I’ve successfully founded and grown two nonprofits from scratch, each reaching $1M+ budgets. These were The Center for Election Science and Male Contraceptive Initiative. I first learned about EA in 2016 and went to my first EA event in 2017. My formal education is in the social sciences and law. You can find my writing and resources at www.aaronhamlin.com.
aaronhamlin
I’m also a heavy sympathizer towards longtermism. But I don’t know that the dilemma needs to be framed as an either/or. Many of the endeavors I’ve personally gotten behind—bringing new reversible male contraceptives to market and fundamentally improving elections—impact the short-to-mid-term future as well as the long-term future.
That’s because these interventions have the ability to have a positive impact now, plus their staying power impacts the future. That contrasts with interventions that deal with consumables or models where you have to keep adding the same large inputs to sustain future good.
Of course, these interventions aren’t the only ones. We can think of others such as with charities like SENS. That fits the category because any technology developed doesn’t go away and creates benefit into the far future. Good Food Institute has many of these features as well because it focuses on technology that can permanently affect the market yet can also affect people and animals now.
Of course, one may argue that these types of interventions may be somewhat erroneous given they could happen anyway. Even if that’s the case, speeding along their timeline helps many people (or other sentient beings) who may not have been helped at all. Or absent the intervention, they wouldn’t be helped to the same extent given how far along the intervention was in time.
Perhaps this is a way to have your cake and eat it too. You could focus on interventions that affect the near-term and the future rather than just the future. This way, you’re also much more likely to see the interventions blossom or at the very least see their buds begin to form during your lifetime. And getting to see at least part of the excitement firsthand is a nice bonus.
As someone who started a nonprofit to speed up pharmaceutical drug development, this quote rings very true:
“The amount of money you need to develop these technologies at the early stages is much less than what you need at the later stages, but obtaining money for the later stages, like clinical trials, is much easier because much of the de-risking has already happened. Since philanthropic money is only needed at the early stages, the answer to that question is a relatively tiny amount of money: 500 millions or even 250 millions over a period of 10 years, which is an order of magnitude of what SENS currently has, which is about 5 million dollars per year. 250-500 millions is still a pitifully small amount of money as compared to the kind that’s spent in medical research generally.”
Disclaimer: The bulk of my recent personal giving ($1k) went to SENS.
I feel like this comment falls in this category:
”Q: I heard there was this thing about approval voting that wasn’t so good or that another voting method was better. Also, don’t forget about Arrow’s Theorem.A: All voting methods have quirks, but we maintain that the quirks of approval voting are comparatively mild compared to the alternatives. You can see this article where we go into all the details about approval voting critiques. Also, I talked with Kenneth Arrow personally for an hour, and he said that our choose-one voting method was bad. Really.”
I put together a detailed article where I compare different voting methods (including STAR). Some relevant details there are that STAR had its chance on the ballot in the city of Portland and failed. Note that voting methods poll much, much better in cities. So that it failed in Portland where STAR advocates are centered is a particularly discouraging sign. We also find that methods involving scoring (like STAR does) simply do not poll as well. This isn’t that big of a deal because they’re only slightly better in winner selection. And we have other methods that perform very nearly as well (approval voting, in the same cardinal family) that do poll well.Recall also that approval voting passed by over 60% in both cities it was on the ballot for. I would disagree with the claim that our forces in St. Louis and Fargo were so large that they would have passed any voting method. Our forces were so large in St. Louis and Fargo because it was approval voting. I know because they considered other options. STAR folks even reached out to our key person in Fargo, and they still decided on approval voting. IRV folks reached out to the same folks we partnered with in St. Louis and they still went with approval voting. I feel like to say that our forces were so strong that we could have passed anything misses the causality of why our forces were so strong to begin with.
I also find it a bit hard to take seriously the idea of putting energy behind Condorcet methods. Condorcet methods are a class of ranking methods that elect a “beat-all” or Condorcet winner. The math involved to select the winner when there is no Condorcet winner is quite complex (more so than STAR or IRV). That alone seems like a large barrier. Even I have to look up the algorithms to remember how they’re computed. And there’s no doing these by hand.
I feel like those two rationales help to explain why we continue to get behind approval rather than splitting our focus.
