On Sat, Nov 01, 2003 at 06:17:18PM -0500, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: > On Nov 1, 2003, at 15:36, Branden Robinson wrote: > > > >[b] Debian should retain support for the x86 architecture > > > >That option is likely to beat almost any proposed change to the Social > >Contract by a landslide -- *if people vote sincerely*. > > But would it beat "Debian should retain support for the x86 > architecture, and remove SC 5."
This requires either the original proposer, or a group of 6 people, who support taking the original proposal and tacking this irrelevant rider onto it. Personally, I have no intention of accepting wholly irrelevant amendments to my proposed GR. I think that makes for a bad legislative process and cheapens the integrity of a deliberative body. A lot of awful stuff in U.S. politics is the result of "riders" tacked on to completely unrelated legislation, which gets passed and signed into the law because the main topic ofthe legislation is perceived as too important to go unpassed. I won't say that we face a combinatorial explosion of irrelevant ballot options, because each one will have to have 6 sponsors and that will serve as a brake on *that* variety of abuse. But my thesis is that even one irrelevant option on the ballot is enough to either defeat the relevant option that would otherwise win, or promote the phenomenon of insincere voting. And in case I haven't already said it, I think insincere voting is a problem in part because I have come to think of our voting method as a useful polling apparatus. That is, there is useful information we can extract from a vote apart from just which option won. Irrelevant options, even if defeated, will tend to introduce noise into this signal and cause the defeated options to be more of a jumble than they otherwise would be. Maybe that's just the (amatuer!) sociologist in me, though; maybe most other developers don't perceive the utility in studying and discriminating among the defeated options on a ballot once the results are in. -- G. Branden Robinson | A committee is a life form with six Debian GNU/Linux | or more legs and no brain. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- Robert Heinlein http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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