference
is easy: I like A over B. Even then, sometimes you can't seem to decide
who is better.
Working out precisely how much I approve of A versus B is harder. It
takes a lot of effort and the basic simulation approach responds heavily to
how good you feel about A losing to B, not about how much B satisfies you
on a scale of 0 to A.
Score and approval voting source a high-error, low-confidence sample.
It's like recording climate data by licking your finger and holding it in
the wind each day, then writing down what you think is the temperature.
Someone will say, "it's more data than warmer/colder trends!" While
ignoring that you are not Mercury in a graduated cylinder.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 3:10 PM Felix Sargent felix.sargent@gmail.com
wrote:
Valuation can be ordinal, in that you can know that 3 is more than 2.
There are two questions before us: Which voting method collects more
data? Which tabulation method picks the best winner from that data?
Which voting method collects more data?
Cardinal voting collects higher resolution data than ordinal voting.
Consider this thought experiment. If I give you a rating of A:5 B:2 C:1 D:3
E:5 F:2 you should create an ordered list from that -- AEDFBC. If I gave
you AEDFBC you couldn't convert that back into its cardinal data.
Which tabulation picks a better winner from the data?
Both Score and Approval voting pick the person with the highest votes.
Summing ordinal data, on the other hand, is very complicated, as to
avoid loops. Methods like Condorcet or IRV have been proposed to eliminate
those but ultimately they're hacks for dealing with incomplete information.
Felix Sargent https://felixsargent.com
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 5:23 AM John john.r.moser@gmail.com wrote:
Voters can't readily provide meaningful information as score voting.
It's highly-strategic and the comparison of cardinal values is not natural.
All valuation is ordinal. Prices are based from cost; but what
people WILL pay, given no option to pay less, is based on ordinal
comparison.
Is X worth 2 Y?
For the $1,000 iPhone I could have a OnePlus 6t and a Chromebook.
The 6t...I can get a cheaper smartphone, but I prefer the 6t to that phone
plus whatever else I buy.
I have a higher paying job, so each dollar is worth fewer hours, so
the ordinal value of a dollar to me is lower. $600 of my dollars is
fewer hours than $600 minimum wage dollars. I have access to my
most-preferred purchases and can buy way down into my less-preferred
purchases.
Information about this is difficult to pin down by voter. Prices in
the stock market set by a constant, public auction among millions of buyers
and sellers. A single buyer can hardly price one stock against another,
and prices against what they think their gains will be relative to current
price.
When pricing candidates, you'll see a lot like Mohs hardness: 2 is
200, 3 is 500, 4 is 1,500; but we label things that are 250 or 450 as 2.5,
likewise between 500 and 1,500 is 3.5. Being between X and Y is always
immediately HALFWAY between X and Y, most intuitively.
The rated system sucks even before you factor in strategic concerns
(which only matter if actually using a score-driven method).
Approval is just low-resolution (1 bit) score voting.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 12:01 AM C.Benham cbenham@adam.com.au wrote:
Forest,
With paper and pencil ballots and the voters only writing in their
numerical scores it probably isn't very practical for the Australian
Electoral Commission
hand vote-counters.
But if it isn't compulsory to mark each candidate and the default
score is zero, I'm sure the voters could quickly adapt.
In the US I gather that there is at least one reform proposal to use
these type of ballots. One of these, "Score Voting" aka "Range Voting",
proposes to just use Average Ratings with I gather the default score
being "no opinion" rather than zero and some tweak to prevent an unknown
candidate from winning.
So it struck me that if we can collect such a large amount of
detailed information from the voters then we could do a lot more with it,
and if we
want something that meets the Condorcet criterion this is my
suggestion.
Chris Benham
How score voting works:
1. Each vote <https://rangevoting.org/MeaningOfVote.html> consists
of a numerical score within some range (say 0 to 99
<https://rangevoting.org/Why99.html>) for each candidate.
Simpler is 0 to 9 ("single digit score voting").
On 21/06/2019 5:33 am, Forest Simmons wrote:
Chris, I like it especially the part about naive voters voting
sincerely being at no appreciable disadvantage while resisting burial and
complying with the CD criterion.
From your experience in Australia where full rankings are required
(as I understand it) what do you think about the practicality of rating on
a scale of zero to 99, as compared with ranking a long list of candidates?
Is it a big obstacle?
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On 22/06/2019 9:15 am, John wrote:
The great purported benefit of score systems is that more voters can
rank A over B, yet due to the scores score can elect B:
John,
Is every method that uses score ballots a "score system"? My suggested
VIASME method meets Smith and therefore avoids
the "benefit" you refer to.
Wrapping it in a better system and using that information to make
auxiliary decisions is still incorporating bad data. Bad data is
worse than no data.
