Jameson Quinn

• Jameson QuinnJan 11, 2021, 2:09 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: Dacourt’s comment on: Prac­ti­cal post on 4 #ProRep meth­ods (Pro­por­tional Rep­re­sen­ta­tion)

  Also worth noting that both AV and FPTP are winner-take-all methods, unlike the proportional methods I discuss here. The AV referendum question was essentially “do you want to take a disruptive half-step that lines you up for maybe, sometime in the future, actually fixing the problem?”; I’m not the only one who believes it was intentionally engineered to fail.

• Jameson QuinnJan 10, 2021, 4:29 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: iceplant’s comment on: Prac­ti­cal post on 4 #ProRep meth­ods (Pro­por­tional Rep­re­sen­ta­tion)

  It seems that most of what you’re talking about are single-winner reforms (including single-winner pathologies such as center squeeze). In particular, the RCV you’re talking about is RCV1, single-winner, while the one I discuss in this article is RCV5, multi-winner; there are important differences. For discussing single-winner, I’d recommend the first two articles linked at the top; this article is about multi-winner reforms.

  Personally, I think that the potential benefits of both kinds of reform are huge, but there are some benefits that only multi-winner can give. For instance, no single-winner reform can really fix gerrymandering, while almost any multi-winner one will.

  The issue of politicians not wanting to “do surgery on the hand that feeds them” (I like that metaphor) is a real one. The four methods I’ve chosen to discuss are all chosen partly with an eye to that issue; that is, to being as nondisruptive as possible to incumbents (unless those incumbents owe their seats to gerrymandering, in which case, fixing gerrymandering has to take precedence). Actually, of the four methods, RCV5 is the most disruptive, so if this is your main concern, I’d look more closely at the other three methods I discuss.

• Jameson QuinnJan 10, 2021, 4:22 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Prac­ti­cal post on 4 #ProRep meth­ods (Pro­por­tional Rep­re­sen­ta­tion)

  Formally speaking, nothing. Indirectly speaking: the candidate is a Schelling point for voters in those districts, especially if they are not excited by the that-party candidate in their own district. So those voters are a potential source of direct votes for that candidate, which help win not just directly, but also by moving the candidate up in the preference order that gets filled in on ballots cast for other candidates.

• Jameson QuinnJan 10, 2021, 4:18 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Prac­ti­cal post on 4 #ProRep meth­ods (Pro­por­tional Rep­re­sen­ta­tion)

  This is not an article about the specific circumstances in the US. Suffice it to say that, while you make good points, I stand by my assessment that things are more hopeful for electoral reform in the US some time in the next decade, than they have been in my 25 years of engagement with the issue. That doesn’t mean hopes are very high in an absolute sense, but they’re high enough to be noticeably higher.

• Jameson QuinnJan 10, 2021, 12:31 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Prac­ti­cal post on 4 #ProRep meth­ods (Pro­por­tional Rep­re­sen­ta­tion)

  You’re right, the sentence you quoted is only a small part of the necessary ingredients for reform; finding a proposal that’s minimally disruptive to incumbents (unless they owe their seat to gerrymandering) is key to getting something passed; and even then, it’s a heavy lift.

  The 4 methods I chose here are the ones I think have the best chances, from exactly those perspectives. It’s still a long shot, but IMO realistic enough to be worth talking about.

Prac­ti­cal post on 4 #ProRep meth­ods (Pro­por­tional Rep­re­sen­ta­tion)

• Jameson QuinnJan 8, 2021, 12:03 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: Ericf’s comment on: A vot­ing the­ory primer for rationalists

  You’ve described, essentially, a weighted-seats closed-list method.

  List methods: meh. It’s actually possible to be biproportional — that is, to represent both party/​faction and geography pretty fairly — so reducing it to just party (and not geography or even faction) is a step down IMO. But you can make reasonable arguments either way.

  Closed methods (party, not voters, decides who gets their seats): yuck. Why take power from the people to give it to some party elite?

