Standards

[Mike Ositoff]

Since the subject line of Saari's letter is about standards, let
me remind him that, as I tried to explain to him, he isn't wrong just
because his standards aren't the same as ours, but (can you accept
this, Saari?), neither are our standards wrong because they aren't
the same as his. 

I was chided for allegedly trying to discourage free thinking, but
where I disagree with Saari's thinking is where he says that the
rest of us are making an erroneous assumption about a factual
matter. Wrong! Standards aren't a factual matter, they're an
individual, subjective preference.

No one's saying that Saari shouldn't try to change our standards,
and those of most electoral reform advocates, or the LO2E concerns
of huge numbers of voters (good luck with that last one!). But
I can't guarantee him much success. In particular, as long as LO2E
is so important to voters, I suspect that it will remain important
to electoral reform advocates. 

But I very sincerely wish him success if he wants to try to lessen
the importance of LO2E to voters.

***
Saari said that we're vague about whether our rankings represent
opinion or voting. No, we usually are explicit about that distinction.
Very often we state what the sincere rankings would be, and what
the innocently or strategically truncated rankings are, or what
the strategically order-reversed rankings are.

I would point out (as several already have) that those
points ratings of Saari's wouldn't be sincere in a public political
election--any more than our friends' & acquaintances' Plurality votes
are now. Same old problem, LO2E. Except that, with the points ratings,
we'd then addionally have _offensive_ strategy, which would further
aggravate the LO2E defensive strategy problem. So it's rather ironic
that Saari said that _we_ were ignoring the distinction between
sincere & insincere voting.

Again, Saari repeated his statement that rank-balloting doesn't
count enough data. As I said when I replied to his previous
repetion of that: Who says that all information needs to be counted
(assuming even that it's genuine)? I gave the example of the information
about whether we'd rather give our wallet to a mugger, or have him
carry out his threat against us. Do we really want that information
used? Saari's point rating systems, like Plurality, mug us by
forcing us to choose between giving up helping Favorite beat Compromise,
or helping Compromise beat Worst. Exactly as other muggers force us
to choose between giving up our money or our life.

So, as I said before, let's not replace one Mugger-Method with
another.

Mike