As it relates to VIASME, I'm afraid you've lost me. A few years ago
James Green-Armytage proposed a Condorcet method that asked the voters
to both
rank the candidates (with equal ranking and truncation allowed) and also
give each of them a high-resolution score and the ranking and the scoring
had to be consistent with each other. If there was a Condorcet winner
the scoring was ignored.
Well it seems to me that the ranking is a redundant extra chore for the
voter because it can be inferred from the scoring. That is what I
propose for
VIASME. The Green-Armytage method was called Cardinal-Weighted
Pairwise and was designed to try to resist Burial strategy. He had a
simpler-ballot
version called Approval-Weighted Pairwise. One of the reasons I don't
much like it is that it can elect a candidate that is pairwise-beaten by
a more approved
candidate.
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Cardinal_pairwise
On 22/06/2019 8:57 am, Felix Sargent wrote:
That's not even going into what happens when a voter ranks an ordinal
ballot strategically, placing "guaranteed losers" to 2nd and 3rd
places in order to improve the chances of their first choice candidate
(in IRV at least).
Felix, the Burial strategy you describe doesn't work in IRV because your
2nd and 3rd place preferences won't be counted if your first choice
candidate is still alive.
It is methods that fail Later-no-Help (such as all the Condorcet
methods) that are vulnerable to that, some more than others.
Chris Benham
On 22/06/2019 9:15 am, John wrote:
The error comes when you make inferences.
The great purported benefit of score systems is that more voters can
rank A over B, yet due to the scores score can elect B:
A:1.0 B:0.9 C:0.1
C:1.0 A:0.5 B:0.4
B:1.0 A:0.2 C:0.1
A=1.7, B=2.3, C=2.2
Both B and C defeat A, despite A defeating both ranked.
If the first voter scores B as 0.7, C wins.
Whenever a system attempts to use score or its low-resolution Approval
variant, it is relying on this information.
So why does this matter?
The voters are 100% certain and precise that these are their votes:
A>B>C
C>A>B
B>A>C
We know A defeats B, A defeats C, and B defeats C. A is the Condorcet
winner.
For score votes, 1.0 is always 1.0. It's the first rank, the
measure. This is of course another source of information distortion
in cardinal systems: how is the information meaningful as a comparison
between two voters?
How do you know 10 voters voting A first at 1.0 aren't half as
invested in A as 6 voters voting B 1.0, this really A=5 B=6?
Ten of us prefer strawberry to peanut butter.
Six of us WILL DIE IF YOU OPEN A JAR OF PEANUT BUTTER HERE.
Score systems claim to represent this and capture this information,
but they can't.
(Notice I used the negative: that 1.0 vote is an expression of the
damage of their 0.0-scored alternative.)
Even setting that aside, however, you have a problem where an
individual might put down 0.7 or 0.9 or 0.5 for the SAME candidate in
the SAME election, solely based on how bad they are at creating a
cardinal comparison. Humans are universally bad at cardinal comparison.
So now you can actually elect A, B, or C based on how well-rested
people are, how hungry they are, or anything else that impacts their
mood and thus the sharpness or softness by which they critically
compare candidates.
It's a sort of random number generator.
Wrapping it in a better system and using that information to make
auxiliary decisions is still incorporating bad data. Bad data is
worse than no data.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 7:27 PM Felix Sargent <felix.sargent@gmail.com
mailto:felix.sargent@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't know how you can think that blurrier data would end up
with a more precise result.
No matter how you cut it, if you rank ABCD then it translates into
a score of
A: 1.0
B: .75
C: 0.5
D: 0.25
There's no way of describing differences between candidates beyond
a straight line between first place and last place.
Even if the voter is imprecise in the difference between A and B
they will never make the error of rating B more than A, whereas
the error between a voter's actual preferences and the preferences
that are recorded with an ordinal ballot has the liability of
being massive. Consider I like A and B but HATE C. ABC does not
tell you that.
That's not even going into what happens when a voter ranks an
ordinal ballot strategically, placing "guaranteed losers" to 2nd
and 3rd places in order to improve the chances of their first
choice candidate (in IRV at least).
Your analysis depends on the question of how intelligent you
believe the average voter to be.
If voters can use Amazon and Yelp star ratings, they can do score
voting.
Felix Sargent <https://felixsargent.com>
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 2:14 PM John <john.r.moser@gmail.com
<mailto:john.r.moser@gmail.com>> wrote:
Cardinal voting collects higher-resolution data, but not
necessarily precise data.
Let's say you score candidates:
A: 1.0
B: 0.5
C: 0.25
D: 0.1
In reality, B is 90% as favored as A. C is 70% as favored as
B. The real numbers would be:
A: 1.0
B: 0.9
C: 0.63
D: etc.
