Weiye Loh's Library tagged Methodology → View Popular, Search in Google

Feb

2012

Skepticblog » “Pure” science and serendipity

On pure vs. applied science: the best research is “pure” research, often with no practical goal in mind.

www.skepticblog.org/...pure-science-and-serendipity

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Science Research Methodology Consequentialism

people think that science is about planning your research carefully to achieve some specific goal. They are often not tolerant about “pure research” that doesn’t have a specific conclusion in mind, but is focused on finding out general facts about nature, whether or not they have practical uses. Even the scientific funding agencies operate this way, where they tend to reward research that is conventional and “more of the same,” and seldom fund research that is a speculative gamble.
More often than not, scientists who find a crucial new piece of evidence were not looking for it, but looking for something else, and make their great discovery without planning to. The term “serendipity” was describes this phenomenon.
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- nature is not always predictable, and scientific research cannot be restricted to straightforward results that were expected when the study began. Shortsighted people like the right-wing radio hosts and the Congressmen who ridicule pure research must not be allowed to destroy our scientific curiosity and creativity, or our scientific discoveries would come to an end. Isaac Asimov said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’, but ‘That’s funny …’“

Sep

2011

What Do Test Scores Tell Us? - NYTimes.com

Tests used to be just for evaluating students, but now the testing of students is used to evaluate teachers and, in fact, the entire educational system. On an individual level, some students and parents have noticed a change — more standardized tests and more classroom and homework time devoted to preparation for them.

So what exactly do test scores tell us?

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...what-do-test-scores-tell-us

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Test Academia Education Validity Reliability Methodology

Sep

2011

Johann Hari: A personal apology - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

www.independent.co.uk/...-personal-apology-2354679.html

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Research Methodology Interview Plagiarism Journalism

I did two wrong and stupid things. The first concerns some people I interviewed over the years. When I recorded and typed up any conversation, I found something odd: points that sounded perfectly clear when you heard them being spoken often don’t translate to the page. They can be quite confusing and unclear. When this happened, if the interviewee had made a similar point in their writing (or, much more rarely, when they were speaking to somebody else), I would use those words instead. At the time, I justified this to myself by saying I was giving the clearest possible representation of what the interviewee thought, in their most considered and clear words.
But I was wrong. An interview isn’t an X-ray of a person’s finest thoughts. It’s a report of an encounter. If you want to add material from elsewhere, there are conventions that let you do that. You write “she has said,” instead of “she says”. You write “as she told the New York Times” or “as she says in her book”, instead of just replacing the garbled chunk she said with the clear chunk she wrote or said elsewhere. If I had asked the many experienced colleagues I have here at The Independent – who have always been very generous with their time – they would have told me that, and they would have explained just how wrong I was. It was arrogant and stupid of me not to ask.

Sep

2011

Epiphenom: Is The God Delusion more disgusting than the Koran?

Ever wondered why we get disgusted by things that taste bad and also by things that are morally outrageous? Well, it seems that they really are connected in a very deep way - moral disgust seems to have evolved as an extension of physical disgust.

And that means you can play a neat trick: you can measure moral disgust indirectly by looking to see how it affects our physical sense of disgust.

epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/...sion-more-disgusting-than.html

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Research Methodology Religion Morality

Jun

2011

Sam Geall - Lies, damn lies and Chinese science | New Humanist

newhumanist.org.uk/...-damn-lies-and-chinese-science

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Science Methodology Prediction Forecast Seismology Earthquake China Plagiarism

