Axel Boldt wrote:
That's interesting. The campaign for a voting procedure, repeatedly rejected by the mailing list, is now continued via private email directly to you? Could we have more details?
Erik has been emailing me with his reasons for thinking that implementing a voting procedure for major decisions would be a good idea. We've had a good discussion about it, barring some side discussions of real-world politics where I ended up going bonkers and yelling at him. :-)
One of the strongest arguments that he's made, in my opinion, is that a voting procedure gives a clearcut _result_, whereas consensus is necessarily vague.
One of the strongest arguments that I've made against voting is that voting is usually game theoretically bad. I can explain what I mean by that if anyone is interested, but basically I think that we can find better solutions under a consensus-seeking incentive system than a power-bloc-seeking incentive system.
Erik counters this by suggesting a more sophisticated voting mechanism like approval voting or Condorcet's Method or the like. (Actually, he didn't mention Condorcet, but it would be a good choice for us, I think.)
Simple majority rule would almost certainly be a bad idea, as it would tend to result in decisions that are clearly suboptimal.
--Jimbo