[EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?

[Howard Swerdfeger]

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> At 10:10 AM 4/25/2007, Howard Swerdfeger wrote:
> 
> 
>> Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
>>> At 06:41 PM 4/24/2007, Juho wrote:
>>  >>> If you vote Approval style, you fail to express your true
>>>>> appreciation of the candidates, and this can backfire.
>>>> Yes, but typically/statistically Approval strategy improves the outcome.
>>> No. Check out Warren's simulations. Sincere voting (which means 
>>> expressing weak preferences as weak votes) produces the best 
>>> outcomes. Approval style produces acceptable outcomes, relative to 
>>> some other methods.
>> You are making assumptions about what is "best".
> 
> Obviously, there are ways in which such a simulation could vary from 
> reality. But I haven't seen anything better. One further refinement 
> would be to assign importance factors for the issues, which would 
> vary with the voters. It's a task all its own.... and worth doing, 
> I'd suggest, wish I had time.

I believe this effect would be either negligible, or non existent.
but That is just a first guess.

The 2 factors I worry most would effect the results would be
1. The Individual Utility Function
2. The Distribution of Candidates and society in issue space.


1. in my opinion is partially a moral choice about what type of society 
you want to have
and 2 is more of something that needs to be calibrated to an existing 
society (really frigging hard to do).

> 
>> On a side note: I still have not found the definition of the 
>> Individual Utility Function used in the simulations talked about at 
>> 'rangevoting.org'.
>> I am willing to accept there Society Utility function as the Sum of 
>> Individual Utilities. Did they use U(v, c) = 1/R? Or did they use 
>> something else? how does the choice of the Utility function affect 
>> the simulation results.
> 
> Warren has published his code and has invited others to vary how it 
> is used, or to substitute their own functions. And I'm quite sure 
> he'd be happy to put up, on the Range site, anything reasonable. He 
> really is looking for optimum simulations, not merely simulations 
> that show Range as being better!

I never tried to question his Intent. Just stating that I don't 
understand all of what he is doing .
do you have a link where I could find his code?

Thanks

> 
> Swerdfeger left a huge amount of quoted text at the end with no 
> comment, which is offensive. I've done it myself, but only as an 
> error, somehow I had managed to push it off-screen, with blank lines, 
> and then forgot to check for it. But there weren't blanks.... still, 
> perhaps it was simply inadvertent....

sorry. no offence intended.


> 
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