[EM] Outcome Design Goals

[David L Wetzell]

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 6:57 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd at lomaxdesign.com>wrote:

> At 09:22 AM 7/1/2013, David L Wetzell wrote:
>
>> Some thoughts.
>>
>> 1. You need to consider the difference between Cardinal and Ordinal
>> Utility.
>> You presume the existence of Cardinal utility.
>>
>
> First of all, who is "you." David is writing to an entire list. *Who*
> "presumes"?
>

Who do you think?  Benn.

>
> In the study of Bayesian Regret, we do *not* presume the existence of
> cardinal utility, we *assume it.* It's a device for studying voting
> systems, to see how they perform when we know *summable cardinal utilities.*


dlw: It's not a neutral device.  It is a non-trivial heuristic/assumption,
since when it is relaxed it makes the "right" voter strategies with
approval/score-voting indeterministic.

>
>
>    Ordinal utility can be monotonically positively transformed so long as
>> it preserves the order.  For example, if the original scale is between 0
>> and 100 then one could randomly generate a real number a from the normal
>> distribution, transform it by taking b=E^a, and then transform the utility
>> to become X^b *100^(1-b).  This would not change the rank-orderings of
>> candidates, but it would change the approval or score-ratings given to
>> candidates and it'd muddy the water about your example.
>>
>
> Well, we aren't looking at the example. However, there is a radical
> misunderstanding of how cardinal utilities are used in studies. The choice
> of representational range is a study option, and it's arbitrary. Utilities
> may be represented in the range of 0 to 1, or using any real number,
> positive or negative. What matters is the assumption: these are *absolute*
> utilities and the scale is *assumed* to be commensurable. Often
> "heaveh-hell" utilities are used. These represent *actual motivational*
> preference. I.e, assumed. The absolute utilities that underly a study
> assume commensurability, and incommensurable utilities would be adjusted so
> that they are commensurable.
>

And my point is that there's no good reason not to relax the presumption of
absoluteness of utilities, since utility is fundamentally a way to
aggregate things that o.w. can't be aggregated.  This point is meant to
scale back claims like those that Warren Smith and Clay Shentrup or Dale
Sheldon-Hess have made in the past that Approval/Score have been proven to
be the best rule based on BR.

>
> This system makes a basic assumption that all voters are equal, equally
> deserve to be pleased. So the *full range* of pain/pleasure for these
> voters is made equal.
>

dlw: Yeah, and that involves assumptions found in utilitarian philosophy
that have been widely discredited in philosophy at large.  I'm simply
saying it's a heuristic and so the implications from such need to be taken
with a grain (or more) of salt.

>
> The utilities in the example that David is referring to seem to have been
> utilities on a scale, perhaps, of 0 to 100. These are utilities that have
> been transformed to representation on a scale of 0 to 100. They are no
> longer absolute utilities in the sense described, but we can still posit
> such utilities, for simplicity, and see how a voting system performs.
>

And we can relax the assumption slightly by letting someone see their "true
utilities" obscurely after having been transformed s.t. the rankings are
not changed but the relative intensities are changeable.

>
> Take-home point: we are not "presuming" commensurable utilities, we are
> "assuming" them for purposes of study. David is falling into a classic
> error, *presuming* that to be useful, utility must be real. What we are
> doing when we assume a set of utilities is saying that *if there are
> utilities like this,* then this result is better than that.
>

As I recall, assumptions that are not valid lead to conclusions that are
not valid.  Albeit, one can make assumptions that are "useful" but this
begs the question of useful to what end and opens up the possibility of
working with a different set of possibly "useful" assumptions.

>
>  2. In real life, parties/candidates choose their candidates/positions to
>> enhance their likeability, so what is taken as exogenous in most of our
>> thought experiments are in fact endogenous.  This is also another reason
>> why it's hard to grow the number of competitive candidates, because good
>> ideas from a not-so-competitive candidate will tend to get coopted by
>> already-competitive candidates.
>>
>
> David is taking a *very simple situation* and making it quite complex and
> difficult-to-understand. He's just making up a story about what happens,
> which might have some effect, and it might not.


I'm hardly making up a story to suggest that politicians/parties
strategically change their positions to change their appeal to different
voters so as to help them get reelected.  The issue is does that matter.
 My point is that when we generate voter-utilities from a random source, as
Warren Smith has done quite a bit of, it takes as exogenous what is often a
matter of strategic decision-making.

He is aiming, it appears, to make some claim about the numbers of
> candidates, claiming that it is "hard to grow" them, when we don't give a
> fig about "growing the number of candidates." It will happen, that's what
> we know. It's like clockwork, under some election conditions. People like
> to run for office, and it's commonly easy to get on the ballot in
> nonpartisan elections. David is mixing up partisan and nonpartisan
> elections, smearing it all together as if they were the same.
>

dlw: I am not mixing up partisan and nonpartisan elections.  I am focusing
on partisan elections where there are more economic consequences from the
outcome of the election, leading to more economic rent-seeking/keeping
during the election.  I agree that the number of candidates will rise but
distinguish between the rise in non-competitive candidates and the rise in
the number of competitive candidates.  The latter rises more slowly and
it's when you have lots of competitive candidates that other alternatives
than a variant of IRV may matter, afaict.

I'm cool with my points not being useful for nonpartisan elections since I
wasn't thinking of such elections when I made them.

>
> Presently in many places we see minor candidates, and minor party
> candidates, with few votes. They do this in spite of the spoiler effect and
> vote-splitting. Top two runoff, in some places, causes massive spawning of
> candidates/parties. It's obvious. IRV will do the same, and so will any
> method that addresses the minor spoiler effect. The major effect is
> vote-splitting, which becomes a serious problem for IRV as a minor party
> approachs or just exceeds parity. Since IRV will encourage the growth of
> minor parties, that can be predicted -- and it would happen with other
> systems as well -- we can see, then, that IRV is likely to eventually
> create the conditions for its own failure.
>

dlw: But there's scope for learning of the need for major parties to
combine with minor parties who grow a lot or there's the possibility that a
minor party might displace a major party, as might have been the case for
the progressive party displacing the GOP in Burlington if we had held the
course with IRV.  Either way, IRV serves to improve election outcomes
without ending a tendency for a system to have two dominant parties.

>
> FairVote, had they been capable of intelligent strategic thinking, would
> *never* have chosen Burlington as a place for IRV. Bad Idea. But Terry
> Bouricius was there, and they had LWV Vermont in their pockets. They were
> screaming when the move was being made to drop IRV. Quite simply, they were
> not listening. They had stuffed their fingers in their ears, they were not
> going to recognize a problem with their baby.


dlw: I doubt they foresaw how much the progressive party would drop in
popularity during its first term or how strongly the anti-IRV campaign
would get waged against them.

>
>
>  3. It seems that your self-described magical certainty as to voter prefs
>> is at worse chimerical and at best a useful fiction.
>>
>
> Again, this is that basic analytical error. David is not understanding
> what he sees. He is seeing an "assumption" of voter preferences, i,e., of
> underlying utilities -- which then define and create preferences and
> preference strengths. It is not a "magical certainty," it is an assumed
> condition. It is not intended to be an actual representation of real-world
> utilites, merely as a possible pattern. Unless it was. If this was properly
> done, for that, the assumption would, again, be explicitly stated.
>

But there are no "real-world utilities", it's a construct we choose to use
to help us communicate our ideas about the value of real world stuff.
 However, in Benn's post, which I was replying to, he was positing the
certain knowledge of real world utilities.

I'm sorry, I got some other stuff to do at this point.  Let me know if
you'd like me to respond to the rest of the email.

dlw
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