[EM] Heitzig consensus ...

Forest Simmons fsimmons at pcc.edu
Fri Jul 31 10:16:25 PDT 2020


Minimizing the entropy gets you as close as possible to determinism.

BTY I suggest random implicit approval as the default lottery.

As for repeated referendae, if all factions used that option  then their
favorite would be adopted with a frequency predicted by the consensus
lottery, assuming preferences stay the same over the time period of the
repetition; it would backfire if it annoyed the voters.

On Friday, July 31, 2020, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de>
wrote:

> On 31/07/2020 03.09, Forest Simmons wrote:
> > In general it is easier to find a lottery that is unanimously
> > preferred over the default lottery than to find a deterministic
> > alternative that is unanimously preferred over the default lottery.
>
> So a good consensus mechanism should both find as good a lottery as
> possible, and then try to arrange that the deterministic alternative
> is the best one.
>
> I guess there's a tradeoff between randomness and consensus acceptance,
> so to speak. The whole reason a deterministic consensus is a good thing,
> and better than a random consensus, is that it leaves less to chance. If
> we didn't value determinism as such, then deterministic consensus would
> be no different from any other unanimously accepted consensus lottery.
>
> On a related note, how would you guard against a "repeated referendum"
> strategy with repeated voting, e.g. in a parliament? Suppose a faction F
> wants its favorite implemented at all costs, so it proposes F in every
> possible election/proposal and relies on that as the number of elections
> goes to infinity, the probability of passing this favorite goes to one.
>
> Clearly, if F is so dead set on getting its favorite and nothing else,
> there can't be a consensus. The "exploit" is that F, in essence, gets to
> play over and over until the favorite *is* passed.
>
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