I haven’t mentioned futarchy (“markets for predictions, votes for values”) at all here. Futarchy, of course, would not be classed as a voting method in my typology; it’s something bigger than even than my concept of a voting system. I think that the main useful thing I can say about futarch is: if you’re going to spend energy on it, you should spend some energy on understanding lower-level voting methods too.
ETA: I guess I think I can expand on that a bit. The issue is that when you embed one system inside another one, there’s some inevitable bleed-over in terms of incentives. For this meta-reason, as well as for the simple reason of direct applicability, one lesson from voting theory that I think would apply to futarchy is that “patching a problem can make it worse, because strategic outcomes can be the ‘opposite’ of unstrategic ones.” That’s an intuition that for me was hard-won, and I wouldn’t expect it to be easy for you to learn it just by hearing it. If that’s true and you still want to learn it, spend some time thinking about honest and strategic outcomes in various voting methods in the five levels of pathology I mentioned above. The playable exploration I mention at the end will substantially focus on these ideas, in a way I hope will be visually and interactively easy to digest.
I haven’t mentioned futarchy (“markets for predictions, votes for values”) at all here. Futarchy, of course, would not be classed as a voting method in my typology; it’s something bigger than even than my concept of a voting system. I think that the main useful thing I can say about futarch is: if you’re going to spend energy on it, you should spend some energy on understanding lower-level voting methods too.
ETA: I guess I think I can expand on that a bit. The issue is that when you embed one system inside another one, there’s some inevitable bleed-over in terms of incentives. For this meta-reason, as well as for the simple reason of direct applicability, one lesson from voting theory that I think would apply to futarchy is that “patching a problem can make it worse, because strategic outcomes can be the ‘opposite’ of unstrategic ones.” That’s an intuition that for me was hard-won, and I wouldn’t expect it to be easy for you to learn it just by hearing it. If that’s true and you still want to learn it, spend some time thinking about honest and strategic outcomes in various voting methods in the five levels of pathology I mentioned above. The playable exploration I mention at the end will substantially focus on these ideas, in a way I hope will be visually and interactively easy to digest.