  Weighted methods: who knows, it’s scarcely been tried. A few points:

  • If voting weights are too unequal, then effective voting power can get out of whack. For instance, if there are 3 people with 2 votes each, and 1 person with 1 vote, then that last person has no power to ever shift the majority, even though you might have thought they had half as much power as the others.

  • I think that part of the point of representative democracy is deliberation in the second stage. For that purpose, it’s important to preserve cognitive diversity and equal voice. So that makes me skeptical of weighted methods. But note that this is a theoretical, not an empirical, argument, so add whatever grains of salt you’d like.

  General points: I like your willingness to experiment; it is possible to design voting methods that are better than even the best ones in common use. But it’s not easy, so I wouldn’t want to adopt a method that somebody had just come up with; important to at least let experienced theoreticians kick it around some first.

• Jameson QuinnOct 1, 2020, 8:17 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  V0.9.1: Another terminology tweak. New terms: Average Voter Effectiveness, Average Voter Choice, Average Voter Effective Choice. Also, post-mortem will happen in a separate document. (This same version might later be changed to 1.0)

• Jameson QuinnOct 1, 2020, 8:16 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  V0.9: I decided to make a few final edits (mostly, adding a summary and a post-mortem section, which is currently unfinished) then freeze this as is.

  (This was done some time ago but I forgot to post it here.)

• Jameson QuinnAug 31, 2020, 2:25 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Sammy Martin’s comment on: A vot­ing the­ory primer for rationalists

  You seem to be comparing Arrow’s theorem to Lord Vetinari, implying that both are undisputed sovereigns? If so, I disagree. The part you left out about Arrow’s theorem — that it only applies to ranked voting methods (not “systems”) — means that its dominion is far more limited than that of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem.

  As for the RL-voting paper you cite: thanks, that’s interesting. Trying to automate voting strategy is hard; since most voters most of the time are not pivotal, the direct strategic signal for a learning agent is weak. In order to deal with this, you have to give the agents some ability, implicit or explicit, to reason about counterfactuals. Reasoning about counterfactuals requires make assumptions, or have information, about the generative model that they’re drawn from; and so, that model is super-important. And frankly, I think that the model used in the paper bears very little relationship to any political reality I know of. I’ve never seen a group of voters who believe “I would love it if any two of these three laws pass, but I would hate it if all three of them passed or none of them passed” for any set of laws that are seriously proposed and argued-for.

• Jameson QuinnAug 8, 2020, 4:26 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  V0.7.3 Still tweaking terminology. Now, Vote Power Fairness, Average Voter Choice, Average Voter Effectiveness. Finished (at least first draft) of closed list/​Israel analysis.

• Jameson QuinnAug 4, 2020, 9:43 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  V 0.7.2: A terminology change. New terms: Retroactive Power, Effective Voting Equality, Effective Choice, Average Voter Effectiveness. (The term “effective” is a nod to Catherine Helen Spence). The math is the same except for some ultimately-inconsequential changes in when you subtract from 1. Also, started to add a closed list example from Israel; not done yet.

• Jameson QuinnAug 1, 2020, 9:39 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  V 0.7.1: added a digression on dimesionality, in italics, to the “Measuring “Representation quality”, separate from power” section. Finished converting the existing examples from RF to VW.

• Jameson QuinnJul 30, 2020, 3:51 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  V 0.7.0: Switched from “Representational Fairness” to the more-interpretable “Vote Wastage”. Wrote enough so that it’s possible to understand what I mean by VW, but this still needs revision for clarity/​convincingness. Also pending, change my calculations for specific methods from RF to VW.

• Jameson QuinnJul 29, 2020, 3:25 PM

  1 point

  on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  I am rewriting the overall “XXX: a xxx proportionality metric” section because I’ve thought of a more-interpretable metric. So, where it used to be “Representational fairness: an overall proportionality metric”, now it will be “Vote wastage: a combined proportionality metric”. Here’s the old version, before I erase it:

  
  

  Since we’ve structured RQ_d as an “efficiency” — 100% at best, 0% at worst — we can take each voter’s “quality-weighted voter power” (QWVP) to be the sum of their responsibility for electing each candidate, times their RQ_1 for that candidate. Ideally, this would be 1 for each voter; so we can define the overall “quality-weighted proportionality” (QWP) of an outcome as the average of squared differences between voters’ QWVP and 1, shifted and scaled so that no difference gives a QWP of 100% and uniform zeros gives a QWP of 0. (Note that in principle, a dictatorship could score substantially less than 0, depending on the number of voters).

