I expect the quadratic voting not to be very different from the 1-4-9 system, but I favor including quadratic voting again even if that is the case. I have two actual reasons for this:
It’s a cool mechanism, with flexible levels of engagement, and this is a good way to practice using it. If we don’t make options like this available when voting opportunities arise, we can’t expect them to ever appear in critical arenas like elections or governance.
The more posts there are, the more valuable being able to fine-tune our votes becomes, operating under the assumption that the number of quality posts correlates with the number of posts overall (which I strongly expect). Since there are more posts this year, more granular voting has more value than it did last year. I want to be able to capture the additional value of the opportunity for granular voting.
I do think, on the margin, that experimenting with new mechanism design is pretty important. Whether to stick with a given mechanism depends a lot on whether that’s a mechanism I expect to really scale up.
The Lightcone team has used quadratic voting internally on occasion (i.e. for deciding which topics to discuss during a team retreat). But I’m not sure this was all that much better than a really simple averaging. I don’t know which domains really benefit from quadratic voting.
For comparison – I’ve also considered building something like Liquid Democracy into the LW Review, where you can delegate your vote to someone else.
I’m legitimately unsure about the differences in complexity, actually. Quadratic Voting throws a bunch of upfront complexity at you, and forces you to deal with it. The impemntation of1-4-9 is secretly somewhat complex in that the exact value of your votes varies based on how many votes you cast of varying strengths.
I expect sometime-this-month to build UI that shows you what the actual value of your votes on hover-over, so you have a bit more visibility into what’s going on, but it’d still be a bit opaque and probably require more overall effort to “truly” understand than quadratic voting.
I expect the quadratic voting not to be very different from the 1-4-9 system, but I favor including quadratic voting again even if that is the case. I have two actual reasons for this:
It’s a cool mechanism, with flexible levels of engagement, and this is a good way to practice using it. If we don’t make options like this available when voting opportunities arise, we can’t expect them to ever appear in critical arenas like elections or governance.
The more posts there are, the more valuable being able to fine-tune our votes becomes, operating under the assumption that the number of quality posts correlates with the number of posts overall (which I strongly expect). Since there are more posts this year, more granular voting has more value than it did last year. I want to be able to capture the additional value of the opportunity for granular voting.
I do think, on the margin, that experimenting with new mechanism design is pretty important. Whether to stick with a given mechanism depends a lot on whether that’s a mechanism I expect to really scale up.
The Lightcone team has used quadratic voting internally on occasion (i.e. for deciding which topics to discuss during a team retreat). But I’m not sure this was all that much better than a really simple averaging. I don’t know which domains really benefit from quadratic voting.
For comparison – I’ve also considered building something like Liquid Democracy into the LW Review, where you can delegate your vote to someone else.
Counterpoint: the quadratic voting mechanism was difficult to understand, and confusing. 1-4-9 is simple.
I’m legitimately unsure about the differences in complexity, actually. Quadratic Voting throws a bunch of upfront complexity at you, and forces you to deal with it. The impemntation of1-4-9 is secretly somewhat complex in that the exact value of your votes varies based on how many votes you cast of varying strengths.
I expect sometime-this-month to build UI that shows you what the actual value of your votes on hover-over, so you have a bit more visibility into what’s going on, but it’d still be a bit opaque and probably require more overall effort to “truly” understand than quadratic voting.