Posts made by clay

@toby-pereira

no, i'm saying that an argument about any topic, ethics or dinosaurs or infant formula, depends on the underlying meaning of whatever words you're using to discuss it. and since "ethics" is a meaningless word, similar to "free will", that makes it functionally useless.

@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):

That does not imply aggregate utility maximization in cases of conflicting interests.

this is extremely simple. genes are "trying" to maximize their expected utility. they've been selected on that basis. therefore our preferences operate on a "maximize it in expectation" basis. therefore from behind the veil of ignorance we just want whatever regime maximizes net utility.

That does not imply aggregate utility maximization in cases of conflicting interests.

you seem to be implying NOT behind the veil of ignorance. but we can't choose a social welfare aggregation function in front of the veil of ignorance, because every person's proposed function will be "i am a dictator", duh.

however, even then, you can mathematically prove the social welfare function is cardinal via reductio ad absurdum. this is one of the most elementary facts of social choice theory.

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/a-simple-proof-that-majoritarianism-is-wrong-5ac15b195b66
https://rangevoting.net/XYvote

It applies only where all affected parties would freely choose an outcome while fully informed.

"fully informed" is confusion. we're talking about actual intrinsic utilities, not instrumental utilities. that's "omniscient" by construction. of course someone might make a bad investment unintentionally. that's irrelevant. the social choice function can only use the information they provide to it.

We are clearly not getting anywhere.

i mean, i'm stating incredibly trivial proofs of things and you're not understanding them.

@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):

@clay you can plug your ears and say La La La all you like. Kantian ethics is a perfectly legitimate alternative to utilitarian ethics.

brutally false. i completely debunked kant indirectly at wonk.blog/ethics - and the massive gaping holes in his arguments are widely known.

The wonk.blog framework versus Kantian ethics

The axioms are directly contradictory

Preference sovereignty holds that no outcome is unethical if those subject to it would freely choose it fully informed. Kant's Formula of Humanity holds that one can act wrongly toward a person who has consented, and even toward oneself: suicide, selling an organ, consensual self-degradation are all forbidden because they treat humanity merely as a means. Kant needs the moral law to bind independently of inclination; that independence is the entire point of "categorical." The wonk.blog framework holds that any rule capable of overriding an informed preference is thereby refuted. There is no diplomatic middle. Kantian ethics is the purest available instance of the thing section viii declares fundamentally flawed.

Kant reified a heuristic and built a metaphysics under it

The rules-as-instruments reading in section viii applies to Kant more than to anyone. "Do not lie" is a cheap, fast, usually-correct approximation. Kant took the felt apodicticity of that rule and inferred that it must be a synthetic a priori truth of pure practical reason. On the wonk.blog account, the phenomenology of "this is simply forbidden, full stop" is exactly what an evolved fast rule feels like from the inside, because a rule that presented itself as revisable would be worse at its job. Kant mistook the introspective signature of a heuristic for evidence of its source.

The murderer-at-the-door case is the framework's section vi test run on Kant's own commitments and failing. Any rule appearing universal should be checked for whether informed agents would prefer its violation. The person hiding in the house would obviously prefer the lie. Kant knew this and bit the bullet in "On a Supposed Right to Lie," which is about as clean a demonstration as the literature offers that the rule was never intrinsic.

The trolley section is a Kantian argument being dismantled

The recoil at pulling the lever, the doctrine of double effect, the means/ends distinction, all of it is Kantian in structure. The essay's veil treatment holds that the ex ante vote is 5-to-1 and unanimous, so the recoil is a bias about agency and physical proximity rather than a moral discovery. Greene's dual-process work is the empirical companion piece and would be worth citing in any expansion of that section: deontological verdicts track the affective, fast system and correlate with personal-force features carrying no plausible moral weight.

Mackie's queerness argument lands hardest on Kant

Section ix deploys queerness against moral facts in general. Kant's version is the most exposed: a noumenal realm outside space and time, a will that legislates universally, a faculty of pure practical reason that a spatiotemporal brain somehow accesses. Whatever the epistemic access story is supposed to be, it is not one. The essay's amendment to Mackie applies as well: Kant was not asserting a falsehood so much as elaborating an opinion he mistook for a discovery, at extraordinary length.

The parts of Kant that work are veil arguments in disguise

This is the strongest move the framework has available and the one that should lead. Kant's own argument for imperfect duties of beneficence in the Groundwork is that one cannot will a world in which no one helps anyone, because there are circumstances in which one would need others' help. That is positional uncertainty. It is Harsanyi with worse bookkeeping and a metaphysical superstructure bolted on top. Where Kant's arguments reduce to something like the veil, they are plausible; where they do not, they produce the murderer at the door and the ban on suicide. A reduction that explains both the successes and the failures of a rival theory is the good kind of critique.

Autonomy inverted

Kant's central value is autonomy, but Kantian autonomy means conformity to a law given by pure reason, which routinely forbids what the actual agent, informed, wants for himself. By the framework's lights that is heteronomy toward an abstraction. Preference sovereignty is the position that gives actual sovereignty to actual persons over their own lives.

@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):

@clay Kant does a fair job of that, in direct contest with utilitarian ethics, through his categorical imperative, as one example. If you engaged with ethics as deeply as you claim, you would be well aware of that.

there is no alternative to utilitarian ethics. preference sovereignty principle says you cannot separate "ethics" from "what people would prefer", and preferences are maximized in in terms of expected utility.

@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):

@clay “real philosophers” say many different things about almost everything. I’ll repeat the main point that you did not address: 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.

this is word salad. give me a specific concrete definition of "ought".

@toby-pereira said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):

Ethics 101 does not determine what a word means.

i don't care if "ethics" does it, it's still obviously true that it does not "mean" anything. and it technically just communicates "i have a preference for this thing", and possibly also, "i wrongly believe that it's objectively true, because i do not realize it's subjective not objective."

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

there you've clearly named a specific concrete concept, whether it's real or not. you can draw a ghost even.

but no such thing exists for the word "ought". it has no actual meaning. it's just expressing a preference.

i beg of you to actually spend a few minutes learning what real philosophers say about this. here's alex o'connor saying essentially this: it's just expressing an emotion. it's not an actual semantically meaningful word.

Youtube Video

this is just super elementary ethics and i cannot believe you're unfamiliar with it even after i've repeatedly pointed it out to you.

@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.

@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."

@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.

@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.

@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 Video

Maybe 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.

@toby-pereira

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.

@Toby-Pereira

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.

@toby-pereira

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.

@toby-pereira ok toby, sure.

@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.

@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#isought

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.

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?

1. 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.

@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/UtilFoundns

i'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/UtilFoundns

More fundamentally, how do you propose to measure utility and make cardinal interpersonal comparisons of it across the affected individuals?

elections.
https://rangevoting.net/WhyNoHumans

voting theory 101.

@cfrank you can choose whether you want to debate with the moderator or with me. take your pic.

@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.