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(Message started by: gitanas on Jun 22nd, 2016, 11:43pm)
Title: Brexit
Post by gitanas on Jun 22nd, 2016, 11:43pm
So referendum starts today. What do you think Britain will vote for and what results will we have?
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by towr on Jun 23rd, 2016, 11:24am
To quote/paraphrase Margaret Thatcher: "referendums are a splendid weapon for demagogues and dictators". Not that I'm a Thatcher fan, but she wasn't wrong all the time.
You only need to look at the "arguments" (and I use the term lightly) on both sides of the debate. The truth is nowhere to be found.
I suppose the one saving grace is that people have at least a vague idea about what they're actually voting on, as opposed to the ridiculous referendum we (NL) had about the trade-agreement with Ukraine.

Maybe for such decisions, people should have to write down or tick boxes for all the reasons why they decide one way or another, and if those reasons are factually incorrect, then the vote is deemed invalid.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rmsgrey on Jun 24th, 2016, 6:45am
~52% exit. On the bright side, 48% of us get to spend the next decade or so saying "we told you so"...
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by Grimbal on Jun 28th, 2016, 8:24am
In democracy you can hear "mock".
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rmsgrey on Oct 7th, 2016, 4:30pm
Recent article in the Guardian points out that both Leave and Remain campaigns combined had their entire budgets covered by about 20 donors total, including a suspiciously new UK-based corporation that may or may not have been a legitimate funding source...
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rloginunix on Oct 8th, 2016, 8:27am
Pattern recognition. Is what we do.

UK is not the only country whose political landscape the man, having about two billion of US dollars worth sprinkled across offshore banks, is trying to alter to his perceived advantage - in US he is revealing the names, personal emails and personal cell phone numbers of the members of the National Democratic Convention just in time for the upcoming November elections. How convenient and what a coincidence (full Journal article (http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-blames-russia-for-recent-hacks-1475870371)).

(not to mention the gruesome fact that while his daughter lives in towr's country, he kills 193 of its citizens by shooting down an innocent passenger jet out of the sky)

I think that the biggest defence weapon in an arsenal of a democratic country is exactly the concept that his own country never had in the past, does not now and never will in the future - freedom of speech and freedom of thought:

- investigate
- analyze
- publish
- publish
- publish

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by towr on Oct 9th, 2016, 2:45am

on 10/08/16 at 08:27:47, rloginunix wrote:
I think that the biggest defence weapon in an arsenal of a democratic country is [...] freedom of speech and freedom of thought:
[...]
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Looking at the political landscape, I can't help but comment that it's a terrible shame that most people seem to take it only as a freedom to bullsh*t. Brexit: bullsh*t, bullsh*t, bullsh*t; US election: bullsh*t, bullsh*t, bullsh*t.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by JiNbOtAk on Nov 9th, 2016, 11:32pm

on 10/09/16 at 02:45:10, towr wrote:
... US election: bullsh*t, bullsh*t, bullsh*t.


I thought the consensus was it's the opinion polls that's bullsh*t.

On that note, what do you guys think about those who protest against Trump being elected president ?
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by towr on Nov 10th, 2016, 9:38am
Well, 60M out of 300M Americans voted for Trump. And of those 60M many didn't vote Trump because they wanted him as a president, but because they hated the alternative more.
So, yeah. As far as democracy goes it's ridiculous.
The whole process is ridiculous. For example if you look at the popular vote, Hillary would have won (barely). And then you've got gerrymandering, where the sitting politician redraw the maps of the district so they'll get reelected. They make it more difficult to vote for people that would vote for the opposite party. And they create laws targeted at locking up, and taking away the voting right, of whole groups of people.
So yeah, f*cked up.

It's probably pointless to protest Trump's presidency, but I find it entirely understandable.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rloginunix on Nov 11th, 2016, 7:18am
Disclosure: though I could, I did not vote; not dabbling in politix in any way, shape or form whatsoever; strictly neutral side observer.

