selylindi

Karma: 640

selylindi 11 Apr 2022 3:08 UTC
2 points
on: Ideal governance (for companies, countries and more)
The r/achipelago subreddit is quite small but exists for hobbyists to share designs for alternative political systems and to consider the effects the alternatives would have. Most of what’s there right now is about electoral systems rather than full institutional structures. Some posts include links to resources, such as one of my favorites, The Electoral System Design Handbook, which describes case studies of several countries and the typical good and bad effects of different design decisions.
“Ideal governance” depends on what ideals you’re aiming for, of course. There have been proposed improvements to futarchy such as this one, which picks utilitarianism as its explicit ideal. An explicitly virtue theorist option could be to modernize Plato’s Republic instead. Granted, these are extreme examples. For more sober-minded investigation into ideal governance, you’d of course want to start with criteria that are well-defined and pragmatic, rather than broad philosophical or ideological traditions.

selylindi 25 Feb 2019 0:47 UTC
9 points
on: “Other people are wrong” vs “I am right”
Regarding the title problem,

I have historically been too hasty to go from “other people seem very wrong on this topic” to “I am right on this topic”

I think it’s helpful here to switch from binary wrong/right language to continuous language. We can talk of degrees of wrongness and rightness.

Consider people who are smarter than those they usually argue with, in the specific sense of “smarter” where we mean they produce more-correct, better-informed, or more-logical arguments and objections. These people probably have some (binarily) wrong ideas. The people they usually argue with, however, are likely to be (by degrees) wronger.

When the other people are wronger, the smart person is in fact righter. So I think, as far as you were thinking in terms of degrees of wrongness and rightness, it would be perfectly fair for you to have had the sense you did. It wouldn’t have been a hasty generalization. And if you stopped to consider whether there might exist views that are even righter still, you’d probably conclude there are.

selylindi 1 Jan 2019 21:31 UTC
18 points
in reply to: ESRogs’s comment on: Contrite Strategies and The Need For Standards
Yes. Page 287 of the paper affirms your interpretation: “REMORSE does not exploit suckers, i.e. AllC players, whereas PAVLOV does.”
The OP has a mistake:
Remorse is more aggressive; unlike cTFT, it can attack cooperators
Neither Remorse nor cTFT will attack cooperators.
What links here?
- Zack_M_Davis's comment on Contrite Strategies and The Need For Standards by sarahconstantin (25 Nov 2019 2:29 UTC; 4 points)

selylindi 1 Jan 2019 21:17 UTC
3 points
on: The Pavlov Strategy
If Pavlov accidentally defects against TFTWF, the result is
D/C → D/C → D/D → C/D → D/D → C/C,
Can you explain this sequence? I’m puzzled by it as it doesn’t follow the definitions that I know about. My understanding of TFTWF is that it is “Tit for Tat with a small randomised possibility of forgiving a defaulter by cooperating anyway.” What seems to be happening in the above sequence is Pavlov on the left and, on the right, TFT with a delay of 1.

selylindi 19 Oct 2018 5:28 UTC
1 point
on: Complete Class: Consequentialist Foundations
in Critch’s framework, agents bet their voting stake rather than money! The more bets you win, the more control you have over the system; the more bets you lose, the less your preferences will be taken into account.
If I may be a one-note piano (as it’s all I’ve talked about lately on LW), this sounds extremely similar to the “ophelimist democracy” I was pushing. I’ve since streamlined the design and will try to publish a functional tool for it online next year, and then aim to get some small organizations to test it out.
In brief, the goal was to design a voting system with a feedback loop to keep it utilitarian in the sense you’ve discussed above, but also utilitarian in the Bentham/Sidgwick sense. So that you don’t have to read the linked blog post, the basic steps in voting in an organization run on “ophelimist democracy” are as follows, with the parts that sound like Critch’s framework in italics:
1. Propose goals.
2. Vote on the goals/values and use the results to determine the relative value of each goal.
3. Propose policy ideas.
4. Bet on how well each policy will satisfy each goal.
5. Every bet is also automatically turned into a vote. (This is used to evade collusive betting.)
6. The policy with highest vote total * weighted bet value is enacted.
7. People are periodically polled regarding how satisfied they are with the goals, and the results are used to properly assign weights to people’s bets.

