Also, the Groups page lists which accounts have admin/mod privileges. Since it's tied to the forum software, it will update automatically.

@NevinBR said in Least-bad Single-winner Ranking Method?:

On average, in the long run, game theory voting will produce winners who are preferred by as many or more voters than the winner produced by any other method. In other words, there is no ranked-ballot voting system whose winners are preferred by more voters than the game-theory winner, over the long run.

So "optimal" means that the expected value of the margin between the winner selected by GTV and by some other system will always be non-negative?

In order for such a system to effectively deter strategic voting, the best strategies in the component systems used need to be sufficiently different. Otherwise common vulnerabilities still can be exploited. The most useful strategy in Score and Condorcet is usually exaggeration, so I am skeptical that the two systems effectively complement each other.

There is also a risk that mixing many systems in this way could compound their strategic vulnerabilities rather than offset them.

Strategic voting in Condorcet methods often attempts to increase the size of the Smith set and force cycles. The same strategies could be used with this system since the size of the Smith set also indicates how many winners the Score-based methods are expected to return. Random selection can be exploited by running many similar candidates, since when the Smith set contains multiple candidates, cloning a candidate in the Smith set would cause the clone to be added to the Smith set.

My name (David Hinds) is on my account here, though I did keep the same handle from the CES forum. @Jack-Waugh it would be fine to put my real name in this post.

I changed the default setting for new accounts to have external links open in a new tab but it does not appear to apply retroactively to accounts that have already been created. So everyone who already has an account will have to change it themselves.

@Keith Out of curiosity, what in particular do you think he lacks knowledge about?

@Jack-Waugh I meant that the directory of categories and topics should be on one page, and then for each topic the posts in that topic should have their own page separate from the directory.

Being able to order all topics by date irrespective of category (or grouped by category) would probably be a useful feature, though it's less useful in an archive than a live forum. It would also probably be useful to be able to order by number of replies, since topics that turned out to be important tended to also generate a lot of discussion.

Being able to search/filter posts by author, title, category, or some combination of each would be useful, but sorting by them might be of limited use. For the title, I might remember what the thread was about and could think of a few words likely in the title, but not the first word. Navigating a list of posts sorted by author feels unwieldy, since chances are that the person I want is somewhere in the middle, not among the first few or last few people listed.

Another filter might be whether a user participated in a topic, i.e. including not only the author but anyone who replied. Specifying multiple users to return only topics in which all of these users participated would be a more niche but potentially still useful.

I can think of some very niche sorts as well which might be useful for finding specific discussions, but those have more to do with what I personally think might have been useful for finding past discussions that I wanted to refer back to. Those would be by number of replies by a specific user, number of replies by a specific user to a specific user (if you still have the data for what each reply was to; possibly the initial post, but which could also be another reply), or number of replies from one user to another and vice versa.

@SaraWolk OK I went ahead and made these change for now.

While the most likely outcome of the New York Mayoral election is an uncontroversial win for Eric Adams, especially as he leads first preference polling, and in practice many voters do not use ranking even when the option to do so is provided, some polling has suggested non-monotonic scenarios.

Polling suggests that Eric Adams' worst matchup is against Kathryn Garcia. It tends to suggest that he would receive between 48% and 56% support. In contrast, he polls well against both Andrew Yang and Maya Wiley. No polls that have publicly released data about these pairwise matchups suggest he would do worse than 56% against Yang or 54% against Wiley.

However, Garcia is no lock to make the final round. If Yang finishes 4th, Garcia and Wiley would be nearly tied for elimination. There is limited information on what will happen if Wiley finishes 4th, but what information exists suggests that Garcia would be eliminated in a final 3 against Adams and Yang.

Here is an example of a poll that showed a nonmonotonic result:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qvizm3xxx1jjvyv/dfp_tech_team_memo_nyc_rcv_2021_06_21.pdf

That said, I suspect that polls of the race may be overestimating voters' tendency to rank additional candidates just by explicitly asking about it. This reduces the chance of a paradox.

Unfortunately, New York City does not appear to release the actual ballot data, so if a paradox does occur, we might not be able to catch it. Related: https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/5/12/22433507/ranked-choice-voting-software-new-york-city

That said, they will release two preliminary reports that run through the IRV counting process before they have all of the ballots. This could be an effective demonstration of how chaotic the process can get if the absentee ballots change the ranking.

@Jack-Waugh I think it is difficult to define a sincere vote as something completely isolated from its effects on the outcome, since I think that those effects are what give votes "meaning". Imagine a Score voting system where whoever had the fewest points wins. A "sincere" vote under this system might be the exact opposite of a sincere vote under standard Score voting.

