[EM] STAR

[Toby Pereira]

    On Tuesday, 15 August 2023 at 06:28:51 BST, C.Benham <cbenham at adam.com.au> wrote:  



>>As for what the boxes are about, they are about ensuring that voting methods have sensible behaviour in certain situations, so I wouldn't expect them to >>necessarily negatively correlate with a "good" result. 
  
>Then you are not using the right boxes.
 
I think you probably misread my sentence. I would *not* expect them to *negatively* correlate with a good result. So I probably would expect passing criteria to correlate positively with a good result. Apologies for the convoluted sentence.
 
 
 >>It's what I just replied to Kristofer - the fact that there's no way that you can consistently define society's preference in a way that you can determine whether >>society prefers A or B by looking at the pairwise comparison.
 
>Then what do you "look at" ??
There's different things you can look at. But what I said is true, not just my opinion, so it's a question for everyone. But you can still look at pairwise comparisons and indeed use a Condorcet method. But I'd want someone to come to this by evaluating various methods and deciding that this is the best compromise overall, rather than deciding from the outset that this is the One True Way. I'm not anti-Condorcet, if this is how it's come across.
 
 
 >>I would counter this by saying that it's based on this logical contradiction.

 
>I'm still not seeing this "logical contradiction".
It's just the premise that if A pairwise beats B then society must prefer A to B. But it makes no sense to say that society prefers A to B, B to C and C to A. I don't think this is controversial. It's a centuries-old realisation.
 
 
>>I would also counter it by saying that someone could equally say (perhaps have a greater claim) that a method cannot be democratic if it fails participation
 
>I don't see that either. So which method that meets Participation do you like?
I do actually like both score and approval. I like their simplicity and the fact that a complete numerical results list can be published that's simple and easy to understand. And I like the fact that there's no hidden weird paradoxes in either method. Any criterion they fail is pretty obvious.
My absolute favourite method isn't suitable for many elections because it has to be done online, but would be suitable for votes in online communities etc. It's approval voting but where the current scores are visible and where a voter can change their vote as much as they like until the deadline. But because co-ordinated factions might try to mess with this by voting or changing their vote at the last minute, I think a non-deterministic end point might be necessary. So you might have a week of voting plus and end section that has a half life of one hour. There may be a sense in which this fails participation though because with perfect game theoretical voting it should become Condorcet. However, this is likely to be from other voters' reactions to your presence in the voting procedure rather than you voting against your own interests. This is a fairly nebulous failure and one I could easily tolerate for a clean results table and a transparent and simple method. Also it might in practice not always elect the Condorcet winner if the Condorcet winner isn't particularly liked. E.g.
49 voters: A>>C>B49 voters: B>>C>A2 voters: C>A>B
C (the Condorcet winner) is unlikely to get off the ground in the first place in this case.
 
 
 
 >>Two of the main ones I tend to look out for are monotonicity and independence of clones because they are obviously things we would want and they don't >>seem to be too restrictive in terms of methods they allow
 
>STAR fails both of them, "badly".
 
>STAR is obviously garbage and a strategy farce,  as I'll explain later on EM.
 

I look forward to seeing it. As I say, I'm not a fan of STAR, but I am still interested in seeing how it stands up to scrutiny given that it has a following. (Actually I'm not aware of how STAR fails monotonicity. I was under the impression that it passed.)
Toby


  
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