[EM] Fwd: Re: Problems with finding the probable best governor

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

I'd said:

 > You mentioned newspapers in IRV countries.
 > I don't know if Australian newspapers have articles advising
 > lesser-of-2-evils voting, but if they don't, that might merely
 > reflect a difference in their newspapers from ours. Maybe
 > U.S. newspapers are taking on more of a social control roll than
 > Australian papers are. Do British newspapers have articles advising
 > voters to vote for a lesser-evil instead of a "spoiler"? Of course
 > Plurality is used there too. I don't think Australian newspapers
 > can be used to show that IRV or Tideman(m) wouldn't have strategy
 > problems here.

Blake wrote:

If you can come up with any evidence from any of the many countries
where IRV or some form of successive elimination is used, that a
significant number of people know that you can vote strategically to
elect a compromise, then I would be very interested to here it.  I
also argue against IRV, so I would actually be rather pleased if such
evidence could be found.  I just don't think it exists.

I reply:

First of all, it isn't "many countries". It's Australia &
Ireland. And you can't really count Ireland, because an Irishman
told me that in his country IRV is only used for a ceremonial
office. So, instead of many, it's one. And don't count
the "2nd ballot" system as IRV.

I believe it was Tom Round, of Australia, who said that in
Australia's IRV elections, the small parties have a difficult time
getting their members to rank their own party in 1st place, because
the members want to rank one of the big-2 in 1st place, as a
lesser-evil, believing that their favorite can't win, but might
eliminate the big-2 candidate whom that voters prefers to the
other big-2 candidate.

Another thing: IRV is going to come under much harsher scrutiny
& criticism here than in Australia. I, for one, will be obtaining
the rankings, and studying them to determine if IRV has failed
in the ways that we all predict that it must. That wasn't possible
in Australia, for nearly the entire history of IRV's use there.
The published count results don't include the necessary information.
So the fact that it hasn't caused anger & resentment in Australia
is due to the fact that no one has actually looked for those
failures. Now it would be technologically possible, but now
IRV is already well established, and not vulnerable the way it
will be here. Of course I won't be the only one who will check the
rankings to look for failures by IRV. No doubt a number of people
who simply don't want reform (and may not realize that IRV isn't
reform) will do the same thing.

For these reasons, and various cultural & political reasons,
the fact that IRV hasn't been rejected in Australia doesn't mean
that it won't be rejected here due to its results.


Blake said:
[regarding the best candidate estimate issue]


My reasoning is this.  If we have majority (of those expressing a
preference) decisions that form a cycle, we know that they cannot all
be correct.  So, which one should we discard?  Presumably, the
decision that has the least probability of being true.  The one where
the balance evidence is least compelling.  This, I argue, is the
proposition with the smallest margin of victory.

I reply:

I understand that part. What I don't understand is how that
makes Tideman(m)'s winner the candidate most likely to be the
best.

You correctly said that I was guessing you reasoning. I guessed
that you were assuming that if the fact that A beats B says that
A is more likely to be the best than B is, and the fact that
B beats C means that B is more likely to be the best than C is,
means that A is more likely to be the best than C is.

It's not like A beats C. Maybe C beats A. Doesn't that mean that
the people said that C is more likely to be the best than A is?
Sure, A>C was a weaker defeat, and has been dropped (or skipped).
But the people nonetheless said, with that defeat, that C is
more likely to be the best than A is, since you take a defeat as
a statement of that type.

So I said that the assumptions needed to say that A is the most
likely to be the best because it's the Tideman(m) winner are
arguably less convincing than the assumption that we can judge
a candidate's probability of being the best by counting how many
favorable individual pairwise preference votes he has.

So I was saying that a claim that Borda picks the candidate most
likely to be the best seems to require less questionable
assumptions than a claim that Tideman(m) picks the candidate most
likely to be the best.

Blake wrote:

Of course, there are some other possibilities.  You could decide to
overturn more than one majority, or you could argue that a number of
smaller majorities should be more powerful than one larger one.  I'll
address these points if asked.

I reply:

Yes, that 2nd argument seems a good one.

Blake wrote:

It doesn't really make strategic sense to ever leave candidates
unranked at the end of the ballot in either method.  However, the

I reply:

Maybe not if we ignore deterrence. But, as you know, defensive
truncation, in Condorcet, deters offensive order-reversal.
So you can't really correctly say that truncation doesn't make
strategic sense.


Blake wrote

This
effect is much more pronounced in wv, and this is responsible for the
"truncation-resistance" that has gained it so much support on this
list.

If this is really a difference of opinion about a fact, and not just
a subtle difference in the way we are using words...

I reply:

I think it's a difference in what we look at in  a method's results.

I don't think we disagree about an objective factual issue.

You want truncation to be able to take the election away from
a sincere CW, and we Condorcet advocates don't want that to happen.
SFC  describes the conditions under which that won't happen, with
Condorcet's method. With Tideman(m) there's no such guarantee.

Mike Ossipoff


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