@jack-waugh said in STAR vs. Score:

But systems that lead people to think (correctly or not) that strategy in nomination is no longer helpful to their cause, will likely lead to races having more than three candidates.

You are right that STAR isn't as good with more than three candidates.

What it comes down to, from my perspective, is that to reduce the incentive to strategically exaggerate (*), you need to minimize any reliance on "strength of preference."

STAR does this by doing a pairwise comparison as the last step. A pairwise comparison by its nature doesn't consider strength of preference (as you can see when it is a 2-candidate race in simple FPtP).

Condorcet methods try to do it all with pairwise comparisons. This reduces incentive to exaggerate even further. But since we can't guarantee there will be a Condorcet winner, we'll never get it to zero.

However, my position all along has been that getting it all the way to zero would be nice, but isn't necessary. If you get it close enough to zero, attempts to be strategic will have just as much chance of backfiring as they have of helping. A Condorcet method, including one with a very simple "tie breaking" formula, is good enough. STAR may or may not be good enough. Score is not good enough. Again, this is my opinion, but I it does come from a pretty solid game theoretical foundation.

* technically, incentive to exaggerate isn't the only thing we are trying to reduce. We also want to reduce vote splitting, which creates the incentive to strategically nominate, which in turn causes partisanship and polarization. Finally, we also want to aspire to "one person one vote", so each person has equal voting power. All of these things are accomplished by reducing the consideration of "strength of preference" in the tabulation.

@Jack-Waugh I mean that partisan voters will rank their candidate first and the main opposition last. So one (or both?) of the top contenders is likely to be eliminated early.

@multi_system_fan Your complaint is about a technical page meant for people who want all of the details. The details will remain. When there is a page ready for marketing, then your concern can be applied to that for evaluation.

@brozai I see, yes according to what I've learned about it QV tends to incorporate the strengths of interests and not just the proportion of people with those interests. Depending on what is desired that may be a good thing or a bad thing. There has also been research on its resistance to collusion and it seems to hold up very well, which is a property that I definitely like.

I found this presentation very interesting:

Youtube Video

One point brought up by an audience member during the Q&A was that QV seems to illuminate the relative preferences of the electorate, which show up in the presenter's data as approximate Gaussian distributions and the grouping together of different strata of right-wing and left-wing groups, which does not occur without the quadratic cost.

@Keith said in S-TM:

If there was two candidates supported by the largest bloc of about 40% of the voters they would still fight with eachother.

Yes, but they would still both be supported by that 40% because they both don't want to do things that make them lose that block.
Positive the fact that they try to have the block bigger and bigger, but if the block is for example "Republican", it will remain "Republican" (as well as the 2 candidates who then end up in the automatic runoff).

Also, falling back to score is not something I would view as a problem

The problem is that if you end up in Score Voting then you might as well use Score Voting from the start, which is simpler (but has its downsides).

I believe this is resolved.

@Jack-Waugh, Thanks for working through all these examples. I, too, had some questions about the GF vote, or the more general instructions regarding always voting for every alternative subjectively preferred over the focus. For a GF vote to be instrumental in impeding termination, the G vote total would have to be at least a strict majority (that is: F > half, because equal to half is not sufficient), and the F vote total would have to be the maximum vote count and exactly equal to the G vote total. Thus it is possible for a GF vote to hinder termination. However, in addition to G blocking termination, G is preferred by the voter over F, so G blocking theloop termination with F as the final winner is also indicating the possibility for G to be a later focus and possibly a better final outcome.

For testing purposes I wrote voter-agent code for voting to stop the loop. This strictly speaking is not part of SAVE, but it does indicate what I think voters might do. Each voter-agent has a property called indifference, which is a fraction between 0.0 and 1.0. At 0.0 the slightest difference matters, while at 1.0 the voter is totally indifferent to the alternatives. All voters start at 0.0 and increment their indifference value (1) every time the focus is a Condorcet winner (because if we cannot improve upon a Condorcet winner we will eventually accept it), and (2) whenever the focus subjectively improves after having first moved away (when the focus move away, such as when in a majority cycle, we also want to be more accepting, but only as we're coming back). These are the five basic reasons for an agent to vote for the focus:

Ideal - the focus is close to the voter's subjective ideal alternative. Cluster - the best and the worst of the most recent focus alternatives are really close together. Top-half - the spread between the best and the worst is moderately close (3x indifference) and the focus is in the top half of that spread. Limited-gain - the focus is close to the upper limit to any potential future gains. Peak - the focus is as good or better than a focus that was followed by a movement away from the agent's idea.
All of these conditions except Peak use the indifference value. The conditions are ordered from most difficult to satisfy to the easiest to satisfy.