How would this happen?
Cardinal: I approve of A 90% as much as B.
Natural and honest: I prefer A to win, and I am not just as
happy with B winning, or close to it. I feel maybe half as
good about that? B is between C and D and I don't like C, but
I like D less.
Strategic: even voting 0.5 for B means possibly helping B beat
A, but what if C wins...
The strategic nightmare is inherent to score and approval
systems. When approvals aren't used to elect but only for
data, people are not naturally inclined to analyze a score
representing their actual approval.
Why?
Because people decide by simulation. Simulation of ordinal
preference is easy: I like A over B. Even then, sometimes you
can't seem to decide who is better.
Working out precisely how much I approve of A versus B is
harder. It takes a lot of effort and the basic simulation
approach responds heavily to how good you feel about A losing
to B, not about how much B satisfies you on a scale of 0 to A.
Score and approval voting source a high-error, low-confidence
sample. It's like recording climate data by licking your
finger and holding it in the wind each day, then writing down
what you think is the temperature. Someone will say, "it's
more data than warmer/colder trends!" While ignoring that you
are not Mercury in a graduated cylinder.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 3:10 PM Felix Sargent
<felix.sargent@gmail.com <mailto:felix.sargent@gmail.com>> wrote:
Valuation can be ordinal, in that you can know that 3 is
more than 2.
There are two questions before us: Which voting method
collects more data? Which tabulation method picks the best
winner from that data?
Which voting method collects more data?
Cardinal voting collects higher resolution data than
ordinal voting. Consider this thought experiment. If I
give you a rating of A:5 B:2 C:1 D:3 E:5 F:2 you should
create an ordered list from that -- AEDFBC. If I gave you
AEDFBC you couldn't convert that back into its cardinal data.
Which tabulation picks a better winner from the data?
Both Score and Approval voting pick the person with the
highest votes.
Summing ordinal data, on the other hand, is very
complicated, as to avoid loops. Methods like Condorcet or
IRV have been proposed to eliminate those but ultimately
they're hacks for dealing with incomplete information.
Felix Sargent <https://felixsargent.com>
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 5:23 AM John
<john.r.moser@gmail.com <mailto:john.r.moser@gmail.com>>
wrote:
Voters can't readily provide meaningful information as
score voting. It's highly-strategic and the comparison
of cardinal values is not natural.
All valuation is ordinal. Prices are based from cost;
but what people WILL pay, given no option to pay less,
is based on ordinal comparison.
Is X worth 2 Y?
For the $1,000 iPhone I could have a OnePlus 6t and a
Chromebook. The 6t...I can get a cheaper smartphone,
but I prefer the 6t to that phone plus whatever else I
buy.
I have a higher paying job, so each dollar is worth
fewer hours, so the ordinal value of a dollar to me is
lower. $600 of my dollars is fewer hours than
$600 minimum wage dollars. I have access to my
most-preferred purchases and can buy way down into my
less-preferred purchases.
Information about this is difficult to pin down by
voter. Prices in the stock market set by a constant,
public auction among millions of buyers and sellers.
A single buyer can hardly price one stock against
another, and prices against what they think their
gains will be relative to current price.
When pricing candidates, you'll see a lot like Mohs
hardness: 2 is 200, 3 is 500, 4 is 1,500; but we label
things that are 250 or 450 as 2.5, likewise between
500 and 1,500 is 3.5. Being between X and Y is always
immediately HALFWAY between X and Y, most intuitively.
The rated system sucks even before you factor in
strategic concerns (which only matter if actually
using a score-driven method).
Approval is just low-resolution (1 bit) score voting.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 12:01 AM C.Benham
<cbenham@adam.com.au <mailto:cbenham@adam.com.au>> wrote:
Forest,
With paper and pencil ballots and the voters only
writing in their numerical scores it probably
isn't very practical for the Australian Electoral
Commission
hand vote-counters.
But if it isn't compulsory to mark each candidate
and the default score is zero, I'm sure the voters
could quickly adapt.
In the US I gather that there is at least one
reform proposal to use these type of ballots. One
of these, "Score Voting" aka "Range Voting",
proposes to just use Average Ratings with I gather
the default score being "no opinion" rather than
zero and some tweak to prevent an unknown
candidate from winning.
So it struck me that if we can collect such a
large amount of detailed information from the
voters then we could do a lot more with it, and if we
want something that meets the Condorcet criterion
this is my suggestion.
Chris Benham
https://rangevoting.org/
*How score voting works:*
1. Eachvote
<https://rangevoting.org/MeaningOfVote.html>consists
of a numerical score within some range (say0
to 99 <https://rangevoting.org/Why99.html>)
for each candidate. Simpler is 0 to 9
("single digit score voting").
