<div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
KM1:Alright, then tell me what kind of evidence would change your mind as<br>to whether the scarcity of competitive candidates is an artifact of<br>Plurality or inherent to single-winner elections. (If no such evidence<br>
can exist, then there's no point in discussing.)<br><br>dlw1:Let's switch to IRV + American forms of PR(in more local elections)<br>and watch the feedback loop. We should be able to observe over time<br>how the dynamics of elections shift, as voter-prefs get better<br>
cultivated. When folks get habituated to the new system then it'd be<br>easy to put multiple alts to IRV on various ballots, using IRV to choose<br>between them, and then we'd see from various experiments whether<br>
upgrading from IRV continues a feedback loop in improving the quantity<br>as well as quality of competitive candidates on the ballot.<br></blockquote><br></div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">KM2:So you're saying that nothing short of actually trying the experiment in public elections will change your mind? <br>
Then I believe I am done here. I can't change your position, so all I can do is to argue to others that your position is flawed.<br></span><br>dlw2: Yes, our diffs are epistemic. The thought experiments commonly used here are not persuasive to me, since I'm trying to hold onto a realistic notion of voters that views voter-utilities or political spectrumes as at best useful heuristics. <br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
<br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">KM2: Though, on another level, I could argue that IRV itself has already been tested in the US. Yes, I'm going to use the B-word. But you have already made it clear enough that you consider Burlington to be an anomaly: therefore, it appears only widespread center-squeezing will be enough to show the inferiority of IRV.<br>
</span><br>dlw2: Exactly, this illustrates our epistemic diffs. Why put so much resources to end the use of IRV in Burlington if it is such an ineffective rule? The bank-rollers of the recall campaign weren't worried about IRV's not always electing the Condorcet winner. With one more election, folks would have adjusted so that IRV, ie GOPers wd've forced their party to the center or voted strategically for the Democratic party, and IRV would work reliably. It would've made the two biggest parties hew towards the center and accommodate outsiders. The dissatisfaction with IRV was $pun with evil intent in Burlington and you propagate the $pin with your perfectionism. If the number of competitive candidates proliferates and IRV is found inadequate in multiple elections then change will be possible. Meanwhile, there was no good reason to stifle the adoption of IRV there and my view is that you bring it up to elevate the short-term import of your preferred alternative electoral rules. <div>
<br></div><div>This is what it feels like, "Oh, if only our rules were in place then this wouldn't have happened." Well, the opponents of reform are good at figuring out ways to manipulate people's perceptions of election rules and dividing and conquering those who push for reform. They'd have adapted their attacks if a different rule had been in use in Burlington. <div>
<br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">KM2:If anything, I'm reminded of a right-populist party over here. Their policies have been criticized many times. One of their replies is simply: "we've never been in power, so you don't know that it would turn out that bad".</span><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
<br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">dlw2: Well, IRV hasn't never been in power and I'm not pushing for it alone nor am I claiming it's the end-all-be-all of electoral rules. I'm defending it as the best known progressive alternative to fptp against critics who rely on relatively abstract models and the presumption of a strong feedback loop from switching to their rules to the increase in the number of competitive candidates. I am skeptical of how strong the feedback loop would be in important single-winner elections. <br>
<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">KM:And furthermore, tell me why we shouldn't just use what you call<br>
"multi-winner elections" like runoffs and not have to take on faith that<br>no single-winner method can produce diversity.<br><br>dlw: We need both diversity and hierarchy. This is why we need a mix of<br>election rules, some encouraging diversity/equality, others encouraging<br>
hierarchy/order. We need the latter because of the need for collective<br>action and coordination.<br></blockquote><br></div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">KM2: So long as there are parties, there will always be hierarchy. Fred Gohlke argues pretty well for this. He does that because he thinks party hierarchy is a bad thing. I'm not going to comment on whether it is, here, because it is besides the point. Instead, I'll only say: Why?<br>
</span><br>dlw2: The state holds a monopoly on the legit uses of violence to prevent the growth of violence. This monopoly leads to hierarchy. Hierarchy is also a part of making changes possible. If we are to search for long-term alternatives to nuclear and non-renewable energy, we'll need to coordinate research which will require hierarchy to parcel out different tasks and to abet the dissemination and rewarding of good work. </div>
<div><br></div><div>Single winner election rules abet the transparent formation of hierarchy. They also should promote checks and balances to keep it from abusing its authority. <br>
<br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">KM2: There are nations that only use what you call multi-winner rules. There are even nations on the American continent that do so. Yet they manage. Their lack of what you call single-winner elections for partisan positions do not seem to measurably harm them in comparison with similar nations that do use such election rules.</span><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
<br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
dlw2: Hierarchy can be established through less transparent means and it's different with smaller nations than bigger nations. But I guess it's also a statement of political values. I value both hierarchy/order and equality/change and thereby I want my country to evince both through the use of both single-winner and multi-winner election rules. I believe right now, the real root problem is that our nearly exclusive use of single-winner election rules enabled $peech to become over-aggressive in the 70s, manipulating successfully the cultural wars wedge issues. Thus, we need more multi-winner elections and we need to make our single-winner elections harder to game or open to outsiders voices. <br>
<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">dlw:I classify multiple stage elections as hybrids between multi-winner and<br>
single-winner elections. I think they're costly but good systems. If<br>we replaced all of our current fptp systems with a partisan primary in<br>the US with the FairVote upgrade on top two primary, it'd improve the<br>
