Meta-Tool

[Friedrich Lindenberg]

Hi,

I like all the talk about push v. pull and how we can create a large
platform, but I still fear that from a very practical standpoint,
we're going down a wrong turn here. It comes down to this point:

> Martin Häcker wrote:
>> ... But in the end, each voter casts one vote for one issue. (Does
>> this leave preference based voting methods out?)
>
> Maybe we can get away with vote translations like the following:
>
>  * From ranked to single (R->S), the autocaster takes the top-ranked
>    R as the single choice S
>
>  * From single to ranked (S->R), it marks the single choice S as the
>    only choice on ranked ballot R

First, you'll have to realize that this is really different data,
using different levels of measurement and different semantics. It's
not like twitter and Facebook, where both have activity streams and
thus you can make some kind of bridge. The answers you get are
actively dependent on the type of voting system used in the
application. Voting for or against something is subject to strategic
considerations and there is no perfect system to circumvent that.
There is near certainty that if you piped all the data from system A
to system B without adding any votes in B, both systems would come up
with completely different results (For this to happen you don't even
need to do mapping between preference and majority voting, all you
need is to map between two methods of counting either).

If you do any kind of mapping here, you'll start to actively construe
voter decisions. YOU CANNOT DO THAT. Asking the voter one question and
then using that data to answer a completely different question is
essentially fraud. I've sat in a lot of lectures on media market
research, a pseudo-science aimed at selling ad space to potential
advertisers. Even they wouldn't get away with this kind of data
mangling. Any LD implementation that is intended to retain some kind
of respect both on a theoretic and a practical level should actively
try to keep this from happening, down to the level of shutting down
API access.

So: voter mapping: sure, proposal mapping: yes, graph mapping: maybe,
but mapping between voting systems which differ even in the slightest
way: do not do that. NEVER.  No amount of XMPP will fix that. Let's
rather think about how we can link debates, link arguments, link
users, and maybe even build little questionnaires incorporating the
different polls open on an individual issue.

Sorry about the rant, but this point is crucial and it needs to be
generally accepted.

Cheers, Friedrich

-- 
Friedrich Lindenberg <friedrich at pudo.org>