[HN Gopher] Liquid Democracy. Two Experiments on Delegation in V...
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Liquid Democracy. Two Experiments on Delegation in Voting
Author : valkrieco
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-01-12 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nber.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nber.org)
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _There is a clear, immediate problem: are experts correctly
| identified?_ But there is also a second, more subtle, but also
| more fundamental question: even if the experts are correctly
| identified, delegation deprives the electorate of the richness of
| noisy but abundant information distributed among all voters.
| _Unless the extent of delegation is modulated correctly,
| Condorcet has taught us that a smaller number of independent
| voters, even if more accurate, may well lead to worse decision-
| making. This very basic trade-off is the necessary point of
| departure of Liquid Democracy and is the focus of this paper._
|
| Seems highly tendentious to me. How is abundance synonymous with
| richness when processing costs are ignored? The whole point of
| delegation is that it's not efficient or enjoyable for everyone
| to get up to speed on everything. Representative democracy is ass
| because representatives' own intellectual capacity is limited and
| the incentives for self-dealing vastly outweigh those for
| probity. Liquid democracy proposes to delegate on a per-issue
| basis, but the cost of expert identification is necessarily a
| function of the cost of expertise acquisition. Further, the
| payoffs for right or wrong decisions isn't always apparent in
| size or time. These latter considerations don't seem to have been
| factored in, causing the paper to read as a dismissal of a
| proposed heuristic by comparison to an impractical ideal.
| vore wrote:
| What prevents someone from just buying someone's delegation in
| liquid democracy? If you were destitute, someone buying your vote
| might sound like a pretty good deal...
| POiNTx wrote:
| I'm a fan of liquid democarcy on a conceptual level so this
| result is surprising to me. Started a side project to test it out
| in a game environment, basically an online Nomic[1] although I
| have abandoned it for now. Reading through some of the paper
| makes me realize I didn't think it through as deep as the authors
| and I'm probably not smart enough.
|
| I understand they used a perceptual test to figure out who the
| experts are.
|
| And 'over delegation' results in losing benefits of delegates who
| have information that might be useful?
|
| This is not clear to me: "...it (over delegation) reduces the
| variety of independent information sources"
|
| In a perceptual task where one is found to be better than the
| other participants, why wouldn't it be the case that voting for
| the best participent (the expert) gives you the best result? I
| think I'm missing something
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
| gardenfelder wrote:
| https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30794/w307...
| mistermann wrote:
| > The two designs are very different, but the experiments reach
| the same result: in both, delegation rates are unexpectedly high
| and higher than abstention rates, and LD underperforms relative
| to both universal voting and abstention.
|
| What might be the meaning of "underperforms" in this context?
| yorwba wrote:
| In the experiments, there are two options, exactly one of which
| is designated correct, and voters are given the task of voting
| for the correct option using imperfect information as to which
| one that is.
|
| "Underperforms" then means that the correct option is chosen
| less often. (If you want a more precise mathematical statement,
| the explanation of the model starts on page 8.)
|
| Basically, the model subscribes to the "mistake theory" of
| political disagreement (
| https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/74vpwm/soci...
| ) that there is a single outcome that's best for everyone and
| disagreements only happen because sometimes people are mistaken
| as to which outcome that is.
|
| In a "conflict-theoretical" experiment where voters are trying
| to maximize their benefit even at the expense of others, I
| suspect people would do quite well at identifying a member of
| their own tribe to delegate their vote to.
| StefanKarpinski wrote:
| Was confused by that as well. Sounds like Liquid Democracy
| doesn't do well compared to the alternatives, which would
| certainly be an interesting result, but doesn't fit with what
| the rest of the abstract seems to be suggesting.
| pc86 wrote:
| What might be the meaning of "doesn't do well" in this
| context?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Less good at identifying a correct answer than just polling
| people.
| heisenzombie wrote:
| ""
|
| For example, consider one of the parametrizations we study: a
| group of 15 voters of which 3 are experts; the experts'
| information is correct with probability 70%, while the
| precision of non-experts' signals can take any value between 50
| and 70%, with equal probability. Then only non-experts with
| signals of precision close to random should delegate: a non-
| expert with information that she knows is only 55% likely to be
| correct should not delegate to experts whom she knows to be
| correct with probability 70%.
|
| ""
|
| This is not about politics, or subjective questions about
| complicated situations. It imagines a world in which there is
| one correct answer and the reason that different people vote
| differently is due to a lack of information about that truth.
|
| This is very much a simplified "game" they're playing with. In
| this context, the result -- I think -- is more like an outcome
| of the central limit theorem. Basically, if you get lots of
| people each with a 55% chance of being correct to vote on a
| binary choice, they're very likely to pick the correct choice
| in aggregate. If you have one person who is 70% correct vote,
| they're 30% likely to get it wrong. So you actually don't want
| too many of the 55% people to delegate their decision to the
| 70% person, which is a bit counter-intuitive.
|
| This is sort of interesting, and I think says something useful
| about the Liquid Democracy concept. However I think the
| experiment is simplified to the point that it's a categorically
| different thing than even moderately interesting political
| questions, and so I don't think it's an argument against
| applying liquid democracy to politics.
| amelius wrote:
| Biggest threat to democracy is echo chambers and fake news. How
| does this help with that?
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