Disqus - Latest Comments for Zarathustra

Re: Grant II

Daniel — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:40:25 -0000

Awesome news!

Re: Obama to Republicans

Daniel — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 04:13:42 -0000

Truth. The sad thing is that everyone he was talking to knew exactly what they were doing and did it anyway. Take this quote from after the event:

“It makes my job a little easier than if he were moving to the middle and picking up people,” McConnell says. “I naïvely thought he was going to do a course correction.”

Mitch McConnell is the Senate Minority Leader. Kind of perverse that he thinks his job gets *harder* the more Obama compromises with him, huh?

Re: The Gunslinger

Daniel — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:28:31 -0000

Those 5 factors explain pretty well why I'll never finish "Gravity's Rainbow."

Re: The future

Daniel — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 04:07:27 -0000

Most of these future predictions I can let slide. But the hoverboard by 2015, I wanted that.

Re: Language and Religion

Daniel — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:08:34 -0000

That's so unrealistic. The aliens would be using Lisp for sure.

Re: MN senate update

Daniel — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:42:20 -0000

Hopefully Minnesotans can get some kind of IRV going now or at least a runoff out of this. Is anyone talking about that there? Whoever wins the recount, still something like 15% of the votes went to Barkley, and you'd think those people would want to do something so their votes mattered in future elections.

Re: Credit where it’s due

Daniel — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 13:24:14 -0000

The level of ignorance in the crowds at this late date is shocking. 20 months Obama has been campaigning, and they still think he's an Arab or a secret Muslim terrorist or whatever. That goes beyond anti-intellectualism to anti-realityism or anti-truthism, or something like that.

At least it seems like for a moment he realizes what a bad idea it was to start pandering to the racists and xenophobes. If there is a decent guy still in there somewhere, that means there's a part of him that's hating every minute of his own campaign. And that kind of makes me feel sorry for him, actually.

Re: Private: Crunching the Numbers

Daniel — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 02:06:34 -0000

538 is indeed a good side for the numbers-obsessed. Just today they broke out the independent districts in NE and ME that I mentioned in my last post, so now I like them even more. It's like they're listening.

Re: (Non-Partisan) Election Tidbit

Daniel — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:44:53 -0000

Well, there are a number of issues keeping more states from doing this, but here's what I think is the most fundamental problem. Think of a "red" area within a "blue" state, such as rural Minnesotans within Minnesotans. The district-based or proportional system helps the people in the red area, because they get attention from their candidates and have their vote counted in the electoral college. But, from the perspective of everyone else in the state, the change to a proportional or district system will simply make the end result less blue, and hence less good for them. So, they will vote to keep the state as a single block. And since these decisions get made at the state level, they will almost always get their way.

This actually came up within the last couple of years in California, and this was basically the reason that it got shot down (as far as I can tell). There's also a problem with unilateral action that comes into play here. If California makes the switch to proportional and everyone else stays with winner-take-all, the net effect will be a less "blue" outcome, and since California is blue, they won't do it. Of course, the same reasoning applies from everyone else's perspective (changing "red" to "blue" when necessary), and so we're stuck in what is a likely a suboptimal situation. This suggests the situation is something like a Nash Equilibrium, but I don't enough Economics/Game Theory to say that for certain.

Re: Voting Reform

Daniel — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:38:00 -0000

Hmm, good question (and thanks for reading). Here are some I've heard, stupid arguments first.

1. People will be confused by the great complexity of this new system. This is weak because in an IRV system you're not actually required to rank every candidate, so you can always still vote for just one, if that's all the effort you can muster. It kind of defeats the point of IRV to rank just one, but if you don't know anything about the others, it's better than giving a baseless ranking. The biggest consequence of doing this is that mathematically certain scenarios can result in no one winning a majority if enough people don't rank more than one candidate, but I believe this is rare in practice (and there will still be a winner, just not a majority winner).

2. IRV lowers the bar for minor parties to be taken seriously, and this is a bad thing. Believe it or not, some well-known American political thinkers like Larry Sabato have made the argument that more than two parties is bad and that the current two party system is the right one for America (he made the case in his book "A More Perfect Constitution," in the context of awarding presidential electors in a proportional manner). I found this shocking and kind of appalling, and I can't claim to give this argument enough credence to explain it well, but it's out there.

3. As usual, the most subtle critique get the closest. This one is about the "instant" part of IRV. There is reason to believe that IRV produces different results from a traditional run-off under certain conditions, and to some this itself is an objection to IRV. This might occur if (for example) many people choose not to rank more than one candidate, or people look more closely at the remaining candidates in the time intervening between the first and second election, and so change their minds. Of course, the upside to IRV is that having only one election round is much more efficient, and most of the time the result should be the same as the standard run-off system. Also, sometimes the outcomes in a two-round runoff are unintuitive, especially when many candidates run at the same time, so using that system as the "gold standard" is questionable. France has had a few results like this, including the most recent election if I'm not mistaken.

Theoretically speaking, IRV approximates a runoff of up to n-1 rounds, where n is the number of people running, while a two-round runoff only has two rounds (obviously). Since having n-1 rounds is extremely inefficient and time-consuming, I think this point actually turns into an argument in favor of IRV.

There are others, but weaker still than these, in my opinion. Wikipedia gives three: 1. An abstruse technical argument based on non-monotonicity, 2. "if it ain't broke don't fix it" (seriously), and 3. IRV violates the principle of "one person, one vote" because your vote gets counted multiple times (in the virtual runoffs, but everyone else's vote does too so...). Overall, not much to these and not anything persuasive compared to the pro-arguments.