election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto)
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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.
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@toby-pereira ok toby, sure.
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@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.)
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being a better speaker is already an advantage in our present system. "I don't know what he said. I don't think he does either."
having hours upon hours and days upon days of adversarial interrogation by the other candidates Will take us as far as is physically possible toward minimizing The impact of that bias relative to the impact of the bare facts.
Will this change people? absolutely that's the whole point. we want them to be statistically representative in terms of their intrinsic preferences, not their instrumental preferences. we want the electorate to get what they would have gotten if they had all gone through the same process.
Will this make people tune out of politics? God willing. why should anybody have to care about how their computer operating system is working? they just want it to work. and an ideal world we barely even talk about political issues. we know we have a process that matches policy to our collective well-being as accurately as is humanly possible and we pity all those countries using democracy and getting the kind of chaos we have now. we don't have anti-vaxxers running HHS.
it's hard to say whether the public would react negatively. I haven't been able to find any negative public commentary about election by jury in Georgia. maybe we need to give people a few things they still vote on to address this. kind of like giving your kid a toy steering wheel dor the car.
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OK @clay @cfrank, I read through the argument you two were having as best as I could!
The thing about sampling - cfrank's point was that with random sampling, some people's needs might end up getting underrepresented (which could result in worse outcomes overall - lower utility). I don't think the concern is completely unmerited. And a good voting system can only go so far in terms of eliminating this.
However, as Clay pointed out, there's more to this than geography and you can cut the population many different ways with minority groups all with their own concerns. By favouring just one minority, it could even have knock-on effects elsewhere. E.g. the people in that minority might mostly also be in some other interest group that ends up getting overrepresentation as a result.
Clay brought up the example of noise levels in two equally-sized cities and how actually things should still work out even in that case. But there are likely to be more complex examples where a small majority can essentially take all the power, which would not provide greater utility. But top-down meddling with the sampling can always have unintended consequences and you wouldn't be able to foresee every possibility where the utility isn't maximised.
For something like this, random sampling would be the simplest and should be seen as the default. Anything else would need great justification to show it would be warranted. And I'm not sure that's realistic. I think it's fine to ask the question, but overall I think random sampling would win out.
As for the utilitarianism debate - it's obviously a bit of a side debate in a way, but also relevant to every discussion that involves morality. I don't have a mathematical argument against it so we could leave it at that. It is also likely the simplest way to model things mathematically (when measuring the effectiveness of voting systems etc.) and is likely in any case to correlate quite highly with most people's ideas of morality in most realistic situations.
But I would actually push back on one or two things. On the definition of "ought" merely being someone's subjective preferences. I'd say that's not true. Utilitarianism can't prove what the definition of words are. Most people are not well versed in utilitarianism and when they say that someone ought to do something, they may (probably in fact) speak without consideration of utilitarianism, regardless of whether their moral framework is coherent at its roots. Also when I say "ought" I don't necessarily mean my own subjective preferences. I might say that I really want to do x but I ought to do y because it would help out other people, which doesn't contradict a utilitarian stance in any case.
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a uniform random draw is unbiased. rural, poor, renters, rabbit lovers, people who care about noise ordinances, whatever cut you pick, each shows up at its population share in expectation. the caveat is where it is so low in number as to be justified in excluding because it has so little impact on utility. (plus i think something like 90% of policy just boils down to economic aspects that don't even have this problem.)
to be clear: so there's no standing bias for weighting to fix. what any particular draw has is variance. a small group can come up short in one sample. but that error averages to zero, and it shrinks with jury size. you fix it by seating more jurors. weighting can't touch the variance. it can only add bias on top of it. to correct an under-draw you'd have to know which groups came up short and by how much, and you don't, because you can't read minds and you can't see the deviation in advance. so you buy a permanent distortion and get nothing back. unbiased with variance beats biased with the same variance.
it's almost as if i have already rigorously analyzed the jury size you need to be robust. and i advocate making it even larger than that just to add robustness to bribery/coercion. so this is a non-issue.