Opinion: mathematically speaking, the receiving end of the attention should be directed not at the individual, whose personal traits and character in the big scope and long run are of no consequence, but rather at the rules of the game by which that individual (and others before him have) played.

Fact: only two states in the union, Nebraska and Main, have addressed the above issue.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by towr on Nov 11th, 2016, 7:57am
The winner takes all at state-level issue?
It's only one of the bad rules of the game, though.

Heck, the whole interpretation of democracy as dictatorship by the "majority"* is sick.


* even if it were.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rloginunix on Nov 11th, 2016, 8:14am

on 11/11/16 at 07:57:13, towr wrote:
The winner takes all at state-level issue?

Yep. By losing even by one physical/personal/popular vote, you lose the entire block or chunk of allotted to that state Electoral Votes.

Imagine playing a game of soccer (football). Personally, you are an excellent player. You played a good game. You fought a good fight. You scored two goals. Your opponent scored tree. Then, by the time the final whistle blows, the "2:3" score becomes "0:5", they win.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by towr on Nov 11th, 2016, 12:32pm
Try comparing it to tennis ;)
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by Grimbal on Nov 21st, 2016, 2:11pm
Maybe it is a paradox, but it seems to me that the rule that the majority of one state wins all votes of the state gives more power to the individual votes in that state.

If all states shared votes on both sides, proportionally to how electors voted, and one large state applied the winner-takes-all rule, then that state would almost certainly decide the end result.  If it doesn't their opinion didn't matter anyway.  So that state's elector's votes have more value.

It is therefore in each state's interest to use that winner-takes-all rule.

The paradox is that this is valid for each state.  So everybody's vote should have more value.

Actually it works like the prisoner's dilemma.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by towr on Nov 22nd, 2016, 10:21am

on 11/21/16 at 14:11:26, Grimbal wrote:
Maybe it is a paradox, but it seems to me that the rule that the majority of one state wins all votes of the state gives more power to the individual votes in that state.
It only gives more power to the winning votes in that state, it takes all power away from the losing votes.

It also means you can win with just ~25% of the votes (you only need to win just over half the electoral votes, by winning the states by just over half). Actually, I don't think electoral votes are distributed quite proportional to state population size, so you can probably win by less.
All of which is great news for a soon-to-be minority that wants to stay in power.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by dudiobugtron on Nov 22nd, 2016, 1:51pm

on 11/22/16 at 10:21:11, towr wrote:
It only gives more power to the winning votes in that state, it takes all power away from the losing votes.

I think the only 'power' that votes have is to help determine the outcome.  Once the outcome is determined, they have no further power.  The votes have the same amount of 'power' regardless of whether the option they voted for won or lost.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rloginunix on Nov 22nd, 2016, 6:03pm
I would observe that the fact that a candidate can win the Electoral and lose the Popular Votes tells us that there must be a skew factor or some sort of (unbalanced) differential in the way EVs are distributed. In a perfectly balanced system if a candidate is the first one to race to, say, 270 EVs - no matter the path through the "state-EVs graph" - then the arithmetic sum total of all his/her PVs better be greater than the remaining PVs and conversely. I am too lazy to dig through the details to find where the screw is though.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by towr on Nov 22nd, 2016, 11:25pm

on 11/22/16 at 13:51:02, dudiobugtron wrote:
I think the only 'power' that votes have is to help determine the outcome.  Once the outcome is determined, they have no further power.  The votes have the same amount of 'power' regardless of whether the option they voted for won or lost.
That sounds like saying probability doesn't exists because after the outcome is determined it's always 100% or 0%.
The point, however, is that the large minority's opinion is simply ignored, because they lost by a marginal difference.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rmsgrey on Nov 23rd, 2016, 6:24am

on 11/22/16 at 18:03:30, rloginunix wrote:
I would observe that the fact that a candidate can win the Electoral and lose the Popular Votes tells us that there must be a skew factor or some sort of (unbalanced) differential in the way EVs are distributed. In a perfectly balanced system if a candidate is the first one to race to, say, 270 EVs - no matter the path through the "state-EVs graph" - then the arithmetic sum total of all his/her PVs better be greater than the remaining PVs and conversely. I am too lazy to dig through the details to find where the screw is though.


