[EM] Sports and "The Condorcet Mindset"

[Adam Tarr]

Alex wrote,

>IRV is like a post-season tournament,
>where teams and players qualify by doing well during the regular season
>and procede through a series of eliminations.

Actually, this is still not very IRV-ish, since each team competes in a 
series of pairwise tests in the elimination series.  IRV would be more 
analogous to the current college football season, where we use the results 
of different (largely disjoint) athletic conferences to pick two teams to 
play in a national title game.  The winner is declared the champion, but in 
some years people claim that the best team was left out of the title 
game.  There's no way to be sure, since a team doesn't play all the other 
teams.

>Condorcet is more like
>boxing, where a person only keeps the title by being undefeated (cycles
>are deadlocks where NO person is undefeated).

As you pointed out, it's not a perfect analogy, since every boxer doesn't 
face every other boxer in any predictable time span.  Maybe a better 
example is the eight-team college baseball World Series, where teams play a 
double elimination bracket.  Not every team plays every other team, but if 
you are knocked out you had to lose to a team that lost to the champion by 
extension.  The cyclic ambiguity is possible, if you beat the eventual 
champion (giving them their first and only loss), only to be beaten by two 
other teams before reaching the championship game.  This sort of outcome is 
uncommon but it does happen.

Or perhaps the race really was a good analogy for Condorcet?  After all, a 
race does compare every candidate to every other candidate in a pairwise 
fashion, simultaneously.  But there's no analog to the cyclic ambiguity.

>Approval Voting is like
>gymnastics, where each candidate is judged independently.

Or maybe a more binary scoring single event like archery.  Well actually, I 
think Archery scores on a 1-10 scale depending on how close to the target 
you hit, but in the Olympics I don't recall hearing anything but 9's and 10's.

-Adam


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