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<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">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. <br>
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.<br>
CJC<br>
</font><br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 19/08/2023 12:07, Kristofer
Munsterhjelm wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:7e4d6d0f-e546-0955-64ae-abd7bdee91e6@t-online.de">On
8/19/23 11:11, Colin Champion wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">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.
<br>
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.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
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
<br>
<br>
60: A (100) > B (80) > C (0)
<br>
40: C (100) > B (80) > A (0)
<br>
<br>
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:
<br>
<br>
60: A (100) > B (0) > C (0)
<br>
<br>
and then the 40% minority has no way to respond that doesn't end
up with their hated outcome.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite"> 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.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
-km
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
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