On 21/06/2019 5:33 am, Forest Simmons wrote:
Chris, I like it especially the part about naive
voters voting sincerely being at no appreciable
disadvantage while resisting burial and complying
with the CD criterion.
From your experience in Australia where full
rankings are required (as I understand it) what
do you think about the practicality of rating on
a scale of zero to 99, as compared with ranking a
long list of candidates? Is it a big obstacle?
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My point is mostly that score is useless, a d hybrid methods are
essentially trying to cover for Score by incorporating it while avoiding
it's use in practice. It's kind of like saying you have a new ear
infection treatment where you use amoxicillin, and if that doesn't work you
attach leeches to the earlobes.
I have found that even e.g. Tideman's Alternative resisits burying,
although I cover it with a robust candidate selection via a proportional
primary election specifically to prevent formation of useful oligarchy
coalitions. Someone should quantify "resists burying" for all these
methods one day.
Note that resistance doesn't mean burying does nothing. In some
4-candidate examples, I had to inflate a candidate's voter base (to about
31% in one example) to eliminate the Condorcet winner, and the practical
result was if 4% of voters whose first choice was the Condorcet winner
preferred a candidate less-desirable to the burying coalition, that
candidate was elected. In simple terms, it produced worse results for the
tactical voters than if they had voted honestly.
The single-election approach simply cannot provide a good election on its
own for statistical reasons, and mixing bad rules into good rules won't
make better rules.
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 12:50 PM C.Benham cbenham@adam.com.au wrote:
On 22/06/2019 9:15 am, John wrote:
The great purported benefit of score systems is that more voters can rank
A over B, yet due to the scores score can elect B:
John,
Is every method that uses score ballots a "score system"? My suggested
VIASME method meets Smith and therefore avoids
the "benefit" you refer to.
Wrapping it in a better system and using that information to make
auxiliary decisions is still incorporating bad data. Bad data is worse
than no data.
As it relates to VIASME, I'm afraid you've lost me. A few years ago James
Green-Armytage proposed a Condorcet method that asked the voters to both
rank the candidates (with equal ranking and truncation allowed) and also
give each of them a high-resolution score and the ranking and the scoring
had to be consistent with each other. If there was a Condorcet winner the
scoring was ignored.
Well it seems to me that the ranking is a redundant extra chore for the
voter because it can be inferred from the scoring. That is what I propose
for
VIASME. The Green-Armytage method was called Cardinal-Weighted Pairwise
and was designed to try to resist Burial strategy. He had a simpler-ballot
version called Approval-Weighted Pairwise. One of the reasons I don't much
like it is that it can elect a candidate that is pairwise-beaten by a more
approved
candidate.
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Cardinal_pairwise
On 22/06/2019 8:57 am, Felix Sargent wrote:
That's not even going into what happens when a voter ranks an ordinal
ballot strategically, placing "guaranteed losers" to 2nd and 3rd places in
order to improve the chances of their first choice candidate (in IRV at
least).
Felix, the Burial strategy you describe doesn't work in IRV because your
2nd and 3rd place preferences won't be counted if your first choice
candidate is still alive.
It is methods that fail Later-no-Help (such as all the Condorcet methods)
that are vulnerable to that, some more than others.
Chris Benham
On 22/06/2019 9:15 am, John wrote:
The error comes when you make inferences.
The great purported benefit of score systems is that more voters can rank
A over B, yet due to the scores score can elect B:
A:1.0 B:0.9 C:0.1
C:1.0 A:0.5 B:0.4
B:1.0 A:0.2 C:0.1
A=1.7, B=2.3, C=2.2
Both B and C defeat A, despite A defeating both ranked.
If the first voter scores B as 0.7, C wins.
Whenever a system attempts to use score or its low-resolution Approval
variant, it is relying on this information.
So why does this matter?
The voters are 100% certain and precise that these are their votes:
A>B>C
C>A>B
B>A>C
We know A defeats B, A defeats C, and B defeats C. A is the Condorcet
winner.
For score votes, 1.0 is always 1.0. It's the first rank, the measure.
This is of course another source of information distortion in cardinal
systems: how is the information meaningful as a comparison between two
voters?
How do you know 10 voters voting A first at 1.0 aren't half as invested in
A as 6 voters voting B 1.0, this really A=5 B=6?
Ten of us prefer strawberry to peanut butter.
Six of us WILL DIE IF YOU OPEN A JAR OF PEANUT BUTTER HERE.
Score systems claim to represent this and capture this information, but
they can't.
(Notice I used the negative: that 1.0 vote is an expression of the damage
of their 0.0-scored alternative.)
