Missed Distinctions

[Mike Ossipoff]

This is something that I already covered briefly in
"Robert's Rules?? Hippo Logic."  But I'd be willing to bet
that Don will fail to catch on to it in that note, and so
I'd better spell it out more fully here. Not that that will
work, necessarily. But since Don will keep on with that
argument, I'd like to cover it more prominently here, in
a message of its own.

If the use of IRO to as a standard to justify IRO, in a
recent message by Don, is merely a coy way of saying
that Condorcet is being to justify Condorcet, then there's
just 1 thing that Don is right about: I don't deny that
Condorcet is pretty much a direct re-statement of the LO2E
standard, & the majority rule principle that I've talked
about. But there are 2 things that Don is missing about
this.

1. Merit of standards

There's such a thing as merit. A seeming unawareness of there
being such a thing as merit seems, in fact, to be a unifying
aspect of the things I've talked about in these P.S.s. 
I'll be brief, since I've said this so many times. 
Majority rule & LO2E aren't just things that we've come up with
because of the similarity of Condorcet's method's rule
with those standards. Those are standards that were already
widely agreed to be important long before anyone was
advocating Condorcet(EM). Now, when Don uses a re-statement
of IRO's definition as a standard by which to judge IRO,
that just isn't quite the same thing. The fact that the
standard & the method are identical isn't enough. The 
standard has to have merit. It has to be important to 
people. Don hasn't justified IRO in terms of anything
but itself, and his "Abused Candidates" rule, he states
that rule but doesn't justify it in terms of anything.
The fact that one person likes it isn't enough. If
his hippo logic is sincere, or if he's being coy &
trying to say that both method advocacies are using
the same hippo logic, then either way, he's missing the
point about merit.

2. Order

Which came first? I emphasize that merit is the important thing,
but it's also a fact that, with Condorcet, the method came
after the standards, chronologically. We chose Condorcet
as the method to recommend because of standards that it meets.
We didn't just look around for standards that could justify
something that we'd already decided to advocate for no particular
reason. All of us who advocated Condorcet have done so because
of standards. The standards came first, and then the method
was chosen because it meets the standards. Have you got that
yet, Don?

Don once thanked me for not giving up on him, when I wrote
a letter to carefully explain that to him. Waste of time.
If he's being coy again, or if he's sincere in his hippo
logic this time, either way, what I was saying didn't reach
him. I'd have avoided wasting some time if I _had_ given
up on Don before writing that letter. He's still missing
both of those distictions: Merit, & order. As if I hadn't
written that letter in which I so carefully explained it
to him.

All of this that I've been talking about in this letter,
& the other installments of this P.S., and in the
announcement that I wouldn't answer anymore letters from
Don, all these things point to the conclusion that replying
to Don is a waste of time. Excuse me for writing this
P.S. when I thought I was finished, but I just wanted
to add these things. Now I've said everything I have to
say about Don & his statements. This time I promise that
I won't waste any more time replying to him.

Mike








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