I am generally very skeptical about quadratic voting. In my opinion:
1. The nice calculus identities that it satisfied are optimal under an assumption of individual strategic voting
2. There are some kinds of elections where people are mostly motivated to be strategic, and others where they’re mostly motivated to be honest. Basically, strategy tends to happen when there are factions, “us vs. them”; otherwise, people don’t bother.
3. But when there are factions, that means there will tend to be group-level strategic voting. And QV is no more robust, and possibly more vulnerable, to group-level strategy than other voting methods.
4. There are ways to patch QV to “fix” (3); but, as with many voting method patches, you create 2 new problems for every 1 you fix.
At a meta level: overall, my level of confidence in each of those points above is not particularly high. Say, on the order of 70% confident in each, and they’re roughly independent. So that would mean that a chain of logic that relied on all four being true would only be roughly 25% reliable. But I suspect that for QV to be a bad idea, it’s not necessary that all 4 of them are perfectly true; “most of them are mostly true” would be enough. So, say, 50% confidence that it’s a bad idea. If your prior was 75% that it’s a good idea, and if you trust me completely, you’d now think that it’s 37.5% a good idea. (Which might be good enough to be worth a try, given that failure in this case wouldn’t be so very bad.)
Also meta: Honestly, I don’t think it’s too arrogant to say that I doubt there’s more than a handful of people in the world more qualified to opine on this than I am.
Gotta go now, but I’ll respond on this more later, with an actual suggestion.
However, I’m not sure what sorts of collusion you’re worried about for this round (but haven’t though much about it)?
My understanding is that collusion in QV looks like:
1. People hijacking what bills get put up for vote in order to bankrupt people who want to veto the bill
2. People splitting their funding contributions across multiple fake identities in order to extract more subsidies
3. People coordinating their votes with others (because rather than me buying x votes it’s cheaper that I only buy x-y and “pay for that” by spending money on someone else’s preferences)
1 and 2 won’t be a problem for the review since you have a set number of voters with known identities, as well as a set number of posts to vote on. So I presume you’re worried about vote trading as in 3?
One of the things I really love about pairwise bounded QV is that it actually disincentivizes even unconscious collusion. In a democractic republic like the US with a traditional voting scheme, I’m incentivized to find issues that agree with others so that I have more voting power.
In a pairwise bounded QV voting scheme, I’m actually incentivized to find issues that I care about that are neglected by others, and vote on those (as my votes will literally be worth more).
Of course, one of the biggest issues with pairwise bounded QV is that it makes it much harder to figure out how much an individual vote will be worth on any given issue, as it depends on how correlated my votes are with others who vote on the same issues.
Gotta go now, but I’ll respond on this more later, with an actual suggestion.
Still interested in your suggestions. :)
There are some kinds of elections where people are mostly motivated to be strategic, and others where they’re mostly motivated to be honest. Basically, strategy tends to happen when there are factions, “us vs. them”; otherwise, people don’t bother.
I’m (personally) less convinced than Oli, Jim or Ben that quadratic (or any system with extra complexity to address strategic voting) is the way to go here. I don’t really think this is a situation where people are pressured to strategic vote, at least not very strongly.
Honestly, it’s harder to come up with a better suggestion than I would have thought. This is nearly the ideal use case for quadratic voting:
Reasonably engaged, and very nerdy, voting population
Relatively high mutual respect and common values; relatively low factionalism
The meta-goal is actually as much increasing overall engagement and building community, as it is choosing the optimal winner set.
QV is a shiny new thing, and the math behind it is cool.
The very definition of “ideal winner set” isn’t well-specified. Do you want proportionality? That is, if there is a 30% faction that loves things other people hate, should they decide 30% of the winner set, or should the algorithm try to find good compromise options that everyone can live with but nobody loves, or something else?
Overall, without hearing more about what your real goals are with this, I guess my best suggestions would be:
Include options to vote “score voting style” (bounded ratings) or “quadratic style” (ratings with bounded euclidean norm). I’d suggest scaling the SV votes so that their average euclidean norm is the same as that of the QV votes. (The strategy in this case is relatively obvious, but the strategic leverage isn’t too high, and the stakes are relatively low, so I wouldn’t worry too much.)
For the QV ballots, draw visualizations: spirals made up of successive right triangles, so that the first rating is an adjacent side, each further rating is an opposite side, and the root-sum-squares is the final hypotenuse.
