Jameson Quinn 24 Jan 2020 21:05 UTC
28 points
in reply to: Bucky’s comment on: 2018 Review: Voting Results!
It’s far worse than that.
Even without the off-by-one bug, if you were able to vote on all the nominees, then the most efficient use of points would have been to make your average vote as close to 0 as possible. For instance, imagine there were 50 nominees, and one voter rated 5 of them at 10 to use their 500 points. If instead, they rated each of those 5 at 9, and the other 45 at −1, that would be 405+45=450 points, with exactly the same overall impact on relative standings. (In algebraic terms, this is a simple quadratic decomposition, akin to the fact that mean squared error equals bias squared plus variance).
It’s clear from the vote results that the average voter did not ensure mean-0 and thus probably left some voting power on the table. The average of all votes is substantially positive.
This is even more “irrational” for those voters who were also authors of one or more of the works. Such voters were not allowed to vote on their own works, but could have helped their works win by voting all other works down. In other words, the incentive would be to have their average vote be negative, not just zer0.
I myself subtracted 2 from all my default-calculated votes for the above two reasons. Frankly, this 2-point difference (reduced to 1 in many cases by the off-by-one bug correction) was less than I considered selfishly rational, but I didn’t want to take too much advantage of such “underhanded” strategy. Looking at the voting results, I don’t think it’s likely that anybody else but me did this.

Jameson Quinn 12 Dec 2019 17:49 UTC
28 points
on: A voting theory primer for rationalists
As the author, I think this has generally stood the test of time pretty well. There are various changes I’d make if I were doing a rewrite today; but overall, these are minor.
Aside from those generally-minor changes, I think that the key message of this piece remains important to the purpose of Less Wrong. That is to say: making collective decisions, or (equivalently) statements about collective values, is a tough problem; it’s important for rationalists; and studying existing theory on this topic is useful.
Here are the specific changes I’d make if I were going to rewrite this today:
- The most significant change is that I’d probably start off with multi-winner voting theory, because I’ve come to believe that it is clearly more important than single-winner theory overall.
- I would avoid quick-decaying cultural references such as the “American Chopper” meme. There are also a few passages where the language is noticeably awkward and could be rewritten for clarity.
- Unlike my attitude in this piece, I’ve come to accept, although not to like, the “Rank Choice Voting” terminology.
- I am no longer on the board of the CES; my term ended. I still endorse their work, though I wish they’d do more on multi-winner reform rather than focusing so strongly on single-winner methods.
- Today, I wouldn’t be quite so dismissive of the issues with asset voting. Though minor and probably resolvable in practice, they are actually quite thorny from a philosophical point of view.
- On the topic of comparing multi-winner methods, and which ones are best, I have substantially more that I could say today. In fact, I plan to write this new material up as a new article in this series. In the context of this article, though, I wouldn’t fully explain that new material, but rather just briefly outline it. Essentially: I have developed a metric for comparing outcomes of different voting methods. This metric is not directly utilitarian, but I have arguments that suggest it is among the “best known strategy-robust estimators of the difference from the optimal utilitarian outcome”.
- The hashtag “#ProRep” seems to have won over “#PropRep” as a way of tagging the topic of proportional representation.
- I did not in fact finish the “playable exploration” that I talked about in the penultimate paragraph. But I did, just three days ago, finish my doctorate (defend my thesis) in statistics, so I may end up having time to finally make that playable exploration soon. Certainly, if I can get funded with at least $45K for around 6 months of work, I will finish that and other productive voting theory work that I think would be well worth the money.

Jameson Quinn 21 Dec 2019 17:14 UTC
24 points
on: (Feedback Request) Quadratic voting for the 2018 Review
I am generally very skeptical about quadratic voting. In my opinion:
1. The nice calculus identities that it satisfied are optimal under an assumption of individual strategic voting
2. There are some kinds of elections where people are mostly motivated to be strategic, and others where they’re mostly motivated to be honest. Basically, strategy tends to happen when there are factions, “us vs. them”; otherwise, people don’t bother.
3. But when there are factions, that means there will tend to be group-level strategic voting. And QV is no more robust, and possibly more vulnerable, to group-level strategy than other voting methods.
4. There are ways to patch QV to “fix” (3); but, as with many voting method patches, you create 2 new problems for every 1 you fix.
At a meta level: overall, my level of confidence in each of those points above is not particularly high. Say, on the order of 70% confident in each, and they’re roughly independent. So that would mean that a chain of logic that relied on all four being true would only be roughly 25% reliable. But I suspect that for QV to be a bad idea, it’s not necessary that all 4 of them are perfectly true; “most of them are mostly true” would be enough. So, say, 50% confidence that it’s a bad idea. If your prior was 75% that it’s a good idea, and if you trust me completely, you’d now think that it’s 37.5% a good idea. (Which might be good enough to be worth a try, given that failure in this case wouldn’t be so very bad.)
Also meta: Honestly, I don’t think it’s too arrogant to say that I doubt there’s more than a handful of people in the world more qualified to opine on this than I am.
Gotta go now, but I’ll respond on this more later, with an actual suggestion.

