Discussion:
[MG] proxyfor.me alpha/beta test
Scott Raney
2017-04-14 00:51:50 UTC
Permalink
OK, we've let representative democracy thrash around for long enough
and it's just not getting the job done. So it's time to start testing
a new decision-making system that can replace it: Democracy by Matched
Proxy. An alpha-test version of this new system can now be found at:

https://www.proxyfor.me

The most important thing for everyone to do is register (log in) and
then fill out your profile. Then vote on whichever proposals you find
interesting and/or important (the system has been preloaded with about
a dozen of them, with another couple dozen already in the development
queue). I'd recommend *not voting* on at least one upcoming proposal
so that you can test the automated proxy calculation: You'll get
reminders by email each week telling you what your proxy vote will be
if you haven't cast a direct vote, and because this is the way
(eventually) the vast majority of The People's votes will be cast it's
important that it works well.

If you can post and/or cite after voting, that'd be great too as we
need some content to help incoming voters make their decisions. Note
that although the UI is still just alpha-test and so may change, the
intention is to keep the data (proposals, votes, and posts) live all
the way through to production use (i.e., your votes and posts may be
used by thousand or even millions of others as this project scales
up). If you're multilingual, please consider making a post in some
language other than English. Even better would be a multi-language
post where you include the translation(s) for us so that we can get
some idea how well automated translation tools work for this type of
content (e.g., try http://translate.google.com, which if there is
enough interest could be integrated into the app).

Feedback can be provided directly to me, to this list, or on the new
forum (which is also the place to debate the proposals if you're
having trouble making up your mind):
http://www.matchism.org/forum/

Please don't cross-post this announcement outside of this list/group
at this point because we need to get some benchmarks on how much
server resources we'll be needing to scale up first. Once we get to a
1.0 release, though, we hope that you will be able to help spread the
word.
Regards,
Scott
Patrick Millerd
2017-04-14 23:33:54 UTC
Permalink
I'm glad this is a functioning system now, congrats Scott for seeing it
through this far. I've signed up now and will be voting on a few proposals
soon.

I had a couple comments about the profile questionnaire. Questions like
"Can be somewhat careless" or " Is sometimes shy" seem out of place for the
ranking system, weird to have a strong reaction to something that's
"somewhat" or "sometimes". Strongly agree that sometimes I'm shy. See what
I'm saying?

Question 41 tripped me up "Has few artistic interests" I read "Has a few
artistic interests" which changes the context completely. Might want to
rephrase that as I suspect others might screw that up and not realize.

I'm also curious how the second half of the questionnaire will work as
those answers are subjective dependant on your circumstance and locality.
Like I don't have a strong opinion on children's health because I don't
have kids, I have no idea if we're spending too much or too little in the
area. If I lived on the farm my opinion of government infrastructure would
be different than if I lived in the city.

Finally, I don't know if this is an observed phenomenon but I caught myself
being more conservative with my assessment of traits early on not venturing
past a little agree or disagree but by the end, I felt more comfortable
picking the strong options. Just something to keep in mind maybe.

