[EM] Fair and Democratic versus Majority Rules

[Jobst Heitzig]

Dear Abd ul-Rahman,

some short remarks to your claims:

> Random ballot does nothing to encourage compromise!

Perfectly true. That's why nobody suggests it to be used for decisions.
We suggest to use it instead as a benchmark any reasonable method must
improve upon. More precisely, we want that the actually used decision
process is preferred to the Random Ballot lottery by all voters.
Majoritarian methods do not produce outcomes that everyone prefers to
the Random Ballot lottery. Our methods do.

> The goal of government is not to be "fair," per se, but to maximize
> social welfare. 

Nice try. So we're back to the problem of deciding what we mean by
"social welfare". Most definitions would agree that in this very simple
and common situation, C maximizes "social welfare": 55 voters assign
utilities A 100, C 80, B 0, and 45 voters have B 100, C 80, A 0. That
was my "challenge" back in 2007. Obviously, majoritarian methods
spectacularly fail to maximize "social welfare". Our consensus methods
choose C in this example.

> Democracy begins with majority rule. 

Democracy begins with Athenian Democracy in which offices were filled by
lot, which is essentially equivalent to Random Ballot. Majority rule has
nothing to do with democracy, its pleocracy.

> It does not end there, but random
> ballot discards majority rule, which leads to, inevitably, minority
> rule, at least part of the time. 

Nope. What you don't seem to understand is that neither "the majority"
nor "the minority" need to "rule". "Ruling" means you can be sure your
choice will be realized. In our consensus method, no group that is
smaller than 100% can guarantee that their favourite wins, so there is
no "ruling" but rather the cooperative choice of a consensus.

> And the damage from that can be
> enormous. Suppose 10% of the population believes that using nuclear
> weapons to get rid of enemies is a fine idea. Would we, to provide this
> faction with a "fair" opportunity to exercise decision-making power,
> give them the button 10% of the time? 

No we wouldn't. We are well-advised to prevent such options from being
considered at all in the first place since they might easily be approved
by large majorities as well (Examples: death penalty, Rwanda, Hitler,
near-extinction of native Americans, etc.). For this reason it makes no
sense to repeat bringing up ridiculous examples with extreme options.
Our goal is to find good methods to decide between feasible not
infeasible options. The latter can only be safely excluded legally in a
constitution.

Yours, Jobst