[EM] Did someone not hear what I said about Approval vs Condorcet?

Sun May 26 12:25:28 PDT 2024

On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 04:59 Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de>
wrote:

> On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
> > Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
> > strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
> > state our sincere-rankings.
> >
> > That’s of course a common attitude:
> >
> > …wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent system to
> > do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
> > us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
>
> I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
> have not expressed. Nowhere have I said…

Whoa. I didn’t mention you. I said only “someone”. I wasn’t referring to
you.

>

…that Condorcet "[isolates] us
> from the choice" we make.

I didn’t quote anyone as saying that. .*I* used that phrase, but I didn’t
say that anyone else did.

>
> What you call "sheltering" and "isolating", I see as the method taking
> proper responsibility - proper responsibility to turn the voters'
> unambiguous honest opinions into an outcome without dumping the
> algorithmic calculation upon te voter themselves.

…a different wording for the same thing.

See my "kick the can
> down the road" post for more info.
>
> Now, I could make a caricature of Approval itself. Perhaps something
> about a calculator that just says "IDK, do the base conversion yourself,
> I only accept input numbers in factoradic". But caricatures only make
> people angry.

Or puzzled. I have no idea what that would mean, or how that supposed
analogy applies.
But, since you aren’t saying it, we can dismiss the matter.

Let's not stoop to them, shall we?

I didn’t “caricature”. I described the goal of rank-methods, in agreement
with your description, with different wording.

Approval is a simple reliable do-it-yourself handtool. Rank-methods seek to
allow you to merely express a sincere ranking & say”now you fix it”,
instead of actually dealing with the choice as you’d have to without that
humungously computation-intensive automatic machine.

>
>
> > I’ll ask this for the 3^rd time:
> >
> > …
> >
> > How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
> > many-candidate national presidential election?
>
> I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a
> 25-candidate presidential election,…

However many candidates you have, a Condorcet-count is much more
complicated & computationally-intensive than the summation of approvals.

With a given number of people & hours the ability to detect count-fraud is
less with Condorcet.

I said that Approval has been choosing the CW in our polls. I didn’t say
that it was the poll winner (though it has won in 1 or more of our polls).

I didn’t comment any farther down in this text. I say that, because it’s
easier to say it than deleting the rest of the text.

I sent this quick preliminary reply to answer the misunderstanding about
the matter of whom I was referring to.

I haven’t yet replied to your other post because it’s mor involved than
this one.

But as for putting the choice on the voters instead of just collecting
sincere rankings, yes that’s what I prefer.

…because using the absolute minimal method, with the least demanding count,
is that important, for count-fraud prevention.

…with immense benefits for easier explanation, defined, enactment, &
admission too.

(Autocorrect can be a nuisance. I’m not used to having to check my whole
post for autocorrect’s word-changes.)

you've already lost, because nobody
> is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the method is
> Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
>
> I'm not familiar with minor parties in the US. Has there ever been a
> 25-candidate presidential election?
>
> I don't think I can comment beyond that: I don't know enough about poll
> workers. I'll leave that to someone with experience. (Although roughly
> calculating: suppose 6 candidates like in Burlington. That's 30 pairs.
> Five times the work if counting a particular preference is as before. So
> you'd either need 5x the workers, or five times the time, or some
> combination of the two.)
>
> On an aside, though, I would say that I generally wouldn't want to get
> computers anywhere near election counting. However, if you absolutely
> have to have them, there are ways of making sure they don't cheat:
> formal verification. You could also create special-purpose tools that
> say, only turn ranks into matrices and nothing else: there's no reason
> (apart from programmer convenience) why an election tool should be a
> general purpose computer that you could hide all sorts of shenanigans in.
>
> > I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
> > necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
> >
> > But, just summarize:It’s easy.Whichever of the various ways you prefer
> > to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy.…& no, it doesn’t
> > require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
>
> >
> > I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium is
> > the voter-median.
> >
> > i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
>
> Not necessarily. See the following paper:
> https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04216v2
>
> According to the authors, under their model, if every voter follows a
> particular thresholding rule, then iterative approval generally arrives
> at the Condorcet winner (but not always). However, if voters are left to
> choose any thresholding rule they want (as you propose), then anything
> is possible. The arrangement might even elect a Condorcet loser, and the
> outcome may be slow to converge or who wins may depend on how many polls
> you hold.
>
> I'm reminded of a quote about distributed algorithms that I read
> somewhere: "It's really easy to design distributed algorithms that
> suffer from deadlock, network floods or widely unpredictable and bizarre
> oscillations". That's in the context of computer science - deadlocks
> might not be applicable to election methods. But it does justify a
> starting position of skepticisim when considering schemes that offload
> more of the work to the voters by turning a one-shot method into a
> dynamical system.
>
> > It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent
> > one, Approval chose the CW.
> >
> > Have we forgotten that?
>
> I haven't, nor have I forgotten that Approval wasn't actually the poll
> winner.
>
> But let's take this reasoning at face value. I don't have the other
> polls' ballot data available at the moment, so let's consider the latest
> one and pick... say, Borda.
>
> As one can see by going to https://munsterhjelm.no/km/rbvote/calc.html,
> pasting in the data, and clicking Borda, Ranked Pairs is also the Borda
> winner.
>
> But I don't think I'm going to start advocating for Borda.
>
>
> To not be accused of tu quoque, let me clarify the point. As Burlington
> shows, an election method needs to handle the hard cases, not just the
> easy ones, or there may be a considerable uproar when the method is
> faced with a hard case and then stumbles. (In addition, people trying to
> make sure a stumble doesn't happen may start to do mass compromising,
> further entrenching two-party rule.)
>
> So it's quite possible that our polls are easy cases. But like FairVote
> claiming that IRV gets the Condorcet winner more than 90% of the time,
> that doesn't by itself tell us much, because the failures have such a
> strong impact.
>
> I illustrate the example above by picking a method we know to be bad
> (Borda being so extremely easy to fool with cloning and burial), and
> showing that the poll result comes out right. If a bad method can get a
> good result, then "getting a good result" is less useful than it might
> appear at first glance.
>
> -km
>
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