system. But I'd rather not use one election rule for all elections. I<br>think it'd be hard to get turnout up and fair in the first election,<br>even with four winners.<br></blockquote><br></div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">KM2:If Abd is right, then low turnout is a feature, not a bug.</span></div>
<div><br></div><div>dlw2: If we increase the number of winners from the early stages, we'd increase the number of groups with a vested interest in turning folks out for the earlier stages. <br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
<br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">KM2:And what do you mean by "and fair in the first election"?<br></span><br>dlw2: The fairvote analysis of the 1st stages in the CA top two primaries showed a conservative, anti-hispanic bias in the earlier stages. </div>
</div><div><br></div><div style>KM2:<span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">The amusing thing about the GIGO argument is that it is not IRV that does best when dealing with noisy votes. That honor goes to Condorcet (as shown by Brian Olson's simulations). Even Approval does better than IRV as noise increases.</span></div>
<div style><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></span></div><div style><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">dlw2: If the noise is endogenous with people being more informed on some candidates they care about then the exclusion of info from lower in the rankings wd be more useful and IRV wd perform better. </span></div>
<br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">KM2:And still, the three-scenarios argument holds. If there is some kind of weird IRV-specific GIGO so that IRV is really good, then BTR-IRV is no worse, fuzzy epistemic limits or no.<br>
</span><br>dlw2: Fuzzy epistemic limits can make longer lists have less value added and, afaict, BTR-IRV needs meaningful longer lists to be better. <br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">
<span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">KM2:Finally, specificity can hit both ways. Perhaps the specificity works to degrade DLW's unproven IRV/Approval hybrid, and what we need is a robust noise-handling method like Condorcet. Perhaps, perhaps. Without any evidence, anybody can play that game and it will get us nowhere.</span><div style>
<br></div><div style>dlw2: It's not unproven. Others have used the short-cut I proffer to expedite the candidate-elimination/vote-counting process and to avoid the use of recursion in explaining how a rule works. <br>
<br>dlw2: It's not a game. We can come to terms that experimentation w. variants of IRV and their adoption in the US are more apt to happen in the near future than any other single-winner rule. Thus, the issue is do we support the experiment that's begun or do we provide fire-power to the opponents of reform for the sake of an even better rule. You insist the burden of proof is on me or proponents of variants of IRV for single-winner elections, but as the outsider to the main movement for electoral reform in the US, the burden of proof rightly rests on you and unfortunately what you have are pseudo-experimental models that are ineffective at rallying others around some alternative to IRV. </div>
<div style><br></div><div style>dlw</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div dir="ltr">dlw</div></div>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 1:46 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:km_elmet@lavabit.com" target="_blank">km_elmet@lavabit.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="im">On 06/25/2013 12:25 AM, David L Wetzell wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
KM:Alright, then tell me what kind of evidence would change your mind as<br>
to whether the scarcity of competitive candidates is an artifact of<br>
Plurality or inherent to single-winner elections. (If no such evidence<br>
can exist, then there's no point in discussing.)<br>
<br>
dlw:Let's switch to IRV + American forms of PR(in more local elections)<br>
and watch the feedback loop. We should be able to observe over time<br>
how the dynamics of elections shift, as voter-prefs get better<br>
cultivated. When folks get habituated to the new system then it'd be<br>
easy to put multiple alts to IRV on various ballots, using IRV to choose<br>
between them, and then we'd see from various experiments whether<br>
upgrading from IRV continues a feedback loop in improving the quantity<br>
as well as quality of competitive candidates on the ballot.<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
So you're saying that nothing short of actually trying the experiment in public elections will change your mind? Then I believe I am done here. I can't change your position, so all I can do is to argue to others that your position is flawed.<br>
<br>
Though, on another level, I could argue that IRV itself has already been tested in the US. Yes, I'm going to use the B-word. But you have already made it clear enough that you consider Burlington to be an anomaly: therefore, it appears only widespread center-squeezing will be enough to show the inferiority of IRV.<br>
<br>
If anything, I'm reminded of a right-populist party over here. Their policies have been criticized many times. One of their replies is simply: "we've never been in power, so you don't know that it would turn out that bad".<div class="im">
<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
KM:And furthermore, tell me why we shouldn't just use what you call<br>
"multi-winner elections" like runoffs and not have to take on faith that<br>
no single-winner method can produce diversity.<br>
<br>
dlw: We need both diversity and hierarchy. This is why we need a mix of<br>
election rules, some encouraging diversity/equality, others encouraging<br>
hierarchy/order. We need the latter because of the need for collective<br>
action and coordination.<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
So long as there are parties, there will always be hierarchy. Fred Gohlke argues pretty well for this. He does that because he thinks party hierarchy is a bad thing. I'm not going to comment on whether it is, here, because it is besides the point. Instead, I'll only say: Why?<br>
<br>
There are nations that only use what you call multi-winner rules. There are even nations on the American continent that do so. Yet they manage. Their lack of what you call single-winner elections for partisan positions do not seem to measurably harm them in comparison with similar nations that do use such election rules.<div class="im">
<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I classify multiple stage elections as hybrids between multi-winner and<br>
single-winner elections. I think they're costly but good systems. If<br>
we replaced all of our current fptp systems with a partisan primary in<br>
the US with the FairVote upgrade on top two primary, it'd improve the<br>
system. But I'd rather not use one election rule for all elections. I<br>
think it'd be hard to get turnout up and fair in the first election,<br>
even with four winners.<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
If Abd is right, then low turnout is a feature, not a bug.<br>
<br>
And what do you mean by "and fair in the first election"?<br>
<br>
</blockquote></div><br></div>