Re: Wisdom of Crowds vs Kenneth Arrow

Posted by gepr on Sep 09, 2016; 8:15pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Wisdom-of-Crowds-vs-Kenneth-Arrow-tp7587842p7587867.html


As usual, I ignore all the places where we agree and emphasize the disagreements ... because life is more fun that way. 8^)

On 09/09/2016 12:01 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> (I rarely actually hang by the media outlet waiting for these things).

I'm not sure when it happened.  But at some point I began to buy the idea that politics is deeply embedded in everything.  I think it started when I moved to the bay area and heard people (constantly) say things like "that's just politics" ... implying that whatever they were talking about was somehow not politics.  This article reinforced my position just this morning:

Enough With This Basic Income Bullshit
https://salon.thefamily.co/enough-with-this-basic-income-bullshit-a6bc92e8286b#.1xcadg3vf

As a result, I began following all the politics I could stomach as closely as my [in]competence would allow.

>Though I think gay (LGBTQZedOmega) and reproduction rights would have been retarded and a few (other) conservative Xtian rights would have been advanced differently but...

Maybe.  I resist our "great person" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory) tendencies wherever I find them, though.  It's reasonable to speculate that Obama had much less to do with those advances than we might think.  But it's also dangerous to argue that some event/process would have happened regardless.  That's a typical flaw of my libertarian friends who'll claim that advances like artificial hearts or whatnot, despite being government funded, would have emerged even without government funding.  Criticalities (like "great people") probably do play some/much role in some/many cases.  I'm simply skeptical that we can tease out which cases.

>> In short, this game has absolutely nothing to do with the
>> idealistic system(s) framing Arrow's or Condorcet's propositions.  And
>> that may partially explain why markets would be more robust predictors.
>
> Excepting, I would contend that "this game" is *shaped* by the lack of viable paths to successful 3rd party intrusions INTO the game.

Well, good games, games that I find _fun_, anyway, are always co-evolutionary with implicit objective functions.  Boring games are those with unambiguous rules, zero-sum outcomes, etc.  Were I to run for a large office (or participate on the campaign of someone running), I'd regard the viable paths as part of the game, not isolable merely as the context of the game.

Perhaps this is why, during near-drunken argumentation, people always accuse me of private definitions and "moving the goal posts". 8^)  Who says I can't move the goal posts?  What game were _you_ playing?

> This is my own fundamental point, no matter how poorly made.   I'm looking for the mechanical changes that might be made in our system to *allow* third parties to be relevant.  There is a chicken and egg.  For all the things I like about both Jill and Gary, they are not as serious of candidates as I think we need in third parties. As long as third parties are a priori non-viable at this level, we will not see anyone *build* a machine and put a seasoned driver at it's helm... and of course, the argument many make against supporting third parties *because* they are not viable, or that their chosen representatives are not experienced or serious enough is a little bit self-fulfilling methinks.

So both Ross Perot and Bernie Sanders are good examples, here.  Bernie tried to seize (or cajole) control of a good machine.  Perot (if I understand correctly ... I was very naive at the time) built/repurposed his own.  I think there's a great chance diverse characters like Jeff Bezos or Nate Silver could change the game enough to do it.  But they'd need to be very Machiavellian and much less ideological or narcissistic than our typical candidates.

In the end, I chalk it up to how we incentivize different types of work.  We tend to reward moronic activities, skills, attributes (like the ability to throw a stick further than everyone else ... or good bone structure) more than the geeky/wonky skills/behaviors needed to change the game.

> Also I hoped that this august body (ok, so we are into September by now) would have more interest/insight into the game-theoretic/structural issues implied by our electoral system. Maybe the real world stakes are too high to even try to think objectively/abstractly for most of us....

Yes, I would have thought this directly in the camp of "applied complexity".  I have a friend working on election security: http://freeandfair.us/  But that work is too "close to the metal" for me, I guess.  I'd prefer a systems engineering project experimenting on geopolitical systems in general.  I imagine there are lots of people doing that work, breathing stale air in faraday cages peppered around the country housed in various nondescript buildings.

--
☣ glen

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