[EM] Craig's posts

[Dave Ketchum]

I am not ready to claim trolling.  There are a variety of complications:
     He is from New Zealand.  I assume they call it English, yet there
are different meanings for words.  For example, when he writes "papers"
I like to read "ballots".
     When he asks for equations he really is trying to drag me into his
math world.  I resist that partly for no time and partly because, while
math can do wondrous things, and his might actually do something useful,
you can also stumble into theories that do not work usefully in the real world.
     He does not like Condorcet.  I now suspect he is working from an
incomplete definition - if he claims failure when he sees a cycle (A>B;
B>C; AND C>A) he would be sort of correct.  Condorcet backers look for
sensible ways to resolve such cycles.
     He does what seem to be serious papers.  I got to some, I think
from this email:
          He likes FirstPastThePost, but sees problems and is defining
an improvement as IFPP.
          He likes FBC, and inspired Forest Simmons to formally define
that yesterday on this reflector (Forest is willing to do equations).

When I joined this reflector (Tuesday) Craig and Forest were debating,
Craig said something unkind about Condorcet, and I could not resist
joining in at 16:40 EDT.

Dave Ketchum

On Wed, 05 Sep 2001 22:21:51 -0700 Richard Moore wrote:
> 
> Roy One wrote:
>  > I'm finding it a bit hard to get the gist of what points
> Craig is
>  > trying to make in his recent posts. Maybe it's because
> they refer to
>  > private conversations that preceded them.
> 
> Or maybe it's because Craig is simply trolling this list.
> That's right: He's been deliberately wasting our time. None
> of his requests seem sincere. How else do you explain
> the reference in one of his messages to "this list's typing
> monkeys" (or "a community of monkeys in a zoo")? There are
> lots of other cryptic ramblings such as "pairwise
> comparing's ability to properly implement vote bartering and
> perhaps bribing", or "Usage of it [FBC] could involve a
> tariff before the far side of a better method could arrived
> at." What the hell is that supposed to mean?
> 
> Craig states "Condorcet finds the wrong number of winners
> sometimes". I'm not sure what the wrong number of winners
> for a single winner method is. Something other than one?
> Then in a later message he requests "Mr Ketchum: to state a
> position you can post up the equations that define when this
> Condorcet method you like, will find the wrong number of
> winners." So Craig is asking Dave Ketchum to defend his
> (Craig's) own statement!
> 
> Or how about when , in response to Dave Ketchum's "As to
> hundreds of candidates - how can any voter be expected to
> pick intelligently among such a crowd, regardless of method
> of counting votes?", he writes: "Post up the equations and I
> will have a look at them. Unless there is some problem with
> that (nonexistence?)"? Does Craig think that the way to
> understand human behavior is by means of equations? I
> presume he is a big fan of Dr. Asimov's psychohistory
> novels, but that math just doesn't exist.
> 
> Richard
-- 
 davek at clarityconnect.com    http://www.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
   Dave Ketchum     108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708    607-687-5026
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