@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.

Hi Jack, apologies for a late reply here, I believe I responded to you via email. I mentioned a little bit ago that I was concerned about notifications on the site, I don't know how we can address that except it appears that there was something I was missing. Notifications appear to be an "opt in" situation, for example I just changed my status on this topic to "Watching," so hopefully I will get a notification when you or anybody else replies.

I personally think it would be better for notifications to be a more passive, opt-out situation, because I think the site should be as conducive as possible to keeping the public conversations and posts easily available to the whole community, especially more recent updates to discussions. I also think I was just not used to the new format of this site compared to the old forum and I think it probably works great. We will have to see it in action once it goes public.

In my opinion though, the site appears to be virtually complete. The privacy policy and terms of use would be more urgent so that we can get the forum public. I also think inviting more people to the council is a good idea, since many of us will probably go through phases of being busier than usual and we want the train to keep rolling.

Also, can I be made an administrator/moderator?

@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.

@Jack-Waugh a 100% correct guess lol. I stand by my reasoning there, I hope you find it sensible. Anyway, it’s sort of neither here nor there, just a small point of conversation. I personally think the very concept of Frohnmeyer balance casts voting systems into a combative rather than a cooperative framework. I honestly see no reason why ballots should be required as a prerequisite to conform to that artificial structure, it seems to me at worst almost like an ad hoc dogmatism invented to justify supporting Score over other systems, and at best an example of paradigmatic confirmation bias.

@Jack-Waugh I will try, I’m on my phone and will try to link the past discussion here soon.

@Jack-Waugh I also want to make one point about systems being “balanced.” If you are talking about a formal property like Frohnmeyer balance as a criterion by which to judge the democratic quality of a system, I explained in the previous forum how that quality can be artificially induced into a slightly modified version of literally any voting system whatsoever without significant alterations in the election results. So it’s actually a bit of a red herring argument against a system anyway. The only somewhat legitimate but hazy argument people seemed to have against my construction before was that it somehow went against the “spirit” of balance, whatever that means. To me it means the Frohnmeyer formalism is a failed one and perhaps a new one is necessary. Until then it’s a fuzzy concept that’s up to interpretation, and because of that I can’t take it as more than fluff used to support the biases in favor of systems that are already preferred for other reasons.

@Jack-Waugh that’s reasonable. I think both are important considerations, but while there is always going to be conflict I do think avoiding a bloody conflict would be ideal. I am of the opinion that tamping down on capital control is a much loftier and less realistic consideration than quelling political divisions. Even Marxists are selling books. Of course a Marxist would view that only as postponing the inevitable. But maybe postponement will give more time to let the passions diffuse in a steadier and more controlled way rather than as an explosion.

Any system that encourages compromise and empowers the electorate over the politicians would probably have beneficial effects in terms of reducing political tensions. Easier said than done, politicians will fight tooth and nail to hold on to any power they can keep. I think most of the tensions are fabricated intentionally via identity politics anyway.

@Jack-Waugh are you referring to my system as shiny or are you talking to @rob, or both of us, or speaking generally? Not impassioned here, but I’m definitely happy with SP Voting on a theoretical level and also believe it could be implemented in a way that is almost as simple and straightforward as Score or STAR. It definitely outperforms Score, I am certain of that, I can try to organize some simulations to convince you but I’m not that tech savvy or idle. I can send you the code and elaborate on it or share it publicly, etc. If large factions of the electorate consistently split-bullet vote, then split-bullet voted candidates become run-of-the mill noise to the system, and room is made in the middle for people who want to express their preferences with more nuance to be heard.

The theoretical backing of the system is superior to Score. I am not just saying that because I developed it, although I did develop it with that specific purpose in mind—I’m saying that because it is based first and foremost on the concept of a candidate being consensually evaluated on a global scale, rather than on a candidate locally amassing score points with arbitrarily assigned numerical values that gamify what is supposed to be a workable substitution for large-scale social agreement.

