election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto)
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Moderator note: @clay, your tone is crossing the line for productive exchange.
Referring to another participant’s argument as “statistical nonsense” and “statistically illiterate nonsense,” and describing that participant as “deeply confused,” is not acceptable here. You may identify errors, criticize reasoning, and reject premises. Do not characterize another participant’s intelligence or competence.
The disagreement concerns the appropriate target and unit of political representation. Treating one side of that contested institutional question as evidence of statistical illiteracy is personal disparagement, not argument. Continue without such characterizations.
Returning to the substance in my capacity as a participant:
Districting is not merely a “hack.” It is a choice to give territorial constituencies standing within a federated political structure. Your argument assumes that the only legitimate target is the distribution of individual preferences across the entire population. That is one possible target, but it is not politically neutral and cannot be established by statistics alone.
Suppose 80 percent of a state’s population lives in a few coastal metropolitan areas and 20 percent lives across a large rural interior. A statewide uniform sample may accurately reproduce the numerical distribution of individual preferences. It does not follow that it provides an adequate mechanism for coordinating the distinct territorial interests, jurisdictions, infrastructure, resource use, and local conditions of the rural interior. A federation may deliberately give constituent territorial units institutional standing rather than permit every issue to be determined solely by aggregate population weight.
You write:
“this is a statistical distortion away from actual accurate representation.”
“Accurate representation” is undefined until you specify what is being represented. If the target is individual preferences in statewide proportion, then uniform sampling is accurate relative to that target. If the target includes representation of constituent territorial units, then stratification is part of the target rather than a distortion, as I have already stated. This seems to be a point of disagreement. If you believe this notion is erroneous, can you please identify the statistical or political premise you reject, and illustrate why?
Politics is not merely an exercise in estimating a population distribution. It is also a system for coordinating interests, jurisdictions, rights, obligations, and policies across differentiated communities. The desired representation must be judged relative to that political purpose. Statistics cannot choose the purpose for us.
You write:
“the district mandate is putting a thumb on the scale rather than letting voters decide.”
No. It selects a different representative unit. I am not arguing that an individual’s vote should count more because that individual’s preferences are rare. I am arguing that a federal structure may reasonably represent both persons and constituent territorial communities in order to coordinate geographically organized interests and prevent persistent statewide majorities concentrated in some regions from overriding sufficient political investment in smaller constituent regions.
Your example involving “Brian’s vote” therefore misses the argument. Territorial representation is not a reward for unusual preferences. It gives institutional standing to communities whose concerns are organized partly by geography: land use, water, transportation, extraction, agriculture, environmental exposure, infrastructure, policing, and local jurisdiction.
Geographic representation can certainly be designed badly. Districts may be unequal, arbitrary, or gerrymandered. But none of that proves that territorial representation is inherently irrational or “obviously suboptimal”; it shows that the structure must be designed carefully. Treating the entire state as a single constituency lies at the opposite end of the same design spectrum and is itself a districting and aggregation choice. For a large, territorially heterogeneous polity, that arrangement is not self-evidently ideal or stable.
You also say:
“there is no ‘supposed to’. there is no ‘ought’.”
That cannot be correct. The decision to define representation as proportional reproduction of individual statewide preferences is itself a normative institutional choice. Invoking what rational citizens would choose behind a veil of ignorance does not eliminate the normative question. A person who did not know whether they would belong to a dense metropolitan majority or a smaller rural region might reasonably prefer a system that protects both individual equality and some degree of territorial standing. They might reject a structure in which a geographically concentrated majority could permanently determine policies for regions with substantially different conditions and needs. The veil of ignorance therefore does not uniquely imply undifferentiated statewide representation.
The proper object of representation cannot be derived from sampling theory alone, because sampling theory evaluates procedures relative to a target that must first be specified. You have assumed a political objective and then labeled alternatives statistically inaccurate relative to that assumed objective. That does not establish that the objective itself is uniquely correct.
If you believe my position contains a contradiction, identify the propositions that generate it. Calling the position statistically illiterate does not demonstrate one.