China’s anti-imperialist May Fourth Movement: the early 20th-century cultural and political uprising that championed critical thought and innovation, guided by two enlightenment concepts famously personified as “Mr Science” and “Mr Democracy”. “Not many people understand the work we are doing,” he said. “Most Chinese people’s attitudes to science are superstitious and fearful.” Things may be even worse at the elite level, he said, where science is encouraged in the abstract, without a grasp of the scientific method. Regarding scientific and critical thinking, Fang added, “Chinese people need a new enlightenment.”
Jia Hepeng, editor of the government-backed magazine Science News Bi-weekly, agreed. At an elite level, he explained: “Science – with a capital ‘S’ – is regarded as a once-and-for-all solution to Chinese problems, and as a result it has enjoyed a higher status than any other discipline in China. Anything that is scientific is equal to good.” An important slogan of the current generation of Chinese leaders is the so-called “scientific view of development”, and the government periodically leads crackdowns against “superstition”. But these have nothing to do with “evidence-based approaches” or the “experimental spirit”, he said. Here is the predicament in today’s China: Mr Science may be good, but independent, critical thinking is bad – or as Fang discovered, even life-threatening. This leaves the science dissenters – the sceptics who understand science not as an ideology, but advocate experimental, evidence-based approaches and dare to criticise malpractice – walking a political tightrope.
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- This publish-or-perish culture has led to unrealistic targets at Chinese universities – and as a predictable consequence, rampant plagiarism.
- In January, the peer-reviewed international journal Acta Crystallographica Section E announced the retraction of more than 70 papers by Chinese scientists who had falsified data. Three months later, the same publication announced the removal of another 39 articles “as a result of problems with the data sets or incorrect atom assignments”, 37 of which were entirely produced in Chinese universities. The New Jersey-based Centenary College closed its affiliated Chinese business school programme in July after a review “revealed evidence of widespread plagiarism, among other issues, at a level that ordinarily would have resulted in students’ immediate dismissal from the college.” A government study, cited by Nature, found that about one-third of over 6,000 scientists surveyed at six top Chinese institutions had practised “plagiarism, falsification or fabrication”.
- Publication bias – the tendency to privilege the results of studies that show a significant finding, rather than inconclusive results – is notoriously pervasive. One systematic review of acupuncture studies from 1998, published in Controlled Clinical Trials, found that every single clinical trial originating in China was positive – in other words, no trial published in China had found a treatment to be ineffective. Moreover, a nationalistic and defensive approach to discredited methods keeps superstition alive in the academies and government.
- One commentary in Science, titled “Earthquakes Cannot Be Predicted”, concluded that it seemed “unwise to invest heavily in monitoring possible [earthquake] precursors”. An advisory body to the Japanese prime minister – Japan had previously been supportive of earthquake prediction research – argued in 1999 that forecasting was not realistic and that research should instead focus on developing new disaster prevention technologies. But nonetheless the practice remains an article of faith for many Chinese scientists and officials

Jun

2011

Book Review - Everything Is Obvious, Once You Know the Answer - By Duncan J. Watts - NYTimes.com

We rely on common sense to understand the world, but in fact it is an endless source of just-so stories that can be tailored to any purpose. “We can skip from day to day and observation to observation, perpetually replacing the chaos of reality with the soothing fiction of our explanations,” Watts writes. Common sense is a kind of bespoke make-believe, and we can no more use it to scientifically explain the workings of the social world than we can use a hammer to understand mollusks.

www.nytimes.com/...-answer-by-duncan-j-watts.html

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Common Sense Rationality Rationalization Patternicity Methodology Complex System Organization Weak Ties Network