Even setting that aside, however, you have a problem where an individual
might put down 0.7 or 0.9 or 0.5 for the SAME candidate in the SAME
election, solely based on how bad they are at creating a cardinal
comparison. Humans are universally bad at cardinal comparison.
So now you can actually elect A, B, or C based on how well-rested people
are, how hungry they are, or anything else that impacts their mood and thus
the sharpness or softness by which they critically compare candidates.
It's a sort of random number generator.
Wrapping it in a better system and using that information to make
auxiliary decisions is still incorporating bad data. Bad data is worse
than no data.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 7:27 PM Felix Sargent felix.sargent@gmail.com
wrote:
I don't know how you can think that blurrier data would end up with a
more precise result.
No matter how you cut it, if you rank ABCD then it translates into a
score of
A: 1.0
B: .75
C: 0.5
D: 0.25
There's no way of describing differences between candidates beyond a
straight line between first place and last place.
Even if the voter is imprecise in the difference between A and B they
will never make the error of rating B more than A, whereas the error
between a voter's actual preferences and the preferences that are recorded
with an ordinal ballot has the liability of being massive. Consider I like
A and B but HATE C. ABC does not tell you that.
That's not even going into what happens when a voter ranks an ordinal
ballot strategically, placing "guaranteed losers" to 2nd and 3rd places in
order to improve the chances of their first choice candidate (in IRV at
least).
Your analysis depends on the question of how intelligent you believe the
average voter to be.
If voters can use Amazon and Yelp star ratings, they can do score voting.
Felix Sargent https://felixsargent.com
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 2:14 PM John john.r.moser@gmail.com wrote:
Cardinal voting collects higher-resolution data, but not necessarily
precise data.
Let's say you score candidates:
A: 1.0
B: 0.5
C: 0.25
D: 0.1
In reality, B is 90% as favored as A. C is 70% as favored as B. The
real numbers would be:
A: 1.0
B: 0.9
C: 0.63
D: etc.
How would this happen?
Cardinal: I approve of A 90% as much as B.
Natural and honest: I prefer A to win, and I am not just as happy with B
winning, or close to it. I feel maybe half as good about that? B is
between C and D and I don't like C, but I like D less.
Strategic: even voting 0.5 for B means possibly helping B beat A, but
what if C wins...
The strategic nightmare is inherent to score and approval systems. When
approvals aren't used to elect but only for data, people are not naturally
inclined to analyze a score representing their actual approval.
Why?
Because people decide by simulation. Simulation of ordinal preference is
easy: I like A over B. Even then, sometimes you can't seem to decide who
is better.
Working out precisely how much I approve of A versus B is harder. It
takes a lot of effort and the basic simulation approach responds heavily to
how good you feel about A losing to B, not about how much B satisfies you
on a scale of 0 to A.
Score and approval voting source a high-error, low-confidence sample.
It's like recording climate data by licking your finger and holding it in
the wind each day, then writing down what you think is the temperature.
Someone will say, "it's more data than warmer/colder trends!" While
ignoring that you are not Mercury in a graduated cylinder.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 3:10 PM Felix Sargent felix.sargent@gmail.com
wrote:
Valuation can be ordinal, in that you can know that 3 is more than 2.
There are two questions before us: Which voting method collects more
data? Which tabulation method picks the best winner from that data?
Which voting method collects more data?
Cardinal voting collects higher resolution data than ordinal voting.
Consider this thought experiment. If I give you a rating of A:5 B:2 C:1 D:3
E:5 F:2 you should create an ordered list from that -- AEDFBC. If I gave
you AEDFBC you couldn't convert that back into its cardinal data.
Which tabulation picks a better winner from the data?
Both Score and Approval voting pick the person with the highest votes.
Summing ordinal data, on the other hand, is very complicated, as to
avoid loops. Methods like Condorcet or IRV have been proposed to eliminate
those but ultimately they're hacks for dealing with incomplete information.
Felix Sargent https://felixsargent.com
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 5:23 AM John john.r.moser@gmail.com wrote:
Voters can't readily provide meaningful information as score voting.
It's highly-strategic and the comparison of cardinal values is not natural.
All valuation is ordinal. Prices are based from cost; but what people
WILL pay, given no option to pay less, is based on ordinal comparison.
Is X worth 2 Y?
For the $1,000 iPhone I could have a OnePlus 6t and a Chromebook. The
6t...I can get a cheaper smartphone, but I prefer the 6t to that phone plus
whatever else I buy.
I have a higher paying job, so each dollar is worth fewer hours, so
the ordinal value of a dollar to me is lower. $600 of my dollars is
fewer hours than $600 minimum wage dollars. I have access to my
most-preferred purchases and can buy way down into my less-preferred
purchases.
