Re: Discussions in Debian
On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 10:19:04 +0100, Jochen Voss <voss@seehuhn.de> said:
> In my opinion the best strategy [*] with our current voting system
> is to rank "further discussion" second, directly after your
> favourite option. This slightly increases the chances of your
> favourite option winning (the others could be dropped because of the
> super-majority requirement). And you can still indicate your
> preferences among the remaining options.
Does it really increase your chances? Consider these cases:
Case 1: Your option ends up winning (even without your vote)
a) it made majority
b) it was more popular than the others
In this case you do not need the negative vote, and the bad
feelings that it engenders.
Case 2: No option wins (with or without your vote)
Negative voting gets you nothing here.
Case 3: Your option lost, but some other won
subcase a) Your option lost by more than one vote
your vote would not make a difference here, whether
negative or not.
subcase b) Your option lost by just one vote
in which case, a simple ranking would allow it to win
subcase c)
+ the other option made majority, as did yours
+ the other option beats your option (else we would be in
case 1)
Now, if all people who like your option voted against the
winner, making it lose majority, *AND* if the other side
played nice, you may win -- by knocking that option off the
ballot.
But you only get one win.The next time, the people who voted for the
more popular option, but lost to majority, will vote negatively,
just like you. And your option will get creamed as well. And, from
this point on, no action shall ever be taken -- since people are no
longer interested in working with each other, further discussion
shall win all the time.
This is a social problem. This is not the job of the
technical solution (the vote mechanism) to fix the social problem of
sophomoric developers more interested in having their side win than
working with the others -- the people need to fix the social problem.
If we are not interested in working with other developers,
whose views may not match ours, then Debian has grown too big to
survive.
manoj
--
"In the fight between you and the world, back the world." --Frank
Zappa
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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