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Moderator note: @clay, your tone is crossing the line for productive exchange. Referring to another participant's argument as "statistical nonsense"
tone policing. substitute "statistically nonsensical" or "statistically invalid" or whatever register you prefer. the claim is about the argument, and it stands, so let's test it.
The disagreement concerns the appropriate target and unit of political representation. Treating one side of that contested institutional question as evidence of statistical illiteracy is personal disparagement, not argument.
the boundaries of a constituency are a political given—states, districts, whatever. i've said that from the start. but given a constituency, the claim that its members should be weighted unequally by address is the thing i'm calling invalid, and here's the two-step derivation. behind a veil of ignorance you have an equal chance of being anyone in the constituency, which means you don't know your address. so address-weighting cannot improve your ex-ante prospects—under any risk attitude, from pure expectation to pure worst-case. no symmetric evaluation of prospects assigns you a gain from privileging an address you have equal odds of not holding. harsanyi formalized the expected-utility version; the symmetry step alone is enough here.
Districting is not merely a "hack." It is a choice to give territorial constituencies standing within a federated political structure.
"standing for territorial constituencies" is address-weighting, named politely. it weighs some persons more than others by where they live. nobody behind the veil chooses that, per the above.
Your argument assumes that the only legitimate target is the distribution of individual preferences across the entire population.
no assumption required. the office defines the target: a senator for the state answers to the state's population, so the estimand is what that population would conclude, and the unbiased estimator of a population quantity samples the population as it is. your alternative target—"representation of constituent territorial units"—amounts to a different office, one answering to a federation of localities. that's the boundary question again, which is upstream politics, and which i've never claimed the mechanism settles.
That is one possible target, but it is not politically neutral and cannot be established by statistics alone.
inverted. anonymity—every person counts once—is the unique neutral weighting: it's the only rule that doesn't reference who or where you are. your proposal is the non-neutral one by construction, since it requires knowing which addresses get the multiplier.
Suppose 80 percent of a state's population lives in a few coastal metropolitan areas and 20 percent lives across a large rural interior. […] It does not follow that it provides an adequate mechanism for coordinating the distinct territorial interests, jurisdictions, infrastructure, resource use, and local conditions of the rural interior.
run your own scenario. the harm you're insuring against is intensity mismatch: a numerical majority with weak preferences overriding a minority with strong ones. that's an artifact of ordinal, one-person-one-vote aggregation. cardinal aggregation—which a jury using score voting closely approximates—counts the rural minority's stakes at full weight, issue by issue, because it elicits those stakes from each voter directly. and this is measured, not assumed: strength of preference is exactly what VSE simulations score methods on, with normalized utilities and strategic voters priced in. now suppose you think some residual inaccuracy remains. address-weighting cannot fix it, because a correction requires knowing whose utilities are undercounted and by how much, and you cannot read minds. a geographic multiplier applies a constant to a voter's entire preference vector on zero information about his actual stakes: it overcounts him where he has no special interest, adds nothing where his interest is extreme, and inherits every measurement error the ballot already had, plus an arbitrary distortion on top. an instrument that asks each person his stakes, however imperfectly, dominates one that guesses them from his zip code.
Politics is not merely an exercise in estimating a population distribution. It is also a system for coordinating interests, jurisdictions, rights, obligations, and policies across differentiated communities.
the legitimate core of this is subsidiarity: allocate each decision to the constituency it affects. interior water policy that principally affects the interior belongs to an interior jurisdiction—an office defined over that population, sampled uniformly. the office defines the population; the sample matches it. that handles land use, water, extraction, infrastructure, and local jurisdiction completely, and i endorse all of it. subsidiarity never requires extra weight for interior voters inside a statewide office. you're running together decentralized jurisdiction (often welfare-positive) and disproportional weighting within a jurisdiction (the only thing i've called distorted).
