[EM] Finding the probable best candidate?

Sat Feb 16 16:01:29 PST 2002

Forest Simmons wrote:

 >>You want people to accurately give their personal benefit,
 >>in the hopes that when the method sums the personal benefits you'll get
 >>societal benefit.  At least assuming all members of society vote.
 >>
 >
 >Personal benefits add up to societal benefit if the voters are civic
 >minded enough to consider community benefits of personal worth. If their
 >attitude is "every man for himself" then community values will be short
 >changed (notwithstanding the Chicago School of Economics myth to the
 >contrary).
 >
But isn't social utility supposed to be the sum of individual utilities?
  So if you're hoping that the method will measure social utility, don't
you want to measure actual individual utilities?  If some people vote
the social utility as if it were their personal utility, then the end
result may no longer maximize social utility.  In fact, I gave an
example of just this possibility.

---
Blake Cretney
http://condorcet.org

FFrom election-methods-list-request at eskimo.com  Sat Feb 16 16:56:11 2002
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   You (Mike) wrote this a while ago, but I think it sums up your position.

 >
 > 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.

This is from your recent letter,

 > You gave an example about a candidate who claimed the earth was
 > flat. That's a factual issue. Our elections have important issues
 > that are not factual issues, and whose answers aren't provable
 > even in principle.
 >
 > How much should we help the homeless? Is the price in lives and
 > billions of dollars justified in order to win some war for which
 > certain benefits are claimed if we win? Should general tax revenue
 > be used to pay for the automotive infrastructure such as highways,
 > roads, streets, parking space, highway patrol, etc.?
 >
 > These issues have relevant sub-issues that are factual, of course.
 > How many homeless are there? What will the war cost? But the issues
 > themselves are not factual issues. It's a matter of "Is this benefit
 > worth that cost?" "Is that undesirable result worse than this
 > undesirable result?"

I think you underestimate the extent to which differences in policy are
differences of fact.  For example, the only factual issue you mention
around the homeless is "how many are there."  But there are a lot more
questions you could answer.  Such as, what effect will such and such a
policy have?  Will it reduce the problem or increase it?

 >
 > As I said, the answers aren't provable even in principle.

In some sense, nothing is provable.  One can devise a contrived
explanation for why the earth is really flat, even though this does not
appear to be the case.  But the lack of proof doesn't mean that there is
no right answer.  There was a right answer even before humans started
accumulating evidence against the flat earth.  So, the fact that what we
might consider non-factual issues cannot be resolved by proof does not
give compelling evidence that there is no right answer.

Here's another way of looking at the problem.  I've been able to pick up
subtle clues that you would have preferred Nader to Bush.  So, from your
perspective Nader is better than Bush, and from your perspective, the
election outcome is unfortunate.  Since this is only hypothetical,
I can imagine that you do in fact change your mind.  In
fact, let's imagine that everyone comes to love George Bush (even we
foreigners).

Bush is now best from everyone's perspective.  So, Bush
is best in every possible way.  So is the problem solved?  Of
course not.  Whatever reasons you had for preferring Nader to Bush
haven't gone away just because you've changed your mind.  If Bush was a
bad choice before, he's still a bad choice.  The alternative is to
believe that getting governments we like, and liking the governments we
get, are equally desirable.

 >
 > Blake continues:
 >
 > So
 > democracy, like any standard, can't really be defended, but must be
 > accepted dogmatically.
 >
 > I reply:
 >
 > We don't defend standards dogmatically (though I shouldn't
 > speak for you). We describe standards, and if someone likes them they
 > do, and otherwise they don't. That's it. We can point to the popularity
 > of a standard, and suggest that a less poplular standard won't win
 > popularity.

But what your saying is that you can't possibly rationally defend your
standards.  In fact, I wonder what you think makes people like a
standard?  Whim?  Peer pressure?

---
Blake Cretney

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Forest Simmons wrote:

 >In this EM archive thread, what if (for starters) we just stick to a two
 >way race between two candidates.
 >
 >Wouldn't we all agree that the best democratic method is to give the win
 >to the candidate with the majority of votes, whether or not the voters
 >have actually based their votes on fact, fiction, or superstition?
 >
 >If we cannot resolve the two candidate case, then we have no hope of
 >resolving the multicandidate case.
 >
 >Yet in the two candidate case the philosophical question about absolute
 >best or just best for the voters seems to have no bearing on choice of
 >method.
 >
 >Why does that question suddenly become so important when we bump up the
 >number of candidates by one?
 >
 >Of course there are additional difficulties with more candidates, but do
 >those difficulties really have anything to do with this particular
 >philosophical question?  If so why?
 >
By "best for the voters" I'm going to assume you mean best according to
the voters.  I also suspect you are treating the voters as a kind of
group entity, the way some people think of the public.  The public has 
certain desires and opinions.

People who take this view generally take a majority opinion by the
members of the public to be the desire of that entity called the public.
  With two candidates, this is a plausible way to think about things.
  But with multiple candidates the public ends up with contradictory
desires.  And not only in those Condorcet cyclic situations.  For
example it may be that a majority think A isn't the best, a majority
think B isn't the best, and a majority think C isn't the best.  But this
is contradictory, since these are the only options.  For Demorep, we can
imagine that one of the options corresponds to none of the above.
  Unless one option receives a majority of first place votes (and another
a majority of last place votes) there is a contradiction in majority
opinion.

So, the multi-candidate case forces us to abandon the public will
analysis.  There is no public will.  Just a bunch of people with
different opinions.  But if our method isn't designed to find the public
will, what is it trying to do?

Well, there's different ways of answering that question.  However, if we
agree that we're trying to select the best candidates possible, and if
we agree that voters have some insight into the question of which
candidates are better, then it becomes plausible to see an election as
using the information provided by voters as evidence toward the question
of which candidate is best.  Not 100% reliable evidence, of course, but
evidence the method can use to make a guess.

That doesn't solve the problem.  But it does give a starting point for
arguing about what standards are valuable, and what assumptions are
reasonable, and then what procedure is implied from various standards
and assumptions.

---
Blake Cretney
http://condorcet.org