Interesting. My thought was that putting election by jury in the title would instantly communicate the point, but I guess I could be more explicit right up front. Thank you.
ClayShentrup
Karma: 63
Election by Jury: The Ultimate Democratic Safeguard in the Age of AI and Information Warfare
this is far and away the most important issue.
approval voting should be far and away the top priority IMO, given that social utility efficiency computer simulations show it would massively improve human welfare. and it only has a one-time cost per implementation, and then it’s “free” forever.
another option is instant runoff voting, a form of ranked voting that’s commonly just called “ranked choice voting”. but it’s less accurate, more expensive, and appears to be losing political viability. as someone else here noted:
> There are alternatives to Ranked Choice Voting (like approval voting) and I’m no expert on them. It does seem like, if this campaign were to run for 2026 it would need to start soon.in addition to that, i would say the next most high-priority issue, based on the EA metrics of neglected+tractable+impactful, would be election by jury.
https://www.electionbyjury.org/
honestly i think almost everything else is hugely sub-optimal, because it’s mostly downstream of the collective choice mechanism.
great points John!
these were ballparky estimates created by claude. to me, it seems obvious this is the biggest issue for humanity, because it affects every single other policy issue we care about. as i point out, you can’t educate people at scale. but you can absolutely do it with a small statistically representative sample. so no matter what public policy you care about, this is the #1 issue with a bullet.
of course we want to do more to give this the kind of “objective” impact analysis we get via e.g. voter satisfaction efficiency metrics with voting methods. that would require a pretty substantial research budget and involve a massive amount of ballparky estimation. my point here is just to lay out the case at a high level. i’ve worked in electoral reform and “human welfare optimization” and economics for 20 years, and it seems so obvious to me that this is the solution, that i’m merely trying to pose the idea and get more people thinking about it. if someone thinks there’s any other reform that can come close to competing with this for impact, i’d be floored.
sorry I accidentally posted this twice. see this one.
it’s compulsory, so you know it’s statistically representative without having to use any complicated algorithms based on arbitrary criteria like Democrat or Republican or gay or straight (which aren’t necessarily binary).
this body isn’t writing the laws, they are electing people. or they are voting on ballot measures.
you could have said the same thing about approval voting, but then we got it passed in Fargo by a 64% supermajority.
I’m not sure what point you’re making.
Election by Jury: A Neglected Target for Effective Altruism
genes care about getting themselves copied, not getting other genes copied. the game theoretical approach is to reduce the size of the group that has influence to the smallest possible set that includes itself. so we don’t have an incentive to expand the franchise to non-humans. ideally, you want to even exclude other humans from having influence if possible. ethics is just selfishness plus game theory.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=MWgZviLNPCM&si=76Z_UkNmRo_fgW3j
i think i did a pretty good job summarizing “ethics” here. my position is that ethics is just the behaviors genes deploy to help get themselves copied, and that there’s no such thing as normativity. words like “ought” and “should” are just expressing a subjective preference.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=MWgZviLNPCM&si=76Z_UkNmRo_fgW3j
ClayShentrup’s Quick takes
> It’s somewhat unclear if it means utility in the sense of a function that maps preference relations to real numbers, or utility in axiological sense.
there’s only one notion of utility. if your utilities for x,y, and z are 0,3,5 respectively, then you’d find a 60% chance of the 5 option equally preferable to the guarantee of y, and so on.
> preferences are changed by the political process.
well, no. your estimate of how much a given policy will benefit you, that is changed by the political process. the actual utilities aren’t.
> The second is that people have stable preferences for terrible things like capital punishment.
no. people have utilities that relate to things like “being murdered walking down a dark alley”. the preferences they form for policies like capital punishment are estimates of how well off they’ll be under a given legal policy regime. in reality, most people would prefer a world where capital punishment is illegal. but they erroneously think capital punishment is good becaus ethey don’t understand how ineffective it is, and how they themselves could end up being unjustly killed via capital punishment.
you need to update your mental model with the disparity between actual utility from policy, versus the assume utilities that form your espoused political preferences.
that disparity between actual and assumed preferences was already accounted for by “ignorance factors” in the bayesian regret calculations, fyi.
it only makes sense to be “selfish gene utilitarian”. EA makes an error of advocating actual altruism/charity. this is irrational.
https://medium.com/effective-economics/ethics-9c74a524b6e1
My view is the complete opposite: voting reform is the biggest bang-for-the-buck human welfare increaser, by a huge margin. But don’t equate electoral reform with proportional representation.
Two different math PhD’s have run computer simulations to estimate the benefit of alternative voting methods:
A Princeton math PhD named Warren Smith, who advocates score voting (formerly known as range voting) produced these Bayesian regret calculations. https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig
A Harvard stats PhD named Jameson Quinn used some slightly different modeling assumptions and gave the results in an inverted normalized form called voter satisfaction efficiency or VSE, where 100% VSE is the same as a Bayesian regret of zero.