selylindi 19 Oct 2018 4:43 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: An optimization process for democratic organizations
score voting is immune to the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem
I was basing this off the description in Wikipedia; please correct that entry if you think I was in error. As of this time it still explicitly states, “While the scope of this theorem is limited to ordinal voting, Gibbard’s theorem is more general, in that it deals with processes of collective decision that may not be ordinal: for example, voting systems where voters assign grades to candidates.”
any proportional method is subject to free riding strategy. And since this system is designed to be proportional across time as well as seats, free riding strategy would be absolutely pervasive, and I suspect it would take the form of deliberately voting for the craziest possible option.
What does that mean? If being the “craziest possible option” means it gets selected as the most preferred option regardless and has sharply bad outcomes that you secretly knew would happen, then having voted for it, you’re strictly worse off in future voting power than if you had voted against it. Alternatively, if it means that very few other voters vote for that option, then that option definitionally isn’t going to win, and so there is strictly nothing to gain in future voting power from having voted for it. So on the contrary, honest voting, as a strategy, dominates either interpretation of your suggested variant of a free rider strategy.
it’s a nonstarter politically
This is rich irony coming from Jameson Quinn himself. :D In any case, your comment here is certainly appreciated due to your expertise, even though I currently believe the comment was factually in error on both substantive points.

selylindi 6 Jul 2018 23:49 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: An optimization process for democratic organizations
Regarding exploitability by well-funded and well-connected entities—I’m not sure how to tell without an empirical test. My understanding is that research into funding of electoral campaigns doesn’t show the funding as having any effect on vote totals. If that is accurate, then I’d expect it’s still true under alternate voting methods.

selylindi 6 Jul 2018 23:44 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: An optimization process for democratic organizations
Fully agreed—the intention is to start with small-scale clubs and parts of private organizations that are open to experimenting.

selylindi 5 Jul 2018 21:08 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Aiyen’s comment on: An optimization process for democratic organizations
increased voting power given to those whose bills are not passed risks giving undue power to stupid or inhumane voters.
True. Equalizing the influence of all parties (over the long term at least) doesn’t just risk giving such people power; it outright does give them power. At the time of the design, I justified it on the grounds that (1) it forces either compromise or power-sharing, (2) I haven’t found a good way to technocratically distinguish humane-but-dumb voters from inhumane-but-smart ones, or rightly-reviled inhumane minorities from wrongly-reviled humane minorities, and (3) the worry that if a group’s interests are excluded, then they have no stake in the system, and so they have reason to fight against the system in a costly way. Do any alternatives come to your mind?
Dishonest forecasting, especially predicting poor results to try to kill a bill, remains tempting, especially for voters with one or two pet issues.
Indeed. I spent a great deal of time and effort investigating this for possible solutions. Haven’t found any yet, though. It’s the only attack vector that I know for sure would work.
While giving direct power to the people might help avoid much of the associated corruption and wasteful signalling, it risks giving increased weight to people without the requisite knowledge and intelligence to make good policy.
I may have been unduly influenced by my anarchist youth: I’m more worried about the negative effects of concentrating power than about the negative effects of distributing it. Is there any objective way to compare those effects, however, that isn’t quite similar to how Ophelimo tries to maximize public satisfaction with their own goals?