now compare magnitudes. "universal suffrage" is already a sample. it's just a self-selected one, which is the worst kind there is. pew's numbers, which we cite in the manifesto: adults under 50 are 64% of eligible voters and 36% of actual voters. white americans are 55% of eligible and 75% of actual. hispanic and black americans together are 33% of eligible and 18% of actual. that's a 28 point distortion on age alone, and it points the same way every single cycle. nobody files that under "sampling problem" because we've all stopped noticing it. random sampling is immediately and obviously radically superior to what we currently have.
so cfrank's worry is a symmetric fraction of a percent that shrinks when you seat more people, sitting inside a mechanism that deletes a 28 point one-directional bias, plus a $2.5 million average price tag on a winning house campaign, plus an electorate that thinks 41% of americans are black and 30% live in new york city.
please.
on "ought": you're arguing a massive straw man. no one ever said anything remotely close to "utilitarianism defines ought". i am simply stating the obvious fact that when people say "ought", they're just expressing a personal opinion as if it were an obective fact. it is NOT an objective fact, and that's an objective fact. there is no "oughtness" particle. people can and do completely disagree on what "ought" or "should" happen. take the death penalty for instance. i explained in more detail here, section ix).
"i want x but i ought to do y because it helps others" is incoherent. what you're really saying is that you have competing wants. eating this candy bar tastes good but it will make me fat. you sum the utilities of those two factors together to get your total utility decide whether you ultimately "want to eat the candy bar". you're just describing competing concerns.
this is all so drastically "ethics 101" that i'm a bit at a loss for how helpful i can be here.
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To be clear, I wasn't arguing against random sampling, just thinking through why someone might be concerned about it.
@clay said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
on "ought": you're arguing a massive straw man. no one ever said anything remotely close to "utilitarianism defines ought". i am simply stating the obvious fact that when people say "ought", they're just expressing a personal opinion as if it were an obective fact.
OK, what you did say was:
@clay said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
"ought" means "I would subjectively prefer that". this is ethics 101.
And I would say that this is simply not the case. To expand on my previous point, someone might say "I suppose I ought to try and save those people drowning in the sea, but I don't really care about other people, so I'll just carry on eating my ice-cream."
So in this case it's not their subjective preference, not even a conflicting one. They're working under the assumption that there is a moral framework that exists outside their own subjective preferences (and choosing to ignore it). Whether they're right or not is beside the point when it comes to what they mean by "ought".
Of course, if we zoom out further, with no objective value judgements, we cannot actually say that election by jury is objectively the best system, or better than other specific systems. We can only say that it is better under certain assumptions that you have to smuggle in. For example, you mentioned the veil of ignorance earlier, but in reality we don't have a veil of ignorance. So for someone already in a comfortable position in society, they can happily not support it without being "illogical".
this is all so drastically "ethics 101" that i'm a bit at a loss for how helpful i can be here.
If you took a philosophical ethics course, you might be surprised at what is included. I can imagine you screaming and shouting at the lecturer.
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And I would say that this is simply not the case.
and i just explained why you're wrong.
toby said:
To expand on my previous point, someone might say "I suppose I ought to try and save those people drowning in the sea, but I don't really care about other people, so I'll just carry on eating my ice-cream."
So in this case it's not their subjective preference, not even a conflicting one.that would be using "ought" as in society would prefer i do it. thus they might judge me for not doing it" or something along those lines. you're not making a sophisticated argument.
If you took a philosophical ethics course, you might be surprised at what is included.
philosophers whose works i've read and who were cited in my ethics treatise:
Derek Parfit — All Souls College, Oxford; Reasons and Persons (1984) and On What Matters (2011). The dominant moral philosopher of the late 20th century; source of the repugnant conclusion and the mere addition paradox, and of the reductionist view of personal identity that underwrites much of how veil arguments handle "who you might be."