Common sense is a kind of bespoke make-believe, and we can no more use it to scientifically explain the workings of the social world than we can use a hammer to understand mollusks.
Nowadays, of course, it’s common sense to distrust our common sense. A number of best-selling books have made us painfully aware of the biases that beset our everyday reasoning — we overrate the importance of recent events and overvalue objects because we happen to possess them, and so on.
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- “methodological individualism,” the notion that “until one has succeeded in explaining some social phenomenon — the popularity of the Mona Lisa or the relation between interest rates and economic growth — exclusively in terms of the thoughts, actions and intentions of individual people, one has not fully succeeded in explaining it at all.”
- however well we understand the parts, we do not thereby acquire a complete understanding of the whole. This is one of the big reasons that common sense is unreliable. We are prone to think in terms of individual actors whose doings set predictable chains of events in motion. But social systems can acquire properties that don’t easily jibe with this kind of common sense — through processes like self-reinforcing cascades, in which outcomes feedback upon themselves, or nonlinear dynamics, in which small changes in input can lead to large changes in output.
- Consider the view that those well-connected people the marketing industry labels “influencers” have an outsize effect on other people’s behavior. It’s only natural to assume that certain individuals have a disproportionate impact because of their particular characteristics — charisma, intelligence, popularity. But when Watts used computer simulations to model how new behaviors might spread through social networks, he found that the most highly connected individuals were not the whole story. The spread of an idea or taste depended not only on such individuals, but also on “a critical mass of easily influenced people who influence other easy-to-influence people. When this critical mass existed, even an average individual was capable of triggering a large cascade.” If we drop a match on a forest floor, we cannot predict whether the result will be a conflagration or a campfire just by knowing a lot about matches. The outcome much depends on what is going on nearby: how dry is the terrain, how dense is the forest, how fast is the wind? When the right conditions for a fire exist, any spark will set it off; but when they do not, no spark will suffice.
- If you had asked social scientists even 20 years ago what powers they dreamed of acquiring, they might have cited the capacity to inconspicuously track the behaviors, purchases, movements, interactions and thoughts of whole cities of people, in real time. Of course, this is exactly what is possible now that so many of us — via credit cards, cellphones, online social networks, blogs and so on — leave just such digital breadcrumbs as we move through our lives. Watts provides powerful examples, many taken from his own work in this new field of computational social science. One project tracked patterns of tweets and retweets among 1.6 million Twitter users. Another followed thousands of people as they judged which songs they wanted to download, and found that their individual tastes were easily trumped by small, and random, differences in a song’s perceived popularity among other people.
  In 1969, the sociologist Morris Zelditch asked, rhetorically, “Can you really study an army in a laboratory?” Nearly half a century later, the answer appears to be yes. It’s this sort of study, not common sense, that will shed bright light on human affairs.

Jun

2011

Data Without Borders

Data is everywhere, but use of data is not. So many of our efforts are centered around making money or getting people to buy more things, and this is understandable; however, there are neglected areas that could actually have a huge impact on the way we live. Jake Porway, a data scientist at The New York Times, has a proposition for you, tentatively called Data Without Borders.
[T]here are lots of NGOs and non-profits out there doing wonderful things for the world, from rehabilitating criminals, to battling hunger, to providing clean drinking water. However, they’re increasingly finding themselves with more and more data about their practices, their clients, and their missions that they don’t have the resources or budgets to analyze. At the same time, the data/dev communities love hacking together weekend projects where we play with new datasets or build helpful scripts, but they usually just culminate in a blog post or some Twitter buzz. Wouldn’t it be rad if we could get these two sides together?

flowingdata.com/...data-without-borders

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Data Open Source Collaboration NGO Research Methodology

May

2011

Jonathan Stray » Measuring and improving accuracy in journalism

Professional journalism is supposed to be “factual,” “accurate,” or just plain true. Is it? Has news accuracy been getting better or worse in the last decade? How does it vary between news organizations, and how do other information sources rate? Is professional journalism more or less accurate than everything else on the internet? These all seem like important questions, so I’ve been poking around, trying to figure out what we know and don’t know about the accuracy of our news sources. Meanwhile, the online news corrections process continues to evolve, which gives us hope that the news will become more accurate in the future.

jonathanstray.com/reasing-accuracy-in-journalism

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Journalism Accuracy Objectivity Methodology Research

