Consider the following questions:
1) Should the candidate with the most support win an election?
2) Is it possible to support more than one candidate?
It's really hard to argue with 1 and 2 is definitely true. So, instead of allowing a voter to vote for just one candidate, he/she should be allowed to cast a vote for every candidate they support. Assuming we can count the votes with any sort of accuracy, then the winner should be the candidate who get's the most votes.
Another way of looking at this is to frame an election as picking the candidate that the most voters find acceptible. In the current system, many voters don't even vote for who they think to be best candidate, for fear that their vote will be wasted. And we've created a who extraneous system, the parties and their primaries, to avoid having candidates with similar positions split the vote.
This new system, which we'll call "multicandidate selection," takes away the false choice that one must pick between multiple acceptable candidates. It seems ridiculous that a popular set of principles or platform suffer because multiple candidates share it.
Multicandidate selection more informative as well, all of the voter's preferenced candidates receive credit and positive feedback.
If we treat an election as a constraint satisfaction problem, then with multicandidate selection we're picking the candidate that best satisfies the constraints. With the current system, however, it's not clear to me what we're picking.
Questions remain, of course. What to do in the case of a tie? Well, minimally, we could have a run off where current vote for only one candidate rules apply. We might also include a ranking system in the original ballot, but to preserve the "selects the candidate acceptible to the most voters" property, the ranking system could only come into play due to a tie.
Still, I can't see how multicandidate selection is in any way inferior to the current system. Do we really believe that, in any given election, one only candidate is capable of the job?
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Monday, September 5, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
Science is...
A friend of mine asked me to explain science using a "top down" approach. Here's what I came up with:
Science is fundamentally a systematic way of determining "the rules." We posit the existence of underlying physical law (how the universe works) and science seeks to approximate that law with models. Models include theories, laws, hypotheses and facts. Commonly, theory and law refer to models that are accepted and largely validated (even if there are more accurate models). Facts are assertions that are modelled to be (believed to be) logically true. As you can tell, there's not a clear line differentiating theories, facts and laws in common usage. It doesn't really matter, though, because they're all models.
Science seeks to determine the models that best fit our observations of the world. The "truest" models, if you will. It does so through a process of refinement called the scientific method. A model, called a hypothesis, is tested through observation -- checking it's predictions against observations of the physical world. Generally, experiments are constructed to see how accurate a model is. If a model's accuracy cannot be determined through observation, the model is not "falsifiable" and is thus not scientific. That's not to say it's not in some sense true, but it means the model's accuracy can't be measured. (Note that traditionally people talk of disproving hypotheses, but scientific models are not right or wrong, they are more or less accurate).
The classic non-scientific statement is "God exists." Taking God to mean "an omniscient, omnipotent being," there's no way to measure God's existence. By being omnipotent and omniscient, God can exist but prevent any observation of evidence of God's existence. Since it's not falsifiable, the existence of God is not a scientific question.*
*I don't take this to mean that God doesn't exist, just that such existence is outside the purview of science. Some people do believe that non falsifiable statements cannot be true.
Often times, just observing the world is it happens isn't enough determine how accurate a model is. There are often too many complicating factors like weather that constantly change. So scientists set up experiments that attempt to control as many factors as they can. Then they vary the factors to see if they have any impact on the result.
It turns out that our best scientific models all have drawbacks. Quantum Mechanics doesn't do gravity right and is too computationally expensive to be applied on large scales. General Relativity works well on large scales but not small ones and it doesn't do gravity entirely right, either. Newton's laws work really well on human scales, but not so well on really small or large or fast moving scales. So we have a wide variety of models to describe a wide variety of things.
That's the root of science. 1) The universe has rules. 2) Models approximate those rules. 3) Models are tested and their accuracy measured through observation, particularly experiments. 4) Models are refined or new models created to be more accurate approximations of the underlying universal rules.
Math (and I'm including logic) is a formal way to describe relationships. As such, scientific models inevitably end up with mathematical descriptions.
Engineering shows up too. It's the application of the scientific method and scientific models to create new objects -- be they physical items like airplanes, information like software or social structures like governments. Without the scientific side, it's not engineering, it's artisanship. Another way to look at is that engineering is the application of scientific method and knowledge to art. So, naturally, engineers are both scientists and artists.*
*Yes, this is an idealization. But, really, without the scientist component an engineer is an artisan or an artist. And an engineer that doesn't create is more scientist or analyst. There is no shame in any of these occupations, though.
Science is fundamentally a systematic way of determining "the rules." We posit the existence of underlying physical law (how the universe works) and science seeks to approximate that law with models. Models include theories, laws, hypotheses and facts. Commonly, theory and law refer to models that are accepted and largely validated (even if there are more accurate models). Facts are assertions that are modelled to be (believed to be) logically true. As you can tell, there's not a clear line differentiating theories, facts and laws in common usage. It doesn't really matter, though, because they're all models.
Science seeks to determine the models that best fit our observations of the world. The "truest" models, if you will. It does so through a process of refinement called the scientific method. A model, called a hypothesis, is tested through observation -- checking it's predictions against observations of the physical world. Generally, experiments are constructed to see how accurate a model is. If a model's accuracy cannot be determined through observation, the model is not "falsifiable" and is thus not scientific. That's not to say it's not in some sense true, but it means the model's accuracy can't be measured. (Note that traditionally people talk of disproving hypotheses, but scientific models are not right or wrong, they are more or less accurate).
The classic non-scientific statement is "God exists." Taking God to mean "an omniscient, omnipotent being," there's no way to measure God's existence. By being omnipotent and omniscient, God can exist but prevent any observation of evidence of God's existence. Since it's not falsifiable, the existence of God is not a scientific question.*
*I don't take this to mean that God doesn't exist, just that such existence is outside the purview of science. Some people do believe that non falsifiable statements cannot be true.
Often times, just observing the world is it happens isn't enough determine how accurate a model is. There are often too many complicating factors like weather that constantly change. So scientists set up experiments that attempt to control as many factors as they can. Then they vary the factors to see if they have any impact on the result.
It turns out that our best scientific models all have drawbacks. Quantum Mechanics doesn't do gravity right and is too computationally expensive to be applied on large scales. General Relativity works well on large scales but not small ones and it doesn't do gravity entirely right, either. Newton's laws work really well on human scales, but not so well on really small or large or fast moving scales. So we have a wide variety of models to describe a wide variety of things.
That's the root of science. 1) The universe has rules. 2) Models approximate those rules. 3) Models are tested and their accuracy measured through observation, particularly experiments. 4) Models are refined or new models created to be more accurate approximations of the underlying universal rules.
Math (and I'm including logic) is a formal way to describe relationships. As such, scientific models inevitably end up with mathematical descriptions.
Engineering shows up too. It's the application of the scientific method and scientific models to create new objects -- be they physical items like airplanes, information like software or social structures like governments. Without the scientific side, it's not engineering, it's artisanship. Another way to look at is that engineering is the application of scientific method and knowledge to art. So, naturally, engineers are both scientists and artists.*
*Yes, this is an idealization. But, really, without the scientist component an engineer is an artisan or an artist. And an engineer that doesn't create is more scientist or analyst. There is no shame in any of these occupations, though.
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