[EM] Definition typo

MIKE OSSIPOFF nkklrp at hotmail.com
Fri Dec 28 16:56:23 PST 2001



The error in my definition of voting a candidate higher is obvious. It's 
obvious that
other people's ballots have nothing to do with whether John votes some 
candidate
higher. Equally obvious is the way that the definition should have been 
written:

A voter, John, votes Smith higher if he changes how he marks Smith in such a 
way that
it's possible to contrive a fixed* way for John to mark the other 
candidates, such that
after the change, John's ballot votes Smith over a candidate over whom it 
didn't vote
him before the change.

*By a fixed way of marking the other candidates, I mean a way that John 
doesn't change,
except where such change is an unavoidable result of changing how he marks 
Smith.


[end of definition]

Of course the reason why I accidentally wrote it in terms of other people's 
votes was
because that's how my definition of voting Smith over Jones is written.

It seems to me that my definition of Monotonicity, with its supporting 
definitions, is
satisfactory, but of course there's always the possibility there being some 
other error
that I haven't noticed.

If someone comes up with another bizarrely unproposable method in order to 
find
a "problem" with that Monotonicity definition, then I'd point out that 
Monotonicity is
not going to be discarded, and that it's necessary to have some definition 
of that
criterion. I don't mean to imply that I claim that my definition can't be 
improved on. I merely
post it as a possible, workable way of defining Monotonicity.

Mike Ossipoff



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