[EM] The Repoman strikes again

[LAYTON Craig]

Mike wrote:

>The example dramatizes a genuine IRV problem: IRV tends to often
>jump away from the voter median and choose an extreme. That's why
>IRV did so poorly in Merrill's social utility simulation. Some here
>don't like Approval, but both in Merrill's study and Norm's study,
>Approval did better than IRV. You may not base your judgements on
>social utility, but the fact remains that those SU studies
>show IRV doing poorly because of its frequent jumps to extremes.

I basically accept the SU arguments.  I don't necessarily accept the idea
that a candidate who recieves a lower SU is necessarily more "extreme", nor
do I really accept the idea of voters voting in a neat line from left to
right (or vice versa).  The example is contrived.

>So it isn't really correct to say that Demorep's example is meaningless
>or that any method could be made to look just as bad. The example
>demonstrates a genuine problem that IRV has, something that IRV
>really will do fairly often. IRV jumps to extremes.

Say I pretend to be an IRV advocate.  I give the following example with
Hitler, Mussolini and Roosevelt as the candidates;

H>M>R	42
M>R>H	10
R>M>H 48

Roosevelt wins in IRV. Mussolini wins in Condorcet.  It isn't that hard to
think of some anti-Condorcet arguments to go with it; something about an
unpopular and irrelevant candidate winning, when the contest should really
be between the other two.
&c.