John Rawls — Harvard, arguably the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century; A Theory of Justice (1971) introduced the veil of ignorance and the maximin/difference principle you criticize.
John Harsanyi — economist rather than philosopher, Berkeley, Nobel laureate 1994 for game theory; his 1953/1955 papers gave the expected-utility version of the veil argument and are the foundational text of utilitarian contractualism.
T.M. Scanlon — Harvard, What We Owe to Each Other (1998); the leading contemporary contractualist and the source of the "could not reasonably reject" standard.
David Hume — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739); the is–ought passage in Book III is the origin of the whole meta-ethical problem.
J.L. Mackie — Oxford (University College), Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977); the canonical statement of moral error theory and the argument from queerness.
Richard Joyce — Victoria University of Wellington, The Myth of Morality (2001) and The Evolution of Morality (2006); the main figure in evolutionary debunking arguments and moral fictionalism.
Peter Singer — Princeton/Melbourne, Animal Liberation (1975) and Practical Ethics; the best-known living utilitarian.
Sam Harris — PhD in neuroscience, BA in philosophy from Stanford; not an academic philosopher. The Moral Landscape (2010) argues science can determine values.
Alex O'Connor — degree in philosophy and theology from Oxford; a public commentator, not an academic. Cited for the emotivist "boo, murder" line, which traces back to A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson.
Non-philosophers cited on empirical grounds:
Richard Dawkins — evolutionary biologist, Oxford, The Selfish Gene (1976); gene-level selection, no standing in ethics as such.
Jean-Baptiste André and Nicolas Baumard — evolutionary/cognitive scientists at ENS and Institut Jean Nicod; their Nash-bargaining model of fairness intuitions is the relevant work, and Baumard's The Origins of Fairness (2016) is the book-length version.
Plato — the euthyphro dilemma is from the Euthyphro, though you invoke it without naming him.
i did not yell at any of my philosophy professors in college in 1998 and 1999, but i did have some good arguments with them.
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@clay said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
And I would say that this is simply not the case.
and i just explained why you're wrong.
Well no.
toby said:
To expand on my previous point, someone might say "I suppose I ought to try and save those people drowning in the sea, but I don't really care about other people, so I'll just carry on eating my ice-cream."
So in this case it's not their subjective preference, not even a conflicting one.that would be using "ought" as in society would prefer i do it. thus they might judge me for not doing it" or something along those lines. you're not making a sophisticated argument.
It's difficult to make a particularly sophisticated argument about the definition of a word. You're just saying that it must mean this. You are wrong. Maybe the person is using the word thinking that there is an objective ethical system. Lots of people think that. It doesn't matter if they are right or wrong. That is what you seem to be missing. Check with everyone in the world who has ever used the word and make sure they agree with you about how they are using the word and get back to me.
If you took a philosophical ethics course, you might be surprised at what is included.
philosophers whose works i've read and who were cited in my ethics treatise:
Derek Parfit — All Souls College, Oxford; Reasons and Persons (1984) and On What Matters (2011). The dominant moral philosopher of the late 20th century; source of the repugnant conclusion and the mere addition paradox, and of the reductionist view of personal identity that underwrites much of how veil arguments handle "who you might be."
John Rawls — Harvard, arguably the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century; A Theory of Justice (1971) introduced the veil of ignorance and the maximin/difference principle you criticize.
John Harsanyi — economist rather than philosopher, Berkeley, Nobel laureate 1994 for game theory; his 1953/1955 papers gave the expected-utility version of the veil argument and are the foundational text of utilitarian contractualism.
T.M. Scanlon — Harvard, What We Owe to Each Other (1998); the leading contemporary contractualist and the source of the "could not reasonably reject" standard.
David Hume — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739); the is–ought passage in Book III is the origin of the whole meta-ethical problem.
J.L. Mackie — Oxford (University College), Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977); the canonical statement of moral error theory and the argument from queerness.
