I wanted more details on how this works. For those interested, I found an English pdf describing the full system [1]. The interesting part is Article 110, which discusses how the adjustment seats are allocated. Here is my best summary:
1. Using D'Hondt [2] on every party's national vote share, determine which party should be given the next seat.
2. For every constituency which has adjustment seats available, calculate the D'Hondt quotient of the first candidate in that party who has not already been elected using the constituency vote share. So if a party received V votes in a constituency and two party members were already elected from this constituency, their quotient would be V/3.
3. Elect the candidate with the highest quotient to fill an adjustment seat for their constituency.
4. Repeat until all adjustment seats have been given away.
There's arguably a step 0 here, which is determining how many constituency and adjustment seats every constituency gets, and this is done before the election is held. This is described in Article 10. It's pretty bad. First, the adjustment seats are hard-coded. Second, unlike the US where we reapportion after every census, Iceland appears to only reapportion the constituency seats when the constitution demands they do it. This happens when there are twice as many voters per seat in one constituency compared to another. Furthermore, they only adjust as few seats as possible to get back under this limit rather than actually recalculate a fair apportionment. I'm not sure what the logic of this was, maybe to minimize how often the number of seats in each place is changing? Either way, in the 2021 election this resulted in one constituency with 199% as many voters per seat as another and no changes were made [3].
> So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis.
> That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas
Forgive me if I'm missing something, but these sound like contradictory claims to me?
As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system. The number of members of each party that make it to Congress is the main determinant of what policy gets passed. But I can only influence that indirectly, by choosing which party represents my local district. If I'm in a solid minority in the district I live in, I basically have 0 influence on the result of the election. Overall, those invisible lines let politicians crack and pack constituencies so a party with a minority of the votes still gets a majority of the seats.
In this system, the number of representatives of each party would be determined by the national popular vote, meaning I can more directly vote for which party gets the majority. Your vote does two things: it casts a vote for your party against the other parties in gaining them seats, and it casts a vote for your favorite party candidate over other candidates in the party (including those in other districts) to determine which candidates of the party earn the seats the party is given. It reduces the effect of the invisible line in weakening my vote. I'm okay with this meaning that sometimes my vote helps elect someone in a different district, since this would mean my district doesn't have enough members of my party to justify a representative of our own and because a lot of times the lines are arbitrary anyway. It would require bigger districts with multiple winners, and sometimes that the person with the 6th or 7th most votes in the district gets the 4th or 5th seat instead. This, in my mind, is the "gerrymandering correction:" it ensures those parties who were disadvantaged by the line drawing get their fair share of party members.
As for one vote counting twice as much as another, my understanding (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that the main cause of that is differences in turnout between the different districts and rounding representatives to the nearest whole number. Nothing can be done about the later (big problem in the US too -- people per district varies by hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention the disparity in the Senate). For the former, you could proportion representatives between districts based on turnout instead, but this is a bad idea since it makes it much harder to campaign in a district if you don't know how many seats are up for grabs.
You'd like to live in Alaska and vote for say a Democrat, only to have some Democratic representative from say Florida be the one "you voted in" to the House of Representatives?
A representative with absolutely zero self-interest in representing you, as it's highly unlikely you'll be able to "vote for" them the next time around? Your representation being an odd mathematical quirk?
Because that's essentially what the Icelandic system is like. The US has the same lopsided population-to-representative ratio to some degree [1].
[...]and please correct me if
I am wrong)
No, it has nothing to do with turnout in Iceland.
You can think of it as an odd way to enact something like the US Senate without a bicameral legislature.
You'd like to live in Alaska and vote for say a Democrat, only to have some Democratic representative from say Florida be the one "you voted in" to the House of Representatives?
I don't see how it makes sense to say that the candidate in Florida is 'the one' you voted it. You casted your vote in Alaska for the party. Your vote mattered there, and either the party got candidates in or not.
Then after that mini-election your vote gets to play a second role on the national level, where IF the party got a bad ratio between the number of representatives they got in, and their total vote-%, they can get another candidate. But that candidate is not 'the one you voted in'. You (possibly) voted in candidates in Alaska already, this is your votes' second chance, to get someone in from the party somewhere else (where the party had a particularly bad ratio between representatives and vote-%).