The whole concept of gerrymandering is based on the idea that the winner of the popular vote and the winner of the most constituencies votes needn't be the same.

The simplest example is probably the one with 9 voters divided into 3 constituencies of 3 votes each. By dividing 2-1, 2-1, 0-3, one side can win the election 2-1, while losing the popular vote 4-5.

Since all three constituencies are equal size and all three have equal weight in the outcome, there's no obvious way of "correcting" the outcome short of abandoning the idea of having elected representatives for specific constituencies - any attempt to arrange the constituencies so that the results are as uniform as possible runs into the fact that different regions/groups hold different priorities; attempting to make each constituency's outcome as unanimous as possible runs into the fact that each region has a significant minority opposition. And then there's the traditional method of assigning constituency boundaries which consists of trying to concentrate your opposition's supporters in as few constituencies as possible while spreading yours over as many as possible without risking your majority in any of them...
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by dudiobugtron on Nov 23rd, 2016, 11:57am

on 11/22/16 at 23:25:29, towr wrote:
That sounds like saying probability doesn't exists because after the outcome is determined it's always 100% or 0%.

I disagree.  It's just recognising that each side of a coin has the same chance of occurring, regardless of the outcome.  Heads and tails both played their part, and had the same 'power'.  Flipping heads doesn't mean you are 'ignoring' tails.


Quote:
The point, however, is that the large minority's opinion is simply ignored, because they lost by a marginal difference.

This is indeed an issue, though!  But it's not an issue with the voting process - it's more of an issue with the way elected representatives function.  If they were able to fairly represent everyone, instead of only representing one group, then this wouldn't be as much of an issue.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rloginunix on Nov 23rd, 2016, 12:00pm
Nice example, rmsgrey!

Then it means that with more than two strong contenders things may get even trickier. Say, there are 15 voters split across 3 states as 6, 5, 4 with the corresponding numbers of EVs and 3 strong contenders are running:

state1: c1(3) c2(2) c1(1) and so c1 wins 6 EVs by winning just 3 PVs

s2: c1(0) c2(5) c3(0) - c2 wins 5 EVs

s3: c1(0) c2(0) c3(4) - c3 wins 4 EVs

Bottom line - c1 becomes the president by winning only 20% of PVs while c2 and c3, each, won more PVs. Hm.

Anyway, anyone willing to share how the election numbers work in their country?

Better yet - how about we design a Universal Voting Algorithm.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rmsgrey on Nov 24th, 2016, 4:18am

on 11/23/16 at 12:00:36, rloginunix wrote:
Better yet - how about we design a Universal Voting Algorithm.


Only if the first step is to define the qualities we want a suitable algorithm to have.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by towr on Nov 24th, 2016, 10:21am
Not a bad first step.

I'm starting to think voting for people is inherently a terrible idea, because most people will vote with their gut, but their gut's expertise lies in digesting food, not facts.
So I'd say, vote on what qualities you want your president to have, and a procedure to find someone with those qualities. Then maybe at the end you'll get someone qualified.

Another idea is to give people multiple votes, for example one +1_vote and one -1_vote, then maybe you won't end up with a winner that's absolutely loathed by half of the voters. You'll get some inoffensive schmuck that everyone can shrug their shoulders at.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by dudiobugtron on Nov 24th, 2016, 12:26pm
Afaik it's impossible to make a (sensible) rank-order voting system where the outcome between two candidates isn't affected by the order you rank the other candidates. (Arrow's impossibility theorem.)