Jameson Quinn 12 Apr 2018 18:32 UTC
23 points
on: A voting theory primer for rationalists
I haven’t mentioned futarchy (“markets for predictions, votes for values”) at all here. Futarchy, of course, would not be classed as a voting method in my typology; it’s something bigger than even than my concept of a voting system. I think that the main useful thing I can say about futarch is: if you’re going to spend energy on it, you should spend some energy on understanding lower-level voting methods too.
ETA: I guess I think I can expand on that a bit. The issue is that when you embed one system inside another one, there’s some inevitable bleed-over in terms of incentives. For this meta-reason, as well as for the simple reason of direct applicability, one lesson from voting theory that I think would apply to futarchy is that “patching a problem can make it worse, because strategic outcomes can be the ‘opposite’ of unstrategic ones.” That’s an intuition that for me was hard-won, and I wouldn’t expect it to be easy for you to learn it just by hearing it. If that’s true and you still want to learn it, spend some time thinking about honest and strategic outcomes in various voting methods in the five levels of pathology I mentioned above. The playable exploration I mention at the end will substantially focus on these ideas, in a way I hope will be visually and interactively easy to digest.

Upvotes, knowledge, stocks, and flows

Jameson Quinn10 May 2018 14:18 UTC

21 points

13 comments1 min readLW link

Jameson Quinn 17 Jan 2021 16:15 UTC
20 points
on: What is going on in the world?
Strongly disagree about the “great filter” point.
Any sane understanding of our prior on how many alien civilizations we should have expected to see is structured (or at least, has much of its structure that is) more or less like the Drake equation: a series of terms, each with more or less prior uncertainty around it, that multiply together to get an outcome. Furthermore, that point is, to some degree, fractal; the terms themselves can be — often and substantially, though not always and completely — understood as the products of sub-terms.
By the Central Limit Theorem, as the number of such terms and sub-terms increases, this prior approaches a log-normal distribution; that is, if you take the inverse (proportional to the amount of work we’d expect to have to do to find the first extraterrestrial civilization), the mean much higher than the median, dominated by a long upper tail. That point applies not just to the prior, but to the posterior after conditioning on evidence. (In fact, as we come to have less uncertainty about the basic structure of the Drake-type equation — which terms it comprises, even though we may still have substantial uncertainty about the values of those terms — the argument that the posterior must be approximately log-normal only grows stronger than it was for the prior.)
In this situation, given the substantial initial uncertainty about the value of the terms associated with steps that have already happened, the evidence we can draw from the Great Silence about any steps in the future is very, very weak.
As a statistics PhD, experienced professionally with Bayesian inference, my confidence on the above is pretty high. That is, I would be willing to bet on this at basically any odds, as long as the potential payoff was high enough to compensate me for the time it would take to do due diligence on the bet (that is, make sure I wasn’t going to get “cider in my ear”, as Sky Masterson says). That’s not to say that I’d bet strongly against any future “Great Filter”; I’d just bet strongly against the idea that a sufficiently well-informed observer would conclude, post-hoc, that the bullet point above about the “great filter” was at all well-justified based on the evidence implicitly cited.

