I like snapraid for media drives. As long as it’s something without lots of deletes and changes, I bet more space and can use mixed drives and get a bit of a backup too since it’s a manual sync to create or update the “parity”. And the added advantage that any drive taken out or they dies you still can read any if the content on the other drives at any time.
The challenge is a "bit of a backup" is risky. There's no back up if it's only a single copy of something, or even a single copy of something.
3-2-1 backups are really in time teach everyone the lesson that you don't buy storage, you buy backups, some that are more quickly accessible than others.
The cost of "maximizing" space with the drives I have, for example, is relatively trivial and simpler, its in the hundreds of dollars now instead of thousands. The upside is huge.
Solely trusting third party services is risky, and locally holding your data can be relatively managed well.
Sure. I am just using it for my media server which I could “re-acquire” if I really needed too.
What I meant by “bit of backup” was you could actually restore files that were deleted since the last sync since it’s not always live like RAID and requires scheduled syncs to update the parity info. It’s a compromise I make as a home user for my media server.
While someone’s use case would have to be verified, the below is to show that there are streaming options in Postgres.
Would be interesting to get your take on queues vs streams on the below.
I consider myself a little late to the Postgres party after time with other nosql and rbdms, but it seems more and more an ok place to consider beginning from.
Tables can also do some amount of stream like behaviour with visibility and timeout behaviours:
pg-boss — durable job queues with visibility timeouts and retries.
Zilla — supports Postgres as a source using CDC to act as a stream.
• ElectricSQL — uses Postgres replication and CRDTs for reactive sync (great for frontend state as a stream
Streaming inside Postgres also has some attention from
Postgres as Event Store https://eventmodeling.org. This can combine event sourcing with Postgres for stream modeling.
pgmq — from Tempo - this is a minimal message queue built on Postgres using append-only design.. Effectively works as a persistent stream with ordered delivery
I suspect this comment is LLM generated. There is a 404-ing URL, discussion of queues, and some discussion of Postgres CDC which I believe is Postgres logical replication. Neither of which are a streams implementation on Postgres.
Many of us have used both sides and settled on one area to start.
Kafka, et al are amazing. Also almost always overkill in the first x months or years.
It’s not too much of a stretch to model your queue first in something like Postgres, which oddly offers things a little beyond a traditional rbdms, and when the model implementation in the domain reveals itself… it can shine a nice light in the direction of a Kafka, etc.
Sir, your reply is more coherent than mine. I'll give you props for that.
Still, I disagree that Kafka is always overkill.
When god opened a datagram socket on your computer, you needed to have been capturing this data X months ago, but weren't paying attention. You need to build warbot.py and put it into production before you have the chance to deal with cold storage. Kafka is my go-to if you can do this before you run out of disk space.
I frequently append JSON lines to a "data.json" file in Python. Add a socket server, compression, and typed bindings for 20+ languages. Boom. Kafka. Don't oversell it. Need to delete a row? Congratulations, you selected the wrong tool. It's appending JSON lines to a file. Kafka is a write-ahead log, not a queue.
To your point about Postgres, I've found Postgres has fantastic JSONB support and awesome developers who have been very influential in my life and whom I admire. Postgres is my preferred cold storage, which I connect to Kafka. It feels like swimming upstream because RMDBs are traditionally for normalized data, not denormalized JSON lines that make XML look hip again.
If you have a choice in DB, Postgres' JSONB has helped me avoid unnecessary normalization steps. It's good to have options.
ZeroMQ would call this the Titanic pattern and mic drop because the guide has a section on it. That's why I like ZeroMQ.
Edit: Apologies for typos/brevity. I have an ancient phone that only works with 20% of the web and phone apps. There are no apps or LLMs to help this dyslexic soul.
Identity services from the large companies are very convenient, but the citizens of Google, or Apple, or Microsoft are largely faceless and rightless citizens of a corporation with no ability to contact anyone for anything.
The story and lesson is simple is to tie as little as possible to identity systems using a domain you don't own.
This isn't a statement of expecting perfection from any group, just the opposite, of knowing that things can happen unexpectedly, where is the middle ground in a relationship that impacts the user more than the company if the ID is lost.
This is what constitutions are for. When you have the support, you install a constitutional protection that says the government can't do this. Repealing the protection requires the same super-majority needed to pass it, so changing the law isn't just a matter of the tyrants needing to get back to 51% from 49%, they have to get from 33% to 67%.
Then you layer these protections against multiple levels of government so they'd all have to be repealed together by separate legislatures before the government is allowed to do it, discouraging the attempt.
