This vastly increases your ability to put information into the system.
This looks wrong to me. If two candidates participate in the election and one of them wins, the system has received 1 bit of information from all the voters combined. This doesn’t depend on the voting scheme. If some intermediate stage of the voting scheme collects more information from each voter, then some later stage must throw that information away, because the system doesn’t retain any information except which candidate got chosen.
Or did you imply some other technical meaning of “putting information into the system”? If so, could you explain your definition in more detail?
Yes, at the end only one candidate is selected, but the information isn’t ‘thrown away’ - the MP now knows, rather than just “52% of people in the constituency voted for me”, “27% of people voted for me as their first preference, with the Greens as their second preference, 25% voted for the Greens first and me second, and nobody at all voted for the Tories first and me second, or me second and the Tories first. That means that I’d better pay attention to my environmental policies, which I share with the Green, and maybe not so much my economic policies, which I share with the Tory”.
Or, to look at it another way, the system does throw away all but one bit of information, but the information going into the system is used to tell it which bits to throw away.
We do, but they’re usually not very inaccurate, and they also don’t directly impact on a politician keeping her job. If you know that 27% of people in the country quite like the Greens but not as much as the Tories (or whoever) that’s one thing. If you know that 27% of the people whose votes you need in order to stay in power like the Greens, that’s a very different piece of information.
Because just asking the question doesn’t actually affect their job. Otherwise why not just have a dictator and a lot of polls? The whole point is that this information is used to select MPs.
(BTW I made a typo in the previous response—“usually not very inaccurate” should be “usually not very accurate”).
Here you said that the advantage of AV was that politicians knew more about who voted for them, whose votes they needed, etc. I pointed out that there are easier ways of getting this information. Asking the question doesn’t directly affect their job, but neither do all those extra votes.
In both systems, you have an election, and then a bunch of extra information, which the MP can find useful/make them take into account other voters. In one system, this extra information is gathered at the ballot, in the other, in separate polls. There’s no other relivant difference except that one is cheaper (and monotonic!)
Your dictator response is mistaken because both systems have a No-dictator part; the bit at the ballot where an MP is elected. But both also have a separate ‘more information’ part, which was why you prefered AV—but which seems to be done better by independant polling.
Now you’re making a different argument—you have to show that making your decide_winner function take more arguments is going to improve the quality of the output, and it’s far from clear it will. You could put more information into the system by asking every voter to list their favourite colour, but unless you can show that this would actually improve the output, it’s irrelivant.
Having more information can allow us to have more accurate beliefs, but it’s not the case that putting more marks on a ballot paper will lead to a better result, especially when you’re pushing against Arrow.
Agreed with the first paragraph, but the second one sounds strange. Does it really matter so much whether I enter 1 bit into the computer, or 10 bits telling it which 9 of them should be thrown away?
I see your point, but think of it this way. Say you’re buying a new car, you’ll probably only buy one car. But you might browse a handful of websites, maybe read What Car? magazine. That information contributes to the decision, and isn’t ‘thrown away’, even though you end up just buying one car.
I’m frankly not awake enough to put things any more rigorously (I ran out of melatonin two days ago and my new order hasn’t yet arrived, so I’m dopey as hell), but I hope this handwavey pseudo-explanation gets the point across.
This looks wrong to me. If two candidates participate in the election and one of them wins, the system has received 1 bit of information from all the voters combined. This doesn’t depend on the voting scheme. If some intermediate stage of the voting scheme collects more information from each voter, then some later stage must throw that information away, because the system doesn’t retain any information except which candidate got chosen.
Or did you imply some other technical meaning of “putting information into the system”? If so, could you explain your definition in more detail?
Yes, at the end only one candidate is selected, but the information isn’t ‘thrown away’ - the MP now knows, rather than just “52% of people in the constituency voted for me”, “27% of people voted for me as their first preference, with the Greens as their second preference, 25% voted for the Greens first and me second, and nobody at all voted for the Tories first and me second, or me second and the Tories first. That means that I’d better pay attention to my environmental policies, which I share with the Green, and maybe not so much my economic policies, which I share with the Tory”.
Or, to look at it another way, the system does throw away all but one bit of information, but the information going into the system is used to tell it which bits to throw away.
Well, we already have lots of polls.
We do, but they’re usually not very inaccurate, and they also don’t directly impact on a politician keeping her job. If you know that 27% of people in the country quite like the Greens but not as much as the Tories (or whoever) that’s one thing. If you know that 27% of the people whose votes you need in order to stay in power like the Greens, that’s a very different piece of information.
So why not just have polls that ask that question? It’s not that expensive to get a YouGov to run a poll; much less than running a referendum is.
Because just asking the question doesn’t actually affect their job. Otherwise why not just have a dictator and a lot of polls? The whole point is that this information is used to select MPs. (BTW I made a typo in the previous response—“usually not very inaccurate” should be “usually not very accurate”).
Here you said that the advantage of AV was that politicians knew more about who voted for them, whose votes they needed, etc. I pointed out that there are easier ways of getting this information. Asking the question doesn’t directly affect their job, but neither do all those extra votes.
In both systems, you have an election, and then a bunch of extra information, which the MP can find useful/make them take into account other voters. In one system, this extra information is gathered at the ballot, in the other, in separate polls. There’s no other relivant difference except that one is cheaper (and monotonic!)
Your dictator response is mistaken because both systems have a No-dictator part; the bit at the ballot where an MP is elected. But both also have a separate ‘more information’ part, which was why you prefered AV—but which seems to be done better by independant polling.
No, because the information here changes the result of the election. That’s the whole point...
Now you’re making a different argument—you have to show that making your decide_winner function take more arguments is going to improve the quality of the output, and it’s far from clear it will. You could put more information into the system by asking every voter to list their favourite colour, but unless you can show that this would actually improve the output, it’s irrelivant.
Having more information can allow us to have more accurate beliefs, but it’s not the case that putting more marks on a ballot paper will lead to a better result, especially when you’re pushing against Arrow.
Agreed with the first paragraph, but the second one sounds strange. Does it really matter so much whether I enter 1 bit into the computer, or 10 bits telling it which 9 of them should be thrown away?
I see your point, but think of it this way. Say you’re buying a new car, you’ll probably only buy one car. But you might browse a handful of websites, maybe read What Car? magazine. That information contributes to the decision, and isn’t ‘thrown away’, even though you end up just buying one car.
I’m frankly not awake enough to put things any more rigorously (I ran out of melatonin two days ago and my new order hasn’t yet arrived, so I’m dopey as hell), but I hope this handwavey pseudo-explanation gets the point across.