I understand concerns about manipulation and abuse of modern communication channels, but I completely fail any sort of ITT for support of this kind of gross exaggeration of impact. No way is the relationship between money and outcome linear, and all political spending is not actually evil.
If one candidate gets 200 votes and spends 200 dollars, and candidate 2 gets 201 votes and spends two MILLION dollars, who has the strongest mandate
Well, 201 > 200, right? If you think voters have free will, and are competent to vote, and each vote is equal in strength, then clearly candidate 2 has the support of the majority.
in the sense that the representative actually represents the will of the people when wealth differences are ignored?
I don’t know how one would predict or measure this kind of counterfactual will, or partial-pressure voting, or whatever it’s supposed to mean. Is the will of the people expressed in voting, or is it not?
Look, I’m sympathetic to playing with non-democratic election and decision systems. I’m strongly suspicious that one-person-one-vote is suboptimal (even aside from FPTP winner). I wish there were some sort of directed voting where more informed, smarter, less selfish, voters had more strength than the median citizen. But I strongly expect any change in that direction will immediately be Goodharted away, and the legitimacy conferred by “everyone is equal” is not something to mess with.
“No way is the relationship between money and outcome linear”
What do you claim is the relationship?
”Well, 201 > 200, right? If you think voters have free will, and are competent to vote, and each vote is equal in strength, then clearly candidate 2 has the support of the majority.”
By this logic, payola makes music sound good, which we know is not true. Is it possible that the additional spending is what affected the result, rather than the truth about people’s preferences. If not, why would the right have become obsessed with freedom of speech to preserve citizen’s united?
”Is the will of the people expressed in voting, or is it not?”
False binary, this is a comparative question between two voting systems (in an infinite space) and the question is which system expresses the will of the people better, and the new system does so better by controlling for the confound of payola in measuring preference.
”Look, I’m sympathetic to playing with non-democratic election and decision systems. I’m strongly suspicious that one-person-one-vote is suboptimal (even aside from FPTP winner). I wish there were some sort of directed voting where more informed, smarter, less selfish, voters had more strength than the median citizen. But I strongly expect any change in that direction will immediately be Goodharted away, and the legitimacy conferred by “everyone is equal” is not something to mess with.”
I am proposing a change in the opposite direction from what you propose. One person, one vote, is, let’s say, the ideal, (why say this? considering Condorcet’s jury theorem, in the context of general elections, we have an education system tasked with making voters better than chance so that the conditions of Condorcet’s jury theorem are met, making voter turnout an epistemic virtue—with these conditions provided, one person, one vote is the ideal)
BUT, the extreme fungibility of both attention and money means that one person, one vote, is ‘drowned out’ by the one person, many dollars system of capitalist inequality, which progressively undermines democracy (one person, one vote) as it in increases in size, as votes are easy to buy. In this context ‘money’ is the ‘noise’ and ‘preference’ is the ‘signal’:
‘Getting the money out of politics’ has been a bugbear of many an idealist in the anglosphere (and I presume elsewhere) and I propose to simply divide it out mathematically by law.
I think I’ll bow out after this—feel free to respond, and I’ll read, but I don’t think we’re likely to come to agreement here.
The key difference between payola and political spending is that payola goes to the authority who unilaterally decides what gets played, and political spending is indirect, influencing some voters but not overriding the vote.
I’m deeply opposed to political systems more complicated than “whoever gets the most votes, wins (with some decisions that have a reasonable “no winner” result requiring supermajorities)”, because every time politicians touch complexity, it gets twisted to incomprehensibly biased results.
I understand concerns about manipulation and abuse of modern communication channels, but I completely fail any sort of ITT for support of this kind of gross exaggeration of impact. No way is the relationship between money and outcome linear, and all political spending is not actually evil.
Well, 201 > 200, right? If you think voters have free will, and are competent to vote, and each vote is equal in strength, then clearly candidate 2 has the support of the majority.
I don’t know how one would predict or measure this kind of counterfactual will, or partial-pressure voting, or whatever it’s supposed to mean. Is the will of the people expressed in voting, or is it not?
Look, I’m sympathetic to playing with non-democratic election and decision systems. I’m strongly suspicious that one-person-one-vote is suboptimal (even aside from FPTP winner). I wish there were some sort of directed voting where more informed, smarter, less selfish, voters had more strength than the median citizen. But I strongly expect any change in that direction will immediately be Goodharted away, and the legitimacy conferred by “everyone is equal” is not something to mess with.
“No way is the relationship between money and outcome linear”
What do you claim is the relationship?
”Well, 201 > 200, right? If you think voters have free will, and are competent to vote, and each vote is equal in strength, then clearly candidate 2 has the support of the majority.”
By this logic, payola makes music sound good, which we know is not true. Is it possible that the additional spending is what affected the result, rather than the truth about people’s preferences. If not, why would the right have become obsessed with freedom of speech to preserve citizen’s united?
”Is the will of the people expressed in voting, or is it not?”
False binary, this is a comparative question between two voting systems (in an infinite space) and the question is which system expresses the will of the people better, and the new system does so better by controlling for the confound of payola in measuring preference.
”Look, I’m sympathetic to playing with non-democratic election and decision systems. I’m strongly suspicious that one-person-one-vote is suboptimal (even aside from FPTP winner). I wish there were some sort of directed voting where more informed, smarter, less selfish, voters had more strength than the median citizen. But I strongly expect any change in that direction will immediately be Goodharted away, and the legitimacy conferred by “everyone is equal” is not something to mess with.”
I am proposing a change in the opposite direction from what you propose. One person, one vote, is, let’s say, the ideal, (why say this? considering Condorcet’s jury theorem, in the context of general elections, we have an education system tasked with making voters better than chance so that the conditions of Condorcet’s jury theorem are met, making voter turnout an epistemic virtue—with these conditions provided, one person, one vote is the ideal)
BUT, the extreme fungibility of both attention and money means that one person, one vote, is ‘drowned out’ by the one person, many dollars system of capitalist inequality, which progressively undermines democracy (one person, one vote) as it in increases in size, as votes are easy to buy. In this context ‘money’ is the ‘noise’ and ‘preference’ is the ‘signal’:
‘Getting the money out of politics’ has been a bugbear of many an idealist in the anglosphere (and I presume elsewhere) and I propose to simply divide it out mathematically by law.
I think I’ll bow out after this—feel free to respond, and I’ll read, but I don’t think we’re likely to come to agreement here.
The key difference between payola and political spending is that payola goes to the authority who unilaterally decides what gets played, and political spending is indirect, influencing some voters but not overriding the vote.
I’m deeply opposed to political systems more complicated than “whoever gets the most votes, wins (with some decisions that have a reasonable “no winner” result requiring supermajorities)”, because every time politicians touch complexity, it gets twisted to incomprehensibly biased results.
Then you’re against the electoral college?