Hah, I was going to say that sounded needlessly heavy handed.
Then I checked what the Netherlands does and found that changing the constitution doesn’t merely require you to get a majority, it also requires you to survive at least one election and keep that (super)majority before you can even begin.
Even that sounds easy compared to my country. In Australia a constitutional change requires a referendum, with a double majority condition to pass. Specifically it requires the vote in over half the states to be in favour, in addition to the overall national vote in favour.
That described Dutch system also sounds relatively easy compared to the US model, which requires 2/3 votes in each chamber of Congress (meaning the people-based one and the land-based one), *then* 3/4 of the states (so another land-based check) have to ratify it.
Functionally this means that in the modern political climate, the US Constitution is fully frozen with no hope of amendment really ever again.
Yeah, I wasn’t clear enough. The first vote (before the election) requires a simple majority vote. The second vote (after the election) requires a 2/3 in favor vote in both houses.
I’m not sure if that’s worse than 3/4 states since the Netherlands isn’t so politically localized.
Also note that The Netherlands frequently does constitution changes, even with that complexity. Our current version for example dates from 2022, when (among other changes) the secrecy of correspondence was amended to include all telecommunication, as it only included communication of letter, phone, and telegraph before that.
I'd argue that this is unnecessary in Switzerland due to the existing referendum system.
After the government passes a new law, opponents have 100 days to collect 50000 signatures. If they manage, the law will not take force until it's approved by a vote by the populace.
The way authoritarianism work is they pick some enemy to rally against and convince people that the ends of stopping that evil justify the means of becoming evil. The problem with this is that it can garner 51% support within the population for temporary periods of time, so you need a system that can prevent it even in that environment. This typically means that violations of fundamental rights should require significantly more than 51% popular support or require changes in public sentiment to stick for a period of time before they can make foundational changes (e.g. only a third of the US Senate being up for election every two years).
> After the government passes a new law, opponents have 100 days to collect 50000 signatures. If they manage, the law will not take force until it's approved by a vote by the populace.
I generally hate ballot propositions within the context of California (or American States really, but I put my energy towards the State I actually live in and care the most about), but that's an interesting way to do it. Have there been any significant downsides to this specific clause[1] in Switzerland?
[1] Let me emphasize: "this specific clause" being the one I quoted. I'm not looking for a general discussion on all forms of ballot propositions whether pro or anti.
Downside: Sometimes laws can be delayed for 1+ years due to a referendum. The political process is slower and big reforms are much harder.
Upside: Lawmakers need to write balanced laws or they face threats of referendum signature collection from other parties or civil organizations. Often in political discussions you hear that "position X won't stand a chance in a referendum". That is a good thing.
Further additions to your comment. Expanding on your downside: Big reforms like giving women the right to vote only took effect in 1971 on the federal level. On a cantonal level, Appenzell-Innerhoden had to be forced into it in the 90s by the Tribunal Federal, but well.
I'd add some advantages to the upside as well: some changes require a referendum, such as changes to the constitution. But there's more: a popular initiative can be launched and if you collect 100,000 signatures in 18 months, you can force a vote on your own law. This is most commonly done by political parties and adjacent organisations, so it is at least feasible that a privacy-conscious organisation could launch an initiative to make it illegal to store any kind of user-identifying data. It is even possible private citizens could do it. There would likely be a "contre-projet" arguing why this isn't a good idea, but there is often a for/against for any initiative or referendum and they get to present their views in detail (in paper booklets, the vote swiss app, and on the federal chancellery website).
Further upsides: unlike US/British/some other countries, nobody has a 50% voting block in the Swiss parliament and it has remained a coalition since the modern iteration of the country (since 1848).
Basically Swiss politics is extremely deliberative. I honestly think "we will quit Switzerland if they do this!" is a bit of a hyperbolic reaction.
Ah, so the referendum isn’t then scheduled for a date in short order if the requisite signatures are collected but held at the next regularly scheduled election? Fair enough.
Each will have 1-4 issues (approx) scheduled. Elections for politicians happen every 5 years, but no need to wait for those. What takes time (for votations) is the process: you have to verify the signatures once they're handed in at the federal chancellery and then decide when to schedule it.
Or if there was a law clarifying not to tread on privacy if that’s what the population has latest indicated, this kind of effort wouldn’t always need yo be wasted.
Asking the unpaid population to put in free labour all the time seems like a deterrent.
Democracy is fundamentally about putting in free labour. That’s just how it works, from the lowliest municipal elections up to federal. It’s a lot of unpaid labour.
I think that’s an oversimplification. You can’t take the “free labor of performing democracy” and put it to equally good use doing anything else I can think of.