I am arguing that a federal structure may reasonably represent both persons and constituent territorial communities […] to prevent persistent statewide majorities concentrated in some regions from overriding sufficient political investment in smaller constituent regions.
if persistent-majority protection is the motive, notice geography is one cleavage among many. renters, the disabled, religious minorities, workers in a dying industry—all face persistent majorities. territorial standing protects exactly one minority type, the spatially clustered one, and dilutes the rest to do it.
and see what kind of move this is in general. address is an attribute. weighting by address is structurally identical to weighting by race, by religion, by ideology, by how deontological someone is, or by fondness for spicy food if we want to be pedantic: pick a trait, and give the people who hold it more than their per-person share of representation. "these people deserve extra say" is the entire content, however it's dressed. the escape you'll want is "geography is different because it correlates with distinct interests—land, water, jurisdiction." but every demographic attribute correlates with distinct interests. race does. occupation does. religion does. if correlated-interests justified a multiplier, it would justify a racial multiplier, and you don't believe that, so you need a principled line between geography and race as weighting bases, and at the level of "correlates with interests" there isn't one. this isn't a novel observation, either—it's holding law. reynolds v. sims (1964) struck down alabama's geographically weighted state senate ("legislators represent people, not trees or acres") and explicitly rejected the federal analogy: states may not mirror the u.s. senate's territorial weighting, because counties were never sovereign parties to a compact. territorial weighting in a state-level body is the exact thing the court held unjustifiable, for the exact reason: the 1787 bargain was an instrumental deal—no union without it, and union beat disunion for everyone—and it justified the federal senate and nothing else.
Geographic representation can certainly be designed badly. Districts may be unequal, arbitrary, or gerrymandered. But none of that proves that territorial representation is inherently irrational […]
follow your own concession. require districts population-proportional and uniformly sampled within—the only version that isn't "unequal, arbitrary, or gerrymandered"—and you have arrived at my position: proportional stratification, which weights nobody and which i have zero objection to. everything beyond it is disproportion, which is the thing under dispute.
A person who did not know whether they would belong to a dense metropolitan majority or a smaller rural region might reasonably prefer a system that protects both individual equality and some degree of territorial standing.
"might reasonably prefer" is the claim restated, and it needs the one thing the veil removes: knowledge of where you live. name what the veil agent gains ex ante from the geographic multiplier. insurance? dominated by intensity-sensitivity, above. protection of the worst-off? the worst-off are at least as likely urban renters or the disabled as rural landowners, and your multiplier dilutes them. there's no candidate left.
The proper object of representation cannot be derived from sampling theory alone […] You have assumed a political objective and then labeled alternatives statistically inaccurate relative to that assumed objective.
if you believe a live instrumental case exists—that address-weighting raises total welfare in a state-level body today, where reynolds found none—state it as the empirical claim it is and we can evaluate it. it can't be derived from "coordination" in the abstract.
If you believe my position contains a contradiction, identify the propositions that generate it.
a position doesn't need a contradiction to be false; unsound premises suffice. yours requires that some persons count more than others by address, and every justification you've offered for it—insurance, minority protection, coordination—is served better by a mechanism that weights nobody. you asked which premise i reject: none. symmetry, pareto, instrumental rationality—i accept all of them, and equal weighting follows. now name yours.
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@clay, this has become too sprawling to address productively all at once, so I’m going to isolate one point.
You write:
“Your alternative target—‘representation of constituent territorial units’—amounts to a different office, one answering to a federation of localities. That’s the boundary question again, which is upstream politics, and which I’ve never claimed the mechanism settles.”
That appears to concede the point I have been making. Whether a higher-level office represents individuals in one statewide constituency or instead coordinates constituent localities is an upstream political and constitutional choice. Sampling theory can evaluate a jury relative to whichever target is chosen, but it does not choose the target.
You may argue that the statewide individual-population target is preferable. I may argue that a more hierarchical or federated structure deserves consideration. That is a substantive institutional subject of discussion, not evidence that either side is statistically illiterate.
I am not going to respond simultaneously to every additional argument about score voting, Harsanyi, Reynolds v. Sims, subsidiarity, minority protection, and utility aggregation. That produces parallel monologues rather than examination. We should settle this first point before moving to the next one.
