I don’t have much advice, but I enjoy the recursion of running into preference-aggregation problems (in deciding whether popular-but-imperfect improvements should be fought for or holding out for better) while trying to change voting mechanisms.
Coalition-building and group decision-making is everyone’s life. The fact that there’s no good answer and many/most other participants are approaching it from a power + comfort position rather than a truth + best-outcome perspective is frustrating at all levels.
I’ll admit that I don’t have a lot of hope that those who gained power in a system will allow that system to change out from under them, nor do I have much faith in any system, no matter how complex, that gives equal weight to the opinions of an 18-yea-old 85-IQ dropout as to a 40-year old successful 120-IQ manager.
Getting people to vote better and to help solve the coordination and communication problems seems like it can improve FPTP to the point of tolerability, and is much more likely than changing the US constitution. But my basic fear is that the outcomes we get today aren’t that actually that far off from the outcomes these semi-evolved house-apes want.
You’re of course right that even the best voting method doesn’t solve the “semi-evolved house-ape” problem. But I’d argue that the perverse incentives of FPTP give an outcome substantially worse than that. Neither Bush nor Trump (nor, probably, Clinton) would have won with a better voting method; and I’d argue that even the options would be better.
(Re 2016: I’ve done an “MRP” analysis of high-quality cardinal-rated polling data on the eve of the 2016 election. This uses hierarchical logistic regression, which I was able to control for gender, age, income, race, education, region, state, as well as the two largest interactions between those 7 variables. My own preferences very much aside, I can say with high confidence that Bernie would have won if there had been a last-minute change to an improved voting method with 9 candidates. If the entire campaign had been run under those conditions, I can’t of course say what would have happened.)
I don’t have much advice, but I enjoy the recursion of running into preference-aggregation problems (in deciding whether popular-but-imperfect improvements should be fought for or holding out for better) while trying to change voting mechanisms.
Yeah, that’s definitely cute… but less so, when it’s your life.
Coalition-building and group decision-making is everyone’s life. The fact that there’s no good answer and many/most other participants are approaching it from a power + comfort position rather than a truth + best-outcome perspective is frustrating at all levels.
I’ll admit that I don’t have a lot of hope that those who gained power in a system will allow that system to change out from under them, nor do I have much faith in any system, no matter how complex, that gives equal weight to the opinions of an 18-yea-old 85-IQ dropout as to a 40-year old successful 120-IQ manager.
Getting people to vote better and to help solve the coordination and communication problems seems like it can improve FPTP to the point of tolerability, and is much more likely than changing the US constitution. But my basic fear is that the outcomes we get today aren’t that actually that far off from the outcomes these semi-evolved house-apes want.
You’re of course right that even the best voting method doesn’t solve the “semi-evolved house-ape” problem. But I’d argue that the perverse incentives of FPTP give an outcome substantially worse than that. Neither Bush nor Trump (nor, probably, Clinton) would have won with a better voting method; and I’d argue that even the options would be better.
(Re 2016: I’ve done an “MRP” analysis of high-quality cardinal-rated polling data on the eve of the 2016 election. This uses hierarchical logistic regression, which I was able to control for gender, age, income, race, education, region, state, as well as the two largest interactions between those 7 variables. My own preferences very much aside, I can say with high confidence that Bernie would have won if there had been a last-minute change to an improved voting method with 9 candidates. If the entire campaign had been run under those conditions, I can’t of course say what would have happened.)