Richard Joyce — Victoria University of Wellington, The Myth of Morality (2001) and The Evolution of Morality (2006); the main figure in evolutionary debunking arguments and moral fictionalism.
Peter Singer — Princeton/Melbourne, Animal Liberation (1975) and Practical Ethics; the best-known living utilitarian.
Sam Harris — PhD in neuroscience, BA in philosophy from Stanford; not an academic philosopher. The Moral Landscape (2010) argues science can determine values.
Alex O'Connor — degree in philosophy and theology from Oxford; a public commentator, not an academic. Cited for the emotivist "boo, murder" line, which traces back to A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson.
Non-philosophers cited on empirical grounds:
Richard Dawkins — evolutionary biologist, Oxford, The Selfish Gene (1976); gene-level selection, no standing in ethics as such.
Jean-Baptiste André and Nicolas Baumard — evolutionary/cognitive scientists at ENS and Institut Jean Nicod; their Nash-bargaining model of fairness intuitions is the relevant work, and Baumard's The Origins of Fairness (2016) is the book-length version.
Plato — the euthyphro dilemma is from the Euthyphro, though you invoke it without naming him.
i did not yell at any of my philosophy professors in college in 1998 and 1999, but i did have some good arguments with them.
That's good, but your posts on here suggest to me that you expect the first lecture on an ethics course to begin: "Here are some ethical systems that people have come up with over the years. They are rubbish. Now here's utilitarianism..."
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@toby-pereira said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
It's difficult to make a particularly sophisticated argument about the definition of a word. You're just saying that it must mean this. You are wrong.
you have zero evidence of that. as i've pointed out, you cannot show me any actual objective physical law of nature that the word "ought" could possibly refer to. it's just expressing a vibe.
this is so ethics 101 i don't know what else to say. maybe watch an accomplished philosopher explain.
Youtube VideoMaybe the person is using the word thinking that there is an objective ethical system.
that's exactly what i said!! they're expressing an opinion/vibe/emotion that they possibly (but wrongly) think is objective.
they, like you, cannot find any objective basis for this however.
Lots of people think that. It doesn't matter if they are right or wrong. That is what you seem to be missing.
LOL, that they are wrong is my whole point. so yes, it does matter.
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@clay, can you show me any actual objective physical law of nature that the word ‘preference’ could possibly refer to?
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, can you show me any actual objective physical law of nature that the word ‘preference’ could possibly refer to?
i already said utilities are subjective, by definition.
no one is claiming obama is objectively good. we are saying people have subject preferences for different outcomes.
and you can elicit those via revealed preference. e.g. would you take a guarantee of a million dollars, or a coin flip for 3 million.
dear. god. this is not complicated.
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@clay that does not answer the question. You rejected “ought” because it does not refer to an objective physical law of nature. “Preference” does not refer to one either. Saying that preferences are subjective and can be inferred from behavior simply replaces your original criterion with behavioral elicitation.
Granting that preferences are descriptively real, it still does not follow that satisfying or aggregating them is good. That is the normative premise you keep declining to examine.
You appear to accept that a preference can be a legitimate higher-order description of some material configuration. What you have not explained is why an “ought” proposition cannot likewise describe a higher-order property of a broader configuration involving agents, actions, alternatives, and consequences.
Anyway, this is beyond the scope of this forum.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
that does not answer the question. You rejected “ought” because it does not refer to an objective physical law of nature. “Preference” does not refer to one either.
okay, deep breath...
i did not "reject" ought. i rejected the idea that it is anything other than subjective preference.
of course we already know that "preference" refers to "subjective preference" so there's nothing to argue about there.
Granting that preferences are descriptively real, it still does not follow that satisfying or aggregating them is good.
it is good by definition. "satisfying my preference" is what "good" means.
That is the normative premise you keep declining to examine.
there's no such thing as "normativity". there's just subjective preference.
it's almost as if i thoroughly explained this umpteen times and am having to repeat myself.
