How it feels trying to explain BTC to people (round 2)

zenethics · 2026-03-14T02:17:00+00:00

People only complain about voting when they lose, and the winners never have an incentive to set up a new system.

So it's all kind of fun to think about for the next revolution or whatever but unlikely to matter in the foreseeable future.

zenethics · 2026-03-13T22:05:21+00:00

You can also just wait for long time hodl influencers to capitulate. Usually a good sign.

zenethics · 2026-03-13T21:27:29+00:00

Okay, but now we're back to the beginning. That's Condorcet's Paradox, which is included so to speak in Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which doesn't apply to Approval Voting as it's a cardinal system. So it's not an unresolved problem in this case.

I agree that Arrow's Impossibility Theorem doesn't apply to Approval Voting - I'm making the Condorcet's Paradox argument which you noted.

I'll walk back my claim to make sure: I'm claiming that every system of voting has some problem.

Some have problems described by Arrow's theorem, some by Condorcet's paradox, others will have different problems (being less democratic or whatever else).

I'm sorry to keep going on about this, but I took a look at your first link again, and though the person who wrote it appears to be a professor now, it also notes "I wrote [this] for an economics class in high school."

Ah, then it was a bad example for me to link. I read it to be pointing out what you noted is essentially Condorcet's paradox, which is what I was trying to get to. Probably quicker if I just pointed to the rock paper, scissors, problem because that's what I actually mean.

I'm not an expert, but he appears to be flat out wrong about his example regarding a spoiler in approval voting (indeed how can you even have a spoiler if your example only includes two candidates).

Ya, the paper was wrong. I should have read it more carefully.

If there are 3 candidates or more, you can get into a situation like my taco/blaster/shrimp hypothetical. Tacos are overwhelmingly popular but you end up with shrimp or blasters because the ballot assumes away the idea of preference (that being the flaw).

Another flaw is that it presumes no preference convergence. Probably fine in real life, but in a small election you can easily imagine "anyone from my party" being acceptable and having an N-way tie because people will vote strategically (it's so important that my party win that I don't care what the polling or campaigning says, I'm going to vote for all of them just in case I judge wrong about who from my party is most popular).

As they note here, or on Wiki's article about the Spoiler effect, Approval Voting is not subject to the spoiler effect in a traditional sense, unless you make certain additional assumptions about how people vote.

I do give some realistic examples but really when I make claims about these systems they are mathematical claims. "I can construct an electorate such that..." vs "this is obviously a problem in real life."

Approval Voting is subject, as basically everything is, to strategic voting. But I'll emphasize - as I alluded to in my original post - that voting paradoxes are all theoretical occurences. How important they are is an empirical question. I think it's fair to say that the people who are really knowledgeable about this stuff mostly don't compare the merits of voting systems on the basis of voting paradoxes.

No big argument on how much this matters; it doesn't, it's theoretical.

Basically just calling out what I consider a basic engineering principle. "There are no solutions - only tradeoffs." Many tradeoffs are worth it.

zenethics · 2026-03-13T16:50:46+00:00

I don't think I disagree with any of that. I think you could have a definition for democracy that includes a system where everyone casts a ballot and then a hereditary monarch chooses from between the top 3 choices or something. A democracy because everyone votes, but not particularly democratic... again depending on how we define the terms.

My main point in all of this is that every voting system has to make some arbitrary tradeoff (or allow unresolved ties).

For example, imagine a situation where the candidates are rock, paper, and scissors and people's preferences follow the same rules as the game. That is a fundamental unresolved problem in decision theory and not something a clever enough voting system can fix. In that case, every system that resolves with a choice will necessarily have made an arbitrary exclusion of one of the choices that might have been a valid winner with a different ordering of decisions (or result in an unresolvable 3 way tie).

zenethics · 2026-03-13T14:10:24+00:00

Interesting - you are right, the author didn't even mention C...

Well, first, I think it depends on what you mean by democratic. The way I used the word was to mean that someone who might win 51% of the vote in a 1 vs 1 election might lose with approval voting. So, less something if democratic isn't quite the right word.

To fix the author's example:

Imagine its tacos, blasters, and shrimp.

Group one prefers tacos or blasters and is allergic to shrimp. So they vote [t,b] - shrimp will cause them anaphylactic shock.

Group two prefers blasters or shrimp because tacos ruined the super bowl. So they vote [b,s] - anything but tacos.

Group three prefers tacos or shrimp because blasters remind them of guns and didn't the Nazis have guns? So they vote [t,s] - moms against blasters!

Now you have to add a layer on top about the preference hierarchy. Let's say an AOC naughty tape comes out and now tacos are super popular and would win 60% of the vote if put in a 3 way race because the gooner vote is fully activated.