The reason I bring this up is because I think voters might well vote for loop termination on the off-chance they can get a better result more quickly. Which implies a vote to terminate usually does not mean "I really want to terminate now" but instead is the kinder and gentler "it is okay to terminate now". Under those circumstances, the GF vote is perfectly reasonable, and supports the possibility of termination without foregoing the chance to influence the next focus choice.

@Keith-Edmonds Thanks! Unfortunately it doesn't send me any form of notification, will respond.

@cfrank yes, well I guess the problem can exist at a lot of different levels.

Individuals can certainly vote strategically, and effectively so, under FPTP. Under approval, they almost have to. (unless they truly do think in simplistic black and white "like" and "dislike" terms)

I am also concerned about forming parties and eliminating candidates through primaries (etc), which FPTP strongly incentivizes. To be honest, that is the biggest problem because it causes so much polarization.

I am less clear on how organizations could game it through computation, although I don't doubt it is possible. They certainly do that with gerrymandering, with a lot of sophistication.

@sass said in S-2-1:

It's really weird reading a Score advocate claim that voting behavior should be based on hatred and fear. Score is all about consensus.

Agree completely. I mean I'm not a huge fan of Score but good voting systems should be about bringing people together toward something they can all be relatively happy with.

Instead, this sounds like someone is just raging against the machine rather than approaching it with a positive vision of a better future. Makes me feel like I'm in the wrong place.

Also, "Tongue Kiss" is super f****** gross. I'm genuinely repulsed and knowing that it's from the person who manages this site makes me want leave the entire forum.

Sorry Jack but this was my impression too. I'd recommend giving thought to how that sort of cranky-ranty-weird-angry-gross stuff comes off to people visiting here and considering participating. Rkjoyce did a lot of that on the old forum (example https://votingtheory.com/archive/posts?where={"topic_id"%3A342} ), but he wasn't the one actually running the forum.

@Jack-Waugh you’re right about For-and-Against, the modification I suggested is much less significant because it requires the pairs to match exactly, whereas For-and-Against counts all the positives and all the negatives. Just another example of how arbitrary the concept of “balance” in this formalism is. I liked your strengthening of the argument, you’re absolutely right about that as well, because it virtually eliminates any level of information voters might have about other ballots.

Maybe there is something more tangible that F-balance is trying to point to, but it isn’t clear what it might be. In my opinion, with respect to the concept of balance, the strengthened construction should by all reason send equal.vote back to the drawing board, especially if they can’t even formalize a valid counter-argument.

@Marylander said in SACRW2: Score And Choose Random Winner from 2 complementing methods:

I think it is difficult to define a sincere vote as something completely isolated from its effects on the outcome, since I think that those effects are what give votes "meaning"

True, but with ranked methods, I think we can pretty easily define "sincere" to mean that you ranked them according to your actual preferences. Likewise under plurality, if I preferred Ralph Nader to Al Gore (in 2000), but voted for Gore because I thought Nader didn't have a chance, and preferred Gore to Bush... that's an insincere, strategic vote.

One shortcut to deciding what is a sincere vote is if you actually would vote the same way if you truly had no idea which of the candidates is more likely to win. If so, that is (in all cases I can think of) a sincere vote.

@rob said in Codepens:

So it is installed? Do I just do this?

Yes, you do.

@cfrank said in Ordinal Score Voting, Weighted Variation:

I do think that those things tend to be correlated in voting systems, and that tendency I am referring to as the “rigid/loose” spectrum of voting systems. Do you agree? Does that make sense?

I'm not seeing where rigid and loose come in. What makes a system rigid or loose? Are you saying that Cardinal vs Ordinal ballots is the difference? Otherwise I'm not sure how those terms apply.

Or are you speaking of things that aren't game theoretically stable (i.e. hall of mirrors) as being loose?

You also use the terms elastic and flexible, which I don't know what you are referring to. And you continue to use the term consensuality and distinguish it from utilitarian, but again, it is not clearly defined.