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That appears to concede the point I have been making.
it's the position i opened with. from my previous post: "the boundaries of a constituency are a political given—states, districts, whatever. i've said that from the start." so yes: which offices exist, and which population each answers to, is upstream politics. sampling theory doesn't choose the target. we agree, and have the whole time.
what sampling theory does settle is everything downstream: given an office, uniform sampling (or population-proportional stratification, same thing) is the only rule that weights nobody, and unequal weighting by address within that constituency is invalid.
so here's the one point to settle, since you wanted one. your concrete proposals—"guaranteed representation to local political units" in a senate jury, negotiated "allocation of juror seats" and "guaranteed minimum representation" for localities—were about offices that already exist, with constituencies already defined. that's downstream weighting, the only thing i've called invalid. so which is it? if you were only ever saying that offices could be defined differently—a federation-of-localities office instead of a statewide one—then we have no disagreement and never did. if you're defending unequal weighting within an existing office, the arguments you've set aside are the examination you asked for, ready whenever you are.
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@clay, I understand the distinction you are drawing. Unequal weighting within an office explicitly designed to represent individuals statewide would conflict with that office’s stated representational target. Redefining the office as one partly accountable to constituent localities would be a different institutional design.
There are roughly three different kinds of questions we could discuss: normative theory about what political institutions should aim to achieve; institutional design questions about how those goals could be implemented; and legal analysis concerning what arrangements are permissible under existing constitutional and institutional constraints.
My question concerns the first two: what representational structure an election-by-jury system should implement, and how. Saying that the current office should represent the statewide population accepts that this representative function should remain unchanged. That is one idea that I am questioning, not rejecting. You place this topic within your category of “boundary” concerns. I think that category can extend beyond horizontal constituency boundaries to include vertical and hierarchical structures.
Once jurors are sampled to select public officials, the election-by-jury framework can be generalized in different ways. My examples of negotiated juror allocation and guaranteed locality representation were sketches of a more federated, hierarchical conception of the higher-level office, analogous in some respects to the relationship between states and the federal government. They were not attempts to insert arbitrary address multipliers into a structure whose purpose was otherwise accepted. They were part of questioning what purpose that structure should have in the first place. In the United States, legislative districts are generally required to contain roughly equal populations, so geographic districting is generally designed to preserve roughly (though imperfectly) equal individual weighting, even if gerrymandering often distorts the resulting representation.
The relevant disagreement, if any remains, seems not to concern terminology or the mechanics of random jury selection, but whether higher-level offices should remain directly accountable to the statewide population as a whole or instead be constituted partly through the local jurisdictions with which they coordinate.
That is a question of normative theory and institutional design, and it probably belongs in a separate discussion.
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Unequal weighting within an office explicitly designed to represent individuals statewide would conflict with that office’s stated representational target.
then we're aligned on everything the manifesto claims. given an office, uniform sampling—no unequal weighting by address. equal-population districting is proportional stratification, which weights nobody and which i have no objection to. which offices exist, and to whom each answers, is upstream constitutional design the mechanism doesn't settle. the mechanism survives your review untouched.
That is a question of normative theory and institutional design, and it probably belongs in a separate discussion.
here i'll push back on the framing, because the remaining question isn't open. it's settled, and i'll state the resolution flatly so you can attack it if you think it fails.
first, preference sovereignty: whatever "normative" means (spoiler: it just means "subjective preference"), it cannot float free of what people would actually prefer. you cannot coherently call arrangement Y better than arrangement X if every affected person would choose X. any theory that licenses that conclusion has refuted itself. so "a question of normative theory" reduces to a question about preferences, and the preferences here are not in doubt.
second, the veil makes them unanimous. ex ante—not knowing your address—every person prefers equal per-person weight, because a geographic multiplier is a losing bet for anyone with equal odds of living anywhere. this is harsanyi's result, and the symmetry step alone carries it: no risk attitude, from pure expectation to pure worst-case, assigns you a gain from privileging an address you probably don't hold. yes, once situated, you'd prefer extra weight for yourself—and so would everyone else, symmetrically, which is exactly why no one accepts anyone else's claim to it. equal weighting is the only allocation everyone can agree to without knowing who they are. that's as settled as anything in social choice gets: unanimous ex-ante preference, zero coherent objectors.
third, the dichotomy that closes your federated conception specifically. its allocation of influence is either population-proportional—in which case it's proportional stratification and we already agree—or it isn't, in which case it assigns unequal per-person weight by residence, as a matter of arithmetic, whatever the intent behind it. there is no third option, and you've already disclaimed the second. so there's nothing left to take to a separate thread: the space of positions is {agreement, arithmetic inequality nobody ex ante accepts}, and you've located yourself in the first.
if you think this is wrong, the attack surface is precise: produce the third option, or produce the person behind the veil who gains from the multiplier. those are the only two doors.
