[EM] RE : Re: RE : Re: A few concluding points about SFC, CC, method choice, etc.

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 11:21 AM 2/16/2007, Kevin Venzke wrote:
>What I mean is, if you create two arbitrary methods, one satisfying
>MF and one not, you should expect the first one to have higher utility.

This is weird, actually. It could be the case that there are one 
thousand different election methods, and there is one which generates 
maximum utility. I'd guarantee that this method won't satisfy MF in 
all elections.

Yes, the statement is true, but it is completely off the point. We 
are not comparing "arbitrary methods."

It is obvious that MF has a utility. It is unlikely to choose a truly 
bad candidate. But methods which specifically optimize utility are 
going to fail MF. That's the point.

Question is, how to optimize utility. MF does not optimize utility, 
it can be *far* from that.

Range Ballots, sincere:
51: A, 100      B, 80   C, 0
49: A, 0        B, 80   C, 100

MF winner, A with 51% of the voters favoring A.

Sum of expected utilities:

A: 5100
B: 8000
C: 4900

I've argued that the majority has the right of decision. In this 
example, if the majority wants to ensure the election of A so much 
that it is willing to damage society, overall, it may do so. It 
simply votes B at a lower rating, sufficiently low that B loses. But, 
and I've given this argument again and again, this willingness 
conflicts with an assumption: that the majority values B at 80.

No, if they are willing to lower B's rating to very low, which is 
what it would take, it is necessarily true that they place a higher 
relative value on the election of A than the supposedly sincere 
ratings indicate.

There is a conflict in the assumptions, if we think that the A voters 
will vote insincerely. There has to be a motive to vote insincerely, 
a gain expected, and the gain cannot be trivial. Most people, in my 
opinion, won't lie on a matter of importance for trivial gain (and 
especially when their vote is anonymous).

If you really think B is quite good -- and 80% is quite good -- then 
why would you rate B at zero, merely in order to get a slight 
improvement in personal utility, while at the same time knowing that 
you are going to be seriously disappointing half the society?

This is a basic question, a different view of human nature than is 
being expressed by some. Are people generally out only for 
themselves? Will they impoverish their neighbors for a small gain?

We know that people can be selfish. But *how* selfish? If you 
discover that burning your neighbor's house down, and you are sure 
you can get away with it, will somehow raise your own property value 
by a few thousand dollars, would you do it? How would most people 
answer this question, and how would they act if actually faced with 
the situation.

The fact is, as far as I see, that people are generally quite willing 
to endure small costs in order to provide large benefit to others. We 
*do* value benefit to others. If it is a matter of *large* costs to 
ourselves, matters may shift. Indeed, in such a situation, we may 
expect that others make way for *us*.

In the scenarios proposed by some writers, we have some faction 
organizing a plot to downrate an acceptable opponent in order to gain 
the election of a favorite. Now, if this is a large faction, and it 
must be large to have a significant impact on the election, keeping 
the plot secret would be quite a problem. And there would then be an 
additional problem:

If I knew that a candidate approved of such efforts (and simply 
knowing about them and doing nothing I would count as approval), I 
would consider this a major disqualification for public office. 
Public officials *should* understand that their duties are to the 
whole of society, not just to the party that elected them. So that 
candidate, no matter how acceptable he or she was in other respects, 
would almost certainly lose my vote. They would have shown, 
*clearly*, that they don't understand the welfare of society as a whole.

I don't think I'd be the only voter to react to such a plan so negatively.

Believe it or not, I don't want to disenfranchise Republicans, no 
matter how much they might want to disenfranchise me. (And, of 
course, many Republicans don't want that either.) I want the winner 
to represent society.

I'm not terribly exercised about losing elections when the process 
and counting has been fair. Florida was actually a very new 
experience for me. It wasn't about Bush. It was about partisan 
politics hijacking the *process*, and blatantly. I felt nothing like 
that when Bush Sr. won. It was, "Okay, this is what people want. 
Let's move on."

Florida 2000 is what motivated me to get serious about reform. And I 
decided to focus on root causes and generic solutions, rather than 
working for this or that specific cause. Lots of people work on 
specific causes, they get fired up about them, but I noticed that 
hardly anyone was looking at the root of it all, and about the 
generic problem of how societies make decisions.