What do you mean by the word in this context? [ur-liberalism]
Liberalism is “the ideology of capitalism,” of course, but also all the stated beliefs about individual freedom, one man one vote, self-determinism, everything that makes westerners feel warm and squishy. I believe all of this is ultimately based in idealism; in a fundamental belief that society progresses through the competition of ideas, and that the best ideas win out when they are explained to the masses. The search for the best voting system seems like the search for the final proof that society really can be improved one good idea at a time.
Rather than, you know, reckoning that the history of politics is the history of class struggle.
Hospital example
So starting with the assumption that people who want to build a hospital negotiated for the resources to be diverted to build exactly one hospital (in today’s world: they got a grant from the feds):
Voting obviously isn’t where we start; if each individual has a different idea of where to build the hospital there’s nothing to vote on.
Influential individuals might put forth ideas or arguments as to where to put the hospital, and they might collect others around them and organize for their preferred location. Maybe opinion coalesces around two locations, A and B. We now have two affinity groups, who have decided they have a collective interest in each of those locations, with people making any number of individual negotiations to land themselves in those groups.
The politics happened when people organized themselves into groups and decided on their interests. Ideally, the final decision would involve a negotiation between these groups (hospital goes to A, but with a tram line to the largest neighborhood near B, or whatever).
This isn’t really very different than how it works now, except now the groups wouldn’t usually have any public involvement since most people intuitively understand that they have no political relevance. Some capitalist who wants A will direct their lobby group to ask that of officeholders, maybe capitalist B also exists, maybe others if they don’t get scared off by the competition. The officeholders don’t generally have any personal interest in the outcome—they aren’t members of either group in our example—but they have interests in keeping various lobby groups happy and might negotiate with them on those terms. The point is that the political negotiations always happen.
The final voting on A or B, if it happens, is just a formality. Even if we had direct democracy the process to get to those two was much more impactful, and only the really interested would come out to vote anyway, making it again mostly a formality. If you could force every person to have an informed opinion on A or B, and then force them all to vote, then certainly the result would be meaningful… but this comes back to exactly my point about idealism.
Ultimately my point here is that matters of public political opinion only exist in the kind of mathematical models used to evaluate different voting systems. All real politics is negotiation, and finding the best voting system is irrelevant.
Can someone explain to me why the hell he’s ever needed a monte-carlo analysis? The margin of error is gaussian, and it’s not like it’s running up against zero bounds when it’s 50/50, so why isn’t it just a linear equation?
It’s just a linear equation, right? He does a monte-carlo so he can brag about running 80,000 simulations, not for any good reason, right?