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)
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)