[nwj]

One thing that was helpful to me in making sense of this post was to understand that Quadratic Voting is trying to solve the problem of the "tyranny of the majority." It's a voting scheme that gives greater weight to minority preferences than the one-person-one-vote schemes we are mostly familiar with.

(Please note that this is "minority" in the "!majority" sense of the word, and not merely "!caucasians.")

Tyler's contribution here is to push back a little against the idea that we should be favoring minority preferences more than we do currently. He thinks this is too indiscriminate. Some minority preferences are quite good and others are pernicious. Favoring all minority preferences empowers the good and the bad.

I was also struck by the last paragraph: > "In any case the relevant question is what kinds of preference formation, and which kinds of groups, we should allow voting mechanisms to encourage."

In other words, all voting schemes favor certain preferences and groups over others. There is no perfectly objective voting scheme that would let us avoid this. We as a polity have no choice but to grapple with what and who to favor.

The implicit criticism in that final paragraph is that Quadratic Voting is leaping over the "what/who should we favor" question and optimizing for a particular answer. Tyler is saying "wait a minute, we haven't even agreed on the fundamental questions. So why are we already optimizing for a particular solution?"

[eli_gottlieb]

While I broadly agree with your criticism and Tyler's, what I have to particularly ask about is the following:

>One thing that was helpful to me in making sense of this post was to understand that Quadratic Voting is trying to solve the problem of the "tyranny of the majority." It's a voting scheme that gives greater weight to minority preferences than the one-person-one-vote schemes we are mostly familiar with.

There have always been minorities insisting that we are under a moral imperative to avoid a dreaded monster known only as "tyranny of the majority". Strangely enough, they have never been required to prove the existence of any such creature by actually measuring the degree to which the status-quo system functions in a majoritarian way and represents majority preferences.

Since the status-quo system largely seems to represent the top 10% of the population by income, who are already a minority, I would say that contrary to talk of "tyranny of the majority", we actually need the system to represent the broad masses more.