This should be easier to understand if you suppose that none of your 50 states shares any of its political parties in the House of Representatives.
The Minnesota FLP[1] got members into the house of representatives in numerous elections.
If you'd voted for it in Minnesota, who do you suppose your vote should transfer to in Alaska or Florida?
Of course that's a borderline nonsensical example in the case of both the modern day US and Iceland, as in both cases The Party (whichever one it is) is something you can vote for in any state or district.
But it's important to understand that the cart came before the horse. That purely local parties are unelectable is partly because the incumbents have shaped the system like this, to their own benefit.
In any case. The Icelandic voting system asks you to intern two seemingly mutually incompatible ideas:
- That local politics are so unimportant, that you may as well not care who your local representative is, because you may be getting some party critter from the other side of the country, and the difference shouldn't matter to you.
- That you shouldn't worry too much about some people having up to 2x the voting power you have, based on which district they vote in. That outsized influence being something that transfers indirectly to what constitutes their national party policy.
> If you'd voted for it in Minnesota, who do you suppose your vote should transfer to in Alaska or Florida?
Did it get more than the national cuttof level for adjustment seats (5% in Iceland, 4% in Norway)? Lets assume it did! Then first we calculate the results from all the local elections. Then we look at the total vote-% vs mandates disparancy for all parties across the whole country, and we can calculate how many adjustment seats each party should get nation-wide (we give one seat to the party with the worst disparency, then recalculate until all adjustment seats are used up).
Let's assume now that the Minnesota FLP won one or more adjustment seats this way, which is completely possible in your scenario. Then we figure out which riding the Minnesota FLP should get another candidate from. For this we look at all ridings where they have a candidate, and chose the riding where the disparancy between vote-% and mandates are the worst. In your example, where the party is only registered in a single riding, that will be the riding they get another candidate in from.
You CAN have a system where each riding can get in at most one adjustment seat, and then you can come in the ackward situation where there are no ridings available for a party which should get a adjustment seat if they do not have listings in every riding. But that is not an essential part of the system, you can allow to get multiple adjustment seats in from a single riding.
> Of course that's a borderline nonsensical example in the case of both the modern day US and Iceland,
Yeah I agree, but its a fun though experiment. The interesting part is really when you have a party in some, but not all the ridings. Then you absolutely get that a lot of votes for the party in riding A helps the party get in another candidate in riding B. But notice that this is votes that in a system without adjustment seats are just lost. So it is not that "your vote escapes" and help some asshole somewhere else, its that your otherwise dead vote gets another chance.
> as in both cases The Party (whichever one it is) is something you can vote for in any state or district.
Surpisingly(?) this is not true. The list "Ábyrgrar framtíðar" is only represented in Reykjavíkurkjördæmi norður. And this is not a freak occurent, its quite common in the Scandinavian countries. In the Norwegian parlament there is today a single representative from the list "Patient Focus", which was formed in April 2021, as a support movement for an expansion of the hospital in the town of Alta in Finnmark.
> In any case. The Icelandic voting system asks you to intern two seemingly mutually incompatible ideas:
- That local politics are so unimportant, that you may as well not care who your local representative is, because you may be getting some party critter from the other side of the country, and the difference shouldn't matter to you.
This is really not the take-home. Remember that most of the seats are constituency seats, not adjustment seats. From the article it seams like the ratio is roughly 6-to-1 in Iceland (in Norway its 150-to-19, so 7.8-to-1). So most of the parlament will be people voted in with votes soley from their own constituency.
The question is, what to do with the "leftover" votes which were just barely not enough to get a candidate in? The American system is to discard them, they get nothing, they mean nothing. In the Icelandic system they get to participate in the election of the roughly 1/6th of the parlament which is adjustment candidates.
> - That you shouldn't worry too much about some people having up to 2x the voting power you have, based on which district they vote in. That outsized influence being something that transfers indirectly to what constitutes their national party policy.