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@clay, to clarify, “normative” does not mean “subjective preference.” It refers to claims about what institutions ought to do or what arrangements are justified. A preference-based account can be one normative theory, but it does not define or exhaust normative theory. Your appeal to unanimous hypothetical preference behind a veil of ignorance is itself a substantive normative argument. Its assumptions and conclusions remain open to examination; they do not make the normative question disappear.
You write that normative theory “cannot float free of what people would actually prefer.” That is true in the limited sense that preferences can and should inform normative judgment. But normative judgment is not wholly determined by existing preferences. People can prefer domination, discrimination, exploitation, or institutions that violate rights. Normative theory asks whether such preferences ought to govern.
Even after preferences are known, one must still decide whose preferences count, under what conditions they count, whether adaptive or malicious preferences count, how rights constrain aggregation, and whether future generations or constituent institutions should have standing.
Moreover, the veil does not mechanically yield your conclusion unless we specify the agents’ information, risk attitudes, conception of political goods, and whether they value only equal individual influence or also protections against persistent territorial domination and the political standing of constituent jurisdictions. Those are themselves normative and institutional questions.
You say that “the preferences here are not in doubt.” That appears central to your argument, but it is precisely what I doubt. Which preferences do you mean, and why should we assume that every person behind the veil would rank the available institutional arrangements in the same way?
The mathematical representation theorem may be valid conditional on its axioms. What does not follow is that those axioms adequately describe actual human preferences, capture all politically relevant values, or uniquely determine institutional design. To support your conclusion, you would need to show why the assumed preference structure, informational conditions, and conception of relevant goods are appropriate here, not merely that the conclusion follows once those assumptions are imposed. Even granting Harsanyi’s result, an additional argument is required to move from equal treatment in a social-welfare representation to the claim that every legitimate political institution must represent individuals directly and only in proportion to population.
The normative question I am raising is whether higher-level offices should remain directly accountable to the statewide population as a whole or instead be constituted partly through the local jurisdictions with which they coordinate. You say that “the remaining question isn’t open; it’s settled.”
Does your position therefore imply that any institution giving constituent political units standing independent of their populations is necessarily normatively indefensible? In particular, do you regard equal state representation in the U.S. Senate as democratically illegitimate in principle? If not, then the question cannot be settled merely by asserting equal per-person weight as the only admissible representational target. If so, that would imply that a central feature of many federated democratic systems—giving constituent units some standing independent of population—is democratically defective in principle.
This returns to my example of an 80–20 coastal–rural division. A persistent territorial minority may be outvoted indefinitely even when its interests are geographically concentrated, structurally distinct, and directly affected by decisions made at the higher level. I do not think your appeal to cardinal voting adequately resolves that problem. Cardinal voting may register the intensity of individual preferences, but it does not by itself guarantee institutional standing or protection for a territorially concentrated minority.
Federated structures address that problem by giving constituent units some independent role in higher-level decision-making. They also create other risks and tradeoffs, including unequal influence, entrenchment, and minority veto. The question is how those competing values should be balanced. It is not obvious, and certainly is not established by Harsanyi’s theorem, that there is one uniquely correct structure of political representation.
Consider two unions containing the same people and the same total population. In one, the local jurisdictions dissolve into a unitary government. In the other, they retain governments, responsibilities, and limited rights of self-rule while delegating specified powers to a common higher authority. Must the higher-level institution have exactly the same representative structure in both cases? If not, then population arithmetic alone does not determine the appropriate unit or structure of representation. The constitutional relationship among the constituent political units also matters.
