Psephology and the science of voting (E)

0:00James Prescott Jewell was a very good brewer, a physicist, and a pioneer of everything that we understand about thermodynamics. He was so influential, he and his friend Lord Kelvin, that they named the Kelvin after Kelvin and the Joule, a measure of energy, after James Prescott Joule. The joke's on him and his heirs, though, because he pronounced his last name Jowl. Hey, it's Kevin Beach, and this is a special archived episode of Akembo.

0:40It gets even more ironic. A researcher named Rensis Leichert pioneered a survey format that you've seen, no doubt, maybe even today. And in it, you're asked what you like. Good choice of name on Rensis' part. The Leichert survey basically says, on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is I hate this more than anything, and 10 is I love it, and sometimes it's 1 to 5, where on the bar chart do you want to put your feelings? It's been discovered that this is far more useful than up-down voting for finding out consumer preferences. But back to the irony part. Rensis Likert pronounced his last name Likert, but everyone says Likert, partly because it's a pun, partly because it's spelled like it should be Likert.

1:31So here's the question. How do the Wikipedians settle this argument? How do they settle the argument of the pronunciation of jowl and liquort? Well, you probably guessed, they do it by a vote. And then the question is, how should we vote? This is an episode about sophology, which is the science and study of voting, because it matters more now than ever before. A couple months ago, in the midterm elections in the United States, the New York Times proudly initiated 2.8 million phone calls. They called people at home, on their cell phone if they could, but they called people at home to ask them how they were going to vote.

2:22One out of every hundred people in the country got a phone call in a vain, not particularly productive effort to figure out how people were going to vote. When I was in fifth grade, I participated in my first election. I was a member of the Safety Patrol, a quasi-military organization in which 10 - and 11-year-olds were given bright orange belts and assigned to keep kids from running in the hall. Well, I ran for captain of the Safety Patrol, and in the first of a long series of elections that I lost, I lost that one. How did the election work? Everybody in the safety patrol put their head down on the table so that no one could see how anyone else was voting.

3:08And then, as the teacher read each name, kids raised their hand. One kid, one vote, geography-based. And in many elements of our society, that's what we do. One person, one vote, geography-based. That's why gerrymandering is a problem, because it's based on geography. It's based on an assumption of fairness about geography. And I'd like to argue that much of what we do in public voting is based on the fact that for a really long time, until just a few ago, the only technology that was available to us was one vote, one person, geography-based, do it once, and get it over with. It's interesting to note that in many other elements of our life, we don't do it that way.

4:05We re-litigate and re-discuss over and over again how our family or how our business is going to do something. And we almost never do it in secret. And we don't really do it based on geography. So let's take a look at the different pieces that are on the table and figure out if this is the way we should be doing voting at all. Most of our understanding of voting comes from a paper that was written in 1785, which has a title that could come from today. Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Decisions Rendered by a Plurality of Voices. This paper by Condorcet, and maybe we mispronounce that word as democracy, it depends, was all about the idea that we need to create mechanisms where the group can speak up.

5:03One of the challenges of majority rule is that if it's in the interest of the majority, to hurt the minority, they might go ahead and do that. But if that's what happens, it's really hard to get the minority to voluntarily go along with things like being obliterated. So much of the organization of democracies around the world have some element of the republic in them, in that there are boundaries, there are representatives. It is not a straight up or down democratic vote every time. One of the things you're not allowed to do is take a picture in the voting booth. Why would that be? Well, the answer is it makes it easier to sell your vote, makes it easier to trade your vote.

5:53Should someone in New York be able to trade votes with someone, say, in Alabama, so that each person could feel like their vote was worth more? Well, Eric Posner has written a book called Radical Markets. And in that book, he and his co-author argue that there are lots of ways to use the rules of capitalism to fundamentally change the way that we vote. But I think he and his co-author are missing a really big idea. What most people want isn't really the responsibility to do the work, to do the research, and to own the outcome of their voting. What most people want is stability and dignity. The dignity to know that they can speak up about things that they take umbrage with.

6:48And the stability that comes from living in a world that's predictable, where they can plan. They can plan their lives and their kids' lives. and a lot of what's on the table about changing the way we vote, whether it's at work, in an auction, or in the public sphere, is really disruptive. And that's one of the many reasons why it hasn't changed and probably won't change anytime soon. So, back to Rensis Lickert. The Likert curve, the Likert method, which he pioneered, opens the door to thinking really hard about how we can bring civility back into a system that's broken. Why is it broken? It's broken for two giant reasons.