I guess you could work in soup kitchens, but that’s horribly inefficient welfare compared to just electing competent leadership, if the ultimate aim is to benefit The People.
You’re arguing for massive changes to a very unique country with the oldest democracy in Europe. Unless you’re Swiss, or have credentials related to Swiss law, I don’t think you’re arguing anything realistic.
Countries can be as unique as they want to be, but they still need a system for preventing authoritarianism. The existing system is fine if it's effective and not fine if it isn't.
Switzerland has been preventing authoritarianism since before it was cool. Like, for 700 years. (With a brief interruption when they were invaded and overthrown by Napoleon.) So their system for the first 600 of those 700 years was the best system for preventing authoritarianism; a lot of it survives today.
This would be a wrong argument even if your premise about Switzetland was factually true (it's not).
It's like praising Danish architecture for its earthquake-resistance since no Danish building ever collapsed in an earthquake. It fails to account for the fact that Denmark never gets any significant earthquakes.
You can't tell how good a system is at resisting descent into authoritarian rule unless wannabe-autocrats have tried several times, amassed some support to achieve their goals, and the democratic institutions held against them. This never happened in Switzerland, not even in the 1930s: the ability of the Swiss constitution to precent authoritarian backsliding is untested.
(But as a side note, what you're saying is not factually correct. The Swiss constitution is from 1848, and before Napoleon only Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden would be considered nonauthorian. Many cantons, like Bern, were ruled by birthright autocratic families, and had no popular vote whatsoever.)
I'm sorry I haven't answered your comment so far, because, even though it is mistaken in many ways, it seems to be in good faith, and I think it deserves an answer.
Switzerland also has amassed hundreds of constitutional amendments over that time. So perhaps the ability to frequently pass amendments has been instrumental to their success, and they should be on the lookout for new opportunities to bolster their democracy, such as constitutional safeguards against certain forms of state surveillance.
Requiring 50% in a referendum is different from and safer than requiring 50% in a parliament vote. A parliament can go against the people that elected them.
Countries that don't regularly have popular votes face the challenge that any vote is considered as a vote of confidence in their current government. It basically only reflects the popularity of the government and people do not evaluate the face value, the core of the issue. Having a real democracy takes a lot of training and effort.
Exactly this. In Switzerland, you generally have 3-4 vote periods per year with 0-8 different subjects). This is needed to make sure that people vote on the subject.
Brexit was 52% of voters voting to leave, but that was only 37% of the electorate. [1] It wasn't >50% of the electorate, let alone >50% of the population.
...I'll argue that those that didn't participate in that vote elected to opt out. I.e. Don't cry if you didn't care to participate and then don't get what you wanted.
This is a referendum that changes the fundamental rules of the game, not a pizza order. The onus isn't on the population to waste their time vetoing your bad or mediocre ideas, it's on you to come up with good ideas. And disgusting your constituents enough that they abstain entirely should very much not be a viable strategy. If you want to change the constitution, you gotta convince people that you're doing something good, including those who are hard to convince. That's literally the entire point. If you're not managing that, clearly your change isn't good enough to make.
Anyway, I wasn't even trying to argue in favor of this position, or against it. I was merely replying to the parent comment that Brexit did not meet the threshold that their parent comment had suggested.
People got lazy lately after a long peace time. Saying “it can’t get worse than that” with 5-10% unemployment. Yes this is not good, but it can get way worse than that. Also “my vote doesn’t count, and everyone is bad”. Enemies of democracy have pushed this a lot lately, internet make it trivially cheap and easy to spread. Nations like UK are in the find out phase.
Constitutions can still be ignored, at least temporarily, by incumbent governments, as evidenced most recently by some actions of the current US administration.
Also, the sort of majority needed to enact a constitution change to install a protection in the first place, can be very difficult to attain.
And then you make it so when the tyrants do get back to 51% that they can just ignore the constitution instead. And might as well make sure there are only two major political parties so even though the tyrants ignore the constitution, that the other 49% will stay busy stuffing their pockets with foreign donations.
To prevent the government from ignoring the constitution, create remedies in each of the other branches of government. The US doesn't make this as strong as it should be. Constitutional challenges in the judiciary get shut down as a result of standing or sovereign immunity when that ought not to happen, and there should be a better mechanism for states to challenge federal constitutional violations.
The two-party system in the US is caused by first past the post voting. Use score voting instead. Not IRV, not some other nonsense, a rated voting system that removes the structural incentive to avoid spoilers by limiting the number of parties.
"The existing system isn't perfect" is why you improve it, not why you give up.