Accuracy is a hard thing to measure because it’s a hard thing to define. There are subjective and objective errors, and no standard way of determining whether a reported fact is true or false
The last big study of mainstream reporting accuracy found errors (defined below) in 59% of 4,800 stories across 14 metro newspapers. This level of inaccuracy — where about one in every two articles contains an error — has persisted for as long as news accuracy has been studied, over seven decades now.
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- With the explosion of available information, more than ever it’s time to get serious about accuracy, about knowing which sources can be trusted. Fortunately, there are emerging techniques that might help us to measure media accuracy cheaply, and then increase it.
- We could continuously sample a news source’s output to produce ongoing accuracy estimates, and build social software to help the audience report and filter errors. Meticulously applied, this approach would give a measure of the accuracy of each information source, and a measure of the efficiency of their corrections process (currently only about 3% of all errors are corrected.)
- Real world reporting isn’t always clearly “right” or “wrong,” so it will often be hard to decide whether something is an error or not. But we’re not going for ultimate Truth here, just a general way of measuring some important aspect of the idea we call “accuracy.” In practice it’s important that the error counting method is simple, clear and repeatable, so that you can compare error rates of different times and sources.
- Subjective errors, though by definition involving judgment, should not be dismissed as merely differences in opinion. Sources found such errors to be about as common as factual errors and often more egregious [as rated by the sources.]
  
  But subjective errors are a very complex category
- One of the major problems with previous news accuracy metrics is the effort and time required to produce them. In short, existing accuracy measurement methods are expensive and slow. I’ve been wondering if we can do better, and a simple idea comes to mind: sampling.
  
  The core idea is this: news sources could take an ongoing random sample of their output and check it for accuracy — a fact check spot check
- Standard statistical theory tells us what the error on that estimate will be for any given number of samples (If I’ve got this right, the relevant formula is standard error of a population proportion estimate without replacement.) At a sample rate of a few stories per day, daily estimates of error rate won’t be worth much. But weekly and monthly aggregates will start to produce useful accuracy estimates
- the first step would be admitting how inaccurate journalism has historically been. Then we have to come up with standardized accuracy evaluation procedures, in pursuit of metrics that capture enough of what we mean by “true” to be worth optimizing. Meanwhile, we can ramp up the efficiency of our online corrections processes until we find as many useful, legitimate errors as possible with as little staff time as possible. It might also be possible do data mining on types of errors and types of stories to figure out if there are patterns in how an organization fails to get facts right.
- I’d love to live in a world where I could compare the accuracy of information sources, where errors got found and fixed with crowd-sourced ease, and where news organizations weren’t shy about telling me what they did and did not know. Basic factual accuracy is far from the only measure of good journalism, but perhaps it’s an improvement over the current sad state of affairs

Apr

2011

Effect of alcohol on risk of coronary heart diseas... [Vasc Health Risk Manag. 2006] - PubMed result

Studies of the effects of alcohol consumption on health outcomes should recognise the methodological biases they are likely to face, and design, analyse and interpret their studies accordingly. While regular moderate alcohol consumption during middle-age probably does reduce vascular risk, care should be taken when making general recommendations about safe levels of alcohol intake.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...17326330

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Alcohol Bias Research Methodology

. The consistency in the vascular benefit associated with moderate drinking (compared with non-drinking) observed across different studies, together with the existence of credible biological pathways, strongly suggests that at least some of this benefit is real.
However, because of biases introduced by: choice of reference categories; reverse causality bias; variations in alcohol intake over time; and confounding, some of it is likely to be an artefact. For heavy drinking, different study biases have the potential to act in opposing directions, and as such, the true effects of heavy drinking on vascular risk are uncertain. However, because of the known harmful effects of heavy drinking on non-vascular mortality, the problem is an academic one.
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- Studies of the effects of alcohol consumption on health outcomes should recognise the methodological biases they are likely to face, and design, analyse and interpret their studies accordingly. While regular moderate alcohol consumption during middle-age probably does reduce vascular risk, care should be taken when making general recommendations about safe levels of alcohol intake. In particular, it is likely that any promotion of alcohol for health reasons would do substantially more harm than good.

