Hi, thanks for this! As someone who’s very interested in social choice and mechanism design, I’ll make more suggestions on the submissions form later. Social choice and mechanism design are the branches of economics that ask “How can we extend decision theory to society as a whole, to make rational social decisions?” and “How do we do that if people can lie?”, respectively.
Here’s one very important recommendation I will make explicitly here, though: TALK TO PEOPLE IN MECHANISM DESIGN AND SOCIAL CHOICE OR EVERYTHING WILL EXPLODE AND YOU CAN MAKE EVERYTHING WAY WORSE IF YOU MESS UP EVEN MINOR DETAILS.
If you don’t believe me, here’s an example: how you handle equal-ranked candidates in the Borda count can take it from “top-tier voting rule” to “complete disaster”. With Borda’s original truncation rule (candidates not listed on a ballot get 0 points), the Borda count is pretty good! But if you require a complete ranking, i.e. every voter has to list all the candidates going from best to worst, your rule ends up having the candidates chosen basically at random. That’s because the optimal strategy involves finding the best candidates and putting them all at the bottom of your ballot, with the worst candidates you can find taking up all of the middle ranks. If everyone realizes this, the winner is effectively chosen at random, and can even end up being a candidate who everyone agrees is the absolute worst option.
And public choice theory, too—the kind of “neoliberal cynic legalistic” branch of mechanism design. No point in having a great voting system if your authorities can benefit themselves scot-free. It’s funny how EAs have been arguing about “improving institutional decision-making” for almost a decade (and even before that in LW) w/o reading the basic literature… personal story: I remeber I was fascinated with EY’s Inadequate Equilibria (a wonderful book I recommend even more than HPMOR) and found it super original… but actually it wasn’t nothing new once I discovered the literature in mechanism desing and, more recently, cyberneticists like S. Beer and H. Simon
Hi, thanks for this! As someone who’s very interested in social choice and mechanism design, I’ll make more suggestions on the submissions form later. Social choice and mechanism design are the branches of economics that ask “How can we extend decision theory to society as a whole, to make rational social decisions?” and “How do we do that if people can lie?”, respectively.
Here’s one very important recommendation I will make explicitly here, though: TALK TO PEOPLE IN MECHANISM DESIGN AND SOCIAL CHOICE OR EVERYTHING WILL EXPLODE AND YOU CAN MAKE EVERYTHING WAY WORSE IF YOU MESS UP EVEN MINOR DETAILS.
If you don’t believe me, here’s an example: how you handle equal-ranked candidates in the Borda count can take it from “top-tier voting rule” to “complete disaster”. With Borda’s original truncation rule (candidates not listed on a ballot get 0 points), the Borda count is pretty good! But if you require a complete ranking, i.e. every voter has to list all the candidates going from best to worst, your rule ends up having the candidates chosen basically at random. That’s because the optimal strategy involves finding the best candidates and putting them all at the bottom of your ballot, with the worst candidates you can find taking up all of the middle ranks. If everyone realizes this, the winner is effectively chosen at random, and can even end up being a candidate who everyone agrees is the absolute worst option.
And public choice theory, too—the kind of “neoliberal cynic legalistic” branch of mechanism design. No point in having a great voting system if your authorities can benefit themselves scot-free.
It’s funny how EAs have been arguing about “improving institutional decision-making” for almost a decade (and even before that in LW) w/o reading the basic literature… personal story: I remeber I was fascinated with EY’s Inadequate Equilibria (a wonderful book I recommend even more than HPMOR) and found it super original… but actually it wasn’t nothing new once I discovered the literature in mechanism desing and, more recently, cyberneticists like S. Beer and H. Simon