The Center for Election Science doesn't hide their preference* and advocacy:
> Let’s put approval voting ON THE MAP!
* Generally, each organization has some kind of bias, and I appreciate it when they are up-front about it.
My preferred group would have these biases / goals:
1. Valuing a diverse group of people
2. Valuing clear and honest discussion about member preferences in voting systems
3. Valuing understanding among the group members
4. Help group members form alliances with each other, should they desire to organize and do advocacy, because while each of us might have our 'preferred' voting system, we all benefit from moving beyond the 'worst' voting systems
What's kinda interesting about Election Science is how they've changed strategies. They used to push STAR till about a year ago and have since moved to approval voting. It seems they have found that approval is easier to sell to the average person and is still good enough.
> Valuing clear and honest discussion about member preferences in voting systems
This is a difficult thing tbh. A lot of people learn about voting systems from CGP Grey or Hasan Minhaj and get really passionate, so you get an armchair expertise. Then I think many learn about VSE and see Condorcet methods as the obvious winners (I used to be in this camp). But it often takes awhile to internalize all the nuances in voting. About how to balance VSE, resiliency, simplicity, transparency, computational cost, and more. It is one of those problems that looks easier than it is. A lot of very smart people get into it because it is an interesting problem but it is also easy to convince yourself that your understanding is far better than it is. Every time these threads come up I learn something new and I've been interested in the subject for almost a decade. I think the biggest thing I've learned is to look at the people who have been studying the problem for a long time and see why they are making their decisions. It is difficult to separate the signal from the noise.
In addition to the discord link I also suggest following Clay Shentrup[0]. He's active with Election Science and the co-inventor of STAR (he also typically joins voting threads on HN. Username is his full name). The reason I follow him is because reading his comments and posts have led me to a lot more sources and brought up a lot of the above nuances I didn't understand when I first started getting into the subject.
You may be confusing CES with some other organization. I asked on CES's public discord:
ranicki: someone on HN claimed that Center for Election Science switched from pushing STAR to pushing approval. is it true that this organization formerly supported STAR, or was it one of the other organizations? I don't remember who was advocating for what
-redacted name-: Center for Election Science has broadly supported cardinal voting methods, score voting and approval voting basically since its inception. From everything I can tell it still is supportive of cardinal methods broadly, but as a political tactic has honed in on approval voting specifically due to its Pareto optimality.
...
-redacted name 2-: I don't think CES ever changed from STAR to approval. IIRC they existed long before STAR was invented
(Names are redacted because I didn't ask permission to quote, but the discussion is publicly visible and not sensitive at all.)
> "From everything I can tell it still is supportive of cardinal methods broadly, but as a political tactic has honed in on approval voting specifically due to its Pareto optimality."
Hmmm... the notion of Pareto optimality is driving political tactics (about what voting method to back)? I know what it means, and it seems strange to me. This suggests that a specialized economic term was used as a motivation for a tactical political decision.
CES was originally a research-based organization, but recently shifted to advocating Approval Voting and trying to get it implemented. (I think they should rename as the Center for Approval Voting.)
Their forum and Google Group for discussion of voting systems were good resources, but are now being shut down
In the US, Amtrak shares rails controlled by the freight operators. Amtrak trains can be delayed indefinitely, as the freight trains always get priority, even when they are off schedule. These delays are unpredictable in timing and length.
I used to do the Seattle/Portland route regularly and 1 - 2 hours extra/unplanned travel time wasn't uncommon. Average speed was well less than 50mph.
A few years back, we flew to SEA->MSP to visit family but opted for Amtrak for the return trip. It did happen to save us a couple hundred dollars and the circus that is TSA & airport security, but it was 36 hours. When we were moving, it was a reasonable speed (certainly nowhere close to a TGV). The problem was that we had multiple stops, such as maybe four hours sitting in Spokane.
I would happily spend 12hrs on a train to do that trip -- even 18hrs overnight -- but 36 is way too much.
The local 1-hour stops and lengthy freight train delays really slow things down drastically for Amtrak. If the train was just moving all the time it would be a lot less painful.
The trains are stinky and dumpy, usually with absurdly high fares, but if they kept moving they would be tolerable.
The rail pass is nice because it allows for stopovers, but the Amtrak trips in between are going to be a drag.
Perhaps some trains should remake themselves to be more like cruises, with luxury amenities (delicious food and drink, gym/exercise classes/spa/wave pool, on-train entertainment, live DJ/music and dance floor, interesting lectures and debates, celebrity meet & greet, arts and crafts, on-train library and book discussions, games and social activities, movie theater, etc.) so you wouldn't actually want to get off the train and you wouldn't care about the horrible delays. There could be stopovers at interesting places, and local tours. Or maybe there could be "work cars" with comfortable desks/chairs, high-speed internet access, coffee and snack service, etc..
And when you say indefinitely, it really is. I was once on an Amtrak train that, at one point in the trip, was 25 hours behind schedule. Another time I arrived 8 hours late. On the long haul trains, if the segment you're taking is towards the end of the line, the arrival time of the train is very unpredictable.
In a very literal sense, that's exactly what's broken about the interview process in the software industry. The philosophy is to avoid false positives at all costs, so a high rate of false negatives is seen as OK. The prevailing advice is, just try your luck again in six months.
That's the good thing about Bitcoin. I don't have to prove anything to anyone anymore. It doesn't matter where you work if you convert your fiat to the superior store of value
> A second-order digital filter requires what, about 4 stores, recalls, and multiplies per sample?
This is true today using something like the Chamberlin form for a state variable filter. I don't think that level of optimization had been discovered yet in the DX7 timeframe.
Also, for adequate quality you want to oversample at least 2x, preferably at least 4x.
And 16 bits usually won't be enough headroom in a digital filter for good audio quality. Too much truncation.
So does basically every other human effort where one can extract a benefit for an individual. Since communism on a large scale has always resulted in failure of its implementation can you suggest a 3rd path?
Literate programming aims to help understanding, and this does the opposite. This was hard to read and follow along. I kept having to visually skip past meaningless markup.
[0]: https://electionscience.org/