[EM] ASM Decisions (was ...Does anyone know who this person is?)

[Forest Simmons]

El mié., 27 de oct. de 2021 9:19 p. m., Ted Stern <dodecatheon at gmail.com>
escribió:

> Hi Forest,
>
> I've been thinking about the modified version of ASM. I think it should be
> called *P*referred-*A*cceptable-*I*nsufficient-*R*eject Sorted Margins,
> or PAIR-SM. I don't like movable demarcations, and I think more than 3
> levels within each category would be excessive, so I would go with 10 total
> levels (score 0 to 9, rank inferred from rating): scores 9, 8, 7 are
> Preferred, scores 6, 5, 4 are Acceptable, scores 3, 2, 1 are Insufficient
> (formerly "compromise": the voter finds candidates at this level
> distasteful, but better than the alternative) and score 0 is reject.
>

And blank is counted as zero, too.

>
> Preferred ratings get 10 points, Acceptable ratings get 5 points,
> Insufficient candidates get 0 points but have pairwise votes over lower
> rated Insufficient candidates and all Rejected candidates. Then Sorted
> margins is run using those points.
>
> PAIR-SM could also be run with only 2 levels within each of the approved
> categories, for a total of 7 levels, if you want to retain an odd number of
> ratings.
>

Small scale elections could get by with seven levels, but rigid
demarcations work better with ten imho.

