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

[Richard Moore]

Craig Carey wrote:
 >  >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.

Craig, seeing that the paragraph was purely hypothetical, and contained no
reference to probability, can you point to where the lie about probability
is?

Of course this came out of a discussion about probability distributions, but
it was already pointed out that the probability distribution need not be
uniform (the uniform probability was described as an illustrative example).
Also, it is entirely possible for voters to have a uniform (or other)
distribution and for there to be candidates representing discrete points
that are not representative of that distribution. So there isn't a
contradiction and there appears to be no basis for claiming that there
is a lie.

   -- Richard

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