It’s also worth noting that CES explored the possibility of approval voting in Denver and to a lesser extent in Broomfield. We did this by talking with the Denver city council who invited us and talking with advocates in Colorado. We did not support signature gathering in Denver, and we did not submit it to be on the ballot (though there was an individual who did it on their own and abandoned it). We did not think that we had an adequate team of people who physically lived in Denver during the window that we were focused on. And so we decided to look at other opportunities. We’re data-oriented and cautious about how we spend limited resources. These are hard decisions, but saying no to Denver also meant that we got to say yes to our partners in Seattle. Seattle is polling at 70% and we have great partners who live there.Also, the question is not whether approval voting will outcompete IRV—though with proper funding it very well may. The bar is actually lower. Perhaps a better rephrasing of the question is whether approval voting can thrive as a candidate and be implemented so that it may be tested alongside IRV. And to that question, I’m confident that it can. We’ve evidenced that. And we will surely get more cities with proper funding. And we are currently exploring our plans with states. I can’t say exactly where we’re targeting and when just yet (we have to keep some aspects of our strategy confidential). But we will target states as our strategic opportunities align with our operational capacity—which is determined by funding.
Consider also that there are only two states that use IRV. Both won by slim margins. One of those states (Alaska) failed the first time it tried. IRV also failed by 10 points in Massachusetts. And it’s been repealed by voters multiple times in cities across the US. This is not a runaway for IRV. And it took them multiple decades to get this far. There’s enough reason for concern that it’s worth supporting approval voting as a viable alternative—particularly given that approval voting does substantially better at its job as a voting method.
Plus our team at CES that is pushing approval voting is amazing. I feel very lucky to work with such talented staff. Each of them went through a very challenging blind hiring process, and now they get to continually flex their muscles at work. We’re really just starting to show what we’re capable of.
Thanks for all you’ve done for the forum, Aaron! It was a challenging assignment to say the least. And a personal thank you for your feedback on some of my not-so-short essays! Best of luck on your new path. I’ll be cheering you on.
Do you see existential risks being mitigated without (1) strong governmental policy on those issue areas and (2) the ability for those policies to be sustained over a long time scale?
Follow-ups if yes:
1. How urgent is having a system where those governmental policies can reliably take hold?
2. Which country or countries should be prioritized?
Follow-up if no:
1. What would you recommend we focus on alongside or instead of governmental policy changes?
“I am skeptical whether CES will be able to have much influence at the federal level . . .”
It’s worth mentioning that CES highlighted that approval voting was able to be used for US House, US Senate, Presidential general, and Presidential Primaries with state-wide ballot initiatives. This information seems to be missing in the write-up and instead states that it doesn’t influence Federal elections.
The write-up also seems to portray local-level reform is CES’ only goal. Again. we provided feedback on this issue. We also corrected the review on the cost efficiency, which is incorrect.
We hope that our feedback is more fully considered in future reviews and that this doesn’t dissuade others from supporting our critical work.
Would you be able to add The Center for Election Science? We would fall under Far Future or Other, though preferably Far Future.
The Center for Election Science (CES) - Empowers voters through voting methods that strengthen democracy. CES accomplishes its mission through research and collaborating to pass ballot initiatives for approval voting. CES maintains that approval voting elects more consensus-style candidates and is more likely to maintain governmental stability over a long time frame in addition to providing near-term benefit.
Thanks!
Hi Adam,
I think your response fairly addresses the concerns I initially raised, and I appreciate your effort there. Thank you for the delicate response.
Thanks for sharing, and I like the easy-to-read format of this post! As a reminder for those considering giving that under the CARES Act (this year only) if you’re in the US and don’t itemize, you can make up to a $300 above-the-line deduction for cash-only charitable donations.
I’m liking LEEP & Giving Green in particular, but I’m always excited by the charities that Charity Entrepreneurship puts out.
Resources for those thinking of giving below:
CARES Act Details: https://medium.com/@aaronhamlin/a-donors-guide-to-the-cares-act-d07c7db6a5d9
Tax Efficiency & Giving: https://medium.com/@aaronhamlin/your-guide-to-charitable-giving-and-taxes-a7c0f44c922
This is a good suggestion, one I’ll keep in mind as I read posts that I find valuable. As someone who appreciates how hard it is to write a complex essay, I can say that it’s encouraging to see positive responses alongside critiques. Positive responses register more clearly than an upvote and often include useful information as well.