Information about this is difficult to pin down by voter. Prices in
the stock market set by a constant, public auction among millions of buyers
and sellers. A single buyer can hardly price one stock against another,
and prices against what they think their gains will be relative to current
price.
When pricing candidates, you'll see a lot like Mohs hardness: 2 is
200, 3 is 500, 4 is 1,500; but we label things that are 250 or 450 as 2.5,
likewise between 500 and 1,500 is 3.5. Being between X and Y is always
immediately HALFWAY between X and Y, most intuitively.
The rated system sucks even before you factor in strategic concerns
(which only matter if actually using a score-driven method).
Approval is just low-resolution (1 bit) score voting.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 12:01 AM C.Benham cbenham@adam.com.au wrote:
Forest,
With paper and pencil ballots and the voters only writing in their
numerical scores it probably isn't very practical for the Australian
Electoral Commission
hand vote-counters.
But if it isn't compulsory to mark each candidate and the default
score is zero, I'm sure the voters could quickly adapt.
In the US I gather that there is at least one reform proposal to use
these type of ballots. One of these, "Score Voting" aka "Range Voting",
proposes to just use Average Ratings with I gather the default score
being "no opinion" rather than zero and some tweak to prevent an unknown
candidate from winning.
So it struck me that if we can collect such a large amount of
detailed information from the voters then we could do a lot more with it,
and if we
want something that meets the Condorcet criterion this is my
suggestion.
Chris Benham
How score voting works:
1. Each vote <https://rangevoting.org/MeaningOfVote.html> consists
of a numerical score within some range (say 0 to 99
<https://rangevoting.org/Why99.html>) for each candidate. Simpler
is 0 to 9 ("single digit score voting").
On 21/06/2019 5:33 am, Forest Simmons wrote:
Chris, I like it especially the part about naive voters voting
sincerely being at no appreciable disadvantage while resisting burial and
complying with the CD criterion.
From your experience in Australia where full rankings are required
(as I understand it) what do you think about the practicality of rating on
a scale of zero to 99, as compared with ranking a long list of candidates?
Is it a big obstacle?
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On 24/06/2019 3:13 am, John wrote:
The single-election approach simply cannot provide a good election on
its own for statistical reasons, and mixing bad rules into good rules
won't make better rules.
John,
"Bad rules" give bad results. Instead of this dismissive philosophical
hand-waving, why don't you be so kind as to furnish an example where VIASME
gives a result that you consider to be bad (and where your specified
preferred method gives a better result)?
Chris Benham
On 24/06/2019 3:13 am, John wrote:
My point is mostly that score is useless, and hybrid methods are
essentially trying to cover for Score by incorporating it while
avoiding it's use in practice. It's kind of like saying you have a
new ear infection treatment where you use amoxicillin, and if that
doesn't work you attach leeches to the earlobes.
I have found that even e.g. Tideman's Alternative resisits burying,
although I cover it with a robust candidate selection via a
proportional primary election specifically to prevent formation of
useful oligarchy coalitions. Someone should quantify "resists
burying" for all these methods one day.
Note that resistance doesn't mean burying does nothing. In some
4-candidate examples, I had to inflate a candidate's voter base (to
about 31% in one example) to eliminate the Condorcet winner, and the
practical result was if 4% of voters whose first choice was the
Condorcet winner preferred a candidate less-desirable to the burying
coalition, that candidate was elected. In simple terms, it produced
worse results for the tactical voters than if they had voted honestly.
The single-election approach simply cannot provide a good election on
its own for statistical reasons, and mixing bad rules into good rules
won't make better rules.
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 12:50 PM C.Benham <cbenham@adam.com.au
mailto:cbenham@adam.com.au> wrote:
On 22/06/2019 9:15 am, John wrote:
The great purported benefit of score systems is that more voters
can rank A over B, yet due to the scores score can elect B:
John,
Is every method that uses score ballots a "score system"? My
suggested VIASME method meets Smith and therefore avoids
the "benefit" you refer to.
Wrapping it in a better system and using that information to make
auxiliary decisions is still incorporating bad data. Bad data is
worse than no data.
As it relates to VIASME, I'm afraid you've lost me. A few years
ago James Green-Armytage proposed a Condorcet method that asked
the voters to both
rank the candidates (with equal ranking and truncation allowed)
and also give each of them a high-resolution score and the ranking
and the scoring
had to be consistent with each other. If there was a Condorcet
winner the scoring was ignored.
Well it seems to me that the ranking is a redundant extra chore
for the voter because it can be inferred from the scoring. That is
what I propose for
VIASME. The Green-Armytage method was called Cardinal-Weighted
Pairwise and was designed to try to resist Burial strategy. He
had a simpler-ballot
version called Approval-Weighted Pairwise. One of the reasons I
don't much like it is that it can elect a candidate that is
pairwise-beaten by a more approved
candidate.
