by amalcon | 2025-05-20 21:01:24+00:00
> It does when you describe it to them and convince or force them to use it, e.g. by removing their ability to score the candidate on a scale.

This is essentially the argument that it's good to allow other people to make tactical errors, because it gives more power to those who do not make such errors. Or, perhaps, that I should take an approach that reduces the power of my vote on the basis that others might copy me. Frankly, I philosophically reject both of these.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality

Look, I buy superrationality from an ethical perspective. I favor the Kantian imperative as a framework (among others) for assessing ethical questions, and it's basically the same concept as superrationality.

Superrationality is not, however, a reasonable way to make practical decisions about scarce resources. The reason is because it essentially ignores the problem of perverse incentives. In practical situations, one must deal with perverse incentives. My voting does not create a perverse incentive for anyone else, and in fact it only benefits me (by signaling that I do vote, so my vote is worth competing for).

> Suppose there are two plausible final election outcomes where your vote matters:

You are claiming that I'm not thinking probabilistically, but first off: you're providing an overly specific scenario rather than a probabilistic one. Second, your own overly specific scenario does not even work. If the extra 4 points that I give to B (over the "preferred outcome" strategy) is enough to result in B defeating C in scenario 2, it is also enough to result in A defeating B in scenario 1. A winning isn't an option in either of these cases, even if there is some dataset about the world that makes this set of outcomes plausible.

Maybe try thinking about it this way: In score voting, points are summed and nonrivalrous. So, a point is a point -- regardless of how many other points you gave to that candidate. Why, then, are you choosing 5/10 for B, specifically? What, analytically, leads you to that choice? If you're trying to prevent a C victory as your most important value, why not choose 6/10? 7? And so on. If you find it more important to cause an A victory, why not choose 4/10? A point is a point, no matter how many other points the candidate got from the same voter.

> In a prisoner's dilemma, defection is to your advantage regardless of what the other person does.

There are formulations of the prisoner's dilemma in which a double defection is worse for both parties than a single defection is for the losing party. But it's clear that this terminology is more confusing than helpful, so I'm OK abandoning it.

> Then it's not clear if your support for candidate A will allow them to defeat candidate C, but if it isn't, your defection in assigning the lowest possible score to candidate B would cause candidate C to defeat candidate B, which is to your own disadvantage.

Crucially, this is equally true for every other score I can assign to B less than the maximum. This reasoning does not argue for a vibe-based score assignment, it argues for giving the maximum score to both A and B. By assigning a lower score to either, I have already accepted some risk.

> It has less information content.

Less information on the ballot, yes, but it has the same effect on the outcome. Let's exclude cases where my vote is irrelevant. I have ten options, and nine of them are potential numbers of additional points that a candidate needs to win. Each of those numbers are roughly equally likely, because they are the least significant bits (least significant bits in stochastic processes tend to approximate a uniform distribution).

If I give 1 point, the candidate wins 0/9 times. If I give 10 points, the candidate wins 9/9 times. If I give 5 points, the candidate wins if the number of additional points needed is 2-5 (1 would make my vote irrelevant), and loses if it's 6-10. So, the effect on the outcome is the same as if I gave 10 points 4/9 times.

The only reason this would meaningfully increase the variance is if a large fraction of people in a small election were doing this, too small for the central limit theorem to work its magic but enough people doing it to exceed the difference in fixed preferences.