Comment by amalcon

Comment by amalcon 7 months ago

> It isn't ignoring the problem, it's describing a solution to it: Enlightened self-interest.

"Everybody just does the right thing" is not a solution you can implement in the real world.

> You keep describing it as a tactical error to use a strategy that amounts to hedging.

Maybe this is the source of the confusion: an intermediate score is not an optimal way to hedge. A hedge is a decision that offsets potential losses in the event of a bad outcome. No vote configuration on a single question can do that. It can, in some cases, reduce the chance of a bad outcome. In the best case, it does so by also reducing the chance of a good outcome (in favor of a moderate outcome). But crucually, each point affects each outcome in the same way as each other point.

So, by what rational reason am I choosing an intermediate value? Why would I prefer (in a contrived example, but all cases are linear) a 20% chance of both the good outcome and the bad outcome over both a 25% chance and a 15% chance? Moving from 4 points to 5 always does the same thing as moving from 5 to 6. It's linear, so the local maxima and minima are at the ends.

> There is no single "most important value".

You are making a linear probabilistic trade-off between two values. One of them must be more important than the other in order for any score assignment to be better than any other. Either being more important than the other will drive the score to one extreme.

> But why would you admit even this deficiency just to avoid allowing yourself to specify a score instead?

It's not something I want people to actually do. It's a reduction ad absurdum. Your approach does the same thing as a random approach, so - barring deception reasons - it must be a mistake.

ClayShentrup 7 months ago

> an intermediate score is not an optimal way to hedge

1. of course it is, if you're not mathematically savvy.

https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6

2. a lot of people will do it REGARDLESS of whether it's rational, just like people donate to charity. so YOU as a rational self-interested voter BENEFIT by using a voting method which allows you to receive utility donations from those altruistic voters, however irrational they may be. and that leads to a greater NET utility, because voting isn't a zero sum game. https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes

again, it would really help you to just spend a few minutes reading elementary voting theory before going off on such a wild misguided tangent like this.

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amalcon 7 months ago

> 1. of course it is, if you're not mathematically savvy.
I don't think that says what you're claiming it does. If you actually look at the simulation linked from there (which I do take some issues with, but those are irrelevant to the point):
- Scaled sincerity, the one that gets their claimed 91% effectiveness, is actually one of the more mathematically complicated strategies to execute.
- Maxing + sincerity, the version of "mildly-optimized sincerity" that is least complicated to execute (and thus the one most likely to be executed intuitively), is among the least effective in large elections.
- Mean-based thresholding -- the closest approximation of my proposed strategies here, consistently outperforms all sincere-derived approaches in elections of 10+ participants. It is also simpler to execute than scaled sincerity.
> and that leads to a greater NET utility
This is not accounting for the reduced utility of increasing the complexity of the voting system, or of weakening the secret ballot by allowing more information content on it.
The latter is the real argument against score voting that I don't think has a counter. I haven't brought it up yet, because it's a lot less convincing if you believe that optimal individual strategy in score voting performs much better than optimal individual strategy in approval voting. But you, in particular, don't seem to believe that. So...
Score voting puts more information on the ballot than any other system, for an only marginal improvement over approval voting (which puts the second-least, after single vote). Putting more information on the ballot is bad, because it allows votes to be dis-aggregated. Attack description:
- Alice instructs Bob to fill out the ballot in a specific way. That specific way includes minor random perturbations of scores that are unlikely to influence the election result, but are likely to make Bob's ballot unique. E.g. selecting a random score for a candidate with a very low chance of victory, fully randomizing a question that Alice does not care about, or (worst case) adding or subtracting 1-5 percent from scores of relevant candidates.
- Alice observes the vote counting, and notes if Bob's ballot was observed.
- Alice rewards or punishes Bob accordingly
The value of the secret ballot is very high. I suggest that it is greater than any increase in utility achievable in the delta between score voting and approval voting.

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