>
> The one problem I've had on the EndFPTP subreddit is explaining how the
> ranking is more important than approval. While the Approval level is in
> fact what sets up the seed ordering, it is practically irrelevant unless
> there is a Condorcet cycle. It's a little hard to explain that the Approval
> rating is more of an insurance that it won't be needed.
>
> On Wed, Oct 27, 2021 at 6:31 PM Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I prefer Ted Stern's version of Approval Sorted Margins over any other
>> single-winner public proposal I've seen lately, other than simple asset
>> voting as proposed by Charles Dodgson in the 19th century, and more
>> recently a symmetrical version of Majority Judgment currently in the works
>> if it can be simplified adequately w/o sacrificing its integrity.
>>
>> Ted's version of ASM uses a version of what we used to call "3-slot
>> approval" to seed the  finish order which is then sorted pairwise with
>> pairs that show the least discrepancy in their 3-slot scores getting
>> priority for pairwise rectification. It is important to note that the
>> ordinal information is inferred from six slots, twice as many as those used
>> for the cardinal seeding.
>>
>> This is valuable for several (including psychological) reasons. One is
>> that 3-slots are not enough for the ordinal information to fully
>> distinguish the pairwise preferences important to the voters. But
>> increasing the score slots (as in STAR) is not the answer, for several
>> reasons ... STAR voters aware of optimal approval strategy (vote only at
>> the extremes) would feel too much tension between the need to make use of
>> the intermediate score levels for ordinal information and the need to avoid
>> those levels for optimal cardinal strategy.
>>
>> But for non-perfect information elections, even sophisticated approval
>> voters might welcome a middle slot.
>>
>> I like three slots because, personally I would reserve the top and bottom
>> slots for definite approvals and disapproval, respectively.  [Bottom also
>> takes care of blank or no opinion to obviate darkhorse candidates].
>>
>> How do you know if you "definitely" approve or disapprove of a candidate?
>>
>> Easy ...  if you don't know that you do, then you don't. If you are not
>> sure, or if you have to ask, then your approval or disapproval is
>> definitely not definite.
>>
>> So it's easy to know how to vote honestly under that rule, which should
>> be part of the instructions to the voters.
>>
>> People who think they can out wit the devil may be tempted to vote
>> dishonestly, but at least they have the option of voting honestly if those
>> "definite instructions" are the official instructions.
>>
>> So Ted Stern's version of ASM is one of the best possible public
>> proposals IMHO.
>>
>> However personally, I would rather have it implemented in the format of a
>> Ranked Ranking ballot, so that the voter has more freedom in defining the
>> cutoffs demarcating the three slots, and making more ordinal distinctions
>> within the three approval levels if needed to distinguish among clones in a
>> large election:
>>
>> A>B1>B2>C>>U>V>W1>W2>W3>>X>Y>Z...
>>
>> BORDA is quoted as saying that his method was only intended for "honest
>> men." But honestly would not fix the greater design flaw ... clone
>> dependence ... in particular, clone loser.  Cardinal Ratings is a partial
>> solution ... with all of the caveats expressed in Kristofer's reservations.
>>
>> A solution nearer to the spirit of Borda would be a point system based on
>> Ranked Rankings.
>>
>> Borda can be thought of as a way of converting rankings into a
>> score/point system ... sacrificing clone dependence.
>>
>> A minimal tweak of Borda (to restore clone independence) would be to base
>> a point system on Ranked Rankings ... with weaker rankings reflected in
>> smaller point/score gaps.
>>
>> This idea is not my favorite way of using Ranked Rankings ... but it may
>> help some people to see the value of a different kind of ordinal ballot ...
>> more expressive than ordinary rankings without the strategic and
>> psychological burden (including cognitive dissonance) of the (obviously
>> exaggerated) implied numerical precision of ratings.
>>
>> El mar., 26 de oct. de 2021 8:26 a. m., Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
>> km_elmet at t-online.de> escribió:
>>
>>> On 10/25/21 2:35 AM, fdpk69p6uq at snkmail.com wrote:
>>> > Why does their identity matter?  Discuss the facts, not ad hominems.
>>> >
>>> > Also, I'm surprised and a bit saddened that you haven't come around to
>>> > cardinal systems yet.  :/
>>> >
>>> > The goal of democracy is to elect the candidate who best represents
>>> the
>>> > will of the voters.  My near-indifference between two candidates
>>> > shouldn't arbitrarily be given the same weight as your strong
>>> preference
>>> > between them.
>>>
>>> Let me make a ranked voting advocate (ordinalist?) argument here. I'll
>>> be referring to "simple cardinal methods", by which I mean things like
>>> Range, and not so much things that I'm fumbling towards in my utility
>>> posts.
>>>
>>> Cardinal supporters tend to use two arguments to argue for the
>>> superiority of cardinal methods over ordinal ones.
>>>
>>> The first is that cardinal methods support strength of preference; and
>>> the second is that, because they pass FBC (and IIA), they inherently are
>>> more robust to strategy.
>>>
>>> My response to these are, much abbreviated, that first, the "strength of
>>> preference" that these methods gather is probably ambiguous, and if it
>>> weren't, it would come with significant disadvantages.
>>>
>>> And second, that the methods' IIA and FBC compliance take a form that
>>> shoves what used to be tactical voting into a mush that's kind of
>>> honest, kind of not; and that once that's made clear, it's obvious that
>>> the methods no longer achieve the impossible. But because it doesn't
>>> look like ranked voting strategy, cardinal advocates can shift between a
>>> position that the methods permit everybody to vote "honestly" (an easy
>>> position) and that the methods are strategy-proof (a hard, incorrect
>>> position).
>>>
>>> -
>>>
>>> So for the first point, let's use Range as the standard cardinal method.
>>> Range asks for a set of ratings that are intended to represent utility,
>>> so that your rating is proportional to the utility you achieve from
>>> seeing this candidate elected. That's what's being demonstrated in
>>> examples like the pizza election: that the meat eaters show that their
>>> utility from getting mushroom pizza is not that far off from the utility
>>> of getting pepperoni, so that the method elects the pizza that satisfies
>>> all.
>>>
>>> But here's a problem. I can't know that my scale is calibrated the same
>>> way as yours. In philosophy, this is known as the problem of
>>> incommensurability. Suppose I happen to feel more pleasure (and pain)
>>> than you, but due to growing up in the same society as you, I mistakenly
>>> appear to use the same scale as you. It's then quite hard to know that
>>> when I say 6/10 I mean what you would consider twice as good as that.
>>>
>>> At first it would seem, though, that Range has dodged a bullet. Because
>>> if utility were directly comparable on an absolute scale, then there
>>> might exist "pleasure wizards"[1] who obtain so much utility from a
>>> choice that they effectively become dictators. By insisting on a 0-1
>>> scale (in its continuous version), Range limits the power any one voter
