Comment by ClayShentrup
Comment by 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.
> 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.