It's also impossible to make any (sensible) deterministic voting system which isn't manipulable by strategic voting.
(Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem.)
For example, in towr's +1 and -1 system: imagine there are 3 candidates - one you really like, one you would be fine with, and one that you would hate.  You should ideally give your -1 vote to the candidate you hate, but it might be more strategic to give it to the one you would be fine with, if they are the main competitor.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by towr on Nov 24th, 2016, 1:09pm
Theory is well and nice, but if we're considering a voting system to be used by actual voters, I'm not sure how relevant those concerns are. People's behaviour tends to be poorly described by theory (be it logic, economics, game theory or whatever).
I suppose the only way to find out would be to test it.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rloginunix on Nov 25th, 2016, 6:01am
I see. On the practical side:

1) The algorithm should not be applicable to hard science problems. I can just see it - "the number of primes is finite" - lets vote.

2) It should abstract away the type of participants and goal. Ordinary people electing an official or pirates deciding where to bury the treasure.

3) It should be scalable - from one person voting on one decision to many on many.

4) It should be easy to verify and difficult to manipulate/counterfeit.

5) Every vote should have some effect (as an input bit in a checksum calculation).

6) Every vote has the same weight, no seniorities, etc.

7) The result should be represented as a sorted array/list with the interpretation "left to the user".

My idea was similar to towr's but expressed a bit differently - may be the voters should be able to split their 1.0 vote, as a real number, into arbitrary fractions across the choices with such a vote being valid iff all of its portions add up to 1.0 or less. Say, I will give 0.25 to choice 1, 0.55 to choice 2 and 0.1 to choice 3.

(personally I think that voting is archaic and cavemanish. Historically, majority's opinions were off so many times ... Wonder if any voting situation can be converted into a hard science problem)
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rmsgrey on Nov 25th, 2016, 4:39pm
[quote author=Churchill]Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.[/quote]

Personally, while I can see the difficulty in getting it accepted, I'm something of a fan of Approval Voting: rather than picking one person to support, instead, you indicate approval of as many candidates as you like, and the candidate approved of by most people is the winner.

My main reason for liking it is that it asks the right question - while an election can have only one winner, often people would be happy to support either Alice or Bob, but not Carol or Dave, and find themselves having to decide which of Alice or Bob will get most support from others (or prefer Alice, but are prepared to accept the more popular Bob, so feel forced to support Bob in order to keep Dave from winning)
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by dudiobugtron on Nov 25th, 2016, 11:36pm
I approve of the approval voting idea.

-------------------

Like towr's idea, it still runs the risk that:

on 11/24/16 at 10:21:53, towr wrote:
You'll get some inoffensive schmuck that everyone can shrug their shoulders at.
However, I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rloginunix on Nov 26th, 2016, 9:24am
(hm. Talk about intuition. Prior to reading rmsgrey's post I had no idea about the Approval Voting)

So in smudging your vote across multiple candidates, what final rule do you think should apply:

1) simple relative - to win all you have to have is more votes than the next guy/gal

or

2) compound minimum relative (my term) - before 1) can be applied a certain minimum of votes must be reached?
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by towr on Nov 27th, 2016, 3:22am
You could do "passing grade" voting. Everyone grades each candidate on a scale of 1-10 and you need at least a 5.5 to pass. Best wins if (s)he passes. If all candidates flunk, they'll have to do another year of campaigning ;)
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rloginunix on Nov 27th, 2016, 11:38am
Yeah, I like that one - instead of being painted into the "lesser of two evils" corner, there's an explicit "worthy candidates only" rule (with a "restart" button).
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rmsgrey on Nov 27th, 2016, 12:40pm
You can always throw RON into any sort of transferable voting system - if RON wins, no-one gets elected...
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by dudiobugtron on Nov 27th, 2016, 9:56pm
Let's see how approval voting stacks up against rloginunix's criteria (As a measure of the voting method, and also of the list of criteria!):


Quote:
2) It should abstract away the type of participants and goal. Ordinary people electing an official or pirates deciding where to bury the treasure.