So yeah, don't copy this part:-p Of course, this is not in any way a requirement for the adjustment-seat procedure. It is also not unique to the Icelandic system, and the disparancy is even worse in the US, where a single elector could represent between 200,000 and 700,000 people[1].
> The list "Ábyrgrar framtíðar"
> is only represented in
> Reykjavíkurkjördæmi norður.
A party that got 144 votes nationwide and ran in one election.
But yes you're strictly correct. It's not illegal to only run for election in a subset of districts...
> And this is not a freak occurent
It really is in Iceland, I don't know about Norway.
Even new upstart parties run for elections in every district, because to do otherwise is leaving "money on the table", as in were.
The only exceptions are one-off parties with practically no following.
> This is really not the
> take-home. Remember that
> most of the seats are
> constituency seats, not
> adjustment seats.
I'm of the opinion that this aspect of the system has a more widespread overall impact than suggested by a mathematical review of who's directly impacted in each election.
It heavily biases the system away from one-district parties, and those parties in turn further encouraged to become monoliths where each representative is merely an interchangeable cog in the party machine, not someone voting with their own conscience.
On the other hand it's not like that wasn't happening before.
Another thing you haven't considered is that whenever you vote for a party your vote can be helping to elect someone nationwide, but you're only allowed to strike out the names of people listed in your local district.
So if you really dislike someone who's running for the party in another district, you might not vote for the party at all, least you help them.
> So most of the parlament
> will be people voted in
> with votes soley from their
> own constituency.
Those people might be "tainted" too, even if you look at this from a purely mathematical point of view.
Your seat in parliament may not be an "adjustment seat", but you may have pushed out a more popular candidate in your own district.
There's cases like that every election, e.g. the party with 20% in a district getting 3 members, and the one with 25% getting 2 members or whatever, because the difference of 5% in that district is accumulated to elect 4 members overall.
It is possible! But with more than two dimensions, you have to allow deviations from perfect proportionality to guarantee a solution exists. The more dimensions, the worse it gets, until eventually proportionality breaks down entirely. [1] defines a method to do this and simulates the results on an election where district and party seats are distributed proportionally and divvied up by gender proportionally. The result is a better national proportionality at the expense of worse local proportionality.
There's been a big push to develop modern standards in the IndieWeb community [0]. There are two important standards:
- WebMention, a W3C standard that is basically the equivalent of @ing someone on Twitter [1]. It is simply an http request to a discoverable endpoint with two pieces of data: the webpage being mentioned, and the webpage mentioning it. WordPress had a similar standard called Pingback and websites supporting WebMention often support both for backwards compatibility.
- microformats2, an ad-hoc standard for adding metadata to webpages, meant especially for providing metadata for web mentions [2]. For instance, you can specify that the mention is a "like", "reply", or "reblog", and set the author name and avatar.
Independent websites that add support for this can then parse the WebMention to create a comment section and like counter and readers can follow the links to other blogs that talk about the blog post they just read. There are a decent number of personal sites that already support this, like those mentioned in [3]. With enough adapters, it might build the network effects necessary to become a viable social media alternative. Right now though, those in the network are predominantly tech oriented since there isn't a ton of third party support.
Pingbacks are so helpful if you’re a blogger of any kind. I manage the blog for a family member who’s an author, and the huge a blog to share thoughts with the readers of their books. Pingbacks let’s them see where their blog posts are being discussed, go answer questions, and interact with the community in a really personal way (on top of the comment systems that are also used extensively).
It might’ve lost popularity over the years but it amazed me that there’s still entire micro-communities of authors/fans doing this. Their own little social networks, all self hosted and self managed through blogs and comments/Pingbacks.
You cannot prove the null hypothesis; you can only disprove it. The p-value is the probability that the null hypothesis is true. So if the null hypothesis is that there is no difference, and there is a low probability of that being true, then you have shown that there is a difference between the groups. If the p-value is high, you do not show that the null hypothesis is true. Instead, you show that you did not find a statistically significant difference. This can happen when the difference between the values is small or there is not enough data to make the difference clear, which is why a high p-value is not enough to reject the alternative hypothesis.
> The p-value is the probability that the null hypothesis is true.
