The Grim Reaper wrote:This is why you wrap it up into hypotheticals - it means you don't have to show your hand and you can just try to force people into giving up and picking a face-down card you've gimmicked earlier, instead of coming out clean, showing us your sleeves, and outlining a) what your system is, and b) what the fuck it's supposed to do better than a normal system. This gives you the ability to talk yourself to climax without having to actually deal with meaningful criticism, because you get to explain the increasingly more arcane hypotheticals and shoehorn the system in while people are trying to figure out why the fuck you've recently become obsessed with child education, or baby names, or growling stomachs, or whatever.
In the OP I gave a real-life example of voting being used to name something. I did not, however, provide a real-life example of spending being used to name something. Well... sure there are plenty real-life examples of
naming rights being sold to the highest bidder. But I don't think that any of these examples are the same as what I described in the OP.
In real life, three of my friends and I are starting a website. We came up with a list of more than 400 potential domain names. We are in the process of using the system that I described in the OP to try and choose the most valuable name. I went first and divided up around $30 dollars between a dozen or so names. My friend Mimi went next and put $10 dollars on one name that I did not put any money on. If the game ended now then her name would win. The two other people can now see our allocations. What strategy will they use? I don't know. They can allocate their money to names with or without allocations. What are the chances that they will prefer any of the dozen or so allocated names out of the 400 names?
Unfortunately, I really don't have the words to effectively describe this system. Perhaps somebody would be inclined to use the word "chaos". But it really isn't chaos. None of us are going to randomly allocate our money. None of us would put any money on names that don't match our preferences. We're only going to put our money on names that match our preferences. We logically want to put our money on the names that most closely match our preferences. Except, if nobody else puts any money on Mimi's preferred name, then it's not going to win. So she will either spend more money on this name or take her $10 dollars and try and redistribute it somehow.
In one sense it's like chess or checkers. There's action and reaction. But in neither of those games can you combine forces with other players. So perhaps it's closer to the Chinese card game
dou dizhu.
Last year
I started a thread about how the Libertarian Party (LP) gave donors the opportunity to use their donations to help choose a convention theme. Here were the results...
I don't know how many donors participated in this process. But I'm sure that the number of donors greatly exceeded the number of potential themes. Was the most useful theme chosen out of all the potential themes? Would a more useful theme have been chosen if voting had been used instead of spending? What if the LP leadership had simply selected the theme?
I wrap things in hypotheticals because there's a scarcity of real-life examples to examine/analyze. Personally I don't think that the scarcity of real-life examples proves that this system is inferior to the alternatives. Most people haven't even thought of using this type of system. To figure out the true usefulness of this system there really needs to be a lot more people examining it. Not just examining, but testing as well. We're really not going to make much scientific progress without actual testing.
Sure, I can ask you to be open-minded. But can anybody choose to be open-minded? I'm not sure. Right now I'm majorly biased towards this system. Can I choose to be less biased? Probably not. This is why more scrutiny is always better than less scrutiny.
Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 9:50 pm
