Comment by godelski

  > it's marginally worse than score/STAR to begin with, and on top of that has an ugly failure mode

To be clear, I strongly prefer STAR, but approval is the "good enough" where I'd shut up other than nerdy nit-picky conversations (which I enjoy as much as any other nerd). Approval seems to work out well enough in practice (hell, it's how most people figure out where to eat and even HN is some mixture of Approval and 3-2-1 if you can downvote lol).

The way I like to explain score vs ranking to people is like measuring things with a normal ruler vs measuring things but your ruler only has inches on it. People seem to get it and the importance of specifying how much more you like one candidate over another or how little your indifference is between some.

But I think we both understand these systems sufficiently and probably shouldn't derail. I just want to make sure we don't fall into doing the same thing I'm complaining about over here[0]

  > the lesser of evils

But that's kinda my point. With the example of my parents we can agree that it is a choice between two evils but then they cannot understand how I say I hold my nose while begrudgingly choosing one rather than vote with full devotion. In reality that means one of us doesn't actually believe in a choice between the lesser of two evils[1]. They claim this, but don't act on it. I think this is strikingly common.

That is a far worse form of tribalism because they lie to themselves. They've convinced themselves they believe something that they don't actually believe in. What I'm worried about is how common this is. Even down to the mundane cliche, where I jokingly define as "something everyone can recite, but no one can put into practice." Road to hell I guess...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45225341

[1] Give me the choice between the lesser of many evils! I joke, but as much as I love cardinal voting I won't make the claim that it is a cure all. But given a choice between two evils or many evils (and no other information), I'll take many evils. My chances are better in being able to pick a lesser one.