7:38The first one is this. Candidates have figured out that the more extreme they are, the easier it is to get attention and to get the people on the other side to not vote. Try to imagine what would happen if Nike spent a billion dollars a year trying to persuade you that Adidas sneakers were lousy, crappy, and not worth it. If that's all you heard, if General Motors spent a billion dollars a year persuading you that Ford cars and trucks crashed and were made poorly and secretly and were hurting people, you'd probably be impacted by all that noise. But that's what politicians have been doing our whole lives.

8:25And the second piece, which goes in sync with that, is that special interests in the media both have an incentive to make a loud noise because it sells papers, because it advances their interests. So this combination of hating on the other side and amplifying that hatred over and over again can't help but divide us. But what happens if we bring in the Likert model into voting? So for example, if we say during a primary, 12 people are running, you can vote for as many of them as you like. Don't vote for people you don't like. If we did that, then the candidate that was liked by the most people would get the nomination.

9:17If we did it in the general election with multiple parties, the same thing would work. There are other combinations of this, but what it does is it changes the model from a few people care so much that they will put up a ton of money and effort to push an extremist over the finish line. And it moves it to this is the candidate or this is the issue that most of the people most of the time find they can live with. When you do this, forward motion ensues. But let's go down the list. Geography. We don't need to organize by state anymore. There's no good reason to do that. That Cory Doctorow in his great work, Eastern Standard Tribe, which is probably now 20 years old by now, 15, argued that people are going to organize not by where they live, but by what they do and what they believe into tribes, and that they will pick a time zone that the people in that tribe all are awake during so they can be in sync in real time.

10:25It's way less outlandish now than it was when I read it all those years ago. The next thing, one vote, one person. Well, let's get back to this idea of James Prescott jewel or jowl. The question is, do the jowl ancestors have more to say about how his last name is pronounced than the physicists and professors and teachers and journalists who have to use it, or people like you and me who have no stake in the game? Why should everyone get an equal vote into how jowl pronounces his last name? Because the Wikipedians are busy arguing, well, Well, the physicists were embarrassed to say jowl all the time.

11:07They say jewel, so that's what we should call him because that's what people who talk about him say. That's how the English language works. And it's true, the English language is a constant plebiscite, a vote about how we use an apostrophe or not use an apostrophe. And that's why grammarians are so annoying because they're busy losing the vote and insisting they're right. Well, they were right in the 1820s, but they might not be right now because the definition of how we use words is how we use words, which leads to this next idea that goes next to one person, one vote, which is how often do we have an election?

11:47What would happen if every time something controversial got voted on, there was a re-vote a week later? Because it's way cheaper to have an election now than it used to be because as we've seen from ATM machines, they are widespread, they are cheap, and they are secure. You never hear about a massive hacking of an ATM machine that costs billions of dollars, and yet we get our elections hacked all the time. So if we put in place technology that enabled us to have a second chance to vote about something after we realize, oh, you didn't tell me that the public was about to do something ridiculous, Maybe now I'll try again.

12:29Of course, there are all sorts of challenges with that because now we're going to train people to wait to the second time. So we talked about approval voting. There are also the issues that could be solved with an instant runoff. And so what we can do is we can rank people. How much do we want this person to be in charge? Then this person, then this person, then this person. And if somebody doesn't get enough for a majority, we throw out the person who got the least like votes and recalculate and recalculate and recalculate until instantly we have found the person who is the least offensive or most appropriate to the most people.

13:14But then again, we get back to this issue of one vote, one person. Should people with children have a louder say in how the school board is run? What about a louder say in how we deal with environmental issues that have an impact 70 years down the road? Because if you're 80 years old, what's going to happen to you 70 years from now? Maybe someone with children and grandchildren needs a louder say in that. It's worth discussing. But as soon as we start discussing it, we get rid of this issue of stability. I haven't even begun to talk about the massive difference between public voting and business voting.

13:55Because at the place where you work, it's not one vote one person. The receptionist and the bookkeeper do not get an equal vote with people on the board of directors about just about anything in the company. and everyone seems pretty much okay with that because there is an understanding that it is not, quote, a democracy with a population all showing up at the same time at the same place to vote, but instead it's more of a republic and that the employee, the vice president of this or that is encouraged to leave if they don't like the way their, quote, elected officials are making decisions. And if you're in a committee, the question is, how does that committee make a decision?

14:43Are you one of the people who sit at the meeting waiting to be called on, looking for someone else to take responsibility? At what point does the voting even happen? Have we built the plugins in Slack that make it easier for us to vote and re-vote? Have we experimented with what happens if their votes are anonymous or not anonymous? Because doesn't voting make you inherently responsible for the outcome? And in many organizations, isn't seeking responsibility the antithesis of what we seek to do all day. A couple more things on my rant and my thoughts here. Ballot design. Why are we still talking about ballot design?

