Infra-Bayesian physicalism (IBP) is a mathematical formalization of computationalist metaphysics: the view that whether something exists is a matter of whether a particular computation is instantiated anywhere in the universe in any way. In this post, we cover the basics of IBP, both rigorously and informally, its relevance to agent foundations and the alignment problem, and present new definitions that remove the biggest limitation in the previous formulation of IBP: the monotonicity requirement. Having read the original post on IBP is not required to understand this post, though prior familiarity with infra-Bayesianism is useful for understanding the technical parts.
A physicalist agent - that is, an agent that uses IBP - does... (read 5151 more words →)
Yes. Your counterexample is an example of the Ostrogorski paradox, and there is good evidence that this accounts for a significant portion of why Democrats and Republicans fare similarly in elections despite the Democratic platform being more popular than the Republican platform on most issues.
The ranked voting method you're considering here isn't Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), it's Borda Count
Party list methods can be thought of as such, though I suspect that's not what you meant. Aside from party list, I don't recall any voting methods in which voters vote on sets of candidates rather than on individual candidates being discussed. Obviously you could consider all subsets of candidates containing the appropriate number of winners and have voters vote on these subsets using a single-winner voting method, but this approach has numerous issues.
You have to be careful with this argument because it's valid for any candidate-based proportional voting method. All such voting methods rely on the influence of voters who strongly support candidates who get elected being reduced with regard to other candidates, so all of them have such an incentive. (It takes different forms in different voting methods; in STV the incentive isn't to forgo ranking such a candidate altogether, it's to rank such a candidate second or third.) This does not mean the incentive for free-riding is equally strong under all candidate-based proportional voting methods, however, and I do think that strategy is more important under SPAV than under some forms of STV.
This is not a proportional voting method.
First issue: Suppose there are two opposing factions, one comprising 55% of voters and the other 45%, in a three-winner election. The smaller faction fields only one candidate. Let's suppose the 45% of voters marking this candidate as "good" is enough to get her into the top 3. Then this candidate has the most "bad" ratings and is permanently eliminated, leaving the smaller faction without representation. This issue can be addressed by not having the rejected candidate permanently eliminated.
Second issue: Suppose the same factions for a three-winner election, but suppose each faction fields many candidates. In the first round, three candidates from the larger faction have... (read more)
(Disclosure: Vanessa is my wife.)
I want to share my thoughts on how the LTA can have a large impact. I think the main plan - to understand agency and intelligence fully enough to construct a provably aligned AI (perhaps modulo a few reasonable assumptions about the real world) - is a good plan. It’s how a competent civilization would go about solving the alignment problem, and a non-negligible chunk of the expected impact of the LTA comes from it working about as planned. But there are also plenty of other, less glamorous ways for it to make a big difference as well.
The LTA gives us tools to think about AI better. Even... (read more)
The two main proposals are sequential proportional approval voting (SPAV) and proportional approval voting (PAV).
SPAV proceeds in rounds. In the first round, the candidate with the most votes wins. In the second round, the ballots are reweighted such that those which have the first winner selected have 1/2 weight and all others retain full weight. This is repeated until each seat is filled, and, in each round, a ballot that has voted for n candidates who have already been elected is weighted at 1/(n + 1).
For an election to fill N seats, PAV looks at each possible set of N candidates and elects the set which maximizes the utility function given by 1*(#... (read more)