henk ✅
Smári McCarthyRe-intro time: Hi! I'm Smári. I'm a human from Earth. I live in Reykjavík, Iceland, but travel a lot, and can often be found in the Balkans, California or around Europe. For work, I run Ecosophy, a startup company that makes software to make managing environmental data easy. In free time I fly planes, write code, read and sometimes write text, cook, eat and grow food, and sometimes row boats. I've designed a few voting systems & I used to be a member of the Icelandic parliament. #introduction
I have too many hobbies! It's fun but it also means I sometimes neglect them a bit. Oh well!
Rafał Wileczek@smari Hi! Too many hobbies – same here :) It's always many things I want to do and so little time for it.
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
@rysiek Good point! Done!
Darla@smari A+ intro.
Paul Cantrell@smari Tell more about the voting systems!
@inthehands Okay! I've been meaning to actually write something up about these for years ─ but in short, I developed a class of voting systems designed for resource allocation problems. Specifically, given a fixed budget and spending options of known cost, the system allows voters to prioritize spending. The social choice function aims to find an optimal allocation of funds based on what is possible and what is desired.
@inthehands The simplest of these has been used in Reykjavík's "better neighborhoods" elections for almost a decade. It is analogous to FPTP, in that it collects a voter's "spending" choices but doesn't understand the relative importance of those choices. I have a better one that's closer to STV (by the same analogy), and have played on paper with one that's analogous to Majority Judgement.
@inthehands of course the implication of the system is that while it's about collectively "spending" on things that have different "costs", those terms can have a bunch of different meanings.
@smari This is fascinating! Have you written it up anywhere? I would love a more detailed overview. Seems like a really thorny problem. The nonlinearity of returns on resource investments is one of the reasons that most places just give up and delegate to elected representatives….
@inthehands I did a super informal writeup many years ago and then briefly referenced this work in a report to the EU back in 2014 (PDF: Https://dcentproject.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/D4.3-final.pdf ). Want to sit down and do a formal write up though with analysis of features and drawbacks.
A few links mostly not directly related:
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272290406_Demystifying_Complexity_Why_Worse_is_Better_in_Voting
- https://github.com/smari/voting
- https://hasgeek.com/onevote/electiontech/updates/smari-mccarthy-to-moderate-this-weeks-master-class-87fiRz1JkSQZpbDE1KX1mE
@smari Will give it a look! Out of my depth, but deeply interested.
Aphrodite (recharging)@smari Heya.
Welcome!
Roberto Benitez
Mark Holtom (aka Kingbeard)@smari
It may be hard for you to rationalise "environmental data" with "I fly a lot".
It may be hard for you to rationalise "environmental data" with "I fly a lot".
Jóhannes Birgir Jensson@smari
Segðu mér endilega meira um Ecosophy. Leit fann ekkert tengt nema LinkedIn hjá þér, þetta er mjög algengt orð þó ég hafi verið að lesa það í fyrsta sinn.
Segðu mér endilega meira um Ecosophy. Leit fann ekkert tengt nema LinkedIn hjá þér, þetta er mjög algengt orð þó ég hafi verið að lesa það í fyrsta sinn.
@johannesbirgir er á leiðinni í mat en skal skrifa meira um það á eftir eða á morgun. Erum búin að vera í svona semi silent mode undanfarið ár en erum núna loksins að fara að hafa ögn hærra og sýna hvað við höfum gert.
Jón Levy
ralf tauscher 