FUCK THE POLICE
911 EVERY DAY
http://rangevoting.org/ApisMellifera.html
Good God my bro has a lot of time on his hands.
Voting: The wisdom of bees
Honeybees (Apis Mellifera jpg) have been "voting" in single winner "elections" for 20-50 million years. They've held far more elections than humans, for a lot longer, and to decide something that mattered to each bee voter a lot more than most election winners matter to most human voters: where should we locate our new nest?
With computers we can easily run millions of simulated elections, but even that number is dwarfed by the number of elections that bees have experienced, which exceeds hundreds of trillions.
So it behooves us to ask: what election method do bees use?
Bee election performance – how good are they?
Each spring, about half the inhabitants of each beehive leave with their queen to start a new hive, in a swarm usually containing between 2000 and 20000 bees. The most important decision they need to make is: where to build that new hive? They usually find about 20 different options within about 100 square kilometers, and about 90% of the time, the bee swarm succeeds in selecting (what appears to entomologists to be) the best one. Occasionally, however, they select a sub-optimal choice or even fail to reach a decision. The latter is very bad since there is only one queen – who cannot be divided in two! Details: Lindauer in observing 19 swarms reported 2 that failed to reach a decision. In the first, the swarm split in two, each trying to get the queen to go to its choice; but after it became clear this attempt failed, the swarm rejoined and recommenced negotations, which after two more days resulted in an agreement. In the second instance, the swarm had still failed to find an attractive housing option even after 14 days, at which point it ran out of stored food and inclement weather approached. It then, apparently as a fallback option, decided to construct the new nest in open air right then and there, contrary to the usual policy of nesting in natural hollows. Open air nesting usually leads to the death of the hive in the winter, but in this location the winters were mild enough to make survival probable.
So bees, while not perfect decision makers, are quite good. To provide a little perspective, consider the "plurality voting method" that is the most commonly used system in human single-winner elections.
My computer simulations show that 1283 plurality-voters, given 10 choices, (each voter regarding each choice as worth a fixed standard-normal-random-number "dollar amount," all randoms generated independently before the experiment begins) will succeed in choosing the best choice (maximum sum of dollar values) 32% of the time. While 32% is better than just making a random guess (10%), it's far worse performance than bees. If the simulated-humans instead employ "approval voting" (approving choices with value greater than midway between the best and worst available) then they get the best choice 54% of the time – better, but still far worse than bees. If the humans use 0-100 "range voting" (scoring the best choice 100, the worst 0, and the rest linearly interpolated) then it's 79%. That is at least approaching bee-like decision-making quality.
We humans like to think we are far smarter than bees. We've developed calculus and written language. Human brains weigh about a million times more than a bee brain. So why can't we make collective decisions as well as tiny buzzing flower-suckers?? Several reasons:
It's the voting system, stupid:
Entomologists now understand quite a lot about the voting system that bees use, and it is a lot better than plurality voting (and also better than approval voting). [In fact, we are going to see below for the first time that it basically is range voting!]
Honesty:
Bees have little or no motivation to be dishonest by "strategically exaggerating" in their votes, or "not voting for my true favorite because that would risk wasting my vote." In those respects, humans are a little "too clever." But the explanation it isn't that simple because dishonesty was not the reason for our poor performance in this computer simulation, since the simulated humans voted completely honestly – the main reason there was different voting systems. However, honesty does something to do with it: If the humans had simply honestly reported their dollar values then we could select the best choice (in terms of total dollar value) 100% of the time. While that might initially sound like a great idea, unfortunately even a single dishonest human could then report some enormous "dollar values" and throw the election, so that system would be unacceptable (plus most decisions do not have exactly measurable "dollar values" in some common agreed units such as "dollars" anyway). So we need to restrict the votes to some fixed range to prevent one fanatical human from singlehandedly throwing the election, and then humans often will use the maximum for one candidate and the minimum for another in order not to "waste their vote," in which case already there is some "dishonest exaggeration" in the mix which cannot be avoided. That is not so terrible because (a) even if every human voter exaggerates every range vote to the max, we would then just have approval voting, which is still a good deal better than the plurality system, and (b) experimentally, most human range voters do not do that.
(Somewhat Speculative):
It is known that only 5% or fewer of the bees are "scout bees" that actually find and examine the candidate nest-sites. Conceivably, only bees that are above-average in scouting and judging ability, do the scouting. Lindauer reported that the scout bees are precisely the ones that had been experienced foragers in their previous careers. As H.D.Thoreau complained in an 1838 journal entry, "[when humans make a collective decision] the mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest." ( Richard Nixon put it a little differently to John Erlichman [1971 white house tapes]: "You gotta remember the smartest thing the Congress did was to limit the number of voters... Out of three and a half to four million people, 200,000 voted. And that was true for a helluva long time, and the republic would never have survived if all the dummies had voted along with the intelligent people." ) If only the best decision-making bees become scouts (because bees can somehow assess their own abilities and do so honestly) then that human defect is avoided.
A few apologetic remarks about this computer simulation versus reality:
The computer simulation described above was primarily designed to be "simple and reproducible" rather than "realistic." Making good collective decisions about independent-random-valued options often is harder than if the randomness is significantly correlated, a fact which made the simulated humans "look worse" relative to bees. But on the other hand: there usually are more bees than 1283, more candidate nest-sites than 10, and very imperfect knowledge of "dollar"-values by the bee voters (typically only 22% of the bee-scouts actually examine more than one nest site, and only 5% of the bees are scouts) i.e. in all these respects the bees usually have a harder decision-making job than the one faced by our simulated humans.