Approval voting is also worth considering, where you put a checkmark in the box for any candidate you’d be okay with. Advantage over ranked choice is that communicating the scoring to citizens is simple: “$CANDIDATE received the most checkmarks.” Whereas with ranked voting, the person who gets the most #1’s might not win and that can confuse some citizens.
Approval voting would result in “the okay-est” candidate winning rather than anyone towards an extreme winning in the primaries. Works well when there are a lot of fairly similar milquetoast candidates that split votes, like the Republican primaries of 2015.
> Whereas with ranked voting, the person who gets the most #1’s might not win and that can confuse some citizens.
Not ranked voting, ranked voting is still very broken. Rated voting. Approval voting is a rated voting system.
Score voting: Rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10.
Approval voting: Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 or 1.
Score voting (or STAR) is generally better and the argument that people are going to be confused by "that thing they use at the Olympics" is nonsense, but approval voting is fine if you want to silence the complainers while still using something that basically works.
Score voting is just approval voting with an additional permitted tactical error.
In both systems, the correct tactic is to determine the two candidates most likely to win. Then, assign maximum score to whichever of those is better and to everyone preferable to that candidate.
It is never correct to assign a score between the minimum and the maximum, so why allow it in the first place?
> It is never correct to assign a score between the minimum and the maximum, so why allow it in the first place?
Because it is often correct.
Suppose there are candidates A, B and C. Candidates A and B are each polling around 6/10 and candidate C is polling around 4/10, but candidates A and B are quite similar to each other and share a base of support. According to your strategy, A and B are the two most likely to win, so if you prefer A then even though you still prefer B to C you refuse to express your preference and instead assign 10/10 to A and 1/10 to B and C. The voters who prefer candidate B do the same. The result is that A and B end each up at 3.5/10, C ends up at 4/10 and C wins. In other words, you've devolved back into first past the post and caused your least favored candidate to win because of your erroneous strategizing.
By contrast, if you assign 10/10 to A, 5/10 to B and 1/10 to C, you've given A a significant advantage over B without assigning B such a low score that you could deliver the election to C if C defeats A.
In your scenario, I have made a mistake in assessing which two candidates are most likely to win -- because I took vote shares as win probabilities. This is also a mistake, and it is a mistake no matter the voting system or the next step in your strategy.
You're also assuming that everyone axiomatically uses the same strategy as me. If A-voters use your strategy and B-voters use my strategy, then B is straightforwardly favored to win. This results in a prisoner's dilemma, with its well-known Nash equilibrium in favor of defection.
> you've devolved back into first past the post
Correct. The potential for this to happen is one of the drawbacks of rated voting systems. It's also, through a different mechanism, one of the drawbacks of ranked systems. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try, since both alternatives give some ability to hedge against incorrect assessments.
> By contrast, if you assign 10/10 to A, 5/10 to B and 1/10 to C, you've given A a significant advantage over B without assigning B such a low score that you could deliver the election to C if C defeats A.
I can accomplish the same mathematical thing by assigning 10/10 to A, 1/10 to C, and flipping a coin to determine whether to give B 1/10 or 10/10. Both give the same odds of winning to A and B (well, mine gives B slightly higher odds because its average is 5.5 -- but you get the point). The only difference is that your method outsources the randomness to the rest of the electorate, rather than generating it yourself.
> In your scenario, I have made a mistake in assessing which two candidates are most likely to win -- because I took vote shares as win probabilities.
Your problem is that your voting strategy changes which two candidates are most likely to win. If everyone votes their actual preferences then it's A and B. If too many people vote according to your strategy, C becomes a frontrunner.
> You're also assuming that everyone axiomatically uses the same strategy as me.
I'm only assuming that some proportion of voters use the same strategy as you. The higher that proportion is, the more likely it is that C wins instead of A or B. It doesn't have to be 100% of people to cross the threshold into changing the outcome.
> If A-voters use your strategy and B-voters use my strategy, then B is straightforwardly favored to win. This results in a prisoner's dilemma, with its well-known Nash equilibrium in favor of defection.
That isn't a prisoner's dilemma. A's voters prefer that B win over C and B's voters prefer that A win over C, so they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.
> I can accomplish the same mathematical thing by assigning 10/10 to A, 1/10 to C, and flipping a coin to determine whether to give B 1/10 or 10/10.
But then the voting system is receiving less information from you. Requiring your preferences to be expressed statistically increases the error bars for no reason. Also, most people are not going to do that and requiring them to in order to express their preferences is needlessly confusing.
> I'm only assuming that some proportion of voters use the same strategy as you.
