[EM] proxy ideas: reply to Abd ul-Rahman Lomax 3-26

[James Green-Armytage]

Dear election methods fans,

Thank you to those of you who responded to my earlier post. More
references are still quite welcome. I am continuing to put together my lit
review and work on the proxy paper in general. 

To avoid unwieldiness, I'm going to reply to the replies one by one,
starting with Abd ul-Rahman Lomax's 3/26 post:
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2010-March/025728.html
I intend to follow up on the other replies soon. 

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd at lomaxdesign.com> writes:
>Glad to see you back, James.

Thank you. I'm glad that you're still here.
>
>This list and the Public Choice Society? In terms of membership or in 
>terms of topics, or both?

There's a lot of overlap mostly in terms of topics, as far as I know, but
why not in terms of membership as well? Here is the list of talks from the
meeting in March; that should give an idea of the scope of topics covered.
http://www.pubchoicesoc.org/docs/Sessions%20Schedule%20Final.pdf
>
>The deleted Wikipedia article had more, you can find it at the 
>electorama wiki, I believe, associated with this list. If it's not 
>there, I may have a copy.

Do you mean this one?
http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Delegable_proxy
If so, I've got it now, and thank you for the suggestion. The reference
format seems to be troubled, but oh well. If not, then yes, please e-mail
it to me.
>
>I'm glad you have Black, but you should cite the original paper by 
>Carroll. 

You're right. Google books seems to have the whole book, so I'll print it
from there.

>There is no single document showing my work, which has matured, 
>generally, over the time I've been writing about it. FA/DP is a 
>special application of DP where it is used only for the negotiation 
>of consensus and other commnication between individuals and the whole 
>association, in an FA, the power remains almost entirely with the 
>individual members. FAs work, Alcoholics Anonymous may be the best 
>known. Applying delegable proxy to it, and using the concept for 
>general purposes, is new.

Well, I would like to discuss your work in my paper, but I can only really
do that if I have something specific to cite. Perhaps there are one or two
EM posts that summarize your views at that time, which I can cite as
unpublished manuscripts? If you don't have a document somewhere that
summarizes your views, then I urge you very strongly to write one.
Something around the length of one of your EM posts would be fine. Just
imagine that someone wrote an EM post asking you to summarize your current
views on FA/DP. Then we can treat it as an unpublished manuscript. The
only remaining issue is to put a date to some of your ideas, as I'm trying
to present these in chronological order.
>
>Why this proposal is utterly impractical should be made clear. It 
>isn't delegable proxy, and it runs into the same problem as any 
>direct democratic process runs into: the deliberation. 

Does representative democracy succeed at deliberation? I'd argue that it's
not currently doing so in the US. For example, I watched the House debate
on the health care bill, which was maybe one of the most intense formal
debates that the House has seen in years. And yet, they still don't
respond to each other. They just make their speeches and move on; they
might as well have taped them days ago and sent them in. It's an abject
failure of deliberation. Obviously, much of the political media fails in
the same way. Opposing points of view presented with no attempt at
substantive discussion between them. 

I do have some ideas about how to have more robust political deliberation,
but I'm not sure that it's necessary to include them as part of this
proposal. However, I'm happy to discuss them. Imagine, for example, that
under my proposal, a lot of the people who held a lot of proxies would
often get together with each other, and have discussions, debates, etc.,
with the aim of actually understanding each other's points of view in
depth even when they were opposed, and working toward compromise or common
ground. The discussions would be distributed as free online videos. People
could watch these discussions when deciding how to vote, and/or who to put
on their proxy committees. Ideally they should be filmed in a place with
fact-checkers on site. Possibly they could be edited to take out some of
the pauses, so that they are more entertaining and easy to watch.

>"Continual consideration" is the norm in peer societies, following 
>specific rules of procedure. Basically, any decision can be 
>reconsidered under the rules, there are limits only to prevent 
>holding the same argument over and over.

I don't think that's the same thing. It's just not a matter of
reconsidering an issue, and voting again from scratch each time. It's a
matter of keeping people's votes on file, allowing to change them at any
time, and keeping track of these changes, so that the vote count and
majority opinion is continually updated. Very different. Similar in
principle to voting anew on every issue on every day, but massively more
efficient.
>
>Warren Smith's Asset Voting paper gave every voter one full vote, and 
>they could divide it however they chose. Only a mathematician.... The 
>simplest version, usable with a standard ballot listing candidates, 
>is FAAV, Fractional Approval Asset Voting. You can vote for one, 
>which is what most people, I predict, will do. Or you can vote for 
>more than one, and your vote will be divided fractionally.

My proxy committee idea is different from proposals to allow people to
divide up their vote and give it to different people. What makes it
different is that your vote isn't divided according to the votes of your
committee members, but is rather a single, unified vote, which reflects
the *majority opinion* of your committee. (If it's a ranked ballot vote,
then majority opinion can be determined by something like beatpath/Schulze
or ranked pairs/Tideman.) The idea here is that there is theoretically one
vote that would best express your own, and although you don't know what
that is, you are using a kind of Condorcet jury theorem approach to
maximize the probability that your vote will be cast this way. Also, the
feature of reporting back to you when the committee vote is close is
particularly interesting.
>
>FAAV allows you to choose a committee, but then, whom, exactly, do 
>you hold responsible? What I've come to is that single, responsible 
>representation is a stronger connection between the individual and 
>the society. I'd suggest that you start by imaginging that this is 
>all open and public. Suppose someone you chose is elected. Now, you 
>want to talk to that person. Are you more likely to get personal 
>access if you voted for the person, as your most-trusted 
>representative, or if you spread your vote?

I understand this argument. However, if voting is anonymous, as it should
be if there's any worry at all about coercion, then you wouldn't be able
to prove that they're your proxy. In any case, I think that the value of
being able to use the wisdom of more than one person outweighs this.

>The very idea that you don't trust "current politicians" is rooted in 
>the system that requires candidates to be politicans for votes for 
>them not to be wasted. You are thinking, I suspect, of a system with 
>only a few choices on the ballot. 

Not exactly. I'm thinking of all the politicians, academics, journalists,
etc. whom I currently know about, in the whole country, which is a lot of
people. How do I choose just one of them to represent me. Truthfully I
wouldn't want to do that. I'd rather make a committee. 

my best,
James Green-Armytage
>
>



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