[EM] Correlated Instant Borda Runoff, without Borda

[Paul Kislanko]

I remain amazed that my light-hearted reference to a 50 year old science
fiction short story has prompted so much traffic. At the risk of giving away
the whole story, the idea is that there's this computer that runs
everything, and it picks one person from all the people in the world,
constructs the questionaire, and asks that person to fill it out.
 
Asimov didn't go so far as to include "nominations" in the process, but by
implication this "all-knowing" computer that could decide all possible
elections based upon one voter's responses to it would pick the "candidates"
AFTER it got the information from the one voter that it had to ask to be
able to figure out how all voters should vote.
 
The science fiction/fantasy is that the "mechanism" can tell from the RIGHT
single individual not only how ALL would vote given all possible candidates,
but it would also know who should "run" in the virtual election it
conducted. In a world where the computer knows (or can find out) how all
possible voters could be best represented by choosing "nominations" itself
and playing out the "elections" based upon its choice of voter and
alternatives.
 
It was just a short story and the literary bit was the tension between the
pressure felt by the chosen voter and the honor that was given him by people
who had no more of a clue about how the process worked than he did.
 
I wonder if the timing of the story is a coincidence. It's copyright on my
copy is 1955 by Quinn Publishing. My guess is that the Good Doctor Asimov
had read about Arrow's results and went off on one of his tangents.
 
Amazon.com says you can get the book that contains the story used for as
little as 73 100ths of a US dollar.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385132697/002-7188282-3404049?v=glance
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385132697/002-7188282-3404049?v=glance&n=
283155> &n=283155
 
 


  _____  

From: election-methods-bounces at electorama.com
[mailto:election-methods-bounces at electorama.com] On Behalf Of Simmons,
Forest
Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2005 4:35 PM
To: election-methods at electorama.com
Subject: Re: [EM] Correlated Instant Borda Runoff, without Borda


Paul K. wrote ...
 

We were, in fact, talking about a science fiction short story written in the
1950s. The very idea of figuring out how to correlate such data has been a
thorny problem for AI researchers going even farther back.

But when I talked about the positives, part of it was serious. Exactly how
different is "the candidate might guess how the voters feel about all the
issues and fill out his ballot that way" than "the candidate might guess how
the voters feel about all the issues and tell them on TV that he feels the
same way"?

In the (fantasy) the process is double-blind - the candidates don't know who
the voters are and the voters don't have to put up with candidates.


Forest replies:
 
Good points.  Here's another variation on this idea:  Have the method do the
nomination(s).
 
The voter whose questionaire "best correlates" with those of the other
voters is nominated.  If that voter accepts the nomination and the other
voters ratify it with an approval vote, then the election is done.
Otherwise, go to the second best questionaire, etc.
 
This could get rid of the plague of professional politicians.
 
The only problem I can see is that some mafioso claims to be the guy that
filled out the winning questionaire, no matter who really did.
 
This would work better in a small group setting where everybody knows
everybody else.
 
A variation for a large electorate would be this:  The hundred voters having
the best correlation with the rest of the voters
meet together and nominate someone (possibly one of themselves) as
candidate.   Since they have such high correlation among themselves it
shouldn't be hard for them to come to consensus on this nomination.   This
candidate is put up for approval by the whole electorate.
 
Forest

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