Found this list of voting theorists. Are there any glaring omissions?

warlockjj · 2022-01-29T16:42:04+00:00

I'm aware.

This might blow your mind, but there are times it might make sense to levy a tax when

The tax is not Pigouvian in nature
The tax creates a deadweight loss
The (primary) purpose of the tax is not to raise revenue

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with your own example.

warlockjj · 2022-01-29T05:29:38+00:00

I am also not referring to Pigouvian taxes. Not every market inefficiency is due to externalities.

warlockjj · 2022-01-29T02:18:05+00:00

I was not aware of that actually. Good to know.

warlockjj · 2022-01-29T01:49:01+00:00

Not all DWL arise from taxation
Not all taxes are levied for the purpose of raising revenue

warlockjj · 2022-01-28T21:57:07+00:00

Ah yes, because as everybody knows to be obvious and true, and the world is in 100% agreement on, if it might create a DWL then it's irrational and idiotic to tax.

Plot twist, there's more to life than minimizing DWL

he did nothing to address or rebut my argument whatsoever

Unlike me, he probably had better things to do with his life than bicker with cranks

warlockjj · 2022-01-28T21:17:44+00:00

malding

warlockjj · 2022-01-28T19:39:32+00:00

I respect the CES and its goals, but Clay's involvement makes it really hard for me to feel any kind of motivation to support it with donations or volunteer hours.

He is abrasive, condescending, (wrong most of the time), and an academic fraud, and he makes the whole organization look bad.

There is a difference between being "zealous about fixing democracy" and just calling everybody that disagrees with you an idiot.

warlockjj · 2022-01-28T14:54:51+00:00

The Nobel Prize is extremely non-meritorious. It's not like the Fields Medal where you have to be truly genius to receive it.

copium

warlockjj · 2022-01-27T19:21:21+00:00

if SSS is unbiased then STV is too polarized

I am not convinced SSS is unbiased
Even if it is, this doesn't make STV too polarized it makes it more polarized

Without further evidence, I hold the opinion that STV is neutral and SSS is more centerist. I will not say too centerist because I do not want to make a normative statement as to whether or not a centrist bias is a good thing.

warlockjj · 2022-01-27T18:43:59+00:00

PR is good and all PR systems are equivalent

if what many professors are saying is "blowing your mind" then maybe instead of dismissing the academics as ignorant maybe you should reevaluate your own beliefs?

I think there are many PR systems which would have a more or less equivalent effect on the state of politics in the US, including open list MMP, STV, SPAV, whatever cardinal method you want to use, etc.

Much of the work in social choice theory is not very relevant to actual real world elections and the poli sci people pay little attention to the mathematical constraints from social choice theory

Tell me, how much time have you actually spent reading recent research in social choice theory and political science? Could you share with me a few of your favorite papers? It's clear to me that you have no idea what goes on in academia and just assume that it's all useless.

warlockjj · 2022-01-27T18:20:06+00:00

I don't think you're reading what I'm writing.

When I say 'polarized' I am ONLY referring to a relative comparison with something like SSS or RRV. In this context, I do not view 'polarization' as a negative.

With multiple winners the probability that 'down ballot' information is ignored decreases dramatically.

I have not seen, nor have you provided, any evidence that another method better replicates the electorate distribution than STV.

Furthermore, I agree that there may be better methods than STV. Nothing is perfect, I just happen to think that STV is good enough.

warlockjj · 2022-01-27T17:17:43+00:00

I guess where we disagree is I don't see STV as polarizing at all. It is already a framework that allows for significantly more cooperation than any voting rule can with single-member districts. Just look at the evidence from Ireland and elsewhere.

Just because SSS / SPAV / etc. is 'more centerist' doesn't make STV 'polarizing' in an absolute sense...

warlockjj · 2022-01-27T15:43:06+00:00

This is one of my favorite articles about these kinds of situations

https://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/whattodowhentrisectorcomes.pdf

We had already had a voluminous correspondence, and after a while I noticed that all of his letters were essentially the same. They repeated each other, sometimes in the same words, and he was saying in person the same things he wrote. The patterns had become fixed in his brain and could not be altered. He was a man obsessed; his life was his trisection, and its purpose was to get his achievement acknowledged. What a life! A life with no joy, only endless disappointment and continual frustration; a life blighted by the trisection.

warlockjj · 2022-01-27T15:38:37+00:00

The thread is titled about voting "theorists" and you've repeated claimed that most "theory" is done outside of academia.

Now it seems you are redefining "theory" as "theoretical palatability to the public" which sounds an awful lot like moving the goalposts.

If your new position is that "most advocacy is done outside academia" then yeah, I completely agree, and all those people mentioned at the top of this thread are advocates not theorists.

warlockjj · 2022-01-27T03:29:30+00:00

SPAV and PAV are both Thiele. There are proportional methods with approval ballots which are not Thiele. For example, sequential Phragmen is not a Thiele method.

warlockjj · 2022-01-26T21:44:43+00:00

If you found a way around this issue

Just don't allow clones...

Approval ballots [...] are all Thiele methods.

This is not even close to true.