Taken to its logical extreme, your principle also seems to undermine political boundaries themselves. If equal per-person influence is the uniquely legitimate representational rule, why should only residents of a state or nation participate in decisions affecting that territory? Why should the populations of China and India not collectively exercise more influence over policy in Hawaii than Hawaiians do?
Presumably the answer is that Hawaii belongs to a bounded political community whose members possess some claim to self-government. But that means the relevant constituency cannot be derived from population arithmetic alone. It depends on prior normative judgments about political membership, jurisdiction, sovereignty, self-determination, and the allocation of authority.
So the fundamental question remains: equal influence among whom, over which decisions, and within which political community? Until those questions are answered, equal per-person weighting is not a complete theory of political representation.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, to clarify, “normative” does not mean “subjective preference.” It refers to claims about what institutions ought to do or what arrangements are justified.
"ought" means "I would subjectively prefer that". this is ethics 101.
https://wonk.blog/ethics.html#isought
People can prefer domination, discrimination, exploitation, or institutions that violate rights.
The person doing the dominating prefers it. The person on the receiving end it doesn't. they have different utility functions. it's just subjective preference.
"rights" are just laws.
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@clay, that is not “ethics 101”; it is a substantive and highly contested form of moral subjectivism. Aristotelian, Kantian, contractualist, natural-law, constructivist, moral-realist, and many consequentialist theories do not define “ought” as “I would subjectively prefer that.”
Likewise, legal rights are created or recognized by law, but moral rights are precisely the standards by which laws may be judged unjust. Saying that “rights are just laws” eliminates the distinction between legality and justice by definition rather than defending that conclusion.
Describing domination as a conflict between two utility functions also does not resolve the normative issue. It tells us that the parties prefer different outcomes; it does not tell us whose preference should govern, whether both preferences deserve equal standing, whether malicious or coercive preferences should count, or what constraints should apply to their aggregation.
You are advancing a preference-subjectivist theory of normativity. That is one possible philosophical position, but it is not the definition of “ought,” and it does not make competing ethical theories disappear by stipulation.
But setting that aside, I asked several questions above that your response did not address.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, that is not “ethics 101”; it is a substantive and highly contested form of moral subjectivism. Aristotelian, Kantian, contractualist, natural-law, constructivist, moral-realist, and many consequentialist theories do not define “ought” as “I would subjectively prefer that.”
but they're wrong. and you can trivially demonstrate that. preference sovereignty principle. I explained all of this and you're not making contact with it.
https://wonk.blog/ethics.html#isought
Describing domination as a conflict between two utility functions also does not resolve the normative issue.
Yes it does. normative just means relating to subjective preference.
some people support the death penalty, some people don't. some people think abortion is wrong, other people don't. it's just subjective preferences.
Do you literally think there is some physical property called morality? Do you think I can make a device which can measure it in atoms? this is unhinged.
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@cfrank The problem here is that you have profoundly broken mental models of a number of foundational concepts. The ethical piece and lack of recognition of the preference sovereignty principle is a major one, but the subsidiarity component is maybe more blatant because it's so much more straightforward.
the binding problem is real, i'll grant it outright. a powerful group can override a smaller one for a small gain to itself and a large loss to them. that's game theory, and it happens.
take the hardest version, zoning. upzoning a block cuts housing costs for thousands and mildly inconveniences a few current neighbors. the ones who'd gain most are the people who'd move in, and they can't vote yet, because the units don't exist and they don't live there. the biggest stake sits outside the electorate entirely.
now look at what people actually reach for to fix that. state preemption, by-right approval, ending single-family zoning. nobody proposes giving pro-housing voters extra votes across the board. even in the hardest case, the blanket multiplier isn't on the list, because it's the wrong instrument: it hands a faction more weight on every question to patch a shortfall on one, at a cost well above what it fixes.
and most of the time the problem is smaller than it looks, because good aggregation absorbs it. a candidate who upzones and pairs it with concessions the neighbors actually want takes both camps and beats one who serves a single faction. that's triangulating to maximum total support, and a higher-VSE method does it by construction, capturing intensity across factions without making anyone's vote count double.