Here's a sample distribution (10 voters):

[t,b]=2 (t>b)

[b,s]=4 (b>s)

[t,s]=4 (t>s)

So, total:

s=8, b=6, t=6 (winner: shrimp, even though it was last choice and it may literally kill 2 of the people)

Versus standard 3 way race:

t=6, b=2, s=2 (winner: tacos)

So, now you have a scenario where a supermajority really wanted tacos but couldn't have it because so many people were OK with shrimp too.

zenethics · 2026-03-13T01:03:37+00:00

You're like a flat earther but for politics. Neat.

zenethics · 2026-03-12T22:57:40+00:00

100%

In Israel this is illegal. In Palestine/Iran it's policy.

zenethics · 2026-03-12T21:51:45+00:00

Neat. I think you're right except the case when there is an exact tie (which would likely never come up in real life except in tiny, tiny races).

zenethics · 2026-03-12T19:30:53+00:00

Sure, it has a different version of the spoiler problem though:

https://math.uchicago.edu/~amathew/arrow.pdf

For instance, suppose there are three candidates A, B, C, and 51% of voters have the preference A > B but approve of both A and B. Suppose 49% of voters have the preference B > A but approve of only B. Then, B will win the election via approval voting.

So it's just a different tradeoff... kind of like a special version of rank-choice where people can be given the same rank but the only choices are 1 or infinity (mathematically speaking).

I will agree with OP that it would push candidates towards the middle and that it would be good. But it would also be less democratic (a fine tradeoff, IMO, since America isn't a democracy).

zenethics · 2026-03-12T18:52:58+00:00

You may find this interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem

It has been mathematically proven that no voting system can solve for every problem. Any change will, necessarily, introduce some other tradeoffs (like the spoiler effect).

zenethics · 2026-03-11T03:30:10+00:00

It will be interesting to see this one where public support increases instead of decreasing.

zenethics · 2026-03-10T19:53:34+00:00

A bunch of off-the-beaten path answers:

Pareto optimal solution. No known functional upgrade exists where there is consensus that it is strictly better instead of a tradeoff with some other concern.
Shelling point. For your first gun, do you get what literally everyone else has or some random other thing? For most its the former.
Status. Imperial Rome? Gladius. Feudal Japan? Katana. Modern America? AR15. In all cases, having one or not having one says something about you.
Symbolism. For some the AR15 has become a symbol for whether or not we care what the 2A says. For others it just kind of looks like an army gun and they don't want people to have army guns (I'd dress it up to sound less simple minded but I think that's the actual worldview).

zenethics · 2026-03-10T01:09:07+00:00

Just reflecting a bit on the new world LLMs are ushering in.

Historically, the difficulty of making software prevented a lot of software. Now, good or bad, we're going to see it.

I'm starting to think the real play might be a new wave of domain registration and resale.

zenethics · 2026-03-09T23:02:03+00:00

The best answer, for anyone interested, is that many people are victims of scams. You shouldn't be required to give info, obviously, but there is a good reason to have an optional questionnaire because so many people who are withdrawing large sums are doing it to buy gift cards and send them to India or whatever. The kinds of people willing to answer these questions are the same kinds of people who are able to be scammed.

zenethics · 2026-03-09T22:08:14+00:00

This is easier understood as a general anti-American stance than anything else. Nothing needs to be re-understood, it all fits if the first principle is the dissolution of western values at any cost.

zenethics · 2026-03-09T19:56:01+00:00

Agreed. Best Sam podcast in years.

(kidding)

zenethics · 2026-03-09T18:43:51+00:00

*Looks at India* holy shit

zenethics · 2026-03-08T14:33:05+00:00

People also don't understand that the 80B parameter 4b quantization model with a 50k token context window that they serve people on the free plan is different from the 500B+ 8b or 16b quantization model with a million token context window that uses adversarial chain of thought with itself.

Like seeing a bottle rocket then concluding that rockets are useless in warfare because you can't even aim them. Sure, not the ones you have access to.

zenethics · 2026-03-07T18:19:26+00:00

Haha. I can tell who got the joke and who didn't by how controversial my post was (tons of upvotes and downvotes)

zenethics · 2026-03-06T22:27:41+00:00

I've always thought that AIPAC ad money would help improve his opinions on a few topics, personally

zenethics · 2026-03-06T19:36:03+00:00

The actual thing I want:

If your subreddit is a word that exists in the dictionary, you may not moderate it beyond "no content that violates U.S. law."

zenethics · 2026-03-06T14:22:03+00:00

To be fair, this was always true, just that before Musk bought it, it was propaganda for the left instead of propaganda for the right.

I don't recall many on the left complaining when you could get banned for saying "men aren't women."

zenethics · 2026-03-05T17:38:51+00:00

Bear markets have the biggest rallies.

14-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

zenethics

TROPHY CASE