On Mon, 19 Apr 2021 at 16:35, Sam Hartman <hartm...@debian.org> wrote:
> I think we need voting reform around how the amendment process works and
> managing discussion time ...
> ...
> Preferences can be of different strengths.
> ....
> Which is to say that the gaps between preferences might be relatively
> weak.
Sam, you make an excellent point about gaps between options, and that
a ranking does not show the strength of preferences. Like, I might
prefer ALPHA >>> BETA > GAMMA while you prefer ALPHA > BETA >>> GAMMA.
So if it's down to ALPHA vs BETA, my vote should shift things more
than yours, while if it's down to BETA vs GAMMA, your vote should
shift things more than mine. And if we do sorta-maybe try to encode
this with where FD is in the ranking, it does not actually have this
effect.
If we wanted to encode this information more fully, we would have to
go with some system where people give numeric strengths to each gap in
their preferences. And to avoid people just pegging them all to
maximum strength, we'd have to put a limit on the total strength in a
single ballot.
That's a very interesting idea. I wonder if we could elaborate upon it
to build a more expressive, and more robust, voting system.
To go back to your restaurant situation, imagine there is one person
who's deathly allergic to seafood, so really doesn't want to go to the
dim sum place. Many others do like dim sum (perhaps even a majority),
but it's just a mild preference, they be happy with many of the
restaurant options and okay with all of them. It would be nice if the
allergic person were able to express that in a ballot. Right now,
they'd put everything-else>FD>DIMSUM, but that doesn't really have the
expressive power we'd like, which is that this one voter could put
*all* their expressive power against DIMSUM instead of being forced to
distribute it between all their preferences even though their
preferences between the other restaurants are, by comparison, very
small---and not doing so just wastes the power. What we need is for
people to be able to express mild preferences
SUSHI>DIMSUM>ITALIAN>TAI>..., but the one person who really cares to
be able to go {SUSHI,ITALIAN,TAI}>>>DIMSUM so they can really move the
meter on DIMSUM, at the expense of their ability to express other
preferences.
In an informal group setting this happens naturally. That's why we
discuss which restaurant to go to, rather than voting. We want to
gauge the strength of people's preferences and take that into account.
--Barak.
