[EM] STAR

[Colin Champion]

Kristofer - that makes perfect sense. So Forest's method is a proposed 
solution to the problem in which the objective function is as assumed by 
fpdk, but voters are assumed to act deviously.
    For all I know it may be a very good solution. At any rate, 
strategic voting is so hard to analyse that I wouldn't dream of saying 
that I knew how to characterise the true optimum, even at the vaguest 
conceptual level.
    CJC

On 19/08/2023 12:07, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> On 8/19/23 11:11, Colin Champion wrote:
>> Kevin - I think I agree really. It's a debate about utilitarianism. 
>> There's a shallow objection to adding utilities, which is that they 
>> may not be suitably scaled, and a more serious one that 
>> considerations of justice etc may enter into people's moral 
>> judgements, and that these don't lend themselves to a utilitarian 
>> calculus. Different objective functions will have different optima. 
>> But it's one thing to cricitise fpdk's model, and another to 
>> criticise the conclusion drawn from it.
>>     And this is why I'm still puzzled by what Forest is saying. If 
>> fpdk's model is what I assume it to be, I don't see how there's room 
>> to improve on cardinal voting, or how cardinal voting can be only 
>> 'not too bad'. Perhaps Forest has another objective function in mind, 
>> based on consensus rather than utilities, but I'm not sure what it is 
>> or whether it's really an improvement.
>
> Forest's model is a sort of generalization of the friendly pizza 
> setting to where people are strategic. That is, he considers a 
> situation where the honest utilities are
>
> 60: A (100) > B (80) > C (0)
> 40: C (100) > B (80) > A (0)
>
> and then he observes that with any sort of cardinal method passing 
> InfMC, the majority can force their outcome, so a large electorate 
> might well do:
>
> 60: A (100) > B (0) > C (0)
>
> and then the 40% minority has no way to respond that doesn't end up 
> with their hated outcome.
>
> So the whole motivation for the setting is, given that the honest 
> utilities are as above, how do we incentivize strategic voters to 
> express that information? And ideally without leaving too much to 
> chance, or having awful expected utility.
>
> In a pizza setting, presumably the friends know each other well enough 
> and don't want to ruin their friendship over pizza, so the best 
> outcome will happen anyway.
>
>>     As I recall, Amartya Sen goes to town in distancing himself from 
>> utilitarianism. In an extreme case (which I'm not sure Sen would 
>> reject), collective utility might be an increasing function of the 
>> utility of the worst-off member of society, and a decreasing function 
>> of everyone else's. Obviously no monotonic transformation of 
>> individual utilities can reconcile this with utilitarianism.
>
> I know that he objected to Homo Economicus (there's that post office 
> quote from Rational Fools), but I didn't know he distanced himself 
> from utilitarianism in general. But then there's much of his that I 
> haven't read.
>
> -km

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