The site looks nice overall, few other comments but I'll save those for the
forum maybe.
Post by Scott Raney
OK, we've let representative democracy thrash around for long enough
and it's just not getting the job done. So it's time to start testing
a new decision-making system that can replace it: Democracy by Matched
https://www.proxyfor.me
The most important thing for everyone to do is register (log in) and
then fill out your profile. Then vote on whichever proposals you find
interesting and/or important (the system has been preloaded with about
a dozen of them, with another couple dozen already in the development
queue). I'd recommend *not voting* on at least one upcoming proposal
so that you can test the automated proxy calculation: You'll get
reminders by email each week telling you what your proxy vote will be
if you haven't cast a direct vote, and because this is the way
(eventually) the vast majority of The People's votes will be cast it's
important that it works well.
If you can post and/or cite after voting, that'd be great too as we
need some content to help incoming voters make their decisions. Note
that although the UI is still just alpha-test and so may change, the
intention is to keep the data (proposals, votes, and posts) live all
the way through to production use (i.e., your votes and posts may be
used by thousand or even millions of others as this project scales
up). If you're multilingual, please consider making a post in some
language other than English. Even better would be a multi-language
post where you include the translation(s) for us so that we can get
some idea how well automated translation tools work for this type of
content (e.g., try http://translate.google.com, which if there is
enough interest could be integrated into the app).
Feedback can be provided directly to me, to this list, or on the new
forum (which is also the place to debate the proposals if you're
http://www.matchism.org/forum/
Please don't cross-post this announcement outside of this list/group
at this point because we need to get some benchmarks on how much
server resources we'll be needing to scale up first. Once we get to a
1.0 release, though, we hope that you will be able to help spread the
word.
Regards,
Scott
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Scott Raney
2017-04-15 01:09:05 UTC
Permalink
Post by Patrick Millerd
I'm glad this is a functioning system now, congrats Scott for seeing it
through this far. I've signed up now and will be voting on a few proposals
soon.
And be sure to comment: I'd prefer not to engage Ned in a debate to
start the ball rolling, and the other alpha testers have inexplicably
turned out to be shy...
Post by Patrick Millerd
I had a couple comments about the profile questionnaire. Questions like "Can
be somewhat careless" or " Is sometimes shy" seem out of place for the
ranking system, weird to have a strong reaction to something that's
"somewhat" or "sometimes". Strongly agree that sometimes I'm shy. See what
I'm saying?
I do, but I'm not touching that list: It's a psychological industry
standard and has been used in *thousands* of published experiments.
Post by Patrick Millerd
Question 41 tripped me up "Has few artistic interests" I read "Has a few
artistic interests" which changes the context completely. Might want to
rephrase that as I suspect others might screw that up and not realize.
Fortunately that one loads on Extroversion (although now that I look
at it even that seems odd) which is the least predictive of voting
behavior (or at least party affiliation) of all of the Big 5
dimensions...
Post by Patrick Millerd
I'm also curious how the second half of the questionnaire will work as those
answers are subjective dependant on your circumstance and locality. Like I
don't have a strong opinion on children's health because I don't have kids,
I have no idea if we're spending too much or too little in the area. If I
lived on the farm my opinion of government infrastructure would be different
than if I lived in the city.
LOL: My wife and I actually just had a debate on exactly this issue.
It's an empirical question and it'll be easy to validate it (or reject
it) once we have enough votes (*way* easier than what that paper on
LQFB had to do). But my theory is that your observation is exactly the
point: Your "personality", and therefore your voting habits, *does*
depend on the context in which you're operating, and therefore proper
representation for you depends on your current environment. This
system, and Matchism in general, is therefore highly context-dependent
rather than operating on some idealized representation of people. This
is a property that it shares with representative democracy, but unlike
our current system if you father a child in the next couple of weeks
you can update your profile and have the new information used
immediately rather than having to wait for 6 years (or whatever) to
vote for a different candidate for senator.
Post by Patrick Millerd
Finally, I don't know if this is an observed phenomenon but I caught myself
being more conservative with my assessment of traits early on not venturing
past a little agree or disagree but by the end, I felt more comfortable
picking the strong options. Just something to keep in mind maybe.
It'll make you harder to match, for sure, but this too I think is a
feature, not a bug: The idea is not to classify you somehow, but only
to find other people who would vote like you. All this second-guessing
you're apparently doing is (probably) not unique to you and the theory
is that other people who do the same are more likely to vote like you
than those who just breeze through the questions without every
worrying about any of them. There's lots of research on how different
kinds of people use Likert scales (some people are actually *afraid*
to use the extreme values), but again, this is not a problem because
we only need the data to match people, not classify them.
Post by Patrick Millerd
The site looks nice overall, few other comments but I'll save those for the
forum maybe.
Thanks: Either place is fine, but it would be nice to fill out the
forum a little (people love to follow a crowd and even though we're
only in alpha-test it's just good marketing to make it look like a
real thing).
Regards,
Scott

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