  (To do: better notation and LaTeX)

  Since realistic voting methods will usually have at least 1 Droop quota of wasted votes (or, in the case of Hare-quota-based methods, just over half a Hare quota of double-powered votes and just under half of wasted votes; which amounts to much the same thing in QWP terms), the highest QWP you could reasonably expect for a voting method would be S/​(S+1).

  (show the math for the QWP of the IRV example above. Key point: the D>C>A>B voters have zero responsibility for electing A, so all they do is lower the average RQ of the B>C>A>D and C>B>A>D voters)

  Note that this QWP metric, in combining the ideas of overall equality and representation quality, is no longer perfectly optimizing either of those aspects in itself. That is to say, in some cases it will push methods to sacrifice proportionality, in search of better representation, in a way that would tend to hurt the MSE from God’s perspective. I think those cases are likely to be rare enough, especially for voting methods that weren’t specifically designed to optimize to this metric, that I’m OK with this slight mis-alignment. That is to say: I think the true ideal quality ordering would be closer to a lexical sort with priority on proportionality (“optimize for proportionality, then optimize RQ only insofar as it doesn’t harm proportionality`); but I think most seriously-proposed, practically-feasible voting methods are far enough from the Pareto frontier that “optimize the product of the two” is fine as an approximation of that ideal goal.

  One more note: in passing, this rigorous framework for an overarching proportional metric also helps define the simple concept of “wasted vote”; any vote with 0 responsibility for electing any winner. Although “wasted votes” are already commonly discussed in the political science literature, I believe this is actually the first time the idea has been given a general definition, as opposed to ad-hoc definitions for each voting method.

[Question] How should I back up and redo, in a pub­li­cly-ed­ited ar­ti­cle?

• Jameson Quinn 27 Jul 2020 15:26 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  V 0.6.0: Coined the term “Representational Fairness” for my metric. Did a worked example of Single transferrable vote (STV), and began to discuss the example. Bumping version because I’m now beginning to actually discuss concrete methods instead of just abstract metrics.

• Jameson Quinn 25 Jul 2020 13:13 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  V 0.5.5: wrote a key paragraph about NESS: similar outcomes just before Pascal’s Other Wager? (The Problem of Points). Added the obvious normalizing constant so that average voter power is 1. Analyzed some simple plurality cases in Retrospective voting power in single-winner plurality.

• Jameson Quinn 23 Jul 2020 15:13 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  V 0.5.4: Meaningful rewrite to “Shorter “solution” statement”, which focuses not on power to elect an individual, but power to elect some member of a set, of whom only 1 won in reality.

• Jameson Quinn 22 Jul 2020 19:19 UTC

  3 points

  on: [AN #109]: Teach­ing neu­ral nets to gen­er­al­ize the way hu­mans would

  Finding “Z-best” is not the same as finding the posterior over Z, and in fact differs systematically. In particular, because you’re not being a real Bayesian, you’re not getting the advantage of the Bayesian Occam’s Razor, so you’ll systematically tend to get lower-entropy-than-optimal (aka more-complex-than-optimal, overfitted) Zs. Adding an entropy-based loss term might help — but then, I’d expect that H already includes entropy-based loss, so this risks double-counting.

  The above critique is specific and nitpicky. Separately from that, this whole schema feels intuitively wrong to me. I think there must be ways to do the math in a way that favors a low-entropy, causally-realistic, quasi-symbolic likelihood-like function that can be combined with a predictive, uninterpretably-neural learned Z to give a posterior that is better at intuitive leaps than the former but beter at generalizing than the latter. All of this would be intrinsic, and human alignment would be a separate problem. Intuitively it seems to me that trying to do human alignment and generalizability using the same trick is the wrong approach.