Comment by error_logic
5 days ago
This ties in with something that took me far too long to recognize: Trust has two pillars.
One pillar is alignment of values, and therefore intent. The other pillar is competence.
These are the same issues faced by AI development, as well as representative government, or anything regulating a dynamic with competing elements or agents.
Yet our plurality voting system would be insufficient even to keep a car on the road and driving within the speed requirements. If only the founding fathers had recognized the need to have more information included in ballots so that negative campaigning wasn't as effective if not more effective than positive.
If we voted with {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, 0...} weights, without duplication of non-zero values, the smartest, most constructive candidates would have a better chance. Each district would have its own blend of 3-4 viable parties, and the nation would be all the healthier for it. (Side note: Yes, this is still one person one vote--you could imagine voting with a single checkbox for a single permutation of all possible assignments of the scores, as an intermediate form.)
Back to your point, though: Yes, incompetence and malice can have the same effect in the short term. The long term is what determines the difference, both in effect and our responses to it.
I have realized something quite related in my growing years of experience both interviewing and observing contributors to a technical/engineering organization
Q: Given two engineers, one incompetent and one malicious, how can you tell the difference between the incompetent engineer and the malicious engineer?
A: It doesn't matter.
> One pillar is alignment of values, and therefore intent. The other pillar is competence.
That's a good point.
> If we voted with {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, 0...} weights, without duplication of non-zero values
Are you describing range/score voting?
I don't think avoiding duplicated values is necessary but it's pretty well known that score voting is the best system: https://rangevoting.org/
See the diagram at the bottom of the page describing voter regrets. Everybody at least somewhat interested in voting systems would prefer this, especially over plurality/FPTP which is the stupidest system possible. But a lot of people are clueless or willingly supporting a broken system.
There's also an explorable explanation by Nicky Case: https://ncase.me/ballot/
Sidenote: the fact you need to explain that expressing more information in one vote is still one vote shows how clueless people are. Obviously every vote has the same power to influence the result but some people will try to wear you down through misunderstood technicalities.