In Quadratic Voting, you can vote more for a single choice. Since you can vote more, you can express your degree of agreement, which probably captures preferences and the Truth better.
The quadratic part of Quadratic Voting makes sure that your additional votes for the same item costs increasingly more. This basically ensures voting multiple times won’t break down (tempers extremes cases).
What’s sort of neat is that interest in Quadratic voting is probably the work of one person, Glen Weyl.
Loosely speaking, Weyl seems to be adjacent to EA, in the same way Vitalik Buterin is, who is his collaborator (Management Science is a top journal that is hard to publish in and it is impressive the outsider Buterin has a pub there). Both Buterin and Weyl are mentioned on EA Forum and Lesswrong a bit.
I’m uncertain, but I think the highly technical aesthetic of Weyl and Buterin’s work and the related small social movement diverges from mainstream politics and even many mainstream economists. Tractability of their policies seems low according to this post and karma of related posts is low.
However, mechanism design is a neat field. It’s neat to see a modest implementation of these ideas that is well designed and implemented by internal experts of a community.
Yes, like you said, these numbers [1,4,9] are how many times you vote for each entry.
The quadratic voting being implemented here isn’t really connected to the values of these options. Instead, a calculation happens after you select your votes, e.g. when you choose the “vote 9 times” option, it will cost you more than 900% than “voting 1 time”.
So I think that the set of voting options you see above is arbitrary. The choices could be [1,2,3] or [1,10,100] instead of [ 1,4,9].
The actual values just happen to squares. I guess that is sort of a “mental collision” with quadratic voting.
Maybe the designers (at LessWrong) choose 1,4,9, because these values are the best, or because it is sort of a cute callback to quadratic voting.
If anyone is wondering what is Quadratic Voting:
There is a good explanation from Lesswrong of how Quadratic Voting is used in the Forum Review.
Succinct explanation:
In Quadratic Voting, you can vote more for a single choice. Since you can vote more, you can express your degree of agreement, which probably captures preferences and the Truth better.
The quadratic part of Quadratic Voting makes sure that your additional votes for the same item costs increasingly more. This basically ensures voting multiple times won’t break down (tempers extremes cases).
Wikipedia has more information.
Background:
What’s sort of neat is that interest in Quadratic voting is probably the work of one person, Glen Weyl.
Loosely speaking, Weyl seems to be adjacent to EA, in the same way Vitalik Buterin is, who is his collaborator (Management Science is a top journal that is hard to publish in and it is impressive the outsider Buterin has a pub there). Both Buterin and Weyl are mentioned on EA Forum and Lesswrong a bit.
I’m uncertain, but I think the highly technical aesthetic of Weyl and Buterin’s work and the related small social movement diverges from mainstream politics and even many mainstream economists. Tractability of their policies seems low according to this post and karma of related posts is low.
However, mechanism design is a neat field. It’s neat to see a modest implementation of these ideas that is well designed and implemented by internal experts of a community.
Really cool, Weyl might like to know!
The voting mechanism here seems to sort of be the other way around. A “9” vote counts as 9 “1″ votes, where as in QV it’d cost 9 to get 3 times “1”.
Yes, you are referring to this:
Yes, like you said, these numbers [1,4,9] are how many times you vote for each entry.
The quadratic voting being implemented here isn’t really connected to the values of these options. Instead, a calculation happens after you select your votes, e.g. when you choose the “vote 9 times” option, it will cost you more than 900% than “voting 1 time”.
So I think that the set of voting options you see above is arbitrary. The choices could be [1,2,3] or [1,10,100] instead of [ 1,4,9].
The actual values just happen to squares. I guess that is sort of a “mental collision” with quadratic voting.
Maybe the designers (at LessWrong) choose 1,4,9, because these values are the best, or because it is sort of a cute callback to quadratic voting.