[EM] SARA voting: easier-to-describe MAS

[Jameson Quinn]

Michael, you're arguing that certain kinds of utility or disutility are
more important than others. As a human being with my own judgment and
morals, I'd agree with you. But it's not just impossible, but actively
counterproductive, to try to build that kind of judgment and morals into a
voting system. If a voting system weights certain kinds of ballots more,
sophisticated voters will strategically cast that kind of ballots, and
unsophisticated voters will be ignored.

VSE (aka BR) is, in fact, the right target to aim at. It does not include
any judgment or morals, but, by an argument similar to the Condorcet Jury
Theorem, in the long run it's got the best chance of agreeing with a system
with did. To take your specific example: there are a lot more homeless
people than billionaires, so in general a democratic election system will
(correctly) weight the preferences of homeless people above those of
billionaires. (And if the billionaires can successfully trick all the
homeless people into thinking they prefer a candidate who will actually
serve the billionaires, there's nothing the voting system per se can do
about that.)

2016-10-25 18:41 GMT-04:00 Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>:

> Jameson--
>
> You said that SARA does particularly well by VSE.
>
> But VSE is: (winner's SU)/(average SU among candidates)
>
> ...where SU is social utility.
>
> ...which is some constant minus BR.
>
> But I've just told why BR is no good as a measure of the rightness or
> goodness of an outcome.
>
> Take a dollar from a homeless man and give it to a billionaire? That's a
> negative change, because changes in greater disutilities are more important
>
> Michael Ossipoff.
>
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 4:07 PM, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I've tweaked the wording for SARA again. The only substantive changes in
>> outcome from this new wording is the change from "50 points or more" to
>> "more than 50 points".
>>
>> Here's the latest wording, in 3 steps:
>>
>> Support Accept Reject Abstain (SARA) works as follows:
>>
>>    1. *Voters can support, accept, reject, or abstain on each candidate.
>>    Default is abstain. Candidates get 2 points for each percent of "support"
>>    and 1 point for each percent of "accept", for a total of 0-200 points.*
>>       - *"Support" the best candidates (perhaps a quarter of them),
>>       "reject" the worst (perhaps half of them). "Accept" and "abstain" are for
>>       the ones in the high middle range. For those, "accept" if you want to help
>>       them beat somebody worse, and "abstain" if you could live with them but are
>>       hoping for somebody better.*
>>    2. *Eliminate any candidates rejected by over 50%, unless that leaves
>>    no candidates with over 50 points.*
>>       - *If possible, the winner shouldn't be somebody opposed by a
>>       majority. But this shouldn't end up defaulting to a candidate who couldn't
>>       at least get accepted by over 1/2 or supported by over 1/4 (as in, a
>>       majority subfaction of a divided majority, such as Nashville voters in the
>>       example below).*
>>    3. *Highest points wins. In case of a tie, fewest rejections wins.*
>>       - *This finds the candidate with the widest and deepest support.*
>>
>>
>> 2016-10-22 18:24 GMT-04:00 Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> Support Accept Reject Abstain voting works as follows:
>>>
>>>
>>>    - Voters can support, accept, reject, or abstain on each candidate.
>>>    Default is abstain.
>>>    - Call a candidate "acceptable" if they are rejected by 50% or less
>>>    and supported or accepted by over 25%. If any candidates are acceptable,
>>>    eliminate all who aren't.
>>>    - Give remaining candidates 2 points for each "support", 1 point for
>>>    each "accept", and half a point for each "abstain". Highest points wins.
>>>
>>>
>>> This moves a bit away from the Bucklin roots of MAS, but it further
>>> reduces the instability of cooperation in a CD scenario.
>>>
>>
>>
>> ----
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>> info
>>
>>
>
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