Jan

2011

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS25 - Q&A With Massimo and Julia

www.rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/...qa-with-massimo-and-julia.html

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Philosophy Skepticism Science Methodology

is quantitative research more scientific than qualitative one, can philosophers really claim to have expertise on something, is skepticism just another name for intelligence, what about feminist philosophy, bayesian reasoning

Nov

2010

t r u t h o u t | Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education Is Being Taken Over by the Mega Rich

www.truth-out.org/eing-taken-over-mega-rich65363

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Education Social Divide Political Economy Methodology Critical Pedagogy

Paulo Freire. Freire is one of the most important educators of the 20th century and is considered one of the most important theorists of "critical pedagogy" - the educational movement guided by both passion and principle to help students develop a consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, empower the imagination, connect knowledge and truth to power and learn to read both the word and the world as part of a broader struggle for agency, justice and democracy. His groundbreaking book, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," has sold more than a million copies and is deservedly being commemorated this year - the 40th anniversary of its appearance in English translation
most universities are now dominated by instrumentalist and conservative ideologies, hooked on methods, slavishly wedded to accountability measures and run by administrators who often lack a broader vision of education as a force for strengthening civic imagination and expanding democratic public life.
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- a concern with excellence has been removed from matters of equity, while higher education - once conceptualized as a fundamental public good - has been reduced to a private good, now available almost exclusively to those with the financial means. Universities are increasingly defined through the corporate demand to provide the skills, knowledge and credentials in building a workforce that will enable the United States to compete against blockbuster growth in China and other southeast Asian markets, while maintaining its role as the major global economic and military power. There is little interest in understanding the pedagogical foundation of higher education as a deeply civic and political project that provides the conditions for individual autonomy and takes liberation and the practice of freedom as a collective goal.
- Public education fares even worse. Dominated by pedagogies that are utterly instrumental, geared toward memorization, conformity and high-stakes test taking, public schools have become intellectual dead zones and punishment centers as far removed from teaching civic values and expanding the imaginations of students as one can imagine.
- The profound disdain for public education is evident not only in Obama's test-driven, privatized and charter school reform movement, but also in the hostile takeover of public education now taking place among the ultra-rich and hedge fund zombies, who get massive tax breaks from gaining control of charter schools. The public in education has now become the enemy of educational reform.
- when it comes to the elite of business culture, ignorance about education now ranks as a virtue.
- Freire believed that education, in the broadest sense, was eminently political because it offered students the conditions for self-reflection, a self-managed life and critical agency. For Freire, pedagogy was central to a formative culture that makes both critical consciousness and social action possible. Pedagogy in this sense connected learning to social change; it was a project and provocation that challenged students to critically engage with the world so they could act on it.
- What Freire made clear is that pedagogy at its best is not about training in techniques and methods, nor does it involve coercion or political indoctrination. Indeed, far from a mere method or an a priori technique to be imposed on all students, education is a political and moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills and social relations that enable students to explore for themselves the possibilities of what it means to be engaged citizens, while expanding and deepening their participation in the promise of a substantive democracy.
- critical pedagogy afforded students the opportunity to read, write and learn from a position of agency - to engage in a culture of questioning that demands far more than competency in rote learning and the application of acquired skills.
- pedagogy had to be meaningful in order to be critical and transformative. This meant that personal experience became a valuable resource that gave students the opportunity to relate their own narratives, social relations and histories to what was being taught. It also signified a resource to help students locate themselves in the concrete conditions of their daily lives, while furthering their understanding of the limits often imposed by such conditions.
- experience became a starting point, an object of inquiry that could be affirmed, critically interrogated and used as resource to engage broader modes of knowledge and understanding. Rather than taking the place of theory, experience worked in tandem with theory in order to dispel the notion that experience provided some form of unambiguous truth or political guarantee. Experience was crucial, but it had to take a detour through theory, self-reflection and critique to become a meaningful pedagogical resource.

Jul

2010

New voting methods and fair elections : The New Yorker

WIN OR LOSE
No voting system is flawless. But some are less democratic than others.
by Anthony Gottlieb

