Posts made by Toby Pereira

@clay I have watched that video, so thanks for that. But the bottom line is that I am making an argument about semantics, not ethics. And you insist that it's an argument about ethics. There's nowhere to go from there.

@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.

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

@toby-pereira

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..."

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.

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.

@masiarek said in Condorcet, IIA, monotonicity in RCV IRV:

@toby-pereira is it OK to mention your names at: https://github.com/masiarek/star-voting-library/blob/master/00_start_here/topics/condorcet/ordered_majority_rule_irv.md

Yeah, as long as it's nothing bad!

Maybe I'll get to this when I've gone through the jury thread more thoroughly!

@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.)

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.

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

@clay I read through most of your manifesto

Just for the avoidance of doubt, I did also read through most of it, even if I did miss one or two things!

@clay said in Merits and Demerits of Compulsory Voting:

@toby-pereira no if you want to understand it it's best for you to read the manifesto.

In any case, if they're not in a bubble, they will still be exposed to biased media.

so are normal voters.

you have not stated a better system.

On reading the manifesto, I would still need to think this is something I might agree with to read it all, because I'm not going to read everyone's manifesto on everything. While I got the bubble bit wrong, I think I largely have a basic understanding of it in any case, especially after you corrected me.

Yes, normal voters are exposed to biased media too, but this suggests that the difference between jurors and normal voters might not be so great.

It has to be better than the default current system where everyone gets to vote. It's not about suggesting another alternative. There may be some ways in which the jury system would produce better results, and I can see that, but for this to get traction, it would have to be considerably better and seen to be so, in order to offset the view that this would eliminate most people's democratic rights.

In your piece about the only voting reform worth funding that was posted on this forum the other day, you pointed out that it's not about the best method. "It’s a function of which method gets adopted, times how much better off people are when it does."

So I think approval voting, but allowing everyone to vote seems a better option overall.

@clay I kind of read through it, but might have missed some. But to be honest, it is best to summarise stuff that's that long if you want it discussed on a forum.

In any case, if they're not in a bubble, they will still be exposed to biased media. And the candidates alone in a combative setting likely won't provide the best-rounded view of the candidates. I also don't think the way court systems operate is necessarily the best way to find the objective truth.

I'm not convinced this is the best system.

@clay

The jury model recognizes that competence isn't merely an inherent quality but can be dramatically enhanced through proper process and information environment. The election by jury approach transforms ordinary citizens into competent decision-makers by providing:

Protected time for learning and consideration, free from work and daily responsibilities

Access to comprehensive, balanced information about candidates and issues from multiple perspectives

Expert testimony and direct questioning of candidates

Structured deliberation with diverse peers that enhances critical thinking

A controlled environment that protects jurors from external influence and manipulation

This might sound good in theory, but in practice, how long are you going to keep these jurors in a bubble for, free from biased media etc.?

And who decides what counts as balanced information about the candidates?

@clay Some interesting stuff there. It's been said that score suffers worse with one-sided strategy than other methods. That is - if the supporters of one candidate strategise more than the supporters of another, then the result will be more skewed (favour the strategisers) under score than some other methods. Would you agree with that, and do you see it as a problem?

I think the argument is that it gives a more representative parliament and helps fight against voter apathy.

But I'm not sure I buy this. If people are only voting because they have to, the extra votes will come more from people who don't feel they have anything invested in any of the candidates winning, so the extra votes are more likely to be "noise".

Also, voter apathy is a thing. It's a worry that people don't feel engaged with the political system, and aren't moved to vote for any of the candidates. By forcing people to vote, you're simply hiding that. Knowing that only x % of people vote in an election should be a alarm bell to try and engage these potential voters. But if you force people to vote, you don't know how many of them are just voting under duress.

@jan This sounds like it could get complicated. However, it doesn't need to be. If everyone is bringing 10 games each, I don't think there needs to be a vote on that at all. People just bring the games that they want to. Essentially everyone gets 10 nominations into the pool that you vote on.

It might be the case that one person's favourite game is owned by someone else, but they can easily ask to borrow it for their own 10.

As for what to play, if you are playing a lot of games, I would prefer some sort of proportional system rather than a simple single-winner type vote each time. E.g. If 3 out of 5 players generally prefer one type of game and 2 prefer another type, it makes sense for there to be a 3:2 split rather than the 3 choosing every time.

You could simply take it in turns to choose. Alternatively I would recommend a lottery method, so that you would get proportional representation over the long haul without having to keep track of what has already happened. I think simple random ballot, where you randomly pick who chooses each game, would be inferior to taking turns. Some people would get to choose more, just by luck.

But one alternative, which has a balance between randomness and consensus is COWPEA Lottery. Each person approves as many games as they want. Then you pick a ballot at random and if that ballot lists more than one game, you just pick other ballots at random as a tie-break. So if the next ballot approves all or none of the remaining games in contention, you ignore it. Otherwise you eliminate games not approved. Continue until one game is left. If there is still a tie after all ballots have been picked, just pick at random among the remaining games.

@cfrank Yes, but "choose-any" was selected on the basis of being clear (it rolls off the tongue less well than "approval" I'd say), so it really needs to do that job perfectly before we get on to how well it rolls off the tongue.

Edit - I'd say "choose any number" is a little bit less clunky than "choose however many", but neither are great in that respect.

@wolftune There is this thread from 2024. I think it might have passed me by at the time. I see your point about it being clearer about what it does, but on the other hand, it's not something I've really thought about, so I don't think I will suddenly change my language immediately based on this. It's quite a big thing to do, and I think I would need to see that there is a larger consensus in the general voting community that this is the best name, rather than just individuals deciding one at a time.

Edit - Thinking about it, "Choose-any" comes across as ambiguous to me. It could come across as "choose any one".

I think it's fine to have it here, but being a US-specific thing, I probably don't have much to say on it!

@sarawolk said in RCV found unconstitutional in Maine.:

@toby-pereira
In RCV a vote is the voters top choice in the first round and each round following. The first round finds the Plurality winner and if that candidate has a majority of active votes the election is called right then and there, but if that winner has a plurality of votes but not a majority of active votes, the system may reject that and go on to find a separate winner by reallocating or exhausting those votes. That's why it's not a Plurality method.

In STAR Voting the first round never determines a winner because votes haven't been awarded to candidates yet. That always happens only once in STAR Voting and the candidate with the most votes always wins.

Right, so you're saying that because the IRV counting process could end after any round, it is necessary to call each round a vote.

However, IRV does not need to use the counting process where it stops in the round when a candidate first has a majority. It could just continue until there are two candidates left and just call that final round "the vote". It would never affect the (first place) result, but would just require a bit of extra counting.

But regardless, as I say, I'm not sure a voting method's own definition of what a vote is would hold any weight against what a court says a vote is.

And even if we allow that, by calling just the final run-off in STAR the vote, the method is also excluding most of the candidates from the voting process, which I think might be considered unconstitutional.

Obviously it's not me you would be arguing against, but these are just things that I can imagine might come up.