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse.html
Warren Smith found that an increase from plurality voting to score voting increased human welfare about as much as democracy vs. non-democratic random selection. He summarizes thusly:
there are very few causes out there with this much “bang for the buck.” Examine the numbers yourself. I do not believe religious causes can compete. Disaster relief cannot compete (in the long term; for large disasters in the short term, it can). Curing diseases also cannot compete except for the biggest killers. E.g, ending malaria or halving illiteracy each would cause an amount of good comparable to range voting, but would probably be more difficult to accomplish.
There is a great deal of empirical evidence that bolsters such claims. In a 2014 exit poll for the Maine gubernatorial race, switching from plurality voting to approval voting led to a complete reversal in finish order. A bombastic climate change denier won the real election due to vote splitting between the Democrat and a Democrat-ish independent.
Warren Smith is actually fairly skeptical of proportional representation, mind you.
My view is that if the impact of alternative voting methods was properly understood, it would comprise the vast majority of the EA community’s efforts. You just can’t get this kind of impact (per dollar) from cash transfers, malaria nets, deworming, etc.
Fixing the process by which we decide who runs the government and crafts the policy that ultimately addresses every other issue, from zoning to emissions to pandemic response, sure seems like an effective focus to me. With the latest win in St Louis, I think the Center for Election Science is poised to take off like a rocket.
I discussed this in my post:
We just start with a random utility distribution, then turn that into preferences by mangling it with an “ignorance factor”
The ignorance factor represents a disparity between the actual utility impact a candidate will have on a voter, and the assumed utility impact which forms the basis for her vote. Even with lots of ignorance, there’s still a significant difference in performance from one voting method to another.
In addition, I believe a lot of our ignorance comes from “tribal” thinking. If we have two parties (tribes), and each party must pick one side of any issue (abortion, guns, health care, etc.). Thus voters will tend to retroactively justify their beliefs about a given issue based on how it comports with their stated party affiliation. Note that this forced binary thinking is so powerful that we even have a party divide over the objective reality of climate change!
With a system like approval voting, candidates can easily run outside of the party system and still be viable. Thus they can take any arbitrary position on any issue, giving voters the freedom to move freely through the issue axes. A new offshoot of the GOP could form that is generally socially conservative and pro gun rights, but totally committed to addressing climate change. With 3-5 viable parties able to constantly adjust to changing realities, this is expected to reduce the amount of voter ignorance considerably, by allowing voters to consider issues which were once taken as given as part and parcel of their party affiliation.
A democratic system is not the same as a utility-maximizing one.
In my utilitarian view, these are one in the same. An election is effectively just “a decision made by more than one person”, thus the practical measure of democratic-ness is “expected utility of a voting procedure”. I would argue it could be perfectly democratic to replace elections with a random sample of voter opinions over a statistically significant subset of the eligible voting population. This would probably be more democratic than the current system, which is distorted by demographic disparities in turnout. The issue would be making the process provably random, so as to ensure legitimacy.
The various criteria used to evaluate voting systems in social choice theory are, generally speaking, formal representations of widely-shared intuitions about how individuals’ preferences should be aggregated or, more loosely, how democratic governments should function.
Yes, this is why the utilitarian camp within the electoral reform community eschews voting method criteria in favor of utility efficiency calculations, traditionally expressed as Bayesian regret, or more recently inverted into voter satisfaction efficiency. The procedure is pretty straightforward. We just start with a random utility distribution, then turn that into preferences by mangling it with an “ignorance factor”, then turn that into a cast ballot by normalizing it and adding strategy. Then we compute the winner and measure the utility lost by not electing the social utility maximizer.
This allows us to property assess the combined effect of all criteria at once, even ones we never thought to consider, with their proper utility-decreasing weight, times frequency. There are of course externalities, like complexity and cost of voting machine upgrades, but luckily the better performing methods like approval voting tend to also be simpler than ranked voting methods too.
So an individual gains utility from a voting system if and only if the utility gained by its superior representation of their preferences exceeds the utility lost in other areas lost by switching.
I don’t see how there is any appreciable utility lost by adopting approval voting. There might be a tiny amount lost from the physical cost of things like new voting machines if we upgrade to a more complex ranked system, but even then I believe the utility gain exceeds that by an order of magnitude.
In the simplest terms possible: we know that some voting systems are better than others when it comes to meeting our intuitive conception of democratic government. But we’re concerned about people’s welfare beyond just having people’s electoral preferences represented, and we don’t know what the relationship between these things is.
I have argued above that we do know. We have voter satisfaction efficiency and Bayesian regret. That is indeed the utilitarian lens through which many of the foundational members of the approval voting community see the world, and the basis of much of their support.
It is totally possible that voting systems that violate the Condorcet criterion also dominate systems that meet the criterion with respect to social welfare. We simply don’t know.
This is in fact true! Score voting violates the Condorcet criterion, and also outperforms Condorcet methods in utility efficiency calculations.
OK, thanks for explaining. It’s literally just election by a jury instead of the public.
Looks like the summary bot explained it below.
UPDATE: I significantly restructured the flow so that it now dives immediately into the basic criteria and description of the idea.