Re: Democratic process

Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab-S0/[email protected]> Wed, 28 Sep 2016 09:32:58 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.network.freenet.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Ian Clarke writes:

> Since you admit that the alternatives you are proposing aren't better than using
> mean, which is the obvious choice,

The mean is prone to strategic voting, except for single yes/no
decisions. Just assume I had given 700 points to a single task. No one
voting honestly could have pushed this point out of the first position.

Imagine a single Frost user giving 1000 points to "implement a
Frost-like system" because he/she deems all the rest irrelevant. That
would not actually need to be dishonest (so we could not reject the
vote), but it would decide the outcome if all other people at most
doubled or removed values.

Condorcet voting gets rid of that option, but has the disadvantage that
the values compared are not exactly estimated value/cost.

The alternatives are not better, but DIFFERENT: They make different
tradeoffs.

> I really don't understand what your purpose
> is here except to unnecessarily complicate the process and/or provoke pointless
> debate.

I described my purpose clearly: Showing what can be found from the
results and *what cannot*.

You officially and publicly promised a democratic process to everyone
visiting the webside, and this process currently is not. However it can
be salvaged to some degree so that not all the effort which went into it
is wasted.

This is very much necessary. Without checking what can actually be found
and what cannot, using the poll to support decisions is a mere fraud.
Do you want Freenet to be known as the project which fails at even basic
democratic process?

And that’s the deeper reason why I got involved: Anyone who does
simplistic pseudo-democracy and then uses it as force amplifier for
pushing decisions (regardless of whether they are good or bad) tramples
on actual democratic decision-making.

I believe in democracy and the farce we did wasn’t democracy.
By showing how uncertain the results are (see the differences in ranking
between the different methods) I can at least turn it into somewhat more
of a democratic process.

It’s not the idea behind the process which is problematic (what was
promised on the website sounded good), but the implementation - from
unclear descriptions of the process over not defining the scope
beforehand (what does it actually decide? Spending the 25k, a part of
the 25k or creating a fourth iteration of the Freenet roadmap?), not
defining the groups eligible for voting (and how their votes contribute
to the decision) and not defining how exactly the poll would be
evaluated. To make the process robust, a program like the one I wrote
would have had to be available *before* the poll (or at least the chosen
way to evaluate). But for that someone would have had to actually read
up on voting methods before describing the process.

A good voting method is robust against most trickery (strategic voting)
when the evaluation method is known beforehand. This is not true at all
for the mean (except for a single yes/no vote). It is slightly better
for the median. And it is best for Condorcet.

By screening the results for tasks ranked badly by Condorcet, we can
reduce the problems of using the mean.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein
ohne es zu merken

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