@hubert @ben Indeed. One way to understand approval voting is just as the simplest version of range voting. There's a simplicity benefit to approval voting, there's more information with a larger range, one case for approval voting suggests that in practice, the extra information in the larger range doesn't often change outcomes, so the simplicity benefit of the binary choice outweighs. 1/

@hubert @ben That's an empirical claim. More theoretically, I'd suggest your initial concern, that people have different thresholds, a tough critic's 3 star film may be a gentler critic's 4 star film, binds more heavily with range voting, making the "more information" hard to interpret. I really like the interpretability of "my favorite, and those i'd be generously willing to accept" in approval voting. 2/

@hubert @ben Very much agreed on FPTP!

p.s. my whole thread last night used "olive leaf" where "olive branch" was the cliché i was actually looking for. sorry!

@hubert @ben i think the way to think about it isn’t some threshold, but generosity. you have a candidate you prefer, others you really dislike, others you don’t dislike do much. you can, if you like, “bullet vote” — approve only of your most preferred candidate. if everyone does this the exercise degenerates to FTPT. but everyone doesn’t! 1/

@hubert @ben people who choose more are extending an olive leaf. they are saying, it doesn’t have to be my way or the highway, here are one or more others i can live with. 2/

@hubert @ben these “olive leaf” voters become the swing coalition, the group that decides whether and how results vary from what an FTPT election might have yielded. 3/

@hubert @ben some of these “olive leaf” differences will be mere self-expression. if you would have voted strategically in FPTP for a major party candidate despite preferring a less likely contender, you get to express that. within the context of one election, it changes nothing, but it does change perceptions of who might be credible next time around. 4/

@hubert @ben and when next time comes, when there are in fact multiple credible candidates rather than the FPTP binary equilibrium, these olive leaves are crucial. the credible candidates who win the checkmark of democratic generosity from voters who might prefer someone else, but can live with them, become victors. 5/

@hubert @ben from the candidate side, to win you have to elicit this generosity from people whom you know would prefer, if they were to rank, someone else. that changes how politics is done. trying to destroy someone’s idol is unlikely to call forth this kind of good will. /fin

@stephenjudkins @crookedfootball I guess, but I don't think @crookedfootball is in fact arguing against the sanctions regime, nor would I! We didn't broadly blame the "Iraqi people" in the 90s, but maintained a notoriously devastating sanctions regime. (In a bank shot, you might argue the 2nd Iraq War might have been avoided if we did demonize the Iraqi people, so that continuing less-harm sanctions would have remained internationally sustainable.) 1/

@stephenjudkins @crookedfootball Less speculatively, the useful relationship between not-demonizing and sanctions regimes is that burdens on the broad public are viewed as a cost. Beyond Russia, the recent trend is to target sanctions towards leadership (which, given the poor effectiveness of sanctions in general, seems to do about as much good with less "collateral damage"). 2/

@stephenjudkins @crookedfootball That's not the case with Russia, of course, where the goal is to degrade industrial capacity to fight and so sanctions are as broad and hermetic as possible. But as you say, it's easy to justify that on least-harm terms without resorting to any blame of the Russian public. It's a shame—really!—that blameless Russian workers lose their jobs at auto plants, but its a much lesser harm than enabling what Russia's doing in Ukraine or escalating to a greater war. /fin

@stephenjudkins @crookedfootball I'd say that national norms and traditions are fairer to critique outside of the context of a bitter, criminal conflict likely to promote motivated reasoning. For all one might want to say about Russian chauvinism and imperialism—and yes, there is a vast trove!—how able are you to distinguish it from British or French antecedents, or US manifest destiny? What is more likely of the exercise, to inform or reinforce convenient views? 1/

@stephenjudkins @crookedfootball That said, I think it is perfectly fair and useful to point out the ways that *actual protagonists* of the war revert to ugly cultural antecedents. Putin openly invokes "great" conquerors of the past as points of comparison with his exercise. I think it far to tar *him* as elevating and succumbing to the worst parts of Russia's cultural legacy. But I don't think now is a time when we can make fair evaluations of "Russian culture". /fin