Jameson Quinn 26 Dec 2019 17:42 UTC
19 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: (Feedback Request) Quadratic voting for the 2018 Review
Honestly, it’s harder to come up with a better suggestion than I would have thought. This is nearly the ideal use case for quadratic voting:
- Reasonably engaged, and very nerdy, voting population
- Relatively high mutual respect and common values; relatively low factionalism
- The meta-goal is actually as much increasing overall engagement and building community, as it is choosing the optimal winner set.
- QV is a shiny new thing, and the math behind it is cool.
- The very definition of “ideal winner set” isn’t well-specified. Do you want proportionality? That is, if there is a 30% faction that loves things other people hate, should they decide 30% of the winner set, or should the algorithm try to find good compromise options that everyone can live with but nobody loves, or something else?
Overall, without hearing more about what your real goals are with this, I guess my best suggestions would be:
- Include options to vote “score voting style” (bounded ratings) or “quadratic style” (ratings with bounded euclidean norm). I’d suggest scaling the SV votes so that their average euclidean norm is the same as that of the QV votes. (The strategy in this case is relatively obvious, but the strategic leverage isn’t too high, and the stakes are relatively low, so I wouldn’t worry too much.)
- For the QV ballots, draw visualizations: spirals made up of successive right triangles, so that the first rating is an adjacent side, each further rating is an opposite side, and the root-sum-squares is the final hypotenuse.
If you did want a proportional method, I’d probably suggest something like E Pluribus Hugo with quadratically-scaled ballots behind the continuous part. That is actually not too too complicated (voters who didn’t want to get too complicated would be free to vote approval-style), and proportional, and quite robust to strategy.
What links here?
- Voting Phase UI: Aggregating common comments? by Raemon (31 Dec 2019 3:48 UTC; 9 points)

Jameson Quinn 3 Jun 2018 13:31 UTC
19 points
on: Toolbox-thinking and Law-thinking
This doesn’t pass my ITT for anti-law-thinking. The step where law thinking goes wrong is when it assumed that there exists a map that is the territory, and thus systematically underestimates the discrepancies involved in (for instance) optimizing for min Euclidean distance.

I realize that this post addresses that directly, but then it spends a lot of energy on something else which isn’t the real problem in my book.

Jameson Quinn 17 Nov 2018 15:27 UTC
15 points
on: Mandatory Obsessions
I’m an obsessive about voting theory, and have been for over 20 years now. As time passes and my knowledge deepens, I find that while I still feel “this is really important and people don’t pay enough attention to it”, I feel less and less that “this is MORE important than whatever people are talking about here and now, and it should be my job to make them change the subject”. Obviously I think this is a healthy change for me and my social graces, but it also means that you are more likely to hear about voting theory from a younger, shallower version of me than you are from me.
I don’t know how to solve that problem. It’s one thing to be immune enough to evangelists so that you can keep a balance of caring across multiple issues, as discussed in the post above; it’s another harder thing to be immune enough yet still curious enough to find your way past the proselytizers to the calmer, more-mature non-evangelist obsessives.

Jameson Quinn 3 Jun 2018 4:49 UTC
13 points
on: Hero Licensing
That was surprisingly good. I’ve never let my inner Pat Modesto be the boss, but I’ve never tried to kick them out either. This makes me consider whether I should. Which is a lot more than I get out of most of Eliezer’s writing.

And here’s what kicking Pat out would let me say: I think that I’ve designed at least 5 voting methods that are each the best solution currently in the world to the problem it solves, and at least 3 of those problems are at least 25% likely to be adequately-posed (including pragmatic considerations) and important (fixing would be roughly order of one-off value of $1e12, with SD 1 in the exponent). I think that if you find this sufficiently plausible you should contact me.

Jameson Quinn 22 Jul 2020 17:37 UTC
12 points
on: Swiss Political System: More than You ever Wanted to Know (II.)
Thank you.
Bit of trivia on Switzerland and voting methods: I’ve heard (but have not seen primary sources for) that in 1798 the briefly-independent city-state of Geneva used the median-based voting method we anachronously know as “Bucklin” after its US-based reinventor. This was at the (posthmous) suggestion of the Marquis de Condorcet. Notably that suggestion was not to use what we know of as “Condorcet” voting, as that would have been logistically too complex for the time.
Also, if I’m not mistaken, Swiss municipal councils use a biproportional voting method; one of the only such methods in public use.
In other words, Switzerland, like Sweden, is a place for interesting voting methods.

Jameson Quinn 15 Jan 2020 19:03 UTC
12 points
on: Player vs. Character: A Two-Level Model of Ethics
“Epistemic Status: Confident”?
That’s surprising to me.
I skipped past that before reading, and read it as fun, loose speculation. I liked it, as that.
But I wouldn’t have thought it deserves “confident”.
I’m not sure if I should give it less credence or more, now.
I’m confused.

Jameson Quinn 14 Jan 2020 23:46 UTC
12 points
on: A LessWrong Crypto Autopsy
When this article came out, I put a bit of money into alternate cryptocurrencies that I thought might have upside. They are now worth less than I invested.
I think it’s good to review how you did in the past, but it’s important not to overlearn specific lessons. In retrospect, I think that this article should have put more emphasis on that point.