Dancing Lion Chocolate in Manchester, NH makes an excellent strawberry-chocolate truffle. No idea how they do it, but it is well worth a visit. The strawberry-chocolate truffle is included in their chocolate service for two or more.
Thomas Colthurst
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Nice post! I think though that there is an important class of exceptions to scope matching, which I’ll refer to as “well-engineered systems”. Think of for example the “The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay” described in the Oliver Wendell Holmes poem where all of the parts are designed to have exactly the same rate of failure. Real world systems can only approach that ideal, but they can get close enough that their most frequent error modes would fail the scope matching heuristic.
I bring this up in particular because I think that crime rates might fall into that category. Human societies do spend a bunch of resources on minimizing crime, so it isn’t totally implausible that they succeed at keeping the most common crime causes low, low enough that most of the variation in the overall crime rate is driven by localized (in time and space) one-off factors like lead.
Yet Another Covid Risk Calculator
Chad Ellis wrote a good blog about negotiation for many years at http://negotiatewithchad.blogspot.com/.
First of all, many thanks to everyone in this thread: Gunnar for raising the issue, Ninety-Three for the concrete example, and kbear for testing whether it made a difference in long term outcomes.
I wrote some Python code to simulate three different situations:
a) Wasted Vote Refund with no strategic voting,
b) Wasted Vote Refund with one member of the majority strategically voting, and
c) Wasted Vote Refund with as many members of the majority strategically voting as possible.
I then ran these simulations for every possibility of a 100 voter community for 1000 elections.
Here are the results: (a) gave the right proportion every time. For (b), the only difference was for a 99 person majority, which won 991 elections instead of 990. For (c), there was no difference up to a majority of 55, a one election difference up to 85, a two election difference up to 90, and so forth, all the way up to the 99 person majority winning all 1000 elections (when they should have only won 99).
I admit this surprised me, because I guess I had been thinking that a two party situation with strategic voting would be akin to a three party situation (with the strategic voters as the additional party), and we know that in case, each of the three parties wins only the expected percentage of the time. But that analogy only really serves as a lower bound, since it ignores the fact that the strategic voters can merge their votes with the non-strategic voters when it is in their interest.
I also ran one additional simulation: (d) Wasted Vote Refund with maximal strategic voting but no “borrowing”. Without borrowing, winners of an election will often have to go into “debt” and carry over negative vote totals into the next election(s). The good news is that this eliminates any advantage to strategic voting. The bad news is that negative vote totals come with a bunch of headaches in terms of real world administration and perception. So we are stuck in a pick your poison situation, and honestly, a small 1% advantage to strategic voting might be the more palatable option.