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@masiarek no trouble from me on that account. I just wanted to reiterate my understanding of the paper: it seems like, at best, the authors may have identified an alternative way to define what is equivalently IRV. Even granting that IRV is the unique voting method that satisfies some specific property (which in the case of their stated property is itself suspect), the property itself is not established as good to begin with, as @Toby-Pereira makes clear. In fact, as far as I can tell, it’s the exact reverse; I.e., “since IRV is bad, so must be the property.”

If the property is independently and coherently defined, it may still be mathematically useful to establish that demanding it is equivalent to demanding IRV. But no normative conclusion about IRV follows from that equivalence alone. Treating the characterization itself as a normative defense of IRV would be a non sequitur.

@masiarek said in Condorcet, IIA, monotonicity in RCV IRV:

@toby-pereira is it OK to mention your names at: https://github.com/masiarek/star-voting-library/blob/master/00_start_here/topics/condorcet/ordered_majority_rule_irv.md

Yeah, as long as it's nothing bad!

Maybe I'll get to this when I've gone through the jury thread more thoroughly!

In a recent discussion of an election-by-jury proposal, a broader question arose concerning the nature of political representation:

May an office legitimately represent constituent political units, communities, or federated bodies, or must legitimate representation ultimately be based only on individual persons represented directly and on an equal basis?

The immediate discussion can be found here:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/623/election-by-jury-www-electionbyjury-com-manifesto/40

This is a longstanding disagreement in political theory. Debates concerning the representation of individuals, states, local communities, and other constituent bodies were already central to the Federalist and Antifederalist disputes surrounding the founding of the United States. Similar questions continue to arise in discussions of federalism, bicameralism, local autonomy, sovereignty, and democratic legitimacy.

I would like to raise the issue here for broader discussion. I expect that participants may approach it from quite different normative premises and theories of political legitimacy.

My hope is that this can proceed as a Socratic discussion. For that reason, I ask that everyone remain polite and respectful and that, when disagreement reaches genuinely incompatible premises, participants be willing to identify that disagreement clearly rather than treating the other position as foolish or illegitimate.

Participants should try to state one premise at a time, explain their reasons for accepting it, and ask bounded, good-faith questions about the premises offered by others. No premise should be presumed shared merely because it appears obvious; participants should establish agreement where it is needed for an argument to proceed.

Some possible starting questions are:

1. What kinds of entities can meaningfully be represented: individual persons only, or also states, municipalities, nations, communities, institutions, or other organized bodies?
2. What makes representation legitimate: numerical equality, authorization, accountability, consent, affected interests, historical compact, or something else?
3. May different offices or legislative chambers legitimately represent different kinds of constituencies?
4. Does equal citizenship require that every political institution represent individuals on an equal basis, or only that the constitutional system as a whole secure each citizen meaningful and sufficient political standing?
5. When does representation of constituent units protect pluralism and autonomy, and when does it become an unjustified departure from political equality?
6. Under what circumstances, if any, might direct representation of individuals be an unsuitable basis for a particular office, compared with representation through constituent political units or communities?

Because this is a contentious subject, I ask participants to review the Code of Conduct before posting and to ensure that their contributions comply with it. The Code of Conduct can be found here:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/16/read-me-code-of-conduct?_=1783225633021

Thank you in advance to anyone who offers their thoughts.

@clay A couple of points on the actual idea (I may address some of the points from the ensuing discussion between you two later):

When I said about keeping people in a bubble, you quickly corrected me. I just had another look, and I think it was this bit that made me think of a bubble:

A controlled environment that protects jurors from external influence and manipulation

I presume then that this doesn't refer to their environment the whole time, but just when they're involved in the process - e.g. interrogating the candidates.

In any case, I think that while being able to directly interrogate candidates, rather than just getting stuff from a potentially biased media, is a good thing, I do also think it would be bad to stop them getting information from other sources, even if some or all of those sources may be biased. Some candidates will simply be better at presenting themselves, and being a slick speaker does not necessarily translate into being a good representative.

The manifesto does actually talk about expert testimony, but I can't see this being given more detail in terms of how that would work.

On sampling - random sampling obviously makes the most sense on the surface, but given the discussion that has taken place, I might address that in a separate post.

As for the idea as a whole, it's clear that informed representative sample of voters should make a better decision than the population as a whole.

However, you might consider this to be to be a slightly "philosophical" or "meta" point, but does educating and making competent the sample change its nature and stop it from being representative? The manifesto made it clear that selecting people based on competence would create a biased sample. But what are competent people other than people who were once incompetent and educated out of it?

Finally for this post, while this might give a better result within the landscape of a given election, it changes the landscape itself, which could lead to unintended consequences. The vast majority of people would never vote in an election, and they might view that negatively, with further consequences from that. Perhaps you would argue that it doesn't matter if they disengage from politics because we only need to jury to be engaged, but I think there's something a bit degenerate about a wider public that takes no interest in what their elected representatives are doing.

I have previously discussed advantages of lottery-based methods (variations on random ballot, essentially), but at least in these methods everyone gets to vote, even if most of those votes don't do anything. (This is specifically on the subject of disengagement.)

