Thoughts on majority potential simulations

[Tony Simmons]

>> From: Forest Simmons
>> Subject: Re: [EM] Thoughts on majority potential simulations

>> Tony,

>> Your comments below remind me that it would be interesting
>> to do a singular value analysis to find the effective
>> dimension of the issue space.  Just throw out the
>> dimensions corresponding to relatively small singular
>> values. The eigenvectors corresponding to the larger
>> eigenvalues would give the natural combinations of issues
>> that the various dominant factions disagree on.

I'm sure the dimensionality has been studied plenty.  I'd
expect that poli sci types have spent a lot of time on it.
Also it's the kind of thing that cognitive psychologists deal
with.  The classic is _The Psychology of Personal
Constructs", by George Kelley (I think it was first published
in 1948), in which people are seen as scientists, are busy
constructing models of the world in order to simplify and
predict.  So the people are already doing what's been
suggested, and the task becomes one of measuring the
dimension of subspaces they've already constructed.

What you'll find is that different people construct different
models.  In particular, there are the cognitively complex and
cognitively simple, with more or fewer dimensions.  This is
going to make it pretty difficult to come up with a
generalization.

>> I also have a "poor man's singular value decomposition"
>> based on L_1 and L_infinity norms that might go better
>> with the spaces that we are dealing with, thinking along
>> Richard's line of reasoning.

Having thought about it some more, I think it's going to come
down to how far apart the voters consider the candidates.  I
see big measurement problems.

>> I have more thoughts along these lines, but am late for class.

Run!

>> Forest