15:25When I voted a couple weeks ago here outside of New York City, the ballot question was, vote for any seven judges. And if you read it across by party, some parties had seven people running, some had three. If you read it down in the seven columns, it looked like many of the judges were running unopposed. Of course, they weren't running unopposed. They were just lucky enough to be in a column where no one was below them. This is bad ballot design. You would have thought we learned our lesson 20 years ago, but we haven't. So why isn't there a permit, a license required for anyone who's going to design a ballot?

16:07You can't do heart surgery on somebody without a license. And I'm not sure you should be able to design a ballot without one either. Okay, one last thought. The internet, the internet is the biggest voting machine ever built. It's a voting machine pretty much with one person, one vote. It's a voting machine that demonstrates to us what happens when you pander to the largest possible group of people, the most viewed YouTube videos.

16:46The articles, they get written on Medium or other places. if you are seeking the most votes where a vote is an eyeball, you're almost certainly going to make a mistake. Because what you're assuming is that each set of eyeballs has the same value to you in the mission that you are on. If you're trying to make money, for example, eyeballs that are connected to someone who buys a lot of stuff online are worth more than eyeballs that aren't. and yet in most of the metrics that most of the sites use, that doesn't come up. Or if you're trying to spread an idea, getting it featured on a TED page or getting it featured in a science journal will reach a different group of people than if you make a super popular PewDiePie YouTube video.

17:40Don't make me get angry. You might get more numbers if you're PewDiePie, but that doesn't mean you're going to make more impact in the audience that you seek to make. If we go back in time to the Beverly Hillbillies versus Star Trek, it's really clear what's going on here, that chasing popular, winning that instant election every time, isn't necessarily good for you, for the culture, and for the people that you seek to serve. So thank you, Rensis Lickert, for showing up and teaching us that we don't all have to be extremists. And on behalf of everyone who is grateful that they have not repealed the first law of thermodynamics, thank you to James Prescott Jowell.

18:31We'll see you next time.

18:42Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi, Seth. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth. This is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. Well, you've made it through a third season of Akimbo. We've recorded more than 50 episodes. And if any of them are resonating with you, no, don't go leave a review. That's sort of a myth. Go tell someone else. Share it. There's plenty of backlist, and we love hearing from you. If you've got a question about this episode or anything prior, please visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and click the appropriate button.

19:32It works better from your desktop or Android phone. We got one really juicy question this week. Hi, Seth. This is Jesse from Kansas City. I have a question about your recent episode, The Big Sort. In Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One, he posits that companies should strive to create a new category instead of joining an existing category, the zero to one rather than one to end. And in your episode, you seem to suggest that such an endless number of categories already exist, and creating a new one does not gain such a marginal value. Could you speak into that a little bit? Thank you again for everything you do.

20:15So let's begin with this. Thiel's book talks about a different category of startup, back to the taxonomy idea, and that category is unicorns. There are more than 50, maybe 100 unicorns out there. A unicorn is defined as a startup worth more than a billion dollars. The first thing I'll say about unicorns is there aren't that many. There aren't that many real unicorns, but there are a few more startup unicorns. If you're a venture capitalist playing the high stakes, high risk game of investing millions of dollars in unproven companies, you really need there to be unicorns at the other end of your rainbow.

21:01So it's not unusual for somebody who's in that business to articulate that what they need you to do is build a unicorn. I would argue that the rules for building unicorns are different than the rules for most small businesses. So you need to take a really hard look at what is it that you're trying to build. There's a lot to be said for controlling your destiny, a lot to be said for positive cash flow, for bootstrapping, for serving people you can look in the eye and getting paid for it right at the beginning of the process. But if you want to take a really big swing, then sure, go for it. And part of Thiel's argument is that most unicorns show up with a natural monopoly with a technology and a process and a network effect that makes it that it's difficult for someone else to compete with them.

22:01That doesn't mean that taxonomy doesn't exist. It simply means that they are finding a new solution to an existing problem. So Uber didn't invent transportation. What they did was come up with a technology-based network effect that made that they would incrementally replace many different forms of less efficient ways of getting around. Facebook did not invent the idea that you want to know what people are saying about you behind your back. Facebook did not invent the idea that human beings want to connect. What Facebook did is find a different way to amplify that idea going forward. So we end up with two interesting insights about taxonomy here.

22:50The first one is that unicorns are a category. And the second one is that venture capitalists want unicorns to seek to be in categories unto themselves. The second one obviously is a bit about semantic nuance because we're ending up solving problems. That's what organizations do. If you don't solve a problem, it's hard to justify your presence in our world. Thanks to everyone for listening and going on this journey for three seasons. We'll see you next time.