[EM] Further comments re: Blake's letter

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Lest it seem as if I'm the only person here who prefers defeat-support
to margins, I'd like to point out that Norman Petry, Markus Schulze,
Rob Lanphier, & Steve Eppley prefer defeat support to margins. Most
of these people prefer defeat-support for the same reason for which
I prefer it: Strategy guarantees. That adds up to 5 here who prefer
defeat-support to margins, and that's not counting people off the EM
list.

I should add that, of the 4 list-members that I named (5 if you count
me), all but one also prefer BeatpathWinner to Ranked-Pairs.

Blake says that I have many different arguments why defeat-support
is better than margins. I named two arguments in my previous message
about this: Strategy guarantees, and overruled voters. Of those two,
the strategy guarantees are what's really important, because it's
about something that very much concerns voters.

That's something that's understood by those of us who prefer defeat-support. 
We've noticed how cowed voters are by the lesser-of-2-evils
problem, and we want to change that.

So why isn't that important to Blake? Because he has a different 
standard--copying authority. You've probably heard of the authoritarian
personality. Someone for whom allegiance to authority means everything.
Economists have more mathematical training, so Blake would follow them
like a good sheep, never mind if they live in an ivory tower world of
their own, and are completely out of touch with the concerns of voters.

Blake says that I'm contemptuous of the academic authors, and I won't
deny that I'm contemptuous of many of them. But that, and the question
of the justification for that contempt isn't really relevant to
the issues here. The more important point is that I claim that there's
no particular reason why we have to follow them. Let's judge by
whatever standards we consider important, without regard to
what Blake's authorities say. I don't want to sound radically
anti-authority, but I suggest that we make our choices according to
standards that we consider important, rather than by authoritarian
considerations.

Mike Ossipoff

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