(Edit - This isn't to say I necessarily disagree with the proposal, but I'd need to play around with the arguments first.)

There are some interesting discussion points here, and I might post again later, but it probably won't be a for a few days because I'll need some time to get through the volume of stuff!

But before that, it has been brought to my attention (and I somehow ended up as a moderator on here) @clay that the tone in some of your posts may have overstepped the mark. I understand that this is just how you post, having posted on the same forums as you over the years, but it would be just as easy to make the same points without this abruptness, which can be perceived as hostility, regardless of how wrong-headed you think the other poster's arguments are.

@clay, there is no purpose in continuing this discussion with you. Your approach to discourse is unlikely to convince others, and it is not because you are right while everyone else is wrong. A good-faith response to a serious objection is to examine the premise and answer the question—not repeatedly declare the questioner confused. If you continue engaging with others on this forum in this manner, I expect you will receive responses similar to mine, and if you continue not to adhere to the Code of Conduct, you may eventually face moderation action, including a ban.

Regarding reading material, I linked you to the Code of Conduct, and I strongly advise that you read it before continuing to participate here. I would also suggest consulting a standard dictionary entry for “normative,” since the term does not mean “whatever satisfies my preferences.”

Readers can judge this exchange for themselves. You repeatedly cite your own writings as authority, refuse to engage reasonable objections in good faith, and do not answer basic questions put to you. The external citations you provide are themselves significantly more measured than your presentation of them suggests. Harsanyi, for example, explicitly presented his conclusions as conditional on particular ethical postulates and assumptions about rational choice and interpersonal comparison; he did not claim to have mathematically proved the uniquely correct theory of justice. I see no value for me, for you, for this forum, or for the broader reform movement in continuing this exchange. Best of luck to you.

@clay, I introduced “normative” to mean questions about what institutions ought to do and what arrangements are justified. That is the standard use in political philosophy. You may argue that normativity reduces to subjective preference, but that is your metaethical theory, and that conclusion has not been established here, nor is it the definition of the term.

You now appear to be defending total utilitarianism: for a given population, the best outcome is the one with the highest sum of utilities. That is a controversial normative principle, not something mathematics proves on its own. A theorem may show what follows from a chosen social-welfare function; it does not prove that summed utility is the uniquely correct standard of justice. Without an independently justified method for specifying and comparing utilities, the framework can be made to rationalize radically different outcomes simply by changing the utility assignments. Your own citation is substantially more cautious about interpersonal utility comparison than your claims here.

Regardless, your framework also seems to give rights, consent, sovereignty, self-determination, and distribution no independent force. They apparently matter only insofar as they affect the utility total. So I will ask again: if a large outside population gains many small benefits by confiscating nearly all resources from a smaller region whose residents suffer catastrophic losses, is that policy “by definition good” whenever the summed utility favors the outsiders?

Nor does “elections” solve the problem of cardinal interpersonal utility comparison. Elections record choices under a particular procedure and produce a collective decision; they do not place different people’s welfare on a common measurable scale.

Furthermore, the veil of ignorance reasoning does not by itself imply that individuals would prefer social positions that maximize their expected utility. A chooser behind the veil may evaluate not only their expected payoff, but also the distribution of benefits and burdens, the condition of the worst-off, exposure to domination, and whether some losses may legitimately be imposed for others’ gains. Treating the veil as a device for maximizing summed expected utility imports the utilitarian conclusion into the assumptions rather than deriving it.

So the normative question remains: should political institutions be governed solely by aggregate preference satisfaction, or do rights, consent, distribution, non-domination, self-determination, and political membership have independent importance? You have asserted one answer. You have not shown that the question is confused or that your answer is mathematically compulsory rather than a contestable normative commitment.

@clay you misunderstand. I am both a participant in this discussion and a moderator of the forum. The moderation note concerns your conduct; the rest of my post concerns your argument.

For reference, the Code of Conduct can be found here: https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/16/read-me-code-of-conduct?_=1783225633021

@clay, you still have not answered the questions I asked. But your response regarding Hawaii is clarifying. You appear to be saying that if a sufficiently large outside population gains enough aggregate utility from controlling policy in Hawaii, then such control is “by definition good,” regardless of Hawaiian self-government, political membership, jurisdiction, or consent.

Is that in fact your position?

If so, then your theory does not merely reject territorial weighting within an existing polity. It rejects any independent normative significance for self-determination, sovereignty, jurisdiction, bounded political membership, or consent whenever aggregate external utility points the other way. That is a radical substantive political theory, not “trivial basic social choice theory.”

The same logic would appear to permit a policy such as: “Take all extractable resources from region A and transfer them to region B,” provided that the aggregate utility gain claimed for the population of B exceeded the aggregate utility loss imposed on the population of A. Would that policy therefore be “by definition good” under your framework?

More fundamentally, how do you propose to measure utility and make cardinal interpersonal comparisons of it across the affected individuals? It seems unlikely to me that we could use, for example, atoms, or some such thing.

Moderator note: Describing another participant’s mental models as “profoundly broken” is personal disparagement. Address the argument rather than the participant’s competence. You have already been warned about this. Further personal disparagement may result in moderation action.