Re: Approval Voting is Under-Rated

Approval Voting is Under-Rated (Score: 5, Insightful)

by prospectacle@pipedot.org on 2014-03-16 07:22 (#KH)

Good work on choosing approval voting!

Single-vote (first past the post) methods are terrible methods of translating voter will into meaningful results. They discourage most people from voting and most candidates from running, and produce divisive results (see american presidential elections). If most people dislike a particular candidate, it can still win, because the vote against it may be split between the other options, since people can only express their first preference, and nothing else.

Preferential (ranked) voting systems can be ok, but it gets complicated when you decide how to count the preferences. If you use instant-runoff (eliminate the least popular candidate if there is no majority, then re-distribute the second-preferences from those votes. Repeat until someone has a majority) is divisive, because most people who didn't vote for whoever ends up winning, do not get their preferences counted at all. This is because their first-preference option doesn't get eliminated before a majority is reached by another candidate.

There are some decent preferential systems (e.g. borda count, kemeny-young), but they all suffer from arrow's impossibility theorem (which shows that they're all flawed in some key aspects).

Approval voting is simple to use, simple to count, and tends to produce consensus results.

This site doesn't appear to have a whole team of volunteers like SoylentNews (which I also like), so progress is slower, but I very much like and admire the effort. Consider me sold.

Re: Approval Voting is Under-Rated (Score: 2, Insightful)

by rocks@pipedot.org on 2014-03-16 22:54 (#KW)

I also like the fresh take on this site. Hoping it gains a community!

Re: Approval Voting is Under-Rated (Score: 2)

by scott@pipedot.org on 2014-03-17 08:02 (#M2)

What kind of stuff would you like to see on Pipedot?

Re: Approval Voting is Under-Rated (Score: 2, Interesting)

by rocks@pipedot.org on 2014-03-17 12:41 (#M5)

What interests me more than anything (in the context of a news aggregation/discussion site) are discussions of past or future decisions, i.e., in given circumstances, what have thoughtful people elected to do in the past or plan to do in the future. Based on what comes up, I will follow the lead of others, do something different, or simply learn about the different views that are out there. Almost always, I find such exchanges both fun and helpful.

So, for example:
I liked the recent topic on kids versus adults and learning new tasks because I have kids and I am an adult and I like us all to be learning when possible.
I liked the recent topic on ergonomic office equipment because: a) this hits close to home for me, and b) I get to learn what others have done.

In terms of categories:
technology first (e.g., innovations in Linux distributions, programming workflows, video game system/game preferences, ...)
techno-science ethics second (e.g., is it good to teach/not teach programming to youth, should modern families be preserving stem cells for future health problems, to what extent should business plans place social responsibility over profits or vice versa, etc.)
science third (e.g., what comes after the Higgs boson, the new Mercury shrinking story fits, ...)
techno-politics fourth (e.g., privacy versus convenience, authoritarian design decisions or community-driven, etc.)

So, probably in line with what pipedot is already doing, what slashdot has done (and continues to do), and what soylentnews is trying to do as well. In the end, the community is really what makes it and for some reason (simple design is part of it), I'm quite intrigued by the potential of pipedot to be a fresh take on this community at large.

Story

Preview