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Re: Re: General Resolution: Statement regarding Richard Stallman's readmission to the FSF board result



FWIW, I didn't consider 7 and 8 at all similar.

After watching the strain the pre-vote discussion introduced, I decided making no statement as a project was the best outcome. But if the project were to make a statement, I wanted to express preference between the acceptable to me statements, then put the unacceptable to me options below FD.

Bdale

On April 18, 2021 3:18:22 PM MDT, "Barak A. Pearlmutter" <barak@pearlmutter.net> wrote:
The Schwartz set resolution algorithm is absolutely best of breed. But
there's an old saying in computer science: garbage in, garbage out.

If we look at the actual ballots, it's really interesting. Options 7
and 8 were semantically pretty much equivalent. It's hard to see any
reason for someone to rank them very differently. So if the voters are
rational, we'd think that nearly all ballots would have options 7 and
8 ranking either the same or adjacent. And that if one is ranked the
same as other options, then they should both be. Yet many of the
ballots rank one but not the other, or rank them very differently.
Some voters ranked either option 7 or 8 as "1" and allowed everything
else to default. It's very difficult to imagine someone who actually
preferred option 7 being equally satisfied with any of options 1-6 and
8.

We tend to assume that the DD electorate is highly sophisticated and
rational and understand how to correctly express their preferences,
and how ranking works. But a quick perusal of the actual ballots has
disabused me of that notion.

The usual reaction to this sort of thing is to alter the voter
instructions. But people have intuitions for how voting works, and
blurbs might not be very effective at changing their behaviour.

--Barak.


--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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