www.newyorker.com/...100726crbo_books_gottlieb

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Democracy Methodology

history of voting math comes mainly in two chunks: the period of the French Revolution, when some members of France’s Academy of Sciences tried to deduce a rational way of conducting elections, and the nineteen-fifties onward, when economists and game theorists set out to show that this was impossible
The first mathematical account of vote-splitting was given by Jean-Charles de Borda, a French mathematician and a naval hero of the American Revolutionary War. Borda concocted examples in which one knows the order in which each voter would rank the candidates in an election, and then showed how easily the will of the majority could be frustrated in an ordinary vote. Borda’s main suggestion was to require voters to rank candidates, rather than just choose one favorite, so that a winner could be calculated by counting points awarded according to the rankings. The key idea was to find a way of taking lower preferences, as well as first preferences, into account.
Unfortunately, this method may fail to elect the majority’s favorite—it could, in theory, elect someone who was nobody’s favorite. It is also easy to manipulate by strategic voting.
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- If the candidate who is your second preference is a strong challenger to your first preference, you may be able to help your favorite by putting the challenger last. Borda’s response was to say that his system was intended only for honest men.
- After the Academy dropped Borda’s method, it plumped for a simple suggestion by the astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, who was an important contributor to the theory of probability. Laplace’s rule insisted on an over-all majority: at least half the votes plus one. If no candidate achieved this, nobody was elected to the Academy.
- Another early advocate of proportional representation was John Stuart Mill, who, in 1861, wrote about the critical distinction between “government of the whole people by the whole people, equally represented,” which was the ideal, and “government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people exclusively represented,” which is what winner-takes-all elections produce. (The minority that Mill was most concerned to protect was the “superior intellects and characters,” who he feared would be swamped as more citizens got the vote.)
- The key to proportional representation is to enlarge constituencies so that more than one winner is elected in each, and then try to align the share of seats won by a party with the share of votes it receives. These days, a few small countries, including Israel and the Netherlands, treat their entire populations as single constituencies, and thereby get almost perfectly proportional representation. Some places require a party to cross a certain threshold of votes before it gets any seats, in order to filter out extremists.
- The main criticisms of proportional representation are that it can lead to unstable coalition governments, because more parties are successful in elections, and that it can weaken the local ties between electors and their representatives. Conveniently for its critics, and for its defenders, there are so many flavors of proportional representation around the globe that you can usually find an example of whatever point you want to make. Still, more than three-quarters of the world’s rich countries seem to manage with such schemes.
- The alternative voting method that will be put to a referendum in Britain is not proportional representation: it would elect a single winner in each constituency, and thus steer clear of what foreigners put up with. Known in the United States as instant-runoff voting, the method was developed around 1870 by William Ware
- In instant-runoff elections, voters rank all or some of the candidates in order of preference, and votes may be transferred between candidates. The idea is that your vote may count even if your favorite loses. If any candidate gets more than half of all the first-preference votes, he or she wins, and the game is over. But, if there is no majority winner, the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes is eliminated. Then the second-preference votes of his or her supporters are distributed to the other candidates. If there is still nobody with more than half the votes, another candidate is eliminated, and the process is repeated until either someone has a majority or there are only two candidates left, in which case the one with the most votes wins. Third, fourth, and lower preferences will be redistributed if a voter’s higher preferences have already been transferred to candidates who were eliminated earlier.
- At first glance, this is an appealing approach: it is guaranteed to produce a clear winner, and more voters will have a say in the election’s outcome. Look more closely, though, and you start to see how peculiar the logic behind it is. Although more people’s votes contribute to the result, they do so in strange ways. Some people’s second, third, or even lower preferences count for as much as other people’s first preferences. If you back the loser of the first tally, then in the subsequent tallies your second (and maybe lower) preferences will be added to that candidate’s first preferences. The winner’s pile of votes may well be a jumble of first, second, and third preferences.
- Such transferrable-vote elections can behave in topsy-turvy ways: they are what mathematicians call “non-monotonic,” which means that something can go up when it should go down, or vice versa. Whether a candidate who gets through the first round of counting will ultimately be elected may depend on which of his rivals he has to face in subsequent rounds, and some votes for a weaker challenger may do a candidate more good than a vote for that candidate himself. In short, a candidate may lose if certain voters back him, and would have won if they hadn’t.