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@clay, well then, at least we can be highly confident that you subjectively prefer aggregate utility maximization—and, on your account, that neither you nor anyone else has any substantive, non-preference-based reason to adopt that position.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, well then, at least we can be highly confident that you subjectively prefer aggregate utility maximization—and, on your account, that neither you nor anyone else has any substantive, non-preference-based reason to adopt that position.
this is nonsensical. aggregate utility maximization objectively gives everyone more of whatever it is they subjectively prefer. you cannot "prefer" something other than aggregate utility maximization as that would be like saying "i prefer what i don't prefer."
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@clay “aggregate utility maximization objectively gives everyone more of whatever it is they subjectively prefer.”
Unless there is a known feasible option that maximizes every individual’s utility simultaneously, with no interpersonal tradeoffs, that is simply false. Aggregate utility maximization maximizes the sum or expected sum of utilities, not each person’s utility.
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@clay I think you totally missed the point of what I was saying. The thing I was disputing was:
@clay said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
"ought" means "I would subjectively prefer that". this is ethics 101.
Ethics 101 does not determine what a word means. Words are used in English by English-speaking people in many ways, some informal, some formal and with varying degrees of vagueness etc. It does not matter if someone's meaning for a word is at bottom incoherent or that the thing they mean doesn't exist in real life. The word doesn't then not mean what they were using it to mean. Experts in ethics do not have ownership of the word "ought". So:
as i've pointed out, you cannot show me any actual objective physical law of nature that the word "ought" could possibly refer to. it's just expressing a vibe.
No, and I wasn't trying to. You just missed what I was saying. I'll repeat the example, but with a bit of added commentary for clarity.
Someone might say, "I suppose I ought to try and save those people drowning in the sea, but I don't really care about other people, so I'll just carry on eating my ice-cream."
I initially said this doesn't fit your definition of "ought" above because he's not expressing a subjective preference. You countered by saying:
that would be using "ought" as in society would prefer i do it. thus they might judge me for not doing it" or something along those lines.
(So therefore still a subjective preference.) But I then said actually, he could be referring, not to anyone's subjective preference, but to a moral framework that exists outside of his (or anyone else's) subjective preferences.
So therefore his use of the word "ought" does not refer to subjective preferences. It refers to this objective framework that he believes exists. Even if it doesn't exist. And however you cut it, it's still a long way from:
"ought" means "I would subjectively prefer that". this is ethics 101.
But I'm not sure how else to get the point across. OK, someone believes in ghosts. A ghost (by some definition) is the soul of a dead person that still in some manner inhabits our physical realm.
It doesn't matter if ghosts are real - this is what it means to be a ghost under this definition. Someone might say:
"A ghost is just an illusion. That's what it means to be a ghost."
It might be the case that all the ghosts that people have claimed to have seen are all illusions, and indeed that no "magical" ghosts exist, but this does not change the definition of what a ghost is. A definition can be of something that doesn't exist, or is at bottom incoherent.
That's all I'm saying. Words mean what people use them to mean. There is no dictionary in the sky that defines a word in a very specific way. And there is certainly nothing that cancels out the definition of a word based on the non-existence or incoherence of a concept.
If someone uses the word "ought" to refer to some objective morality, then that is what they are using the word to mean.
This is a silly argument anyway, and far removed from election by jury!
Edit - you do this routine of incredulity when you think people aren't getting what you're saying, but I could do the same on you here. Your lack of comprehension of what I am saying is staggering.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay “aggregate utility maximization objectively gives everyone more of whatever it is they subjectively prefer.”
Unless there is a known feasible option that maximizes every individual’s utility simultaneously, with no interpersonal tradeoffs, that is simply false. Aggregate utility maximization maximizes the sum or expected sum of utilities, not each person’s utility.they are SAME THING, in expectation.
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@clay sure, if we all agree to hook ourselves up to the National Brain Swapping Initiative’s Brain-Swapper 2000 every time a new policy decision is made, you’re pretty much on the money.