[EM] Election-Methods Digest, Vol 210, Issue 62

[culitif at tuta.io]

> That's really interesting. I'm not into crypto at all (bewildered by it really) so I had no idea that Bitcoin was disliked like that. What are the issues with Bitcoin from the point of view of the crypto community? What did they do?
I'm not too into it either, but there's a couple of different divisions. First of all Bitcoin is like the first generation of the blockchain technologies and has a lot of downsides and technical limitations. Some of which are manifesting as massive usage of energy (some estimates put that 10% of all electricity is now used to mine Bitcoin). There's a couple of suggested solutions to their issues, but they all kinda feel like duck tape solutions and nobody wants yet another hard fork of it so we're kinda stuck even though most people recognized we should've dropped it a long time ago. Then there's also the community of cryptography academics who, besides being mad about "crypto" now referring to crypto currencies instead of their field, also have a lot of technical critiques of it being a really inefficient system that didn't even leverage the cutting edge systems that were available when it was created. To be fair, their entire field kinda rests on a few hypotheses that we're pretty sure are true, but have not yet proved. So there's always a lot of new stuff coming from there

And ah yes I do remember digging into his other videos eventually as well. His videos and, later on, Nicky Case's explorable interactive on the matter really gave me the tetris effect about comparing these systems.

Regardless, I appreciate your work and advocacy. Although I can't say I fully agree that IRV isn't better than FPTP, I would certainly like to someday contribute to an effort to get a Condorcet method in widespread use in the US. 

When will you be advocating to the Burlington council? Is there a place I could read up more about your proposed alternative? 

Best,
Culi

Jan 28, 2022, 2:17 PM by dcarrera at gmail.com:

>
> On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 3:39 PM <> culitif at tuta.io> > wrote:
>
>>
>> The animosity in the voting theory community towards IRV reminds me of how those in the cryptocurrency community hate Bitcoin.
>>
>  
> That's really interesting. I'm not into crypto at all (bewildered by it really) so I had no idea that Bitcoin was disliked like that. What are the issues with Bitcoin from the point of view of the crypto community? What did they do?
>
>
>
>> I feel this community is in a similar position. You might not like it, but FairVote's success with popularizing IRV might be the thing necessary to push these more niche debates into a wider audience.
>>
>
> My goal is to replace FPTP with "anything". My goal is to replace FPTP with something better. IRV is not better. But for me personally my animosity toward FairVote is because they conflated the ballot "ranked choice" with their preferred method. That really rubbed me the wrong way.
>
>  
>
>> My own introduction to this field came from that one CGP Grey video that explained IRV.
>>
>
> CGP Grey is great. Note that he doesn't specifically advocate IRV; he just likes voting methods. He has videos on Approval, MMP, gerrymandering, the electoral college, etc. He is a big fan of STV, but that's in part because he is a big fan of PR (yay!).
>
>
>
>> The discussions about the various ways to handle ties or alternative systems sparked an interest in me to dig deeper and keep finding alternatives. Eventually I got to take a course with professor Marek Kaminski that finally let me dive into the mathematical foundations of all these methods and now, here I am, working a website to bring these discussions to a wider audience. But it all started with IRV and watching those pretty animated bar graphs for me.
>>
>
> Yeah, I see your point. I honestly can't remember how I got into voting theory. It was a long time ago. It wouldn't surprise me if IRV was the first method I discovered.
>
> Cheers,
> -- 
> Dr. Daniel Carrera
> Postdoctoral Research Associate
> Iowa State University
>

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