I agree with you that this is an important area. I wrote a whole essay on the technical aspects of planned giving. https://medium.com/@aaronhamlin/planned-giving-for-everyone-15b9baf88632
I have some more related essays here: https://www.aaronhamlin.com/articles/#philanthropy
It’s interesting that you were working on this as this exact issue came up during a project I was working on with Dan Hageman on directing folks to EA-aligned charities for employer gift matching. You can see the criteria that we set, though we don’t have a more exhaustive list that you’re attempting.
https://www.matchformore.org/where-should-i-give
Hi Larks,
On the moderate component, it’s important to note a couple things: (1) moderate can change depending on what the population is and (2) sometimes we get a distorted view of what moderate is through the media.
Here, we’re looking at a subgroup—people registered as democrats. So the population is a bit different. One of the platforms that Warren and Sanders are similar on that separate them from Biden is Medicare for All. It tends to poll rather well, particularly among democrats despite it being considered more extreme by the media.
On the democracy not always being good component, I touched on this a little elsewhere with a kind of “what else?” type reply. But perhaps, as you mentioned, there are some positions that are best not elected. I would take less issue with positions best not elected but more issue with positions elected badly (ex// FPTP).
Note that funding was not sufficient to be able to move forward for this campaign. Feel free to reach out to me for other statewide funding opportunities.
Nice find, and thank you for sharing! I can verify that it worked quickly.
Useful for: Anyone who is required to show COVID Day 2 testing verification for their flight to the UK from the US (or other “non-red” countries).
Getting my ticket through British Airways automatically sent me through a confirmation process for a “Health Passenger Locator Form.” Part of this requirement is for booking a COVID test prior to arrival in London (but actually done in London). The form actually doesn’t let you proceed until 48 hours prior to your arrival in London, so this information may be helpful for those approaching that window.
There is a walk-in testing site right by Heathrow Airport. You can do that right after you land to get it out of the way. They have the DAY 2 LATERAL FLOW TEST. Here is where you can book it: https://ldn.randox.com/You’ll get a reference number after you pay, which you’ll be required to add to a form later. As long as you sent it to a reliable email, you can reference it with no problem. As far as I know, this is all you need if you’re staying in London for fewer than 10 days.
You can take transit right there after you land. I added a bit of a buffer, but Google Maps says you can get there from Arrivals within 15 minutes. https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Heathrow+Airport,+Longford+TW6,+United+Kingdom/Radisson+Blu+Edwardian+Heathrow+Hotel+%26+Conference+Centre,+London,+140+Bath+Rd,+Harlington,+Hayes+UB3+5AW,+United+Kingdom/@51.4724018,-0.4627096,14.38z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x48767234cdc56de9:0x8fe7535543f64167!2m2!1d-0.4542955!2d51.4700223!1m5!1m1!1s0x48767248b4db8263:0x13eaaf45e2a032b0!2m2!1d-0.4410154!2d51.4814337!3e3
I hope this helps! I apologize if I’ve made any errors because this was a bit confusing. If I have, we’ll suffer together. :)
We may have a campaign in 2021 (our initial play is riskier here), but we can’t say yet for sure. We have other cities lined up for 2022. What I can say is all the cities we have in mind are over 750,000 people and are all very well known. We’ve laid out a strategic plan involving polling and legal analysis to factor in where to prioritize given our available funding. We’re working for a surprise win in 2021 to excite our funders.
This is actually a more complicated response. One of my next essays will be on this topic, so thanks for asking!
1a. You mentioned that other groups are trying to implement IRV and may not even understand that approval voting is superior. Can you explain why you think other people think this and even advocate for apparently inferior methods? Your article seemed convincing at first glance and I don’t think this is a particularly partisan issue.
I think the relative support issue is a matter of those IRV advocates deweighting the likelihood of failures in IRV and overweighting the value of IRV’s existing use compared to approval voting. There’s also a lack of knowledge on many of the nuances, which is just a product of voting theory being so complicated.