If you did want a proportional method, I’d probably suggest something like E Pluribus Hugo with quadratically-scaled ballots behind the continuous part. That is actually not too too complicated (voters who didn’t want to get too complicated would be free to vote approval-style), and proportional, and quite robust to strategy.
This all makes a lot of sense, I’m glad to hear you say it. I think that the option for ‘score voting style’ is quite good, we in fact were seriously considering doing something like that.
I really like the idea of producing a visualisation as the user makes their votes up. That sounds delightful.
I’d suggest scaling the SV votes so that their average euclidean norm is the same as that of the QV votes.
Yeah. As I understand is, this just means that you sum the squares of the SV and QV votes, then linearly scale all the votes of one such that these two numbers are equal to one another. And then you’ve got them on the same playing field. And this is a trivial bit of computation, so we can make it that if you’re voting in SV but then want to move to QV to change the weights a little, when you change we can automatically show you what the score looks like in QV (er, rounded, there’ll be tons of fractions by default).
If you did want a proportional method, I’d probably suggest something like E Pluribus Hugo with quadratically-scaled ballots behind the continuous part.
Instant Runoff seems to be optimising for outcomes about which the majority have consensus, which isn’t something I care as much about in this situation. That said I don’t fully understand how it would change the results.
As I understand is, this just means that you sum the squares of the SV and QV votes, then linearly scale all the votes of one such that these two numbers are equal to one another.
… such that the average for each of these numbers are equal, yes. I think that the way you said it, you’d be upscaling whichever group had fewer voters, but I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean that.
Instant Runoff seems to be optimising for outcomes about which the majority have consensus, which isn’t something I care as much about in this situation. That said I don’t fully understand how it would change the results.
E Pluribus Hugo, and more generally, proportional representation, have nothing to do with Instant Runoff, so I’m not sure what you’re saying here.
The Hugos use EPH for nominating finalists, then IRV to choose winners from among those finalists. Those are entirely separate steps. I was talking about the former, which has no IRV involved. I apologize for being unclear.
Include options to vote “score voting style” (bounded ratings) or “quadratic style” (ratings with bounded euclidean norm). I’d suggest scaling the SV votes so that their average euclidean norm is the same as that of the QV votes. (The strategy in this case is relatively obvious, but the strategic leverage isn’t too high, and the stakes are relatively low, so I wouldn’t worry too much.)
This is similar to what I was personally imagining, and what I think I’d personally want.
When I went through the 75 posts myself, imagining voting for them, what I found was that I basically wanted to put each post into one of a few buckets, something like:
“no” – not a contender for book
“decent” – a pretty neat idea, or a ‘quite good’ idea that wasn’t well argued for
“quite good” – some combination of “the idea is quite important; or, the conversation moved forward significantly; or, a neat idea was extraordinarily well argued for with excellent epistemics”
“crucial” – this is a foundational piece that I hope one day becomes ‘canon’
(I could imagine wanting to downvote posts, but in this case there weren’t any I wanted to rank lower than ‘no’)
One additional thing I kinda wanted out of this the ability to flag (and aggregate data) about which posts had better or worse epistemic virtue. At first I thought of having two different voting scales, one for “value” and the other for “is this literally true, and/or did the author demonstrate thoughtfulness in how they considered the idea?”
I was worried about the obvious failure mode, where e.g OkCupid creates a “personality” and “attractiveness” scale, but it turns out the halo effect swamps any additional information you might have gleaned, and the two scales mapped perfectly.
When I attempted to rate each post myself, what I found was I almost always ranked epistemics and importance the same (or at least it wasn’t obvious that they were more than “1 point” away from each other on a 1-10 scale), but that were a few specific posts I wanted to flag as “punching above or below their weight epistemically.”
I’m not quite sure if this is worth any additional complexity. A simple option is to leave a “comments” box for each post where people can explain their vote in plain english. I’m a little sad that doesn’t give us the ability to aggregate information though. (A simple boolean, er, three-option radio radio button, with optional ‘punches above its weight epistemically’ or ‘punches below its weight epistemically’ might work)
Also meta: Honestly, I don’t think it’s too arrogant to say that I doubt there’s more than a handful of people in the world more qualified to opine on this than I am.
We were in fact hoping you’d show up with opinions. :)
Throughout the OP my main question was what does Jameson think about this. It felt a bit odd to me that a specific voting method was being advocated without at least some of his input.