Under a system where the effects of your vote are be completely unpredictable, like the hashing one you described, I don't think your vote is capable of expressing anything about your preferences, since there is no way to tell in advance what any vote actually does.

Keep in mind that the characters displayed by a mobile keyboard vary by the input field. On Android, if I type into the URL field of a browser, the forward slash is in the first set, but if I type in a field like the one used on the forum, it is not. iOS behaves similarly although I am not exactly sure of which characters are available in the first set in a post field on this forum for iOS.

It might be difficult to find good separators in the first set.

This is less of a request and more of an effort to reopen discussion on an interesting idea that sort of wound up forgotten for various reasons that I won't go into here.

In the early days of planning this forum, @rob advocated for incorporating Codepens into the forum. (Archive link: http://www.votingtheory.org:3000/archive/posts?where={"topic_id"%3A734} ) He argued that it would be useful for users to be able to copy example elections that forum users came up with into codepens so that they can figure out what is going on in the example without having to do a lot of computations by hand. This seems like quite a good thing!

However, allowing users to embed codepen plugins into their posts seems like a possible security concern. Obviously it's unsafe to let people run arbitrary javascript on the site, even if the codepens require user permission before they can run. I don't know much about javascript or codepens so there may well be some obvious detail I'm missing.

What could safely be done with codepens on the site?

@Jack-Waugh It would depend on how incomplete rankings were dealt with, but the major parties would probably try to run many candidates to make it more difficult to eliminate them, and try to coordinate the bottom of their supporters' ballots to try to control the order in which their opponents are eliminated. Major parties would still have the advantage of just having more resources to communicate strategies to their supporters. On the other hand, they would face a disadvantage of being more prominent targets for opponents to try to eliminate early, and if these opponents are coordinated, even running many candidates won't help. However, if the major parties agree to coordinate with each other to keep minor parties from being competitive (or even just specific minor parties), they could make it very difficult for those parties.

Major parties could also use the fear that they will be eliminated first if they do not reach a majority to discourage defections to minor parties.

@NevinBR said in Least-bad Single-winner Ranking Method?:

On average, in the long run, game theory voting will produce winners who are preferred by as many or more voters than the winner produced by any other method. In other words, there is no ranked-ballot voting system whose winners are preferred by more voters than the game-theory winner, over the long run.

So "optimal" means that the expected value of the margin between the winner selected by GTV and by some other system will always be non-negative?

In order for such a system to effectively deter strategic voting, the best strategies in the component systems used need to be sufficiently different. Otherwise common vulnerabilities still can be exploited. The most useful strategy in Score and Condorcet is usually exaggeration, so I am skeptical that the two systems effectively complement each other.

There is also a risk that mixing many systems in this way could compound their strategic vulnerabilities rather than offset them.

Strategic voting in Condorcet methods often attempts to increase the size of the Smith set and force cycles. The same strategies could be used with this system since the size of the Smith set also indicates how many winners the Score-based methods are expected to return. Random selection can be exploited by running many similar candidates, since when the Smith set contains multiple candidates, cloning a candidate in the Smith set would cause the clone to be added to the Smith set.

So are they likely to implement STAR then?

@SaraWolk Unfortunately I do not think that the admin tools provide an easy way to change this. The logical place for it would be under post settings.

A quick google search suggests that there is a plugin to make replies appear only in a nested structure, found here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/nodebb-plugin-threaded-replies

Adding a plugin would be a bit deeper on the technical side than just changing the site settings, however, since it would be a change to the site code, so @Jack-Waugh what do you think about using this plugin?

@Jack-Waugh I meant that the directory of categories and topics should be on one page, and then for each topic the posts in that topic should have their own page separate from the directory.

Being able to order all topics by date irrespective of category (or grouped by category) would probably be a useful feature, though it's less useful in an archive than a live forum. It would also probably be useful to be able to order by number of replies, since topics that turned out to be important tended to also generate a lot of discussion.

Being able to search/filter posts by author, title, category, or some combination of each would be useful, but sorting by them might be of limited use. For the title, I might remember what the thread was about and could think of a few words likely in the title, but not the first word. Navigating a list of posts sorted by author feels unwieldy, since chances are that the person I want is somewhere in the middle, not among the first few or last few people listed.

Another filter might be whether a user participated in a topic, i.e. including not only the author but anyone who replied. Specifying multiple users to return only topics in which all of these users participated would be a more niche but potentially still useful.

I can think of some very niche sorts as well which might be useful for finding specific discussions, but those have more to do with what I personally think might have been useful for finding past discussions that I wanted to refer back to. Those would be by number of replies by a specific user, number of replies by a specific user to a specific user (if you still have the data for what each reply was to; possibly the initial post, but which could also be another reply), or number of replies from one user to another and vice versa.