1b. “We also haven’t faced organized opposition.” What kind of opposition do you anticipate facing? IRV supporters? Elected officials?
With ballot initiatives, the most likely opposition will come from those who currently benefit from a choose-one voting method. If an official or party would have likely won under a choose-one method versus approval voting, then they’ll likely oppose approval voting.
We don’t anticipate IRV supporters to oppose specific approval voting ballot initiatives, though we have seen articles from those groups publicly attacking approval voting. In public venues, we’re often bumped to keep room for IRV speakers even if there’s redundancy. This exclusion can affect our perceived legitimacy with donors, media, and other people in the reform network. We’ll likely have to continue with large ballot initiative wins before excluding us becomes unacceptable.
As an opposition example, there was a piece of state legislation that had enabling language permitting cities to use approval voting and IRV. A left-leaning organization opposed the inclusion of approval voting because they thought (rightfully) that approval voting would elect a more moderate government. In my conversation with the left-leaning organization, they told me that with IRV, they’d at least have some wins—even if there was some back and forth losses in the complete opposite direction. I told the person that if they wanted more partisan ideologies to be represented then they should support including proportional methods in the enacting language, but they seemed uninterested in listening to me at that point.
2. Since legislative reform is a nonstarter according to you and ballot initiatives for changing voting methods are present in less than half of US states, what is the medium-long term plan? Get as many cities on approval voting as possible and hope that this builds pressure for approval voting nationally?
I think yes. It’s hard to understate how frantic our pace is compared to how long it took IRV to move with reforms. That said, if we don’t have sufficient funding to run large initiatives, then approval voting could get shut out early. There’s a lot riding on us having that immediate momentum.
Also, while legislative reform is most likely not on the table now, it may be in the future. But that’s likely only if approval voting has more of a track record and the choose-one method is more regularly publicly scorned.
3. What factors led to the convincing margin of victory in Fargo despite it being seen as a long shot by the media?
This is a technical subject, and I think it just takes too much energy for media to gather the information necessary to make a more accurate prediction. For instance, I would classify “long shot” as an event less than 10% likely to occur. Yet, using base rates from similar initiatives and eventually polling, there was never an indication that the odds were ever anywhere near that low. In my calculation, I don’t think my assessment ever dipped to 50%.
Most initiatives focusing on single-winner voting methods pass. Not all of them, as we’ve learned since, but the vast majority do. We also had a convenient narrative in Fargo. Their commission created a task force that recommended approval voting—which the commission then ignored. We also had strong support on the ground. I also had the benefit of talking with lots of other people who successfully ran initiatives at a conference in earlier 2018.
So long as there’s sufficient funding, we’ll only get better at this.
4. What would make you change your mind about approval voting being the best option to advocate for?
Part of the strategic rationale for going with approval voting versus a higher-utility method that’s more complicated is that a more complicated method is less likely to get enacted. Another higher-utility method would be range/score voting where voters score each candidate on a scale. It also has a number of desirable qualities in terms of practicality (though it may take some effort to have it work on the worst of US voting machines).
There appears to be a small but measurable gain in utility going from approval to score where there is little added complexity. If we were to advance score voting in the future, for instance, we’d have to repeat the same process we did with approval voting (i.e.: proof of concept, replication, then scale).
Beyond score voting, there is little to be gained in utility between where score voting lands and where an unattainable magic best voting method would be. There are lots of other variations that scatter around this space, but those methods often add extra complexity and present practical implementation burdens that may also reduce their impact. Keep in mind, a voting method’s simplicity also helps its ability to do other jobs like convey support for other candidates who didn’t win.
I’m at a loss to imagine what might be present for the current choose-one method to be preferred over approval voting. If it somehow showed evidence of consistently electing worse candidates, that would be evidence. The same would be true compared to other voting methods. These are the types of empirical questions we can ask by being able to fund a director of research position. It’s clear that without our work that those polls comparing different voting methods just wouldn’t be done.
Disclaimer: I’m the executive director for The Center for Election Science.
There’s some good stuff in this post.
Great stuff.
Understated, but still good stuff. Also, experts really hate plurality. See one such meeting of experts where not a single person approved of plurality. As an aside, they favored approval voting with IRV following in second.
