Re: General Resolution: Statement regarding Richard Stallman's readmission to the FSF board result
"Barak A. Pearlmutter" <barak@pearlmutter.net> writes:
> Sam, you make an excellent point about gaps between options, and that
> a ranking does not show the strength of preferences. Like, I might
> prefer ALPHA >>> BETA > GAMMA while you prefer ALPHA > BETA >>> GAMMA.
> So if it's down to ALPHA vs BETA, my vote should shift things more
> than yours, while if it's down to BETA vs GAMMA, your vote should
> shift things more than mine. And if we do sorta-maybe try to encode
> this with where FD is in the ranking, it does not actually have this
> effect.
> If we wanted to encode this information more fully, we would have to
> go with some system where people give numeric strengths to each gap in
> their preferences. And to avoid people just pegging them all to
> maximum strength, we'd have to put a limit on the total strength in a
> single ballot.
I think it's worth observing that this discussion started with "our voting
system is too complicated and I think some people are making nonsense
votes because of it" and has now arrived at "we should make our voting
system considerably more complicated to improve its expressive power."
This all seems extremely speculative. Is there some GR whose result you
think did not accurately represent the correct outcome given the
preferences of the people who voted? Precisely what problem are you
trying to solve here?
> To go back to your restaurant situation, imagine there is one person
> who's deathly allergic to seafood, so really doesn't want to go to the
> dim sum place. Many others do like dim sum (perhaps even a majority),
> but it's just a mild preference, they be happy with many of the
> restaurant options and okay with all of them.
Thankfully, our voting system is not an ideal mathematical model in which
communication is limited to only the votes that one casts. Someone can
stand up and say "hey, I'm deathly allergic to seafood," and the rest of
us can take that as input into what decisions we want the project to take.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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