And if your first impulse is to think well yeah because the other side blah blah, you're part of the problem too.
Can I get that on a TShirt please ?
(And yes, was it Nietscheze who says politicians are just sales people for their manifestos?)
The distinction here is that in STAR voting, I could rank two candidates equally to show that I have no preference between them. Also, I don't have to rank the candidates in order: I could give my first-place a score of 5, my second place a score of 2, and my third place a score of 0. If I scored my second place candidate as 3, this ballot could result in a different outcome.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
And outside of specialized circumstances that don’t apply to usual candidate elections, the additional information on STAR ballots compared to unforced preference ordinal ballots is noise of no consistent meaning.
Also, Arrows impossibility theorem applies to any balloting system that expresses ranked preferences and produces a ranked result, whether or not it provides additional information or compresses the available rankings for either the inputs or the result (typically, it applies to single winner election results which compress the results the same way FPTP ballots compress ballots—one first place and everyone else tied for not-first-place.)
[0] “RCV” is a name used by advocates to conflate IRV with ordinal methods generally, and accepted by some opponents of ordinal methods to conceal that their arguments apply only to IRV and not the broader class.
Could you provide an example? Thanks in advance.
> Arrows impossibility theorem applies to any balloting system that expresses ranked preferences and produces a ranked result
My understanding is that Arrow's impossibility theorem does not apply to STAR or any other Cardinal Voting system. Is that incorrect?
The only game-forms which are straightforward (meaning, one’s best strategy in what option to choose not depending on how one expects others to choose, or on others’ preferences) are the probability mixtures of “do whatever voter X said to”, “between option A and option B, determine how many voters expressed a preference for A over B and how many for B over A, and if the proportion preferring A is more than p%, pick A, otherwise B”, and “pick outcome C”, with the mixes being any mix of those over any combinations of A,B,C, and X.
(So for example, you could flip a coin, and if heads, select a random pair of candidates, and the winner is whichever of the two got more pair wise votes, if tails, select a random voter and go with who they said was their top pick, and if the coin lands on its edge pick Neil deGras Tyson. This would count as “straightforward” because in choosing how you want to vote, it doesn’t matter at all how anyone else is voting.)
(Another example is if there are just 2 candidates period. This is also “straightforward”)
Outside of such probability mixtures, there can always be situations where your estimate of how other people will vote would influence the most effective way for you to vote in order to best improve your expected outcomes according to your preferences.
Outside of such “straightforward” game-forms, there can’t be a function from (your preferences (like, vNM utility, not just a ranking) between the different outcomes) to (a dominant strategy for you).
Whatever STAR is, it doesn’t change this fact.
When further combined with other reforms, such as multi-member districts, this could completely transform the political landscape.
The US will probably get better outcomes with a multi-party system, but moving to one will not change the tone of political conversation. (Which is what this thread is about.)
[1] Although it suffers from all the typical FPTP nonsense, where the party that gets 30% of the vote gets 100% of the power.
I believe it could and would. There will always be extremists, but the current outsized focus on them is driven, in part, by their effectiveness in our two-party Plurality Voting system. In a system where the best compromise candidate is regularly elected, I believe the public discourse would differ.
Turning up without the numbers adding up was just an easy way to get pasted by the interviewer.
Now there is no interviewer - so the manifesto is what it always really was - an attempt to connect to the voter on a level of identity, common understanding and culture. It's why it is flat out amazing any single human being can get 70 million votes in the US (or even more amazing 300m in India)
How many hats does such a person have to wear? How many promises does someone need to connect.
I mean Brad Pitt is gorgeous and just has to say five scripted lines and he could not get 300 million women to vote for him.
The idea that democracy has scale this far with just a personality cult as its main adjudicator is incredible
The number of living humans who can make that many people think"yeah"'is tiny !
One day we will go beyond our initial ape reactions
These kinds of problems there is always going to be manipulation. Especially if the stakes are high. As long as the chimps aren't assassinating each other its all par for the course. I am just glad there are people willing to play such a game when things are ambiguous. Cause I usually just run for the hills when things get political :)
Television ads have this figured out, viewers subconsciously want to be the smiling cool guy drinking Advertised Beer (tm) and partying with the wealthy and youthful crowd shown in the ad, but no one wants to hang out in the scenes portrayed on CSPAN.
I'm glad to not need to deal with that level of reality distortion yet, but I don't know why that's the case.
On the other hand, millions of Americans voted for Donald Trump because his being ugly, irascible, and vulgar made him seem more relatable and sincere... likely as a reaction to a negative impression given by Obama's relative youth and well-spokenness.
I strongled doubted it was Nietzsche, so I googled the phrase "politicians are just sales people for their manifestos" (in quotes), and there was one result—your comment. It's yours!
Midwit: politics is actually about making good decisions for society
Topwit: politics is like a gang fight
I suppose in practice there are enough shibboleths in each political camp that readers will still be able to tell which side is their tribe, but it would be interesting to see.
Politics is a world of rap battles and gang fights. It's war by other means. That's the fundamental essence of anything political. The boring, ugly people are the wonks who actually think politics is about 'good policy consensus' and have been spending a little too much time on Laputa.
Then, if we shift our focus further left, we see Bernie Sanders, who is just not all that socialist because he's really working within the neoliberal framework that his years of politics conditioned him to work in. Further left than that, well, there are no anarchists or communists in politics.
I could make the case that this is here (and bad) bc neoliberalism will slide towards fascism if we give equal weight to everyone's ideas, but that does feel like I'm sinking further into divisions, and it presupposes that my positive opinions about the far left are actually supported by facts, regardless of any ground truth. But really, it wouldn't be an issue if we had more variety in ideology: discussion would be more varied and more thorough, we'd all question our own ideology's assumptions just a bit more, and overall it would be easier to engage in someone else's ideas if you knew they weren't coming from the same baseline as you.
Neoliberalism is not a neutral or balanced ideology: let's have more communists, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, hell, maybe a few fascists or stalinists could do some good.