My strategy does not change other voters' strategies. Secret ballots prevent this type of coordination. That's my point. The collective strategy of 1/3 of the electorate does change which two candidates are most likely to win, but my individual strategy does not meaningfully do that.
> they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.
If a voter values preventing the worst case over achieving the best case, then the optimal strategy is to assign maximum scores to every candidate except the worst case. Hedging by assigning a non-maximal score increases the chance of the worst case compared to that approach, in exactly the same way that it reduces the chance of that compared to assigning a minimal score.
I'll grant that my specific tactic is predicated on a preference for achieving the best outcome rather than avoiding the worst one, but the best tactic for someone who finds avoiding the worst-case to be more important also only requires extreme votes.
> A's voters prefer that B win over C and B's voters prefer that A win over C, so they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.
Expressing that preference directly reduces the likelihood of each such voter's preferred outcome, even if a single voter does it. It affects the chance of the worst-case outcome only if voters on both sides of the A/B division do it. The secret ballot prevents any kind of enforced coordination. This is exactly a prisoner's dilemma.
> Requiring your preferences to be expressed statistically increases the error bars for no reason.
You don't know the exact score each candidate will end up with absent your vote -- if you did, you could analytically determine a single-vote strategy that gives the best available outcome. Since you don't know that, your choice of an intermediate score is a statistical expression. It's just expressed in terms of the uncertainty in what the rest of the electorate is doing, not in terms of a coin flip. It does not meaningfully increase the error bars (in a large election -- say, >1k voters) because the former uncertainty quickly dwarfs the latter.
> My strategy does not change other voters' strategies.
of course it does. this is basic game theory. but the point is, at some level of iterating on what other voters will do, you arrive at an effectively static "wave function" of possibilities, so you can behave as if you have constant fixed win probabilities for the other candidates, and vote accordingly.
> My strategy does not change other voters' strategies.
It does when you describe it to them and convince or force them to use it, e.g. by removing their ability to score the candidate on a scale.
And it does because you are part of the electorate, situated the same as the others, so the strategy you devise should be the one that yields the result you want given that similarly situated people will reach the same conclusion:
Special note for the critics of superrationality: Your vote isn't going to change the outcome, so according to classical game theory you should stay home instead of wasting your time doing something that doesn't matter. Therefore, voting at all is an exercise of superrationality. If you're not willing to use it in your voting strategy then you shouldn't use it in deciding whether to vote to begin with and so you should either use a superrational voting strategy or you should stay home.
> If a voter values preventing the worst case over achieving the best case, then the optimal strategy is to assign maximum scores to every candidate except the worst case.
You're not thinking probabilistically.
Suppose there are two plausible final election outcomes where your vote matters:
Option 1, candidate A is at 4.99/10, candidate B is at 5/10, candidate C is at 4/10.
Option 2, candidate A is at 4/10, candidate B is at 4.99/10, candidate C is at 5/10.
If it's option 1 and you assigned 10/10 to candidate B, your preferred candidate loses. If it's option 2 your preferred candidate can't win and if you assign 1/10 to candidate B, your least preferred candidate wins.
But if you assign 10/10 to candidate A and 5/10 to candidate B then in option 1 that could still be enough to see candidate A win, and in option 2 it could still be enough to see candidate C lose.
Moreover, the score allows you to express how concerned you are about each outcome. If you're pretty okay with candidate B but have a moderate preference for candidate A then you can give candidate B 7/10. If candidate B is almost as bad as candidate C you can give candidate B 3/10. It allows you to hedge: How much advantage for candidate A are you willing to give up to reduce the chances of candidate C? You seem to be assuming that the only possible answers are "all of it" or "none of it", but there are other options.
> Expressing that preference directly reduces the likelihood of each such voter's preferred outcome, even if a single voter does it. It affects the chance of the worst-case outcome only if voters on both sides of the A/B division do it.
If affects the chance of the worst-case outcome in all cases because it increases candidate C's chance against candidate B, and you don't know what the other voters are going to do. If candidate A has less support than expected due to inaccurate polling then it turns into a race between B and C regardless of whether B's supporters give A 1/10 or 5.5/10. Meanwhile you assigning a lower score to B is reducing B's chances against C regardless of why the race turns out to be between B and C.
> This is exactly a prisoner's dilemma.
No it isn't. In a prisoner's dilemma, defection is to your advantage regardless of what the other person does. In this case, if the other party defects -- and sometimes even if they don't -- then your defection harms you, because their defection (or something else) put candidate A behind candidate C. Then it's not clear if your support for candidate A will allow them to defeat candidate C, but if it isn't, your defection in assigning the lowest possible score to candidate B would cause candidate C to defeat candidate B, which is to your own disadvantage.