to apply that to your example, if people in the Chinese mainland are barely affected by what goes on in Hawaii, then a politician who makes policies that significantly harm Hawaiians but only marginally improve utility for people living on the Chinese mainland, then with a good voting method he won't do well. and if for some reason they actually do get utility from affecting policy in Hawaii, then enacting that policy is by definition good.
you can make a stupidly simple example where you have a district composed of two cities of equal size several miles from each other and there's a vote on a district-wide law concerning noise ordinances. people in City A just want to party and don't care about loud noise. people in City B are old and retired and want peace and quiet. it's just a few people in the Party City are anti-noise and pass this law by 51% that governs how both cities collectively regulate noise, you could say that's really bad because voters in one of the cities are controlling what voters in the other city are doing even though it doesn't affect them.
but stop and think about this for more than 5 seconds. it can be helpful.
if the noise in city A really doesn't affect people in city B, then they won't be willing to sacrifice very much to get that policy. The winning candidate will tend to be somebody who only wants to apply noise ordinances to City B. or who just wants to leave it to the cities to regulate locally. because somebody who embraces across the board noise ordinances only slightly increases utility for people in city B who just have a weird urge to regulate things that don't even really affect them. but it significantly decreases the utility of people in city A.
this is all just super trivial basic social choice theory. I find it kind of baffling that this is even up for debate.
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@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.
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@cfrank you can choose whether you want to debate with the moderator or with me. take your pic.
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@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
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, [...] 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.
no. i'm explaining that "good" is relative. to the chinese, the move would be good. to the hawaiians, it would be bad.
and given you have a given population, the best outcome is the one that has the highest sum of utilities. this is just proven.
Is that in fact your position?
it's not a "position", it's just a potential set of preferences, and a mathematical proof.
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.
this is confusion. "normative" just means "related to subjective preference", and the hawaiians in that example would experience a loss of self-determination/sovereignty/etc. as "lower utility". that's what happens whenever you make group decisions aka "elections". other people in your city will vote on laws that affect you. they will vote to take your money by force (taxes), vote on how late you can buy alcohol, etc. that just affects your utility. we're just talking about preferences. social choice theory 101.
That is a radical substantive political theory, not “trivial basic social choice theory.”
no, it's just basic social choice theory.
https://wonk.blog/ethics
https://rangevoting.net/UtilFoundnsi'm not sure why you refer to learn about this topic, yet continue to confidently make incorrect statements about it.
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?
it's not my "framework", it's just mathematically proven.
https://rangevoting.net/UtilFoundnsMore fundamentally, how do you propose to measure utility and make cardinal interpersonal comparisons of it across the affected individuals?
elections.
https://rangevoting.net/WhyNoHumansvoting theory 101.
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@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.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, I introduced “normative” to mean questions about what institutions ought to do and what arrangements are justified.
"ought" just means "would satisfy my preferences". if you say someone "ought" to do something, that's identical to saying, "i would prefer it if you would do that thing."
similarly, "justified" means "satisfies my preferences". that's it.
That is the standard use in political philosophy.
show me any use of these words that you think constitutes "political philosophy", and i will demonstrate that it just means subjective preference. your lack of familiarity with basic social choice theory is astonishing.
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.
yes it has, and i just proved it. and you have zero counterargument.
https://wonk.blog/ethics#isoughtYou 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.
you're dead wrong, and this is proven.
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.
you have this completely backward. the theorem proves what the correct social welfare function is. it does not use the social welfare function as a premise. you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
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.
this is a classic novice fallacy, thinking that utilities have to be in a consistent scale to be summed. this is obviously wrong, as harsanyi proved.
it is amazing that you refuse to spend a few minutes learning about this topic before plodding in and making a series of confidently wrong arguments.
Your own citation is substantially more cautious about interpersonal utility comparison than your claims here.
it is not "cautious", it just explains the fact that i just explained to you in even more layman-friendly language with the hope that you might be able to grok it.
Harsanyi's argument "Social Utility" is the average of individual utilities
Let uk(e) denote the utility (according to individual k) of an event e. We want to investigate how to aggregate the individual utilities into a "social utility" saying "how good e is for all of society." For what reason should we claim that social utility is just the average of individual utilities?