I think it would work pretty well irrespective of the participants and goal.  It would work fine for Pirates; in fact it could work quite well!  As long as they have a list of options to begin with.

(I have left off criterion 1, since it is incongruous with criterion 2)


Quote:
3) It should be scalable - from one person voting on one decision to many on many.

Ironically, it actually doesn't work very well at all for one person voting.  I think many people encounter this sort of voting on a regular basis as well ("Where do you want to go to dinner?"  "I don't mind".  "Well, would you rather go to X, Y, or Z?" "I don't want to go to Z".  "But what about X or Y?" "I don't mind"  etc...)

But with a few voters it would probably work fine.  More voters would reduce the risk of a tie.


Quote:
4) It should be easy to verify and difficult to manipulate/counterfeit.

This is not covered by the approval voting suggestion, so far.


Quote:
5) Every vote should have some effect (as an input bit in a checksum calculation).

Check.


Quote:
6) Every vote has the same weight, no seniorities, etc.

This is arguable.  If you think (or agree) that not voting for something has the same weight as voting for it, then this constraint is met.  However, you might think that approving of fewer things means your vote has less weight.


Quote:
7) The result should be represented as a sorted array/list with the interpretation "left to the user".
I think the interpretation is pretty straightforward.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rmsgrey on Nov 28th, 2016, 4:38pm

on 11/27/16 at 21:56:24, dudiobugtron wrote:
This is not covered by the approval voting suggestion, so far.


Naive approval voting (tick the boxes you like) is fairly susceptible to fraud - it's very easy to add more ticks to the ballot of someone who voted the "wrong" way.

You can make it significantly more robust against this sort of tampering by requiring voters to indicate how many ticks they've made in some way, at the cost of a minor increase in spoiled ballots.

Counting approval votes is also not entirely trivial - for traditional one-vote-per-ballot elections, you can simply pile up the votes for each candidate and compare the sizes of the piles to determine the winner; with approval voting, either you have 2^n piles, probably laid out in a Venn Diagram, or you have to resort the ballots between counting each candidate's votes, making verification significantly more difficult.
Title: Re: Brexit
Post by rloginunix on Nov 28th, 2016, 5:30pm
To clarify #6: vote's weight/power is not a game theoretic function or metric - how voters cooperate, form alliances and otherwise scheme en mass should be none of UVA's concern (imho).

1000 seniority-ranked, #1 - highest to #1000 - lowest, pirates vote to spilt the loot: if "yes" wins - the loot is split (equally) and the process terminates. The tie breaker goes to "yes" voters. If "no" wins - the lowest seniority pirate is thrown overboard and the process repeats. Clearly, to stay alive the lowest seniority pirate (being rational) must secure the "yes" vote/support of the pirate directly above him/her (seniority-wise) while the highest seniority pirates (being greedy) will try to vote "no" unless they themselves come into danger. So the process terminates (the two forces balance each other out) at the exact power of two from below: 488 pirates of the lowest rank, #513 to #1000, perish; the remaining 512 vote: #1 through #256 - "no" (greedy), #257-#512 - "yes" (rational), tie ...

In UVA the above seniority type attached to a vote (or probably more precisely - to a person) is ignored.

Those companies that are willing, in US, sell their fractions to public on a stock market via a mechanism known as "shares". Not all shares are created equal: class A > class B > class C shares where > means "higher voting rights". There are also "preferred", "restricted" shares, etc. The (rather messy) ABC classification may be changed at the company's whim but the point is this - if you have 1 A (higher) class share then you will still always outvote me even if I have 2 B (lower) class shares.

UVA ignores these types of "powers" (or weights) also.

All votes, the "currency of election", are created equal.


Reading through rmsgrey's post I realised that I have left out

4') or 4*) The tallying process should be cheap (financially) with error rate approaching zero.


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