> Since you don't know that, your choice of an intermediate score is a statistical expression.
It has less information content. If you roll a D10 and then assign 10/10 to candidate B if it's above a 6 and 1/10 if it isn't, the voting system only gets a single bit of information from you, whereas assigning the equivalent score gives it >3 bits of information. That only matters if the election is very close, but it always only matters if the election is very close.
In 2024 there were dozens of state legislative races decided by fewer than 100 votes:
> It does when you describe it to them and convince or force them to use it, e.g. by removing their ability to score the candidate on a scale.
This is essentially the argument that it's good to allow other people to make tactical errors, because it gives more power to those who do not make such errors. Or, perhaps, that I should take an approach that reduces the power of my vote on the basis that others might copy me. Frankly, I philosophically reject both of these.
Look, I buy superrationality from an ethical perspective. I favor the Kantian imperative as a framework (among others) for assessing ethical questions, and it's basically the same concept as superrationality.
Superrationality is not, however, a reasonable way to make practical decisions about scarce resources. The reason is because it essentially ignores the problem of perverse incentives. In practical situations, one must deal with perverse incentives. My voting does not create a perverse incentive for anyone else, and in fact it only benefits me (by signaling that I do vote, so my vote is worth competing for).
> Suppose there are two plausible final election outcomes where your vote matters:
You are claiming that I'm not thinking probabilistically, but first off: you're providing an overly specific scenario rather than a probabilistic one. Second, your own overly specific scenario does not even work. If the extra 4 points that I give to B (over the "preferred outcome" strategy) is enough to result in B defeating C in scenario 2, it is also enough to result in A defeating B in scenario 1. A winning isn't an option in either of these cases, even if there is some dataset about the world that makes this set of outcomes plausible.
Maybe try thinking about it this way: In score voting, points are summed and nonrivalrous. So, a point is a point -- regardless of how many other points you gave to that candidate. Why, then, are you choosing 5/10 for B, specifically? What, analytically, leads you to that choice? If you're trying to prevent a C victory as your most important value, why not choose 6/10? 7? And so on. If you find it more important to cause an A victory, why not choose 4/10? A point is a point, no matter how many other points the candidate got from the same voter.
> In a prisoner's dilemma, defection is to your advantage regardless of what the other person does.
There are formulations of the prisoner's dilemma in which a double defection is worse for both parties than a single defection is for the losing party. But it's clear that this terminology is more confusing than helpful, so I'm OK abandoning it.
> Then it's not clear if your support for candidate A will allow them to defeat candidate C, but if it isn't, your defection in assigning the lowest possible score to candidate B would cause candidate C to defeat candidate B, which is to your own disadvantage.
Crucially, this is equally true for every other score I can assign to B less than the maximum. This reasoning does not argue for a vibe-based score assignment, it argues for giving the maximum score to both A and B. By assigning a lower score to either, I have already accepted some risk.
> It has less information content.
Less information on the ballot, yes, but it has the same effect on the outcome. Let's exclude cases where my vote is irrelevant. I have ten options, and nine of them are potential numbers of additional points that a candidate needs to win. Each of those numbers are roughly equally likely, because they are the least significant bits (least significant bits in stochastic processes tend to approximate a uniform distribution).
If I give 1 point, the candidate wins 0/9 times. If I give 10 points, the candidate wins 9/9 times. If I give 5 points, the candidate wins if the number of additional points needed is 2-5 (1 would make my vote irrelevant), and loses if it's 6-10. So, the effect on the outcome is the same as if I gave 10 points 4/9 times.
The only reason this would meaningfully increase the variance is if a large fraction of people in a small election were doing this, too small for the central limit theorem to work its magic but enough people doing it to exceed the difference in fixed preferences.
> This is essentially the argument that it's good to allow other people to make tactical errors, because it gives more power to those who do not make such errors.
You keep describing it as a tactical error to use a strategy that amounts to hedging. There are legitimate non-mistake reasons to do that.
> Or, perhaps, that I should take an approach that reduces the power of my vote on the basis that others might copy me.
You're not trying to get them to copy you, you're trying to devise a strategy that maximizes your advantage in the event that other people in exactly the same situation as you come to the same conclusion. In other words, knowing that people using the same reasoning as you will copy you, what reasoning do you choose to use?
> The reason is because it essentially ignores the problem of perverse incentives.
It isn't ignoring the problem, it's describing a solution to it: Enlightened self-interest.