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Cardinal_pairwise
On 22/06/2019 8:57 am, Felix Sargent wrote:
That's not even going into what happens when a voter ranks an
ordinal ballot strategically, placing "guaranteed losers" to 2nd
and 3rd places in order to improve the chances of their first
choice candidate (in IRV at least).
Felix, the Burial strategy you describe doesn't work in IRV
because your 2nd and 3rd place preferences won't be counted if
your first choice candidate is still alive.
It is methods that fail Later-no-Help (such as all the Condorcet
methods) that are vulnerable to that, some more than others.
Chris Benham
On 22/06/2019 9:15 am, John wrote:
The error comes when you make inferences.
The great purported benefit of score systems is that more voters
can rank A over B, yet due to the scores score can elect B:
A:1.0 B:0.9 C:0.1
C:1.0 A:0.5 B:0.4
B:1.0 A:0.2 C:0.1
A=1.7, B=2.3, C=2.2
Both B and C defeat A, despite A defeating both ranked.
If the first voter scores B as 0.7, C wins.
Whenever a system attempts to use score or its low-resolution
Approval variant, it is relying on this information.
So why does this matter?
The voters are 100% certain and precise that these are their votes:
A>B>C
C>A>B
B>A>C
We know A defeats B, A defeats C, and B defeats C. A is the
Condorcet winner.
For score votes, 1.0 is always 1.0. It's the first rank, the
measure. This is of course another source of information
distortion in cardinal systems: how is the information meaningful
as a comparison between two voters?
How do you know 10 voters voting A first at 1.0 aren't half as
invested in A as 6 voters voting B 1.0, this really A=5 B=6?
Ten of us prefer strawberry to peanut butter.
Six of us WILL DIE IF YOU OPEN A JAR OF PEANUT BUTTER HERE.
Score systems claim to represent this and capture this
information, but they can't.
(Notice I used the negative: that 1.0 vote is an expression of
the damage of their 0.0-scored alternative.)
Even setting that aside, however, you have a problem where an
individual might put down 0.7 or 0.9 or 0.5 for the SAME
candidate in the SAME election, solely based on how bad they are
at creating a cardinal comparison. Humans are universally bad at
cardinal comparison.
So now you can actually elect A, B, or C based on how well-rested
people are, how hungry they are, or anything else that impacts
their mood and thus the sharpness or softness by which they
critically compare candidates.
It's a sort of random number generator.
Wrapping it in a better system and using that information to make
auxiliary decisions is still incorporating bad data. Bad data is
worse than no data.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 7:27 PM Felix Sargent
<felix.sargent@gmail.com <mailto:felix.sargent@gmail.com>> wrote:
I don't know how you can think that blurrier data would end
up with a more precise result.
No matter how you cut it, if you rank ABCD then it translates
into a score of
A: 1.0
B: .75
C: 0.5
D: 0.25
There's no way of describing differences between candidates
beyond a straight line between first place and last place.
Even if the voter is imprecise in the difference between A
and B they will never make the error of rating B more than A,
whereas the error between a voter's actual preferences and
the preferences that are recorded with an ordinal ballot has
the liability of being massive. Consider I like A and B but
HATE C. ABC does not tell you that.
That's not even going into what happens when a voter ranks an
ordinal ballot strategically, placing "guaranteed losers" to
2nd and 3rd places in order to improve the chances of their
first choice candidate (in IRV at least).
Your analysis depends on the question of how intelligent you
believe the average voter to be.
If voters can use Amazon and Yelp star ratings, they can do
score voting.
Felix Sargent <https://felixsargent.com>
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 2:14 PM John <john.r.moser@gmail.com
<mailto:john.r.moser@gmail.com>> wrote:
Cardinal voting collects higher-resolution data, but not
necessarily precise data.
Let's say you score candidates:
A: 1.0
B: 0.5
C: 0.25
D: 0.1
In reality, B is 90% as favored as A. C is 70% as favored
as B. The real numbers would be:
A: 1.0
B: 0.9
C: 0.63
D: etc.
How would this happen?
Cardinal: I approve of A 90% as much as B.
Natural and honest: I prefer A to win, and I am not just
as happy with B winning, or close to it. I feel maybe
half as good about that? B is between C and D and I
don't like C, but I like D less.
Strategic: even voting 0.5 for B means possibly helping B
beat A, but what if C wins...
The strategic nightmare is inherent to score and approval
systems. When approvals aren't used to elect but only for
data, people are not naturally inclined to analyze a
score representing their actual approval.
Why?
Because people decide by simulation. Simulation of
ordinal preference is easy: I like A over B. Even then,
sometimes you can't seem to decide who is better.