@marylander Your criticisms are definitely fair and especially I hadn’t considered the midrange score devaluation problem, but I also agree that the calibration of the distributions is probably not an example that would reflect actual use. A winning candidate in this system probably needs to effectively pass thresholds of support of various kinds.

Also, any distribution or class of distributions could be selected as the prior, and more sophisticated methods could be implemented to update the distributions such as Bayesian statistics. It could be that a fixed distribution is chosen, I think the order statistics of uniform variables is not a terrible idea as the initial. But anyway it’s also all somewhat arbitrary, choosing a distribution is the same kind of problem as choosing cardinal score values. Furthermore with relevant updating the midrange support candidate will inform and reinforce the potential for compromise in future elections.

The irrelevant ballot problem can be fixed by simply ignoring or disallowing any ballots where the same score is given to all candidates, or more strictly any ballot that does not make use of both the minimal and maximal scores. I am not sure why right-skewed distributions would be problematic, in fact that is part of the functionality of the system.

@rob I am now formatting the dates that are associated to the posts.

Topics used to show all the details, including creation date. I no longer show any details for them, just the title of the topic.

I believe there were no other contexts in which dates showed up, just those two.

Of course, post headers themselves show up in three contexts: posts for a topic, a single post, and search results.

@rob no need to feel sorry about my perceptions. I agree that there is not much point in discussing this further with you, much as there is no purpose in asking a question to which you have already decided the answer. The “basic things” we don’t agree on are not basic at all.

I literally explained that those curves represent the distribution of P values attained by each score from past elections, and I explicitly stated that I was NOT calling anybody an imbecile. I have put more than enough effort into explaining the concept clearly and precisely. It is not my fault that certain people apparently concerned with quantity-based systems have not sufficiently developed their education in mathematics…

Guess who were mathematicians:

Condorcet, Arrow, Dodgson, Borda, Black, Copeland, Kemeny, Smith, and Tideman, all giants in Voting Theory.

If you look on the following list, I don’t think you will find a single person not well versed in probability theory:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Voting_theorists

What you are complaining about is absurd. Consider this statement:

“A candidate is called (S,P)-consensual if at least a P-fraction of the electorate scored that candidate at least an S.”

How on Earth could that be made any clearer?

What about this?:

“A candidate’s SP-fitness score is given by the expected value of the number of nodes on that candidate’s profile that will poke out of a randomly-generated candidate profile.”

How would you go about describing that with a glass of water?

If you have a simpler way of explaining the system, be my guest! But it’s very rare that a new idea comes neatly packaged up with a bow, and frankly it’s an absurd requirement to expect, let alone to demand, from anyone.

Directly contrary to your claim, I have definitely suggested a very clear alternative system to “majority rules,” which I believe we had discussed in some detail on the previous forum (perhaps not) and that I alluded to. You seemed to comprehend the concept now, but it seems to be that you’ve also painted over it with unwarranted disdain. It’s quite rude to presume that somebody does not have well-defined justification for their claims or beliefs, and when it is not true such as presently, it is also inefficient and counterproductive.

The reason for making the candidates anonymous except for their score distributions is to eliminate bias among the electorate, and for the electorate to select a candidate who gives a good distribution for the whole rather than having only selfish concern for their own vote. It might be even better to have an impartial human arbiter make the decision, who is also elected and has the responsibility of and incentive to choose a candidate based only on their score profiles. I would propose the opposite question: Why leave it up to a mindless mechanical system when it is totally unnecessary?

But I really don’t see this discussion going anywhere, it feels like pulling teeth.

@cfrank regarding Condorcet methods, some professors I've been in contact with did a series of three works on the methods "Split Cycle" and "Stable Voting" you may like to read.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.02350
https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.08451
https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.00542

Regarding multiwinner rules with ranked ballots there is a nice analysis here

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089675/

One of the main takeaways of that one is that choose-one is actually not too bad when there are multiple winners (although as we know, it is quite bad for a single-winner election).

This issue is resolved, or at least, alleviated, as Eric Wilhelm has SSH access to the production and backup servers.

@Marylander said in Approval vs. IRV:

[IRV] will strike out everyone but the top two, then pick the most preferred candidate between the two.

The current system does that just fine.