[EM] 05/13/02 - The Education of Poor Richard:

[Craig Carey]

At 02\05\14 09:26 -0700 Tuesday, Michael Rouse wrote:
 >----- Original Message -----
 >From: "Craig Carey" <research at ijs.co.nz>
 >To: <election-methods-list at eskimo.com>
 >Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2002 7:34 AM
 >Subject: Re: [EM] 05/13/02 - The Education of Poor Richard:
 >
 >>
 >>  >                  There are other important criteria that should be
 >>  >considered: the Majority Criterion, the Monotonicity Criterion, and the
 >>  >Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Criterion, to name a few.
 >>  >
 >>
 >> There are 3 there and 2 are not important I presume. The Majority Criteria
 >> is too weak but that you can tell us how a fix of that problem could
 >> proceed. The "Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives" test is not
 >> important at all, unless you have an uncommon definition.
 >
 >It isn't important that introducing a losing candidate can affect the
 >winning candidate? "I prefer Joe to Bob as my representative. I hate Jack,
 >so if he gets in the race I would prefer Bob to Joe." Granted, it may be
 >impossible to fix (depending on which of Arrow's criteria you follow), but
 >it does not affect all voting methods equally.


Not "which criteria" maybe, but instead which premises are rejected.

You maybe do not understand: the Ossipoff burying rule is rejected or it
isn't. There are not graduations with which methods get passes but instead
there is an shortage of rules because those that made the blunder of
backing the Ossipoff rule, have not provided a weaker replacement. It
start to seem quite unpromising now since you have not conceded anywhere
that the need to have the rule rejected was apprehended


...
 >>  >monotonicity. If the possibility that your second-place vote could help
 >>  >defeat your primary candidate is a problem, how much worse is the
 >>  >possibility that greater preference for a candidate can defeat him?
 >(Others
 >>
 >>
 >> Mr Rouse might mean the "second preference" rather than "second vote".
 >> Anyway the meaning of the words, "primary candidate", seem to be too
 >> unclear.
 >
 >primary (adj)
 >  1.. First or highest in rank, quality, or importance; principal.
 >  2.. Being or standing first in a list, series, or sequence.
 >  3.. Occurring first in time or sequence; earliest
 >By primary candidate I mean the candidate that you rank above all others and
 >place first on an ordered list of candidates. And I mentioned "second-place
 >vote" (second on the ordered list of candidates) rather than "second vote."
 >"Second preference" is certainly an alternative way of saying this, I agree.

A restriction is being introduced by the word primary which is that
what the "your" object is unable to cast more than one paper. However it
might not be a problem since the "you" thing in the argument ("that your
second place vote"), was used in what seems to be an attempt to get to a
conclusion that is untrue. Apparently it is me that creates the false
conclusion and agree with Ossipoff, and rather than the argument making
use of that which never comes from me, instead it ends with a question.

That is no improvement over suggesting that people may have a chance to
be free to choice one of other of something of a Mr Arrow of 50 years
ago.



 >
 >>
 >> What exactly is unfortunate about the Alternative Vote violating the
 >> 1950s axiom of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives ?. A first thing
 >> to do on the 1st night of hearing of something as implausible as IIA,
 >> might be to see if it takes less than the 17 papers that prove the
 >> Alternative Vote non-monotonic.
 >
 >Since we are striving for maximum clarity, by "papers" do you mean
 >scientific papers, newspapers, or official documents? Because if you mean
 >"votes," you should be aware that "papers" and "votes" are not generally
 >used as synonyms.

It means weighted preferences lists with the preferences being permutations
of symbols (and not candidates if candidates are people, but instead
symbols representing them). The weights are likely to be Real numbers but
that is most likely implied by their being processed by inequalities.

It is an abbreviation for "ballot papers".

In the last message you called preferences, votes, which is suggested by
quoting a definition of the word "primary".

So those two words were equated.

Then you wrote

    "By primary candidate I mean the candidate that you rank above all
    others and place first on an ordered list of candidates.",

which makes it plain that in the patch of text, you were equating "votes"
with voters in so far as we can get across a presumption that a voter has
a trait of casting a single vote.

The natural meaning is there too; and a further meaning is I don't regard
as a mistake, is to have the word vote mean that weight (or count if there
is an added constraint of discretizing the some or all of the values,
which simplifies the mathematics).



 >
 >> Where do the transient and false
 >> comments that IIA has some merit, come from ?. Please answer my question.
 >> It could be speculated that false information is taught at American
 >> universities.
 >
 >You have heard of Kenneth Arrow, 1972 Nobel Laureate? Apparently, the Royal
 >Swedish Academy of Sciences was fooled by this false information. Granted,
 >there are many who disagree on how important it is, but I was unaware of any
 >proof that IIA was false.
 >

I am not surprised, because you are an Election Methods List member and the
proof was right in front of you, with a lot of details missing, except that
a person would not say that IIA is false since it is a definition.

Also the date 1972 does not match up with the date the idea first appeared.
There is a discrepancy of about 20 years.


...
 >If the right-wing and left-wing candidates are able to moderate their
 >message enough so that the center candidate has fewer first-place votes, the
 >center candidate is eliminated in the first round, just as he is now in
 >FPTP.

With such vagueness, a perfect method could be rejected. Now there is a talk
of "right-wing ... candidates", yet in the previous message there was a
uniform distribution, or at least that was suggested. At the Election
Methods List is normal for members to remain silent while one of the
subscribers is lying about probability.

...
 >As mentioned before, you can use Gaussian (bell curve) distribution, and it
 >only moves the left/right-wing extremes, it does not remove the effect of
 >squeezing out the center candidate.
 >

What is the point of making what was perfectly defined, vague?


...
 >> How is it that Mr Rouse did not mention truncation resistance?.
 >

You noted your list may be incomplete.


 > [...] Perhaps if you gave an example of how
 >IRV is superior in truncation resistance I might respond.
 >

It passes the test. I am not saying that it is superior since so far there
has not been a consideration of a 2nd method and thus no comparing. I did
introduce the IFPP method, but just to not that the Ossipoff burying
problems as I understand it ought go, would reject both methods.

There might be something interesting for readers. Please provide the
template argument of the argument that is used here:

 >>  >         If the possibility that your second-place vote could help
 >>  >defeat your primary candidate is a problem, how much worse is the
 >>  >possibility that greater preference for a candidate can defeat him?

What suppose I give no opinion?. This is the same technique of arguing
that I posted into the list and that came from Mr Rob Richie to me
privately: the text suggests that an agreement is needed. For what
purpose is an agreement needed and why is it not actually used by the
argument?. I can't answer the question at the end since there nothing
precise there. Methods use inequalities and that questions withholds
the same.





Craig Carey

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