Exciting stuff! It would not shock me in the least for this to be a common point-of-reference for various rationalist experiments (i.e. houses, startups, etc). I have a bunch of questions:
1) Do these voting systems have anything to say about voting for referendums, or is the literature constrained to candidates? Is there any sense in which a batch of competing referendums would not be treated the same as single-winner races?
2) You mention the practical concerns of laypeople being able to grasp the process and counting the votes a few times—is there a body of research that focuses on these elements, or is this work being done by the Center for Election Science?
3) You mention the use of a Condorcet method being used by Debian in internal voting—is there a sense of which methods are suitable for use in organizational voting, as distinct from political voting, ie some of them are unusually sensitive to scale? Further, how is deployment in an organization weighed as evidence regarding deployment in elections?
4) Can you recommend a source which discusses voting theory from the perspective of information aggregation, in the same way as has been done for markets?
1) In most cases, the voting method options when voting on competing (non-sapient) plans are the same as those for candidates. In fact, as I said, Arrow’s theorem and Sen’s theorem were originally posed as being about voting over world-states rather than candidates. And approval voting, with a 50% threshold, has been used various times in practice for voting on incompatible ballot initiatives.
The exception to this rule is when voting methods use delegation in some way (such as “liquid democracy”, SODA, PLACE, and to a much lesser extent 3-2-1). Obviously, these methods require sapient candidates, or at least some kind of impartial divergence measure over candidates.
2) As I hinted, I think that the academic literature on this tends to focus more on the axiomatic/Arrovian paradigm than it should. I suspect that there is some political science research that relates, but aside from a few simple results on spoiled ballots under IRV (they go up) I’m not familiar with it.
3) Organizations are probably more able to tolerate “complicated” voting methods — especially organizations of “nerds”, such as Debian or the Hugo awards. But my intuition in this area is based on anecdotes, not solid research.
4) Hmm… I’ll have to think about that one, I’ll get back to you.
Exciting stuff! It would not shock me in the least for this to be a common point-of-reference for various rationalist experiments (i.e. houses, startups, etc). I have a bunch of questions:
1) Do these voting systems have anything to say about voting for referendums, or is the literature constrained to candidates? Is there any sense in which a batch of competing referendums would not be treated the same as single-winner races?
2) You mention the practical concerns of laypeople being able to grasp the process and counting the votes a few times—is there a body of research that focuses on these elements, or is this work being done by the Center for Election Science?
3) You mention the use of a Condorcet method being used by Debian in internal voting—is there a sense of which methods are suitable for use in organizational voting, as distinct from political voting, ie some of them are unusually sensitive to scale? Further, how is deployment in an organization weighed as evidence regarding deployment in elections?
4) Can you recommend a source which discusses voting theory from the perspective of information aggregation, in the same way as has been done for markets?
1) In most cases, the voting method options when voting on competing (non-sapient) plans are the same as those for candidates. In fact, as I said, Arrow’s theorem and Sen’s theorem were originally posed as being about voting over world-states rather than candidates. And approval voting, with a 50% threshold, has been used various times in practice for voting on incompatible ballot initiatives.
The exception to this rule is when voting methods use delegation in some way (such as “liquid democracy”, SODA, PLACE, and to a much lesser extent 3-2-1). Obviously, these methods require sapient candidates, or at least some kind of impartial divergence measure over candidates.
2) As I hinted, I think that the academic literature on this tends to focus more on the axiomatic/Arrovian paradigm than it should. I suspect that there is some political science research that relates, but aside from a few simple results on spoiled ballots under IRV (they go up) I’m not familiar with it.
3) Organizations are probably more able to tolerate “complicated” voting methods — especially organizations of “nerds”, such as Debian or the Hugo awards. But my intuition in this area is based on anecdotes, not solid research.
4) Hmm… I’ll have to think about that one, I’ll get back to you.