Or to consider it another way, think of it as iterated prisoner's dilemma. You sure you want to make "defect" your first move when the aggregate outcome will be public and there will be future elections?
> My voting does not create a perverse incentive for anyone else, and in fact it only benefits me (by signaling that I do vote, so my vote is worth competing for).
Voting is a perverse incentive for you. It takes time to cast a vote, the chances of it determining the outcome are entirely negligible and so is any notion that the candidates will know, much less change their behavior, based on whether you as an individual cast a vote. It's why so many people stay home, and everyone who doesn't is spending their own time to do otherwise because they altruistically prefer that the system work than that they save the time it takes them to do something that yields no personal benefit.
> You are claiming that I'm not thinking probabilistically, but first off: you're providing an overly specific scenario rather than a probabilistic one. Second, your own overly specific scenario does not even work. If the extra 4 points that I give to B (over the "preferred outcome" strategy) is enough to result in B defeating C in scenario 2, it is also enough to result in A defeating B in scenario 1.
You're ignoring the probabilistic part. It's not scenario 1 and scenario 2 at the same time. You don't know if it's scenario 1 or scenario 2, that's the thing that's indeterminate, and you have to fill out your ballot not knowing that. Then if you assign 10/10 instead of 5/10 to candidate B and it turns out to be scenario 1, you've given the election to B over A. But if you assign 1/10 instead of 5/10 to candidate B and it turns out to be scenario 2, you've given the election to C over B. Neither of those are in your interest, so you have the personal incentive to reduce their probabilities by assigning candidate B a score in the middle of the range.
> If you're trying to prevent a C victory as your most important value, why not choose 6/10? 7? And so on.
Because that's a trade off. There is no single "most important value". You want both for A to score higher than B and for B to score higher than C. Assigning a lower score to B makes one of the things you want more likely and the other one less likely. If you judge them to be equally important and equally probable then you should assign B a score in the middle to hedge your bets. If you judge one to be more important or more likely then you should weight the score in proportion to how much of your vote you're willing to spend to make one possibility more likely at the expense of the other. Assigning the maximal or minimal score assumes that you prioritize one thing entirely at the expense of the other. It's putting all of your eggs in one basket.
> Crucially, this is equally true for every other score I can assign to B less than the maximum.
Except that you're trading each of those increments against the probability of the other thing you want.
> The only reason this would meaningfully increase the variance is if a large fraction of people in a small election were doing this, too small for the central limit theorem to work its magic but enough people doing it to exceed the difference in fixed preferences.
But why would you admit even this deficiency just to avoid allowing yourself to specify a score instead?
Also, what benefit is being achieved by forcing ordinary voters to choose their vote using random number generation instead of simply allowing them to write down the number they would have used as the threshold?
> It isn't ignoring the problem, it's describing a solution to it: Enlightened self-interest.
"Everybody just does the right thing" is not a solution you can implement in the real world.
> You keep describing it as a tactical error to use a strategy that amounts to hedging.
Maybe this is the source of the confusion: an intermediate score is not an optimal way to hedge. A hedge is a decision that offsets potential losses in the event of a bad outcome. No vote configuration on a single question can do that. It can, in some cases, reduce the chance of a bad outcome. In the best case, it does so by also reducing the chance of a good outcome (in favor of a moderate outcome). But crucually, each point affects each outcome in the same way as each other point.
So, by what rational reason am I choosing an intermediate value? Why would I prefer (in a contrived example, but all cases are linear) a 20% chance of both the good outcome and the bad outcome over both a 25% chance and a 15% chance? Moving from 4 points to 5 always does the same thing as moving from 5 to 6. It's linear, so the local maxima and minima are at the ends.
> There is no single "most important value".
You are making a linear probabilistic trade-off between two values. One of them must be more important than the other in order for any score assignment to be better than any other. Either being more important than the other will drive the score to one extreme.
> But why would you admit even this deficiency just to avoid allowing yourself to specify a score instead?
It's not something I want people to actually do. It's a reduction ad absurdum. Your approach does the same thing as a random approach, so - barring deception reasons - it must be a mistake.
2. a lot of people will do it REGARDLESS of whether it's rational, just like people donate to charity. so YOU as a rational self-interested voter BENEFIT by using a voting method which allows you to receive utility donations from those altruistic voters, however irrational they may be. and that leads to a greater NET utility, because voting isn't a zero sum game.
https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes
again, it would really help you to just spend a few minutes reading elementary voting theory before going off on such a wild misguided tangent like this.
> 1. of course it is, if you're not mathematically savvy.
