Last November I started
a thread about prioritization. I made the case that
ideas for phpBB should be ranked by donation votes (DVs) rather than by ballot votes (BVs). In that thread I shared a few examples of DV. Figured it wouldn't hurt to use this thread to share a few more...
DV was used to determine whether men or women are better tippers.
DV was used to determine which skeptic to prank.
DV is being used to rank cats.
DV was used to rank law firm bands.
DV was used to choose the libertarian party convention theme...
$6,327.00 — I’m That Libertarian!
$5,200.00 — Building Bridges, Not Walls
$1,620.00 — Pro Choice on Everything
$1,377.77 — Empowering the Individual
$395.00 — The Power of Principle
$150.00 — Future of Freedom
$135.00 — Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
$105.00 — Rise of the Libertarians
$75.00 — Free Lives Matter
$42.00 — Be Me, Be Free
$17.76 — Make Taxation Theft Again
$15.42 — Taxation is Theft
$15.00 — Jazzed About Liberty
$15.00 — All of Your Freedoms, All of the Time
$5.00 — Am I Being Detained!
$5.00 — Liberty Here and Now
Would the results have been better if BV had been used instead of DV? It's not like we can see how BV would have ranked things. With this in mind, in another community that I'm a member of, I've been trying to juxtapose how BV and DV rank the same things. Here's my most recent attempt...
pragmatarian discussion thread.
Participants can BV and/or DV for their preferred political system. So far "capracracy" (rule by goats) is the most highly ranked political system in both the BV poll and the DV poll. Heh. In theory, the results would be more reliable with a larger pool of participants. Of course it would help if the outcome was more consequential.
Is anybody who manages their own online community interested in conducting a similar experiment? You'd raise money to help pay for your website and/or to help support some other worthy cause. Plus, you'd help us compare the results of BV and DV.
I'll go ahead and shed some light on the this topic's conceptual foundation.
Here's a short video clip of a coywolf comparing a goose egg and a roadkill. Comparing the usefulness of things is what life is all about. The more intelligent an organism is, the more correctly it will determine the usefulness of things. In theory, a group of people is more intelligent than any individual in the group. A group can use two very different ways... BV and DV... to determine the usefulness of things. Given that BV and DV are so very different, they can't be equally intelligent. It's imperative that we figure out whether BV or DV is smarter. Our very survival depends on it.
In any case, DV is a very useful tool that every community should be aware of.