Validity of Vote (SWC)

[Steve Eppley]

Mike O wrote:
>Sure, those who vote are self-selected, since they're the ones
>willing to vote. But surely that's unavoidable in any election.
>
>In the same sense, EM is, itself, self-selected. 

It's this latter self-selection--who subscribes to EM--which
I meant a couple days ago.

>Some members of ER indicated that they'd rather have recommendations
>from the group interested in discussing relative merits of methods,
>instead of having us discuss the topic on ER.  So recommendations
>were asked for from the EM group.

I agree that a vote here is valid in as much as it answers a request 
from some people in ER for a recommendation.  I don't oppose holding 
this poll.  (I doubt I can do as fine a job at justifying my 
rankings, or ratings, as Mike did with his ballot's commentary.)

I have doubts about whether a poll here will be influential without 
substantial explanation, but hopefully I'll be pleasantly surprised.
I also have doubts about the staying power of EM correspondents: it's 
already hard to organize FAQ writing; will a "decision" on a method 
make it even harder?  Again, I hope I'll be surprised.

>My new ranking of methods:
[snip]

Shouldn't we also vote ratings, since there are some WB methods under 
consideration?  Rankings can be derived from ratings if the tally 
algorithm doesn't induce incentives to strategize, or we could vote 
rankings and ratings separately.

I'm not really a fan of rating methods.  My brief experience with
them as a voter is that it's very hard to vote numbers with any
confidence in their accuracy: my "error bars" are quite large, 
and there's no provision for input and tallying of error bars in
conventional WB ballots.  I'd be interested in hearing comments 
from others who try out WB here in EM's sw polling. 

---Steve     (Steve Eppley    seppley at alumni.caltech.edu)