The update from the prior isn’t quite right here. I would have to consider what probability I would have assigned to you having the opinion outlined in your comment if the idea was bad vs if the idea was good.
As you’re only saying 50% confidence it’s hard to distinguish good from bad so an update would probably be of a lesser magnitude and would naively not update in either direction. My actual update would be away from the extremes—it probably isn’t amazing but it probably isn’t terrible.
I am generally very skeptical about quadratic voting. In my opinion:
1. The nice calculus identities that it satisfied are optimal under an assumption of individual strategic voting
2. There are some kinds of elections where people are mostly motivated to be strategic, and others where they’re mostly motivated to be honest. Basically, strategy tends to happen when there are factions, “us vs. them”; otherwise, people don’t bother.
3. But when there are factions, that means there will tend to be group-level strategic voting. And QV is no more robust, and possibly more vulnerable, to group-level strategy than other voting methods.
4. There are ways to patch QV to “fix” (3); but, as with many voting method patches, you create 2 new problems for every 1 you fix.
At a meta level: overall, my level of confidence in each of those points above is not particularly high. Say, on the order of 70% confident in each, and they’re roughly independent. So that would mean that a chain of logic that relied on all four being true would only be roughly 25% reliable. But I suspect that for QV to be a bad idea, it’s not necessary that all 4 of them are perfectly true; “most of them are mostly true” would be enough. So, say, 50% confidence that it’s a bad idea. If your prior was 75% that it’s a good idea, and if you trust me completely, you’d now think that it’s 37.5% a good idea. (Which might be good enough to be worth a try, given that failure in this case wouldn’t be so very bad.)
Also meta: Honestly, I don’t think it’s too arrogant to say that I doubt there’s more than a handful of people in the world more qualified to opine on this than I am.
Gotta go now, but I’ll respond on this more later, with an actual suggestion.
Robin Hanson makes a similar point here.
However, I’m not sure what sorts of collusion you’re worried about for this round (but haven’t though much about it)?
My understanding is that collusion in QV looks like:
1. People hijacking what bills get put up for vote in order to bankrupt people who want to veto the bill
2. People splitting their funding contributions across multiple fake identities in order to extract more subsidies
3. People coordinating their votes with others (because rather than me buying x votes it’s cheaper that I only buy x-y and “pay for that” by spending money on someone else’s preferences)
1 and 2 won’t be a problem for the review since you have a set number of voters with known identities, as well as a set number of posts to vote on. So I presume you’re worried about vote trading as in 3?
There’s a variant on quadratic funding called pairwise quadratic funding that aims to make naive collusion much less useful: https://ethresear.ch/t/pairwise-coordination-subsidies-a-new-quadratic-funding-design/5553
AFAICT it hasn’t been adapted yet to quadratic voting, but I’d love to see LW be the first ones to do so.
One of the things I really love about pairwise bounded QV is that it actually disincentivizes even unconscious collusion. In a democractic republic like the US with a traditional voting scheme, I’m incentivized to find issues that agree with others so that I have more voting power.
In a pairwise bounded QV voting scheme, I’m actually incentivized to find issues that I care about that are neglected by others, and vote on those (as my votes will literally be worth more).
Of course, one of the biggest issues with pairwise bounded QV is that it makes it much harder to figure out how much an individual vote will be worth on any given issue, as it depends on how correlated my votes are with others who vote on the same issues.
Still interested in your suggestions. :)
I’m (personally) less convinced than Oli, Jim or Ben that quadratic (or any system with extra complexity to address strategic voting) is the way to go here. I don’t really think this is a situation where people are pressured to strategic vote, at least not very strongly.
Honestly, it’s harder to come up with a better suggestion than I would have thought. This is nearly the ideal use case for quadratic voting:
Reasonably engaged, and very nerdy, voting population
Relatively high mutual respect and common values; relatively low factionalism
The meta-goal is actually as much increasing overall engagement and building community, as it is choosing the optimal winner set.
QV is a shiny new thing, and the math behind it is cool.
The very definition of “ideal winner set” isn’t well-specified. Do you want proportionality? That is, if there is a 30% faction that loves things other people hate, should they decide 30% of the winner set, or should the algorithm try to find good compromise options that everyone can live with but nobody loves, or something else?
