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

[Michael Ossipoff]

In one of the last paragraphs, I wrote:

“…easier explanation, definition, enactment, & administration.”

..,but I didn’t catch autocratic’s word-changes.

On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 12:25 Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> 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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