In SP Voting, a voter doesn’t know the quantitative value his ballot will contribute to the candidate, because that depends explicitly on how everybody else votes as well. In fact, in SP Voting, individual voters have no ability to add explicit points to the candidate’s score. Only the whole collective electorate can do that. They can certainly choose to form coalitions, or be bribed or what have you, but those broader issues aside there is never really any conflict of interest that the voter faces in casting his ballot, other than the question of how they should express their preferences using the ordinal scores. They know only that scores get better going from left to right, and the question of, for example, “How should I rate my second choice?” becomes totally subjective, as it should be.

Like I said, together with a STAR framework, I think it would be an excellent system. I don’t really care about eliminating voter regret or whatever, I think people will obviously feel dissatisfied to an extent because that’s always going to happen with a successful compromise, but obviously reducing it all else equal is a plus. It’s better to evaporate and spread voter dissatisfaction thin than to let it conglomerate into angry mobs (especially two big Red and Blue ones) that can be easily manipulated by opportunistic parasiticians (am I saying that right?). The STAR framework seems to reduce voter regret and encourage honest preference indication on ballots, which I do believe to be indicative of compromise.

I tend to agree with @rob, I think STAR is a great system, and that political polarization is the main issue in the U.S. I am less keen on Condorcet methods because, in my opinion, they are too rigid/majoritarian, whereas standard Score is too elastic and subject to the negative effects of strategic voting. I believe STAR does a great job of finding a middle ground, my qualm with it has to do with the somewhat arbitrary nature of the cardinal score values, and the fact that rather than reducing the magnitudes of the majoritarian and strategic force vectors individually, it simply pits them against each other. But you can't have it all, and that's probably close to the best we can hope to accomplish, although it would be nice to reduce their magnitudes more directly as well. I hope my analogy makes sense, I have already described this in the previous forum but I'd love to continue the discussion.

In any case I think adopting any one of the voting systems we are talking about here, whether in federal, state, or local elections, would constitute a giant leap forward for democracy. Score is definitely dead in the water, especially compared with STAR. My intuition is that the framework of STAR voting could be easily applied to an ordinal score system (for example something along the lines of "SP Voting") and that the combination would greatly reduce the effects of majoritarianism and of strategic voting.

But that's a lot of armchair philosophizing. If we want to know how and when and why certain systems perform better than others, we will need to do an in-depth comparative analysis, ideally one that is both experimental and theoretical. I think it would be a great but ambitious project to organize a series of game elections, where there is a certain number of candidates, and at each election, each player is made aware of the number of points they will receive according to the winner(s) of the election. Each "board" would be a different voting system. Somehow voters would need real incentives to accumulate points. I mentioned using gambling/stock markets before, I think in a controlled environment it could be a very effective tool for understanding how voting systems operate, especially if we could analyze the ballots of the electorate given their point incentives and also analyze the distribution of points as the system stabilizes. I only mention this because the topic is concerning the evaluation of systems, and I think any evaluation that matters for practical purposes needs to be holistic. I think we should follow suit with the behavioral economists, theorizing and developing special cases seems too much like wheels spinning in mud to me.

@Jack-Waugh choice by the system designers. If anything I would actually prefer the scores to be more arbitrary for the voters, since this will prevent strategic behavior. That’s a part of why the system abstains from assigning the scores cardinal values. In the learning variant, the scores obtain their cardinal values via the manner in which they are used by the electorate, rather than the other way around.

@Jack-Waugh that can be true, but the system can also be made into a deterministic one by choosing a distribution or even by putting in place a deterministic method to select a distribution based on the present ballots.

@Jack-Waugh Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Each candidate is given an “independent” ordinal score, so those kinds of results carry over from cardinal score. Altering the score given to Nader will only affect Nader’s score profile, it can’t cause Gore to beat out Bush or vice versa unless the voters change the scores they give to Gore and/or Bush. If a voter wants Nader to win, doesn’t mind Gore and wants Bush to lose, for example, then they should vote something like [B,N,G]=[0,5,3]. If they are really worried about Bush, then they should vote [0,5,5]. But this obviously increases the chance that Nader loses to Gore, so it’s up to the voter to manage their conflicting interests and indicate a ballot they think will serve them most effectively.

The system is very similar to score voting, the alterations I made were only to make the choice of cardinal scores less arbitrary.