Overall, without hearing more about what your real goals are with this, I guess my best suggestions would be:
Include options to vote “score voting style” (bounded ratings) or “quadratic style” (ratings with bounded euclidean norm). I’d suggest scaling the SV votes so that their average euclidean norm is the same as that of the QV votes. (The strategy in this case is relatively obvious, but the strategic leverage isn’t too high, and the stakes are relatively low, so I wouldn’t worry too much.)
For the QV ballots, draw visualizations: spirals made up of successive right triangles, so that the first rating is an adjacent side, each further rating is an opposite side, and the root-sum-squares is the final hypotenuse.
If you did want a proportional method, I’d probably suggest something like E Pluribus Hugo with quadratically-scaled ballots behind the continuous part. That is actually not too too complicated (voters who didn’t want to get too complicated would be free to vote approval-style), and proportional, and quite robust to strategy.
This all makes a lot of sense, I’m glad to hear you say it. I think that the option for ‘score voting style’ is quite good, we in fact were seriously considering doing something like that.
I really like the idea of producing a visualisation as the user makes their votes up. That sounds delightful.
Yeah. As I understand is, this just means that you sum the squares of the SV and QV votes, then linearly scale all the votes of one such that these two numbers are equal to one another. And then you’ve got them on the same playing field. And this is a trivial bit of computation, so we can make it that if you’re voting in SV but then want to move to QV to change the weights a little, when you change we can automatically show you what the score looks like in QV (er, rounded, there’ll be tons of fractions by default).
Instant Runoff seems to be optimising for outcomes about which the majority have consensus, which isn’t something I care as much about in this situation. That said I don’t fully understand how it would change the results.
… such that the average for each of these numbers are equal, yes. I think that the way you said it, you’d be upscaling whichever group had fewer voters, but I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean that.
E Pluribus Hugo, and more generally, proportional representation, have nothing to do with Instant Runoff, so I’m not sure what you’re saying here.
The second paragraph in the linked post says:
The Hugos use EPH for nominating finalists, then IRV to choose winners from among those finalists. Those are entirely separate steps. I was talking about the former, which has no IRV involved. I apologize for being unclear.
This is similar to what I was personally imagining, and what I think I’d personally want.
When I went through the 75 posts myself, imagining voting for them, what I found was that I basically wanted to put each post into one of a few buckets, something like:
“no” – not a contender for book
“decent” – a pretty neat idea, or a ‘quite good’ idea that wasn’t well argued for
“quite good” – some combination of “the idea is quite important; or, the conversation moved forward significantly; or, a neat idea was extraordinarily well argued for with excellent epistemics”
“crucial” – this is a foundational piece that I hope one day becomes ‘canon’
(I could imagine wanting to downvote posts, but in this case there weren’t any I wanted to rank lower than ‘no’)
One additional thing I kinda wanted out of this the ability to flag (and aggregate data) about which posts had better or worse epistemic virtue. At first I thought of having two different voting scales, one for “value” and the other for “is this literally true, and/or did the author demonstrate thoughtfulness in how they considered the idea?”
I was worried about the obvious failure mode, where e.g OkCupid creates a “personality” and “attractiveness” scale, but it turns out the halo effect swamps any additional information you might have gleaned, and the two scales mapped perfectly.
When I attempted to rate each post myself, what I found was I almost always ranked epistemics and importance the same (or at least it wasn’t obvious that they were more than “1 point” away from each other on a 1-10 scale), but that were a few specific posts I wanted to flag as “punching above or below their weight epistemically.”
I’m not quite sure if this is worth any additional complexity. A simple option is to leave a “comments” box for each post where people can explain their vote in plain english. I’m a little sad that doesn’t give us the ability to aggregate information though. (A simple boolean, er, three-option radio radio button, with optional ‘punches above its weight epistemically’ or ‘punches below its weight epistemically’ might work)
We were in fact hoping you’d show up with opinions. :)
Throughout the OP my main question was what does Jameson think about this. It felt a bit odd to me that a specific voting method was being advocated without at least some of his input.
(To be clear, I did PM him saying I’d love for him to comment on the post, if he had the time.)
Slightly nitpicky:
The update from the prior isn’t quite right here. I would have to consider what probability I would have assigned to you having the opinion outlined in your comment if the idea was bad vs if the idea was good.
As you’re only saying 50% confidence it’s hard to distinguish good from bad so an update would probably be of a lesser magnitude and would naively not update in either direction. My actual update would be away from the extremes—it probably isn’t amazing but it probably isn’t terrible.