Presenter
Mahendra Prasad, UC Berkeley
Mahendra Prasad is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley in political science. At the 2022 American Political Science Association annual meeting, he served on the roundtable “Effective Altruism and Political Science” with Allan Dafoe, Toby Ord, and Peter Singer. After having gone defunct, Mahendra re-founded the UC Berkeley EA chapter in 2020 and served as its president through 2021. He gave a talk at EAG London, “Rational Group Decision Making”. His work has been published in AI Magazine, Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. He founded and is an admin for the official Facebook page for the Bogleheads, whose membership is in the tens of thousands. He double majored in philosophy and political science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Summary:
• Approval voting is a significantly better tool for single winner group decision making, and worth greater adoption and implementation for important decision making• Condorcet and Condorcet’s jury theorem are useful concepts for popular discourse• Condorcet Multiagent Systems are a useful framing tool for policymaking discourse
Challenges:
– The ideas in this presentation are worth the money and effort to write a book to add these ideas to popular and policymaking discourse
– As mentioned in my EA Global talk “Rational Group Decision Making”, optimally solving Condorcet multiagent system problems is probably intractable, but technical research to identify useful heuristics to find good enough solutions would be very helpful for policy making.
