[EM] language/framing quibble

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Fred Gohlke wrote:
> Good Morning, Kristofer
> 
> There is so much good material in your message that, instead of 
> responding to all of it, I'm going to select bits and pieces and comment 
> on them, one at a time, until I've responded to all of them.  I hope 
> this will help us focus on specific parts of the complex topic we're 
> discussing.  For today, I'm going to concentrate on two of your comments 
> regarding group (or council) size:
> 
> 1) "Have a council of seven. Use a PR method like STV to pick
>     four or five. These go to the next level. That may exclude
>     opinions held by fewer than two of the seven, but it's better
>     than 50%-1. If you can handle a larger council, have one of
>     size 12 that picks 9; if seven is too many, a group of five
>     that elects two.
> 
>     For small groups like this, it might be possible to make a
>     simpler PR method than STV, but I'm not sure how.
> 
> 2) "It's more like (if we elect three out of nine and it's
>     always the second who wins -- to make the diagram easier)
> 
>                 e  n  w            Level 2
>                behknqtwz           Level 1
> 
>       b  e  h   k  n  q   t  w  z  Level 1
>      abcdefghi jklmnopqr stuvwxyzA Level 0
> 
>     The horizon for all the subsequent members (behknqtwz) is
>     wider than would be the case if they were split up into
>     groups of three. In this example, each person at a level
>     "represents" three below him, just like what would be the
>     case if you had groups of two, but, and this is the
>     important part, they have input from the entire group of
>     eight instead of just three. Thus some may represent all the
>     views of less than three, while others represent some of the
>     views of more than three. The latter type would be excluded,
>     or at least heavily attenuated, in the triad case."
> 
> For convenience, I'll work with a group size of 9 picking 3 by a form of 
> proportional representation:
> 
> Am I correct in imagining the process would function by having each of 
> the 9 people rank the other 8 in preferential order and then resolve the 
> preferences to select the 3 people that are most preferred by the 9?

Yes. In a truly unbiased scenario, each of the 9 people could submit a 
complete ranking (including himself), but since you've said you don't 
want voters ranking themselves first, they would rank all but 
themselves. Either the method would consider them equal-first, or have 
some sort of special "no opinion" provision (like Warren's Range).

> That seems like a really good idea.  It is, however, a new idea for me, 
> so it may take me some time to digest all the ramifications of the 
> concept.  Even so, the first thoughts that leap to mind are:
> 
> 1) It would allow voting secrecy.  In a group size of 3 selecting 1, 
> secrecy is not possible; a selection can only be made if 2 of the three 
> agree on the selection.  Many people say secrecy is important.  For my 
> part, I'm not sure.  It may be important in the kind of electoral 
> process we have now, but I'm not sure open agreement of free people is 
> not a better option.

You could weaken that in two ways. The first would be to simply make the 
voting public. For instance, each person may need to say "my vote is A, 
then B, then C..", and then that is recorded. The second would be to 
have a consensus step like I considered in my previous post, where the 
proportional representation method is just advisory, and what really 
counts is a supermajority vote for who'll go onwards. The second 
wouldn't really be PR, though - or rather, it would only be so if the 
councilmembers are all good negotiators.

> 2) It reduces the potential for confrontation that would be likely to 
> characterize 3-person groups.  We can make the argument that, in the 
> selection of representatives, confrontation is a good thing.  Seeing how 
> individuals react in tense situations gives us great insight into their 
> ability to represent our interests.  We can also make the argument that 
> a pressure-cooker environment is hard on the participants.

This returns us to the subject of optimal council sizes. I already 
talked about Parkinson's coefficient of inefficiency (that committees 
degrade significantly above 20 members), but beyond that, I think the 
only way to really know or to find answers to your questions - such as 
whether confrontation is too intense at three, or if it's too slack at 
nine - is to try it. People are people, so not everything can be derived 
from models.

There is one thing I will add, though. If we have a very simple concept 
of how people negotiate, where each have to know all the others to find 
a good compromise, then the collective burden increases as the second 
power of the number of members. (For n members, each has n-1 links, so 
n*(n-1)). This means, for the simple model at least, that we pay more by 
increasing the size from 10 to 17 than from 3 to 10.

> 3) Each participant's opportunity to evaluate each other participant is 
> reduced; they must evaluate 8 people in the allotted time instead of two.

That is true, it will either take more time, or be more noisy (if people 
are forced to decide before they're fully ready). I don't think you can 
avoid this; since the point is to find representatives of a broader 
range of ideas, the people will also have to know more of that space or 
range before they can decide.

> 4) There is a greater likelihood that, over an evaluation period of 1 to 
> 4 weeks, the group members will tend to form cliques and will be 
> influenced by their compatriots instead of relying on their own judgment.

Such problems aren't limited to your method, but to organization of 
larger groups in general. Various attempts at discouraging such have 
been considered, like having some argue against what they really think 
just to expose flaws. Since the councils are temporary (they just pick a 
subgroup and then disband), the parallel isn't absolute, but perhaps 
such methods could be used to counter these problems. It does make the 
method more complex, though, and it seems hard to ensure that the 
councils will be using those rules.

I suppose that the closest thing we have in reality (at this time) to 
the make-one-decision-and-then-disband group is a jury. Juries are 
comparatively large and the cases they attend may take time to run to 
completion. On the other hand, juries only have to decide on a single 
issue (guilty or not), whereas the councils has to find one answer among 
many (which people are to continue to the next level).

Given that, one may then ask: do these artifacts happen among juries? 
That is, if the comparison is good enough for the answer to be relevant.

> It takes me such a long time to examine new concepts, I'd like to see 
> what objections are raised to both alternatives to be sure I've 
> considered all the possibilities.
> 
> On re-reading this, I see I haven't addressed your concern; the 
> propagation of minority sentiment.  I'm not sure I can.  My problem may 
> be that I don't see viewpoints as isolated entities.  They are part of a 
> whole, but are not, in and of themselves, the whole.  I do not believe 
> that, just because a viewpoint exists, it is entitled to a role in our 
> government.  To be adopted, a viewpoint must be shown to have merit. 
> People of judgment will accept different viewpoints if they are 
> presented in a rational and compelling manner.  I think the issues that 
> should concern us are the integrity and the judgment of the people we 
> ask to represent us.  If we have people of good judgment, we need not 
> fear that a valid viewpoint will be ignored.

I think the fundamental uncertainty is whether the selected members can 
be of sufficiently high quality to not distort opinions from self 
interest, and whether they can be of sufficient breadth (capacity to 
hold viewpoints) to retain minority ideas and not forget or shed them 
later.
Here, you say that you think they can do both ("we need not fear that a 
valid viewpoint will be ignored"). I'm not so sure, which leads me to 
shift more of these tasks to the method itself; PR election of more than 
one so that minority viewpoints don't lose from being at the wrong 
council or too thinly spread, and consequent larger councils so that 
there are more people to hold the viewpoints.

Ultimately, we don't know the quality of the people, and we don't know 
the complexity required to determine who'll sit on the final council(s), 
the latter being relevant regarding how many viewpoints a single person 
can relate to or draw knowledge from when arguing. What I have is the 
simulations that show majority turning to consensus, but those are of 
stickmen (as you called them). We also have PR and non-PR parliaments in 
the world today, where I think PR ones are better, but you could in turn 
argue that partisanship makes the parliaments sufficiently different 
that we can't argue based on their results.

I've tried to be neutral here, but I am not perfect, and so my 
preference might have crept through. As always, consider that when 
reading. Also, I have not covered the other objections against PR that 
you mentioned; those are above.