[EM] Finding the probable best candidate?

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Blake said:

You haven't actually brought out an argument in favour of your position.
The fact that there exist candidates that are best for some people
isn't in dispute and doesn't address the issue.

I reply:

Actually, I claim that it does address the issue, and that it
means that there's no absolute best candidate.

When I say that different candidates are best for different people,
I don't mean that they benefit some people more than others. I mean
that, as perceived by some people, some candidates are genuinely
the best, and, as perceived by others, different candidates are
genuinely the best.

There's no one "best" candidate. There's one that you insist is
the best, and there's one that someone else insists is the best.
You claim that there's a certain candidate who's really the best,
but there isn't. Sure, there's one that I consider the best. There's
one that you consider the best. But they probably won't be the same one.

So, "the best candidate" has no meaning, unless we define it to
mean "the candidate that the speaker considers to be the best".

There's no 1 best candidate.

Quite aside from that, even if there were a genuine absolute best
candidate,  your way of choosing him doesn't work if voting is
strategic rather than sincere. Since Ranked-Pairs(margins) will
often give incentive for insincere voting, then, to that extent,
it wouldn't choose the probable best candidate even if there could
be a genuine absolute best candidate.

And, aside from all that, if we believed that there were a
genuine absolute best candidate, and that people would vote sincerely,
then obviously the way to elect the candidate most likely to be
the best would be to use Plurality.

Of course we could define the best candidate as the one who
maximizes social utility. In that case, and if we assume sincere
voting, then CR is obviously the way to find that best candidate.

Given the assumptions in the previous paragraph, and if we
have to use rank-balloting, then of course then Borda is the
method that does the best job of picking the candidate most likely
to be the best.

Blake continues:

The part above the ellipsis was answered by what I said above.

[...]

The second problem with your position is that all our arguments are
predicated on there being a right answer.

I reply:

Not a right answer. Merely a democratic voting system, or at
least one that meets standards that are important to us. Criteria
serve as precise yes/no tests for compliance with standards.

Donald says that I advocate Approval because it would make Nader win.

No, I advocate Approval because of the many good things that can
be said for it, the standards and criteria that it complies with.
The fact that it does so much to reduce the lesser-of-2-evils problem
which so many people recognize as a serious problem.

Approval will un-disfavor favorite candidates who aren't considered
very winnable, by allowing everyone to vote for their favorite, for
the first time. That can be expected to very likely improve society,
when people aren't burying their favorites. That's obvious.

But that doesn't mean that there's one particular candidate who
is the genuine absolute best. What's right would be letting people
fully vote for their favorites.  I talk about right in terms of
how the voting system acts, or what it does or doesn't do to the
voter's voting strategy.

Would better candidates win if no one ever had to bury their
favorite? I have to admit that it seems that way. Hold-your-nose
candidates wouldn't be insincerely voted over favorites. But I guess
I'm saying that "better" is gotten by making the voting system better,
but that there's no 1 candidate who's the best, since some are sure
than A is the best, and some are sure that B is the best, etc.
Who's to say whether A, B, or someone else is actually the best?

When you talk about the probability that a candidate is the best,
that depends on the assumption that there _is_ one genuine absolute
best candidate. There isn't.

Mike Ossipoff





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