J.C.Harsanyi, in a 2-page article involving no mathematics whatever [J.Political Economy 61,5 (1953) 434-435], came up with the following nice idea: "Optimizing social welfare" means "picking the state of the world all individuals would prefer if they were in a state of uncertainty about their identity." I.e. if you are equally likely to be anybody, then your expected utility is the summed utility in the world divided by the number of people in it – i.e. average utility. Then by the linear-lottery property (Lin) of von Neumann utility, it follows that social utility is averaging.Regardless, your framework also seems to give rights, consent, sovereignty, self-determination, and distribution no independent force.
it is not my "framework", it is just obvious factual reality. the only "force" people care about is their utility. preference sovereignty principle.
why do you insist on plodding ahead making these kinds of vacuous statements when you could just spend a few minutes learning basic social choice theory?
They apparently matter only insofar as they affect the utility total.
"matter" literally means "has utility", so this is a lovely tautology.
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?
and i will repeat, again, that it is good to those who benefit, and bad to those who don't. maybe learn what the word "preference" means.
Nor does “elections” solve the problem of cardinal interpersonal utility comparison.
there is no "problem" of interpersonal utility comparisons, as i have voluminously explained to you. could you please try actually reading anything i sent you instead of repeating confused nonsense? this should only take a few minutes to read, and would save you a lot of time. and it would save me a lot of time, not having to explain second grade level conceptual reasoning to a grown adult.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/understanding-social-utility-through-harsanyis-argument-528ba25241fd
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.
you DO NOT NEED A COMMON SCALE! the voting method with the highest VSE already has the highest expected utility FOR YOU!!! IN YOUR OWN PERSONAL UTILITY SCALE!!!!
please spend more than 30 seconds studying and trying to understand this before sending me another round of confused nonsense.
Furthermore, the veil of ignorance reasoning does not by itself imply that individuals would prefer social positions that maximize their expected utility.
utility is a measure of how much you want something or prefer it, so of course you by definition want that which maximizes your 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.
this is sheer confusion. behind the veil of ignorance, you do not need to think about anyone else. you can think purely selfishly and that will be identical to being "altrustic" toward everyone else because they are ALSO uncertain of their identity. selfishness and altruism become the same thing. you may already BE the worst off—there is some probability of that. so you've already taken that into account.
you. are. confused. wake up.
Treating the veil as a device for maximizing summed expected utility imports the utilitarian conclusion into the assumptions rather than deriving it.
no, it does not use summed expected utility as an axiom whatsoever. you're just wrong and clearly confused.
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?
- there is no such thing as a "normative question". there's just utility/preference. those things you just listed, to the extent they are even meaningful concepts, are just "things which affect your utility". specifically, there is no such thing as "consent" in group decisions. consent only applies to personal decisions made by a single individual. you only "consent" to having your favorite option selected, but some option is going to happen regardless, and the only thing we can optimize is how well off you are. many/most people will not get their favorite option. this is just reality.
the amount of confusion in your words is staggering.
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.
i have absolutely shown those things. the fact that you are confused is not an argument.
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@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.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@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.
I have meticulously dismantled your arguments point by point.
for example, you made the classic fallacy of thinking my arguments require interpersonal utility comparisons. but harsanyi's observation is that you don't need this at all. The outcome with the highest group utility will also have the highest expected utility for you in your own utility scale without any need to have the different utilities in common units.
when you think about it for a second this is trivially obvious from grade school level mathematics. but I actually cited a voluminous link about it written by a math PhD who is widely regarded as the foremost expert in this field and you STILL just ignored it.
My point here was not just "convincing", it is trivially obviously true. and you're in a forum that is literally called "voting theory"—yet you have chosen to not just spend a little time reading about the foundational principles of the field that literally any expert in the field is familiar with. you should really reflect on this. this would be like going into a climate change debate and saying climate change isn't happening because there was an unusually bad winter storm somewhere. anybody familiar with the topic would absolutely roast you for failing to grasp a multitude of basic scientific concepts that anybody up for a debate should have invested the time learning about.