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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Dear James,

Re your other comments:You've convinced me that, theoretically, meta-majoritarianism may be succesful at determining the truth - and that a close analogue to it (Google) works quite well.

Now I'd need to see meta-majoritarianism in action, along with some analysis as to when it works better or worst that1) Expert opinion and2) Standard majoritarianism

My guess is that it would work better than standard majoritarianism when the issue is polarized between big groups, but worst when the issue is polarized between a smaller, fanatical group and a more uncertain majority.

My guess it would beat both expert opinion and standard majoritarianism in cases where there are degrees of expertise, and the "level" of expertise of any one person is not impossible for average people to see (say market predictions or editors on Wikipedia).

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Dear James,

Thanks for that info - it is indeed a cunning way of avoiding the closed-cult situation. And it becomes more efficient as the size of the cult goes down, which is nice.

I'm not sure how you envision a dynamic situation arising that would give rise to frequent problems

Simply that if you allow eigen-values to move, the top two will cross occasionally, leaving you with two solutions (which may be very different). This model of meta-majoritarianism seems unable to track the fact another solution is so close by, and may be within experiemental error.

Maybe a better model would be to have the average of all the eigenvectors, weighted by the squares of their eigen-values? This would be continuous in the data, and so would avoid such issues.

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