[EM] Yes/?/No

Forest Simmons fsimmons at pcc.edu
Sun Nov 8 23:28:37 PST 2020 

I have been grading math papers for more than 40 years. When I first
started I thought it would be more objective to rank solutions to a problem
than to rate each solution separately. I used the Borda count on the
rankings, etc. It's a good thing I didn't know about Kemeny!

With 30 different solutions to each problem on a 20 problem test, it soon
became obvious that rating was much easier. If a problem has three main
steps, and the student's solution does 2 of them correctly, then the
partial credit is 2/3, etc. If the problem doesn't break down into distinct
steps of roughly equal importance, you can ask yourself what is the
probability that a similar approach would get the right answer to a similar
problem?

Similar approaches can be used for rating candidates...instead of listing
steps to a problem list qualities a candidate should have ... instead of
probability of correct solution to a similar problem, consider the
probability that the candidate would correctly represent your position on a
typical issue.

But it doesn't really matter which is harder; they are both too hard for
the typical citizen.  That was Dodgson's insight 150 years ago... ranking
was too hard for the the typical English voter...it would discourage
voters, etc. Asset voting on the other hand is voter friendly!

Similarly, as has been pointed out many times there is a price to pay for
all of the wonderful criterion compliances met by Approval. That price is
externalized as a burden on the voter. The purpose of Voter Friendly
Approval (Yes/?/No) is to shift the hardest part of that burden (the
resolution of the question marks) onto voter designated proxies.

On Sunday, November 8, 2020, <election-methods-request at lists.electorama.com>
wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. Re: Yes/?/No (??alabio?)
>    2. Re: Yes/?/No (Toby Pereira)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2020 06:15:35 +0000
> From: ??alabio? <Walabio at MacOSX.Com>
> To: election-methods at lists.electorama.com
> Subject: Re: [EM] Yes/?/No
> Message-ID: <439EB80C-149F-4F57-BEFD-1A5C21CA4F8A at MacOSX.Com>
> Content-Type: text/plain;       charset=utf-8
>
>         ?You all make mountains out of MoleHills!
>
>
>         0.      Assign the best candidate, let us say Bye Jiden, a value
> of positive + 1.
>         1.      Assign the worst candidate, let us say Tonald Drump, a
> value of negative - 1.
>         2.      Approve all candidates with positive values.
>         3.      Disapprove all candidates with negative values.
>
>         ?It is that simple!  ?That is how voters should approval vote!
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2020 16:26:38 +0000 (UTC)
> From: Toby Pereira <tdp201b at yahoo.co.uk>
> To: EM <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>,  robert
>         bristow-johnson <rbj at audioimagination.com>
> Subject: Re: [EM] Yes/?/No
> Message-ID: <771518148.5873646.1604852798378 at mail.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
>  As others have also discussed, you can give scores based on your
> intensity of preference. E.g. I like A a bit more than B but I like B a lot
> more than C. And Forest has discussed how you can use an imagined lottery
> to determine what honest score you should give to each candidate. Sure,
> that might sound a bit complicated, but I don't think that e.g. Amazon
> users generally have too much problem in giving a star rating to the
> products they buy, or that they would consider it to be automatically a
> tactical vote.
> I don't think a voter will forget who their second favourite is, but I did
> say rated ballots become easier when there are more than a handful of
> candidates. Second place isn't normally too hard. I don't think an Amazon
> user would find it harder to decide to give two or three stars than to
> decide whether the product they've bought is the 8th or 9th best thing
> they've bought from the site.
> See here?https://www.rangevoting.org/RateScaleResearch.html?for a
> discussion for rated v ranked. You can skip to the subheading "Rating is
> superior to Ranking".
> Toby
>
>     On Sunday, 8 November 2020, 02:58:30 GMT, robert bristow-johnson <
> rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:
>
>
> > On 11/07/2020 5:38 PM Toby Pereira <tdp201b at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Approval voting can also just be seen as scores out of 1.
>
> yes.? Approval Voting and Score Voting are both cardinal instead of
> ordinal.
>
> > So unless score voting is automatically tactical, then approval isn't
> either.
> >
>
> But Score Voting *is* automatically tactical if there are more than two
> candidates in the race.? Without tactical considerations, what score should
> a voter assign to their second preference candidate?
>
> > And for more than a handful of candidates, rating becomes easier than
> ranking,
>
> No, it's not.? That appears to be a claim offered with no evidence to
> support it.? It's like that perhaps it was just made up.
>
> > even if your method then converts the scores to ranks (as long as ties
> are permitted). It would be really awkward to be ranking a load of
> candidates only to find you'd missed one out of the order.
> >
>
> And that's your reason why the ranked ballot is deprecated??!? That the
> voter will forget who their second choice is and will have marked someone
> else as their second choice and now has to squeeze their real second choice
> somewhere between first and second?? Or get a new ballot and fill it out
> again?
>
> It's ridiculous.
>
> >
> > On Saturday, 7 November 2020, 06:35:24 GMT, Andy Jennings <
> elections at jenningsstory.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 6:34 PM robert bristow-johnson <
> rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >? > On 10/31/2020 9:03 PM Forest Simmons <fsimmons at pcc.edu> wrote:
> > >? >
> > >? >
> > >? > Approval is one of the easiest election methods to explain and to
> understand; the ballots are identical to traditional FPP ballots except the
> instructions now say to mark the names of all of the candidates that you
> like instead of only one of them. As before the winner is the candidate
> with the greatest number of likes.
> > >? >
> > >? > But what about the candidates that you just like a little bit? Do
> you include them or not? Where do you draw the line between like and not
> like?
> > >? >
> > >?
> > >? i've been trying for a couple years to get the Election Science
> people to answer that simple question. should a voter approve of their
> second choice or not? there is no simple answer and the voter is burdened
> with the task of tactical voting.
> > >
> > >?
> >
> > Approve your favorite. Disapprove your least-favorite.
> >
>
> Disapprove is no different than not approving.? Approve (mark) your
> favorite.? Leave your least favorite unmarked (which is as "disapproved"
> you can mark them).? What do you do with your second choice?? Or any other
> candidate that you hate less than your least-favorite?
>
>
> > Now imagine if the decision were between just those two, and it was
> being decided with a coin flip.
> >
>
> Are you serious?? You are suggesting that a voter literally flip a coin on
> each candidate that is neither their favorite nor their hated?? That's not
> tactical voting?
>
> > For each of the others, would you rather have them win or take the
> chance on the coin flip between your most-favored candidate and your
> least-favored candidate?
> >
> > If you would prefer that candidate to the coin flip, then approve them.
> If you'd rather take your chances with the coin flip, then disapprove them.
> >
>
> It's ridiculous to ask or to require voters to do that.? What a cognitive
> burden to place on voters to represent their interests faithfully.? If they
> cannot grok this tactical thinking, then they get to wonder (or fear) if
> they harmed their favorite or if they helped a candidate they dislike get
> elected.
>
> --
>
> r b-j? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? rbj at audioimagination.com
>
> "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
> ----
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