Re:What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?
by godelski on Thursday June 24, 2021 @02:07PM
(#27621608)
For the most part, yeah, Condorcet methods aren't that hard. But also consider who you and I are. We're talking on a very niche form where there's an expectation that everyone here can program and do calculus. We are not the average people.
But what I do want to stress is that cardinal systems are _easier_ than condorcet. I actually use approval frequently (it is also extremely natural). One case is how to solve where to eat as a group. It is infinitely scalable and you can just keep adding places as you think of them. If you reach a unanimous decision you stop, if you exhaust the list you take the maximal (baring strong preferences, which makes it kinda score but this works out naturally). I think from this example it should be pretty clear that it is much harder to do this sort of voting using any ranking system (nor is it scalable and is very computationally expensive to add new items).
It is often missed, especially by nerds (I fall in this camp too, I used to prefer Condorcet over cardinal), how important the transparency aspect of the voting system is. Arizona nailed the lid shut for me. If we're looking at it we're really not losing much VSE by using STAR over RP, but we do also gain a lot on every other metric (including spoilage, ease, transparency, and resistance to strategy). VSE isn't the only metric that matters and we shouldn't make large sacrifices in other metrics to gain a minute optimization in it.
> while in an cardinal system an unscored person would have to be counted as having an actual score.
This isn't necessarily true. You can modify cardinal ballots just like you do ordinal (the exact example you gave is not the theoretically perfect ordinal so I'm not sure why you compare to theoretically perfect cardinal). In practice people don't rate every candidate. In ranking you could effectively say that unranked candidates have a minimal score (and you are able to reduce the number of rounds through this, but comes with added complexity).
As to making the scale larger, yes this is correct that an infinitely large scale better encodes information. But there is a balance between that and simplicity. 10 is extremely effective. 5 is more than enough. But even 2 (approve/disapprove) seems to work out pretty well (aka "good enough").
But what I do want to stress is that cardinal systems are _easier_ than condorcet. I actually use approval frequently (it is also extremely natural). One case is how to solve where to eat as a group. It is infinitely scalable and you can just keep adding places as you think of them. If you reach a unanimous decision you stop, if you exhaust the list you take the maximal (baring strong preferences, which makes it kinda score but this works out naturally). I think from this example it should be pretty clear that it is much harder to do this sort of voting using any ranking system (nor is it scalable and is very computationally expensive to add new items).
It is often missed, especially by nerds (I fall in this camp too, I used to prefer Condorcet over cardinal), how important the transparency aspect of the voting system is. Arizona nailed the lid shut for me. If we're looking at it we're really not losing much VSE by using STAR over RP, but we do also gain a lot on every other metric (including spoilage, ease, transparency, and resistance to strategy). VSE isn't the only metric that matters and we shouldn't make large sacrifices in other metrics to gain a minute optimization in it.
> while in an cardinal system an unscored person would have to be counted as having an actual score.
This isn't necessarily true. You can modify cardinal ballots just like you do ordinal (the exact example you gave is not the theoretically perfect ordinal so I'm not sure why you compare to theoretically perfect cardinal). In practice people don't rate every candidate. In ranking you could effectively say that unranked candidates have a minimal score (and you are able to reduce the number of rounds through this, but comes with added complexity).
As to making the scale larger, yes this is correct that an infinitely large scale better encodes information. But there is a balance between that and simplicity. 10 is extremely effective. 5 is more than enough. But even 2 (approve/disapprove) seems to work out pretty well (aka "good enough").