No, the p-value is the probability that the given data generated is as far away or farther by random chance given the null hypothesis is true. That is to say, we assume the null hypothesis to make some predictions and see if the data is a likely occurrence under those assumptions.
This is not the same as the probability that the null hypothesis is true. If that is what you want (and most of us do want this), then Bayesian methods are more appropriate though they are more complicated and more sensitive to initial assumptions.
>"You cannot prove the null hypothesis; you can only disprove it."
Sure, but thats why the null hypothesis should be predicted by your theory. Then you are checking your theory. Most people could care less about whether there is a miniscule difference between groups or not.
>"The p-value is the probability that the null hypothesis is true."
No. This is something entirely different entirely.
Mining a cryptocurrency goes something like this: spend a ton of money investing in a state of the art server farm, hook server farm up to mining pool to earn Bitcoin, withdraw Bitcoin for money, spend money to upgrade your now obsolete server farm.
In addition to being needlessly inefficient, server farms are causing significant harms to the environment in ways that traditional currency does not, and is causing increases in electronics and electricity prices due to their high demand.
Proof-of-Stake is a way to solve this. Instead of computing power determining who creates the blocks (and earns the transaction fees/block rewards), and instead of miners spending Bitcoin to make Bitcoin, miners put their cyrptocurrency in a form of a lottery, with the winner writing the block without using any computing power. The result is the same, but much more efficient and without the environmental cons. It also may make the network more secure, since an attacker would need 51% of the wealth in the network in order to compromise it. And even if someone gained 51%, they would not attack the network because they have the most value to lose.
This article is also about using a lottery, but for a very different purpose. Microtransactions are difficult with current solutions, because vendors like PayPal, Visa, and Cryptocurrencies usually institute minimum fees. This system get around this system through the use of a lottery. As an example, instead of paying $1 to 10 different sites (say in a pay-per-view of newspaper articles), you pay with a reverse lottery ticket. This lottery ticket has a one in ten chance of winning, and if it does you have to pay $10. The resulting payment is the same, but all your payments are in large sums so that transaction fees are taken care of. If the newspaper receives 10 reverse lottery tickets, they will receive equivalent profits to charging each customer $1. Therefore, the customers pay the same and the sellers receive the same, but without transaction fees eating up nearly as large a percentage of the transaction that a micro transaction would.
Both systems use a lottery powered by blockchain randomness, but the similarities end there. The purposes and the meaning of the lotteries are completely different. In the case of the latter, it is actually a lottery you don't want to win.
In theory, a miner could try to manipulate the hash of the future block to change the outcome. It is much more difficult with Bitcoin, where valid blocks are more rare and produce a high income, but with Ethereum blocks are so frequent that it might be possible to collude with the mining pools is done on a large scale.
Additionally, how does this deal with Proof-of-Stake algorithms? Ethereum is heading there, and as far as I am aware the blocks would no longer publish hashes.
1. Using D'Hondt [2] on every party's national vote share, determine which party should be given the next seat. 2. For every constituency which has adjustment seats available, calculate the D'Hondt quotient of the first candidate in that party who has not already been elected using the constituency vote share. So if a party received V votes in a constituency and two party members were already elected from this constituency, their quotient would be V/3. 3. Elect the candidate with the highest quotient to fill an adjustment seat for their constituency. 4. Repeat until all adjustment seats have been given away.
There's arguably a step 0 here, which is determining how many constituency and adjustment seats every constituency gets, and this is done before the election is held. This is described in Article 10. It's pretty bad. First, the adjustment seats are hard-coded. Second, unlike the US where we reapportion after every census, Iceland appears to only reapportion the constituency seats when the constitution demands they do it. This happens when there are twice as many voters per seat in one constituency compared to another. Furthermore, they only adjust as few seats as possible to get back under this limit rather than actually recalculate a fair apportionment. I'm not sure what the logic of this was, maybe to minimize how often the number of seats in each place is changing? Either way, in the 2021 election this resulted in one constituency with 199% as many voters per seat as another and no changes were made [3].
[1]: https://www.stjornarradid.is/library/03-Verkefni/Kosningar/K...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Icelandic_parliamentary_e...