I don't think that says what you're claiming it does. If you actually look at the simulation linked from there (which I do take some issues with, but those are irrelevant to the point):
- Scaled sincerity, the one that gets their claimed 91% effectiveness, is actually one of the more mathematically complicated strategies to execute.
- Maxing + sincerity, the version of "mildly-optimized sincerity" that is least complicated to execute (and thus the one most likely to be executed intuitively), is among the least effective in large elections.
- Mean-based thresholding -- the closest approximation of my proposed strategies here, consistently outperforms all sincere-derived approaches in elections of 10+ participants. It is also simpler to execute than scaled sincerity.
> and that leads to a greater NET utility
This is not accounting for the reduced utility of increasing the complexity of the voting system, or of weakening the secret ballot by allowing more information content on it.
The latter is the real argument against score voting that I don't think has a counter. I haven't brought it up yet, because it's a lot less convincing if you believe that optimal individual strategy in score voting performs much better than optimal individual strategy in approval voting. But you, in particular, don't seem to believe that. So...
Score voting puts more information on the ballot than any other system, for an only marginal improvement over approval voting (which puts the second-least, after single vote). Putting more information on the ballot is bad, because it allows votes to be dis-aggregated. Attack description:
- Alice instructs Bob to fill out the ballot in a specific way. That specific way includes minor random perturbations of scores that are unlikely to influence the election result, but are likely to make Bob's ballot unique. E.g. selecting a random score for a candidate with a very low chance of victory, fully randomizing a question that Alice does not care about, or (worst case) adding or subtracting 1-5 percent from scores of relevant candidates.
- Alice observes the vote counting, and notes if Bob's ballot was observed.
- Alice rewards or punishes Bob accordingly
The value of the secret ballot is very high. I suggest that it is greater than any increase in utility achievable in the delta between score voting and approval voting.
tactical error is GOOD, because it donates more utility to society than that non-strategic voter loses. AND for a lot of not-so-math-savvy voters, an honest score ballot is actually a better vote than a botched attempt to use strategic approval thresholds.
The Indian Supreme Court introduced the Basic Structure Doctrine in 1970, allowing the judiciary to overrule constitutional amendments if they are found to contradict the "basic structure" of the constitution.
It's original purpose, if I understand correctly, was to guarantee that fundamental rights were an essential part of the constitution and couldn't be amended away.
Wikipedia says that multiple countries appear to have adopted the principle: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Uganda.
No it's not. Constitutions are the bones of a republic. They are the framework that gives the government power and that checks that power. Letting it mess with that too much or too often is bad.
Constitutions should be simple. They should delegate very little power to governments and focus mostly on constraining those governments. They should be changed very rarely.
Adaptable government with changing scopes belongs at lower levels of governance (mostly very local) or nowhere.
France disagrees. They iterated 5 times on it and it fixed big flaws each time.
What keeps a country in check is not a constitution but a politically informed and active population. The US shows us right now that the constitution is just a piece of paper.
> The US shows us right now that the constitution is just a piece of paper.
A constitution isn't just words, it creates a structure that exists in actual reality. The day before the tyrant comes you have multiple branches and levels of government. That stuff doesn't instantaneously cease to exist if they try to rip up the piece of paper, and its purpose is to fight against anyone who tries to rip it up.
If it fails at that purpose, your constitution contained insufficient checks and balances.(Notice that several of the ones in the original US constitution have been removed, and that was a mistake.)
Another way to view the US constitution is that parts were amended away in roundabout ways (e.g. through state legislation) and precisely because it is so set in stone that we now have the problems that we see.
France had a vastly bloodier path to that constitution as you know. And france’s constitution today is pretty bad. It fails to protect basic freedoms like speech and arms. It moves too much responsibility to the feds. Etc.
In the USA we have amendments to the constitution, which take considerable political effort to change. These amendments can restrict the types of laws that may be passed.
This system works because the changes are not just recorded in the paper of some lawbook, but in the minds of the people.
This is not true in practice. Inertia and international law / agreements bind future lawmakers. If one government joins the EU, the next still has to follow EU law even if EU law changes.
> It’s odd people don’t push for laws to prevent for these kinds of laws to keep bubbling up every few years.
People don't have a lot of money and a revolving door with the government, like the lobby industry has.
As long as corruption is legalized, in the form of lobby, regular people will find it very hard to influence the government.
Either the people living in the country at the time rule (directly or through representatives), or its not a democracy, but (if they are ruled by the people, or their representatives, of the past) a thanatocracy.
Maybe this is the start of replacing macOS with some form of iPadOS experience in the medium to long term.
reply