On Thu, Nov 30, 2000 at 02:23:08PM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 30, 2000 at 02:00:57PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > Surely you agree that a minority of people being able to subvert the
> > resolution procedure to get what they want instead of what the majority
> > want is a bad thing?
> I think I agree with your underlying point -- that this kind of
> discrepancy in the voting system indicates a flaw.
Oh good, I can delete all my postponed rants then. :)
Here's some possible "fairness" criteria:
* If there are multiple ways of conducting a vote, the outcome
should not depend on which way is chosen (only on the
preferences of the developers).
* Ideally, there shouldn't be any more effective way of getting
what you want than simply ranking your preferences in order.
(Although this is, aiui, provably impossible to achieve)
I suspect we've also agreed that the Condorcet winner (if there is one)
should always win. And we seem to have agreed that the winner should
be from the Smith set, although that's apparently considered debatable
amongst the pairwise voting cognescenti.
There are two reasonable ways of treating supermajorities, that I can
think of:
a) A supermajority of developers believe this option is acceptable.
b) A supermajority of developers support this option above all
others.
I believe (a) is the better case, and I think it's essentially what the
N+1 scheme described in the constitution achieves. From some of your
mails, I'm lead to believe you might prefer (b).
(b) isn't quite what your system does, though (aiui). If you consider
the Manoj and Branden's proposed vote, we might end up with people holding
preferences like:
120 people prefer M, B, S, F (Manoj, Branden, Status-Quo, F.Disc)
100 people prefer B, M, S, F
This means that the ratio between M and B would be only 6:5, rather than
3:1, so presumably neither should win (that's what (b) would imply to me)?
My reading of your proposal would scale both sides of the
M dominates B, 120 to 100
down by 3, which would end up with
M dominates B, 40 to 33.3
which would leave M winning, which, aiui, it shouldn't.
If you really wanted (b), you could achieve this by scaling the sides
individually, ie:
M doesn't dominate B (40 to 100)
B doesn't dominate M (33.3 to 120)
and then using this to eliminate both options. I'm not sure how you'd
phrase that for the constitution, and I don't think it's a desirable
interpretation of a supermajority anyway.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``Thanks to all avid pokers out there''
-- linux.conf.au, 17-20 January 2001
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