>>> has and so enforces a weak type of one man, one vote. It is what I
>>> called a type three method - voters might voluntarily decide to forego
>>> some of their power to make the outcome better for others (again, as in
>>> the pizza election).
>>>
>>> But the problem with this is that Range supposes that there's a common
>>> scale where there isn't. As a consequence, the concept of just what is a
>>> honest vote becomes blurred. E.g. suppose that I consider the sure
>>> election of Y to be equally good as a 50-50 shot of either X or Z
>>> winning. Do I rate X 1, Y 0.5, and Z 0? Or do I rate X 0.5, Y 0.25, and
>>> Z 0? Because there's no way to answer that question (unless it somehow
>>> becomes possible to get at utility information), there's more than one
>>> honest vote, and a honest voter is faced with the burden of having to
>>> decide *which one*. (It is assumed that voters will answer the question
>>> by normalizing[2], but this leads to strategy problems which I'll get
>>> to.)
>>>
>>> My attempts to generalize STAR came from asking "what if we want to be
>>> truly honest about what information it makes sense to ask of voters,
>>> while respecting OMOV?". Well, we could ask the voters about preferences
>>> over lotteries (as the 50-50 vs certainty example above). Doing so, the
>>> method acknowledges the ambiguity of comparing utility. Perhaps there's
>>> more we can do - e.g. by following MJ's reasoning of a common standard,
>>> or by separating "worse than nothing happening" events from "better than
>>> nothing happening" ones.
>>>
>>> But all of this is better than just saying "it means what you want it to
>>> mean", and then sweeping the resulting ambiguity in honest voters under
>>> the carpet.
>>>
>>> -
>>>
>>> As for the point that e.g. Range is superior to ordinal methods because
>>> Range passes IIA and the ordinal ones don't, I always feel like that's a
>>> bit of a sleight of hand. To explain, let's divide the ballot types into
>>> three:
>>>
>>> 1. The highest information honest ballot (ranking candidates in order of
>>> preference, reporting relative utility values in Range).
>>>
>>> 2. Other honest ballots: some monotone transformation of this.
>>>
>>> 3. Tactical/dishonest ballots (order reversal).
>>>
>>> Ranked methods have a very obvious category one, and going for some
>>> category two ballot instead (e.g. equal rank or truncation) doesn't
>>> usually produce much harm. Cardinal methods like Range replaces most of
>>> category three with category two because they pass FBC and IIA.
>>>
>>> As I've argued above, there's not really a category one for Range
>>> because it asks for more than the voter can provide. And we know from
>>> Gibbard's theorem that no deterministic voting method (cardinal or
>>> ordinal) is entirely free of strategy. So both categories one and three
>>> collapse into category two in Range: the former because there's no one
>>> honest ballot, and the latter because order-reversal isn't necessary
>>> (the famous FBC compliance, but it's actually stronger than just FBC).
>>>
>>> So, in ranked voting methods, voting strategy consists of choosing an
>>> appropriate category three ballot. In methods like Range, it consists of
>>> choosing an appropriate category two ballot.
>>>
>>> But here's the problem: having a clearly defined category one and a
>>> narrow category two means that a voter who values honesty *as such* can
>>> just choose the one honest ballot and then go home without regrets. But
>>> in Range, because "every ballot is honest", he has to carefully
>>> deliberate *which* honest vote to choose. And if he chooses wrong (e.g.
>>> in a Burr dilemma), he'll sure come to regret it.
>>>
>>> That kind of peril should only exist, IMHO, for voters who decide to
>>> play rough by choosing a category three ballot.
>>>
>>> And thus the sleight of hand: in a ranked method, "honest" means more or
>>> less category one[3]. So cardinal voting proponents can say "oh, but our
>>> category three is empty because of FBC!", but all they're really doing
>>> is shifting the Gibbard-mandated instrumental voting from category three
>>> over to category two. This lets them say "you can just vote honestly",
>>> thus giving the impression there's no risk in Range. But it's actually
>>> the other way around: it's not only determined strategic voters who may
>>> regret the strategy they chose, but also honest voters who just want to
>>> vote honestly and go home.
>>>
>>> This also poisons the value of IIA. If IIA is to be practically
>>> meaningful, it must mean that the outcome doesn't change when a
>>> candidate who didn't win drops out. But if every voter is deliberating
>>> which type-two ballot to go for, the ballots may change even if the
>>> sentiment doesn't.
>>>
>>> In other words: if enough voters normalize in Approval, then Approval's
>>> IIA compliance isn't worth much at all in practice. E.g. first round
>>> ballots:
>>>
>>> 25: A>B>>C
>>> 40: B>C>>A
>>> 35: C>A>>B
>>>
>>> The Approval winner is C.
>>>
>>> But now let A drop out, and the voters renormalize (as Warren suggests
>>> everybody would):
>>>
>>> 25: B>>C
>>> 40: B>>C
>>> 35: C>>B
>>>
>>> and then B wins, so even though Approval passes IIA de jure, it looks
>>> rather different de facto. Telling the voters to perform a particular
>>> algorithm on their ballots before submitting them, and then claiming the
>>> inputs to the method satisfies IIA, doesn't mean the method plus the
>>> manual algorithm passes IIA!
>>>
>>>
>>> So the problem, in summing up, is that there's too much vagueness to
>>> hide subtleties in. Cardinal methods measure utility (but they don't, so
>>> what do they measure?). Cardinal methods let you vote honestly (but
>>> honest doesn't mean the same thing anymore). Cardinal methods pass IIA
>>> and FBC (but it does them much less good than ranked methods). Bayesian
>>> regret evaluations show Range as superior to ranked methods (but
>>> questionable assumptions about voter strategy may invalidate the
>>> results).
>>>
>>> It's better to be honest about the limitations that exist. If we can
>>> only get lottery information, then the method should reflect that. If we
>>> can get more, then the method should show how we can get it. That way,
>>> there won't be anything up its sleeve.
>>>
>>> -km
>>>
>>> [1]
>>>
>>> https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195189254.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780195189254-e-020
>>> or, if you're more in a funny mood,
>>> https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-04-03 :-)
>>>
>>> [2] E.g. Warren Smith says voters will do so because they're not
>>> "strategic idiots", and that voters who don't normalize in a
>>> two-candidate election are simply "idiots".
>>>
>>> http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2006-December/084357.html
>>> and
>>>
>>> http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2007-January/084662.html
>>> respectively.
>>>
>>> [3] There's a caveat here because equal-rank/truncation seem to be in
>>> category two, and so a response to this reasoning would be "ranked
>>> ballots have category two too!". But there's very little regret in
>>> choosing category one instead of two, in practice. However, some ranked
>>> methods that pass FBC do so by making equal-rank stronger than strict
>>> ranking, and those reintroduce the problem.
>>> ----
>>> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
>>> info
>>>
>> ----
>> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
>> info
>>
>
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