Working out precisely how much I approve of A versus B is
harder. It takes a lot of effort and the basic
simulation approach responds heavily to how good you feel
about A losing to B, not about how much B satisfies you
on a scale of 0 to A.
Score and approval voting source a high-error,
low-confidence sample. It's like recording climate data
by licking your finger and holding it in the wind each
day, then writing down what you think is the
temperature. Someone will say, "it's more data than
warmer/colder trends!" While ignoring that you are not
Mercury in a graduated cylinder.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 3:10 PM Felix Sargent
<felix.sargent@gmail.com
<mailto:felix.sargent@gmail.com>> wrote:
Valuation can be ordinal, in that you can know that 3
is more than 2.
There are two questions before us: Which voting
method collects more data? Which tabulation method
picks the best winner from that data?
Which voting method collects more data?
Cardinal voting collects higher resolution data than
ordinal voting. Consider this thought experiment. If
I give you a rating of A:5 B:2 C:1 D:3 E:5 F:2 you
should create an ordered list from that -- AEDFBC. If
I gave you AEDFBC you couldn't convert that back into
its cardinal data.
Which tabulation picks a better winner from the data?
Both Score and Approval voting pick the person with
the highest votes.
Summing ordinal data, on the other hand, is very
complicated, as to avoid loops. Methods like
Condorcet or IRV have been proposed to eliminate
those but ultimately they're hacks for dealing with
incomplete information.
Felix Sargent <https://felixsargent.com>
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 5:23 AM John
<john.r.moser@gmail.com
<mailto:john.r.moser@gmail.com>> wrote:
Voters can't readily provide meaningful
information as score voting. It's
highly-strategic and the comparison of cardinal
values is not natural.
All valuation is ordinal. Prices are based from
cost; but what people WILL pay, given no option
to pay less, is based on ordinal comparison.
Is X worth 2 Y?
For the $1,000 iPhone I could have a OnePlus 6t
and a Chromebook. The 6t...I can get a cheaper
smartphone, but I prefer the 6t to that phone
plus whatever else I buy.
I have a higher paying job, so each dollar is
worth fewer hours, so the ordinal value of a
dollar to me is lower. $600 of my dollars is
fewer hours than $600 minimum wage dollars. I
have access to my most-preferred purchases and
can buy way down into my less-preferred purchases.
Information about this is difficult to pin down
by voter. Prices in the stock market set by a
constant, public auction among millions of buyers
and sellers. A single buyer can hardly price one
stock against another, and prices against what
they think their gains will be relative to
current price.
When pricing candidates, you'll see a lot like
Mohs hardness: 2 is 200, 3 is 500, 4 is 1,500;
but we label things that are 250 or 450 as 2.5,
likewise between 500 and 1,500 is 3.5. Being
between X and Y is always immediately HALFWAY
between X and Y, most intuitively.
The rated system sucks even before you factor in
strategic concerns (which only matter if actually
using a score-driven method).
Approval is just low-resolution (1 bit) score voting.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019, 12:01 AM C.Benham
<cbenham@adam.com.au
<mailto:cbenham@adam.com.au>> wrote:
Forest,
With paper and pencil ballots and the voters
only writing in their numerical scores it
probably isn't very practical for the
Australian Electoral Commission
hand vote-counters.
But if it isn't compulsory to mark each
candidate and the default score is zero, I'm
sure the voters could quickly adapt.
In the US I gather that there is at least one
reform proposal to use these type of ballots.
One of these, "Score Voting" aka "Range Voting",
proposes to just use Average Ratings with I
gather the default score being "no opinion"
rather than zero and some tweak to prevent an
unknown
candidate from winning.
So it struck me that if we can collect such a
large amount of detailed information from the
voters then we could do a lot more with it,
and if we
want something that meets the Condorcet
criterion this is my suggestion.
Chris Benham
https://rangevoting.org/
*How score voting works:*
1. Eachvote
<https://rangevoting.org/MeaningOfVote.html>consists
of a numerical score within some range
(say0 to 99
<https://rangevoting.org/Why99.html>)
for each candidate. Simpler is 0 to 9
("single digit score voting").
On 21/06/2019 5:33 am, Forest Simmons wrote:
Chris, I like it especially the part about
naive voters voting sincerely being at no
appreciable disadvantage while resisting
burial and complying with the CD criterion.
From your experience in Australia where full
rankings are required (as I understand it)
what do you think about the practicality of
rating on a scale of zero to 99, as compared
with ranking a long list of candidates? Is
it a big obstacle?
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Hi John,
Sorry for letting your reply in this thread sit in the moderator queue
since you originally sent it (on June 21). Weirdly, when I finally
approved it, it appears as if it's a fresh message (in Gmail at least...)
Rob