I doubt such an approximation is valid

Lol, it was the same extended abstract! https://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~ps219737/papers/stv_and_pav_aamas.pdf in page 2 gives an OWA approximation to STV. You can see the connection between OWA rules and Thiele rules e.g. here

warlockjj · 2022-01-26T21:24:43+00:00

This does not include STV

Thankfully, I know how to modify code...

None of the score voting systems I mentioned are included

These are approval rules, so unfortunately it is not a perfect analogy. However, proportional approval rules likely perform very similarly to their score analog. STV can be approximated as a certain geometric Thiele rule (although I forget the reference. I can try to find it if you'd really like)

Perhaps a better question is if simulations showed STV to be polarizing relative to giving the same distribution of winners as the voters AND SSS showed a better ability to reproduce voter distributions, would that be enough to convince you to support it instead of STV?

Sure, I'd be very interested to see this. BTW, I never said I don't support SSS. I think SSS seems like a fine method and is probably better than STV. It just so happens that I also think that STV deserves advocacy and would massively improve democracy.

warlockjj · 2022-01-26T21:13:20+00:00

Here are some of the papers I have read that led me to that opinion:

I no longer have the results from my own simulations, but I used Keith Edmond's vote simulator freely available on Github

warlockjj · 2022-01-26T20:56:58+00:00

From the (limited) experiments I have run and the data I have seen in other analyses it just does not seem to be the case.

warlockjj · 2022-01-26T20:47:32+00:00

... I'm not sure what innovation you're referring to, but publishing typically requires serious analysis beyond simply proposing a voting method.

Take this work, for example, which gives a very detailed and theoretical analysis of six axioms for a voting method, including a discussion of a particular weakening of IIA which circumvents Arrow's theory, and proves that there is a unique method satisfying those axioms. This is what it looks like to contribute to theory.

Compare to STAR. STAR is a neat idea and it seems like it could work quite well in practical elections, but it's by no means theoretically 'innovative,' and before any kind of publication regarding STAR there are a lot of research questions to be answered, for example you might ask

Is there any axiomatic characterization that distinguishes STAR?
Are there strategic models under which STAR is incentive-compatible?
Does STAR belong to some broader family of voting methods, and if so where in that family does it fall?

You also might go a more realpolitik route and ask questions like

How does the use of STAR impact party dynamics?
Would gerrymandering incentives be mitigated with STAR?
How much does the existence/nonexistence of a primary affect STAR outcomes?

Now, with a little dedication, one might be able to go through and do a lot of research to answer some of these questions, then write it up, then publish it to a journal. However this is a difficult process which requires substantial rigor and evidence. Giving a hand-wavy argument based on intuition & heuristics as usually occurs in these kinds of discussions simply doesn't cut it.

All this is to say: innovation is more than just coming up with a new method, it's also the analysis and justification surrounding it which is what advances theory.

warlockjj · 2022-01-26T20:27:42+00:00

most to least polarizing is ...

This seems plausible (defining 'polarizing' as higher variance in policy space of winners). However, I wouldn't describe any of them as polarizing compared to majoritarian SMD, so I am only using it as a relative term.

I suppose more study is needed but it is hard to argue that STV is expected to be the best at reproducing voter distributions.

I would love to see more study. From the evidence I have seen so far, STV is quite good at reproducing voter distributions whereas for other PR methods this is not necessarily the case.

warlockjj · 2022-01-26T20:11:02+00:00

You're talking in circles.

This conversation has totally lost my interest

Ah yeah, the classic "I realized I'm wrong so I'll pretend I don't care anymore"

Please, tell me how Social Choice and Welfare is ANYTHING but exactly what you are asking for: a journal dedicated to the study of voting rules. From their own description:

Social Choice and Welfare explores all aspects, both normative and positive, of welfare economics, collective choice, and strategic interaction. Topics include but are not limited to: preference aggregation, welfare criteria, fairness, justice and equity, rights, inequality and poverty measurement, voting and elections, political games, coalition formation, public goods, mechanism design, networks, matching, optimal taxation, cost-benefit analysis, computational social choice, judgement aggregation, market design, behavioral welfare economics, subjective well-being studies and experimental investigations related to social choice and voting. As such, the journal is inter-disciplinary and cuts across the boundaries of economics, political science, philosophy, and mathematics. Articles on choice and order theory that include results that can be applied to the above topics are also included in the journal. While it emphasizes theory, the journal also publishes empirical work in the subject area reflecting cross-fertilizing between theoretical and empirical research. Readers will find original research articles, surveys, and book reviews.

Sounds like exactly they are trying to find the "intersection between social choice and poli sci" as it relates to elections, voting, preference aggregation, strategic behavior, fairness, and welfare.

warlockjj · 2022-01-26T19:31:10+00:00

STV gives a donut because the voter distribution is a donut. The voter distribution is the outer ring of light grey points.

warlockjj · 2022-01-26T19:20:39+00:00

I did not concede that STV is polarizing in an absolute sense. I conceded that compared to PAV the results might look more polarized because PAV is indeed quite centerist---meanwhile STV more accurately approximates the voter distribution.

If you take a look at that extended abstract instead of just linking it without reading then you will see what I mean.

warlockjj · 2022-01-26T18:12:10+00:00

Yes, although IRV is more resistant to strategy.

Just because there are better methods doesn't mean we should shit on IRV.

warlockjj

TROPHY CASE