selylindi 5 Jul 2018 20:50 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Sable’s comment on: An optimization process for democratic organizations
Thanks for your thoughts. Your questions are quite valid but I’m inclined to punt on them, as you’ll see:
For #3, it depends on the group. If a government were to use it, they could provide access via terminals in public libraries, schools, and other government facilities. If a private group were to use it, they’d probably just exclude the poor.
For #4, 6, 7, 8: It’s intended for use in any democratic organization for the equivalent of ordinary legislation and bylaws, but not intended to replace their constitutions or founding documents. If there are some laws/bylaws that the group doesn’t have authority to make or change (like on citizenship/membership), they would need a separate method of striking those down.
For #5, if the data is lost, they start afresh. They’d lose any prediction scores they’d gained, but if voters can repeat their good predictions, the problem is mitigated, and if they can’t repeat their good predictions, they don’t deserve their old scores.
I justify “punting” because the app is intended to be customized by many clubs and organizations. It doesn’t feel like that’s merely handwaving the hard parts, but perhaps it is.

selylindi 5 Jul 2018 15:35 UTC
2 points
on: An optimization process for democratic organizations
I’m seeking critique of this design. It combines SSC- and LessWrong-influenced thinking about optimization processes and utilitarianism with a long personal history of dabbling in groups that want to reform electoral processes. In my unquestionably rose-tinted judgment (it’s my baby!), I think Ophelimo has much in it that could be desired by everyone from the far right to the far left.
If there’s an error, I want to correct it. (Or to give up on it quickly, if there’s no way to correct it). If there’s an important criticism or technical limitation to address, that’s important, too.
Very-short version: it’s futarchy but based on public satisfaction rather than money, using storable score votes for perfect proportionality.

An optimization process for democratic organizations

selylindi5 Jul 2018 15:34 UTC

9 points

14 comments1 min readLW link

(adelaybeingreborn.wordpress.com)

selylindi 9 Nov 2017 2:19 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Moloch’s Toolbox (2/2)
This means that the organization with the best machine learning algorithm to estimate the bill score gets a lot of political power. … I would expect a few big organisations to arrise that have heavy machine learning capabilities and that hold the power about bill making.
It’s true I omitted the possibility of expending votes at a Vickrey auction level instead of an actual-bid level, so I grant the possibility that, if only one side had good polling data (implausible as that is), then they might buy votes a small fraction more cheaply. However, the “proportional influence” criterion is where most of the power of the system is. - i.e. How would one side actually increase their power long term, since the redistribution of spent votes eliminates their advantage after a single bill, which could then be cheaply repealed by the opposition? And since they’d still have to be maximizing the totals from the polling, would successfully gaining strategic advantage over bills have any downsides?
This looks like short-term effects of the bill become more important than it’s long-term effects.
Mostly true, but missing two significant refinements: (1) What actually matters is the effects of the entire legal code, to which the most recent bill ought to have made at most a small adjustment. (2) It’s the task of the questions to ask about short-term judgments of long-term effects. No system can select for long-term effects that aren’t predictable until the long-term has already arrived.
In general the system is likely sufficiently intransparent …
Entirely fair, though I’d propose that transparency is not a critical difference between a system like this, that can only be fully understood by people who read up on it, versus a system like the U.S. election laws, that can’t be fully understood even by people who read up on it. The U.S. election laws do have the appearance of simplicity as long as one explains First Past The Post and nothing more.

selylindi 9 Nov 2017 1:58 UTC
3 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Moloch’s Toolbox (2/2)
Er, is that agreement or an objection? It reads like an objection to me, though that could be the lack of body language. But the content agrees with the post, which explicitly states at both the beginning and the end that the system is designed to start very small and then grow.

selylindi 8 Nov 2017 6:49 UTC
3 points
on: Moloch’s Toolbox (2/2)
SIMPLICIO: But then what, on your view, is the better way?
I’m not sure if I’m more Simplicio or more the Visitor, but … the political side of it doesn’t seem that hard to fix. At least, I’ve been advocating a set of improvements to futarchy that address all the political-structure inadequacies discussed here, as well as several others not discussed here. I know it’s too much to hope that it’s free of such inadequacies … though I still hope, because I explicitly designed it with the intent to be free of them. So I decided to write up a description of it suitable for this crowd: Ophelia, a weapon against Moloch.
Since political inadequacy seems to underlie many other types of inadequacy, maybe I should reconsider making an alpha version Ophelia app. In the meantime, if any of you wish to criticize flaws in the idea, or point me to a better idea, please do.