I might disagree on the degree, but my sentiment overlaps with its place in longtermism.
The post gets at the idea that anything is better than plurality and that we shouldn’t feel like we have to pick among systems. But then it ultimately picks among systems. This is the dilemma we find ourselves in. We have to advocate for something, and when we’re presenting an opportunity, it is only reasonable for those exploring to consider the options. If experts don’t then do the correcting, then errors will go ignored, and poor decisions will be made.
My full empathy goes to anyone who does the legwork to create a post here (it’s challenging and it’s putting yourself out there). But practically all the arguments raised in this well-meaning post are addressed in the previous posting, which also links to the approval voting criticisms article and limits of RCV. If after looking, you don’t see it addressed, please reply and I’ll see if I can find an answer. You’ll find answers about later-no-harm and bullet voting, proportional approaches, the reflection of candidate support, practicality, and much more.
I’m noticing that the arguments referenced here come almost exclusively from FairVote. As a caveat, this organization repeatedly argues that approval voting should not be used in virtually any circumstance (despite when experts clearly disagree and even prefer approval voting). They also failed to acknowledge any faults within an RCV election where virtually every RCV mistake occurred. It’s hard to take them seriously after that. This refers to the Burlington election where voters got a worse outcome for ranking their favorite first, candidates could have been harmed by getting more higher-preference rankings, voter segments would have gotten a better outcome staying at home, and the candidate who could beat everyone head to head was eliminated due to RCV’s tendency to vote split along the middle. They also discouraged others from looking at election data from alternative voting methods in a Wall Street Journal article.
FairVote frequently cites Dartmouth while omitting any other reason that might have caused voters to choose fewer candidates (like few candidates being on the ballot and an enormous number of write-ins). As one can also get from the approval voting criticisms article, even when a majority choose only one candidate, the remainder who choose multiple candidates can (1) have a material effect in choosing a different winner and (2) give support to candidates who would otherwise be invisible. These repeals were not “often” the case. This argument also fails to acknowledge all the cities that repealed RCV due to either complaints of complexity or flat-out bad winners being elected. There are also cities that take forever to implement RCV or don’t do it at all due to the cost of software and new machines. This is one big reason why Fargo and St. Louis wanted approval voting instead of RCV.
This isn’t to say that any FairVote reference is bad, just that it potentially warrants more investigation.
When we are looking at voting methods, a good track record isn’t merely recorded uses. We need to see how it performs in competitive elections that have a different plurality winner. And note that practically any alternative voting method will handle spoiler candidates who get little support. Want more data? Funding a research department for CES would go a long way.
It’s also important to remember that no voting method can guarantee a majority and that methods like RCV merely contrive a majority through eliminating candidates via vote splitting—sometimes by eliminating the best candidate. Metrics that you can use to see whether a good winner was elected involve looking at Condorcet matrixes and candidate utilities (note that using explicit Condorcet methods is not practical due to “tie-breakers” from cycles). It’s not enough to say that a method didn’t provide a “majority” and so that method must have chosen the wrong winner.
It’s also important to note that CES was seriously vetted for close to a year before a grant was awarded. This grant from two years ago wasn’t a rash decision. This is a system that has been studied academically since the late ’70s with one of its developers on the CES board of advisers.
Also, CES went into this space agnostic about the voting method. We took the time in our early years (before we had any funds) to really think about the alternatives, including practicality as a concern. This is not the same approach that other organizations have taken either going with a system merely because it either (1) has previous use, or (2) superficially approximates the setup of a separate proportional method (STV).
Ultimately, I think for EA to switch to a voting method that already has funding relative to approval voting (and has serious issues) would be a mistake. This is a space that is overall extremely underfunded relative to other election reform areas given its importance (see earlier analysis). As an organization, we’ve already demonstrated how cost-effective we can be in a much shorter time frame compared to peers in our space. We hired staff and got approval voting in its first US city all within a year of initial funding.
Failing to provide further support or removing it at this crucial time wouldn’t be the optimal move here. It would just eliminate a promising alternative approach from being tested at all. If this is perceived as too much of a risk, then I would fear how this mentality would keep EA from pursuing other efforts where outcomes are even more unclear.