Good God my bro has a lot of time on his hands.
Voting: The wisdom of bees
Honeybees (Apis Mellifera jpg) have been "voting" in single winner "elections" for 20-50 million years. They've held far more elections than humans, for a lot longer, and to decide something that mattered to each bee voter a lot more than most election winners matter to most human voters: where should we locate our new nest?
With computers we can easily run millions of simulated elections, but even that number is dwarfed by the number of elections that bees have experienced, which exceeds hundreds of trillions.
So it behooves us to ask: what election method do bees use?
Bee election performance – how good are they?
Each spring, about half the inhabitants of each beehive leave with their queen to start a new hive, in a swarm usually containing between 2000 and 20000 bees. The most important decision they need to make is: where to build that new hive? They usually find about 20 different options within about 100 square kilometers, and about 90% of the time, the bee swarm succeeds in selecting (what appears to entomologists to be) the best one. Occasionally, however, they select a sub-optimal choice or even fail to reach a decision. The latter is very bad since there is only one queen – who cannot be divided in two! Details: Lindauer in observing 19 swarms reported 2 that failed to reach a decision. In the first, the swarm split in two, each trying to get the queen to go to its choice; but after it became clear this attempt failed, the swarm rejoined and recommenced negotations, which after two more days resulted in an agreement. In the second instance, the swarm had still failed to find an attractive housing option even after 14 days, at which point it ran out of stored food and inclement weather approached. It then, apparently as a fallback option, decided to construct the new nest in open air right then and there, contrary to the usual policy of nesting in natural hollows. Open air nesting usually leads to the death of the hive in the winter, but in this location the winters were mild enough to make survival probable.
So bees, while not perfect decision makers, are quite good. To provide a little perspective, consider the "plurality voting method" that is the most commonly used system in human single-winner elections.
My computer simulations show that 1283 plurality-voters, given 10 choices, (each voter regarding each choice as worth a fixed standard-normal-random-number "dollar amount," all randoms generated independently before the experiment begins) will succeed in choosing the best choice (maximum sum of dollar values) 32% of the time. While 32% is better than just making a random guess (10%), it's far worse performance than bees. If the simulated-humans instead employ "approval voting" (approving choices with value greater than midway between the best and worst available) then they get the best choice 54% of the time – better, but still far worse than bees. If the humans use 0-100 "range voting" (scoring the best choice 100, the worst 0, and the rest linearly interpolated) then it's 79%. That is at least approaching bee-like decision-making quality.
We humans like to think we are far smarter than bees. We've developed calculus and written language. Human brains weigh about a million times more than a bee brain. So why can't we make collective decisions as well as tiny buzzing flower-suckers?? Several reasons:
It's the voting system, stupid:
Entomologists now understand quite a lot about the voting system that bees use, and it is a lot better than plurality voting (and also better than approval voting). [In fact, we are going to see below for the first time that it basically is range voting!]
Honesty:
Bees have little or no motivation to be dishonest by "strategically exaggerating" in their votes, or "not voting for my true favorite because that would risk wasting my vote." In those respects, humans are a little "too clever." But the explanation it isn't that simple because dishonesty was not the reason for our poor performance in this computer simulation, since the simulated humans voted completely honestly – the main reason there was different voting systems. However, honesty does something to do with it: If the humans had simply honestly reported their dollar values then we could select the best choice (in terms of total dollar value) 100% of the time. While that might initially sound like a great idea, unfortunately even a single dishonest human could then report some enormous "dollar values" and throw the election, so that system would be unacceptable (plus most decisions do not have exactly measurable "dollar values" in some common agreed units such as "dollars" anyway). So we need to restrict the votes to some fixed range to prevent one fanatical human from singlehandedly throwing the election, and then humans often will use the maximum for one candidate and the minimum for another in order not to "waste their vote," in which case already there is some "dishonest exaggeration" in the mix which cannot be avoided. That is not so terrible because (a) even if every human voter exaggerates every range vote to the max, we would then just have approval voting, which is still a good deal better than the plurality system, and (b) experimentally, most human range voters do not do that.
(Somewhat Speculative):
It is known that only 5% or fewer of the bees are "scout bees" that actually find and examine the candidate nest-sites. Conceivably, only bees that are above-average in scouting and judging ability, do the scouting. Lindauer reported that the scout bees are precisely the ones that had been experienced foragers in their previous careers. As H.D.Thoreau complained in an 1838 journal entry, "[when humans make a collective decision] the mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest." ( Richard Nixon put it a little differently to John Erlichman [1971 white house tapes]: "You gotta remember the smartest thing the Congress did was to limit the number of voters... Out of three and a half to four million people, 200,000 voted. And that was true for a helluva long time, and the republic would never have survived if all the dummies had voted along with the intelligent people." ) If only the best decision-making bees become scouts (because bees can somehow assess their own abilities and do so honestly) then that human defect is avoided.
A few apologetic remarks about this computer simulation versus reality:
The computer simulation described above was primarily designed to be "simple and reproducible" rather than "realistic." Making good collective decisions about independent-random-valued options often is harder than if the randomness is significantly correlated, a fact which made the simulated humans "look worse" relative to bees. But on the other hand: there usually are more bees than 1283, more candidate nest-sites than 10, and very imperfect knowledge of "dollar"-values by the bee voters (typically only 22% of the bee-scouts actually examine more than one nest site, and only 5% of the bees are scouts) i.e. in all these respects the bees usually have a harder decision-making job than the one faced by our simulated humans.