  Supporters of instant-runoff voting say that the problem is much too rare to worry about in real elections, but recent work by Robert Norman, a mathematician at Dartmouth, suggests otherwise. By Norman’s calculations, it would happen in one in five close contests among three candidates who each have between twenty-five and forty per cent of first-preference votes. With larger numbers of candidates, it would happen even more often. It’s rarely possible to tell whether past instant-runoff elections have gone topsy-turvy in this way, because full ballot data aren’t usually published. But, in Burlington’s 2006 and 2009 mayoral elections, the data were published, and the 2009 election did go topsy-turvy.
- Kenneth Arrow, an economist at Stanford, examined a set of requirements that you’d think any reasonable voting system could satisfy, and proved that nothing can meet them all when there are more than two candidates. So designing elections is always a matter of choosing a lesser evil. When the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Arrow a Nobel Prize, in 1972, it called his result “a rather discouraging one, as regards the dream of a perfect democracy.” Szpiro goes so far as to write that “the democratic world would never be the same again,
- There is something of a loophole in Arrow’s demonstration. His proof applies only when voters rank candidates; it would not apply if, instead, they rated candidates by giving them grades. First-past-the-post voting is, in effect, a crude ranking method in which voters put one candidate in first place and everyone else last. Similarly, in the standard forms of proportional representation voters rank one party or group of candidates first, and all other parties and candidates last. With rating methods, on the other hand, voters would give all or some candidates a score, to say how much they like them. They would not have to say which is their favorite—though they could in effect do so, by giving only him or her their highest score—and they would not have to decide on an order of preference for the other candidates.
- One such method is widely used on the Internet—to rate restaurants, movies, books, or other people’s comments or reviews, for example. You give numbers of stars or points to mark how much you like something. To convert this into an election method, count each candidate’s stars or points, and the winner is the one with the highest average score (or the highest total score, if voters are allowed to leave some candidates unrated). This is known as range voting, and it goes back to an idea considered by Laplace at the start of the nineteenth century. It also resembles ancient forms of acclamation in Sparta. The more you like something, the louder you bash your shield with your spear, and the biggest noise wins. A recent variant, developed by two mathematicians in Paris, Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki, uses familiar language rather than numbers for its rating scale. Voters are asked to grade each candidate as, for example, “Excellent,” “Very Good,” “Good,” “Insufficient,” or “Bad.” Judging politicians thus becomes like judging wines, except that you can drive afterward.
- Range and approval voting deal neatly with the problem of vote-splitting: if a voter likes Nader best, and would rather have Gore than Bush, he or she can approve Nader and Gore but not Bush. Above all, their advocates say, both schemes give voters more options, and would elect the candidate with the most over-all support, rather than the one preferred by the largest minority. Both can be modified to deliver forms of proportional representation.
- Whether such ideas can work depends on how people use them. If enough people are carelessly generous with their approval votes, for example, there could be some nasty surprises. In an unlikely set of circumstances, the candidate who is the favorite of more than half the voters could lose. Parties in an approval election might spend less time attacking their opponents, in order to pick up positive ratings from rivals’ supporters, and critics worry that it would favor bland politicians who don’t stand for anything much. Defenders insist that such a strategy would backfire in subsequent elections, if not before, and the case of Ronald Reagan suggests that broad appeal and strong views aren’t mutually exclusive.
- Why are the effects of an unfamiliar electoral system so hard to puzzle out in advance? One reason is that political parties will change their campaign strategies, and voters the way they vote, to adapt to the new rules, and such variables put us in the realm of behavior and culture. Meanwhile, the technical debate about electoral systems generally takes place in a vacuum from which voters’ capriciousness and local circumstances have been pumped out. Although almost any alternative voting scheme now on offer is likely to be better than first past the post, it’s unrealistic to think that one voting method would work equally well for, say, the legislature of a young African republic, the Presidency of an island in Oceania, the school board of a New England town, and the assembly of a country still scarred by civil war. If winner takes all is a poor electoral system, one size fits all is a poor way to pick its replacements.
- Mathematics can suggest what approaches are worth trying, but it can’t reveal what will suit a particular place, and best deliver what we want from a democratic voting system: to create a government that feels legitimate to people—to reconcile people to being governed, and give them reason to feel that, win or lose (especially lose), the game is fair.