Better Quorum Rule

For score voting with "no opinion" scores allowed

Re score voting's notoriously kludgy "quorum rule"... we haven't fully updated the website yet, but the plan is to switch to a system in which each candidate gets some pre-agreed number T of artificial "zero" scores before voting begins (e.g. 1000 zeros each). Then the highest average score wins. "NO OPINION" votes do not affect averages.

The optimum value of T is presumably roughly 50% of the size of the largest set of fanatics anybody can organize to support them while at the same time staying unknown to (or at least inspiring no interest from) the rest of society. (It is very hard both to organize your fanatics and stay unknown at the same time, so I do not expect this number will be very large, percentagewise.)

The point is that, if this is done, it becomes almost impossible to win versus well-known opponents if you have a small number of supporters while the rest of society votes "no opinion" about you. (This "soft quorum" method seems superior in various ways to the old quorum rule, which we now deprecate.)

So those who worry about that nightmare scenario can relax.

But on the other hand, if T were made too large then that also would be bad because it would prevent excellent-quality candidates from winning just because they were insufficiently well known. For example, in the 2008 Time Magazine "person of year" contest (which was conducted via score voting) B.Obama was extremely well known but as of that date had actually done very little. He was winning Time's poll by a small margin. The second-placer was a comparatively extremely-unknown scientist, Douglas Melton, who found a breakthrough which may eventually cure diabetes. If so, he certainly is a great benefactor of humanity and deserves to win or at least place high. But if the number of artificial "zeros" were too many, then Melton would be unable to compete with Obama even if his quality was reckoned higher by everybody who knew both.

So it is bad to set the "quorum" level too high. But it also is bad to set T too low, because that would cause too many people to be too-scared about the "unknown fanatic wins" scenario. We need to employ the level that yields the optimum tradeoff.


Mathematical underpinnings of this, from puzzle 117.

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