selylindi 5 Feb 2017 0:47 UTC
2 points
on: Why is the surprisingly popular answer correct?
In the Nature Podcast from January 26th, the author of the paper, Dražen Prelec, said that he developed the hypothesis for this paper by means of some fairly involved math, but that he discovered afterwards he needed only a simple syllogism of a sort that Aristotle would have recognized. Unfortunately, the interviewer didn’t ask him what the syllogism was. I spent ~20 minutes googling to satisfy my curiosity, but I found nothing.

If you happen to know what syllogism he meant, I’d be thrilled to hear it. Also it would suit the headline here well.

selylindi 14 Jan 2017 17:59 UTC
0 points
on: Triple or nothing paradox
Anyway, please dissolve my confusion.

I think the most fun and empirical way to dissolve this confusion would be to hold a tourney. Remember the Prisoner’s Dilemma competitions that were famously won, not by complex algorithms, but by simple variations on Tit-for-Tat? If somebody can host, the rules would be something like this:
1. Players can submit scripts which take only one input (their current money) and produce only one output (whether to accept the bet again). The host has infinite money since it’s just virtual.
2. Each script gets run N times where N isn’t told to the players in advance. The script with the highest winnings is declared Interesting.

selylindi 17 Sep 2016 15:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: 2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis: Part Four (Politics, Calibration & Probability, Futurology, Charity & Effective Altruism)

2) On political opinions, HBD is about an objective, falsifiable, scientifically mesureable characteristic of the world, whereas the other opinions are opinions.

That’s not how I interpreted the item. This was a political quiz, so to my mind it’s not about “Does X exist?”, but “Do you favor more X than the status quo?” For example, liberal abortion laws exist, and feminism exists, and higher taxes exist. Similarly, HBD may exist depending on its precise definition. But what’s politically relevant is whether you favor more liberal abortion laws, more feminism, more tax increases, more HBD. So it’s quite likely that a substantial fraction of quiz-takers interpreted being “pro-HBD” as being simply an NRXish way of saying “pro-racist-policies”.

selylindi 20 Jul 2016 1:01 UTC
0 points
in reply to: entirelyuseless’s comment on: The AI in Mary’s room
I’m under the impression that the empirical fact about this is exactly the opposite:

“Within a week to a few months after surgery, the children could match felt objects to their visual counterparts.”

i.e. not immediate, but rather requiring the development of experience

selylindi 25 May 2016 2:06 UTC
1 point
on: The AI in Mary’s room
Let’s take the AI example in a slightly different direction: Consider an AI built as a neural net with many input lines and output effectors, and a few well-chosen reward signals. One of the input lines goes to a Red Detector; the other input lines go to many other types of sensors but none of them distinguish red things from non-red things. This AI then gets named Mary and put into a black and white room to learn about optics, color theory, and machine learning. (Also assume this AI has no ability to alter its own design.)

Speculation: At the moment when this AI Mary steps out of the room into the colorful world, it cannot have any immediate perception of red (or any other color), because its neural net has not yet been trained to make any use of the sensory data corresponding to redness (or any other color). Analogously to how a young child is taught to distinguish a culturally-specific set of colors, or to how an adult can’t recognize lapiz versus cerulean without practice, our AI cannot so much as distinguish red from blue until adequate training of the neural net has occurred.

If that line of reasoning is correct, then here’s the conclusion: Mary does not learn anything new (perceptually) until she learns something new (behaviorally). Paradox dismissed.

selylindi

An op­ti­miza­tion pro­cess for demo­cratic organizations

An optimization process for democratic organizations