[EM] The Coming California Single Seat Election

[Alex Small]

Adam Tarr said:
>>Why would you be insane to say that you prefer A to B to C to A?
>
> Well, if that were the case, then your preferences in candidates would
> make  sense, but your stances on the issues appear to be schizophrenic.
> All  you've done here is abstracted the argument from candidates to
> issues.
>
> I guess the question becomes, can you imagine three stances on an issue,
>  such that you prefer stance A to stance B, stance B to stance C, and
> stance  C to stance A?  I can't see any rational reason for that.

Let's make this concrete.  Here are my stances:

Economics:  moderate technophile and free marketeer
Social issues:  hard-core libertarian
Foreign policy:  non-interventionist

Here are the candidate profiles:

Candidate A:  High Tech Entrepreneur, likes the Patriot Act, opposed war
in Iraq but favors continued involvement in Middle East

Candidate B:  Favors moderate regulation, card-carrying ACLU member,
hawkish on Iraq

Candidate C:  loves farm subsidies, moderate on privacy issues, opposes US
involvement in Middle East


Now, I'll admit that it's going to be tough to find people who fit those 3
molds, but A could be an inventor of technology used to spy on people.  B
could be a "New Democrat" type (minus the ACLU part).  C could be a rural
populist who fears the gov't (privacy) but loves his pork, and thinks we
need to stay away from the rest of the world.  So it isn't a completely
unrealistic example.

On economics, I prefer A>B>C (techie>moderate>farm subsidy).  On social
and civil liberties I prefer B>C>A (ACLU>moderate>Patriot Act).  On
foreign policy I prefer C>A>B (non-intervention>moderation>hawk).  You can
agree or disagree with my stances, but it's rational for me to order the
candidates in cyclic order on those 3 issues.

Now, in the end I'll probably make some trade-offs (e.g. there is no free
market for people imprisoned as "enemy combatants", so Patriot Act fan A
is out) and come up with a transitive order.  But a cyclic order still
isn't completely ludicrous.


Another example:

As a first-year grad student I had 3 choices for how to spend a certain
Saturday:  In the cleanroom working on a class project, at a
quasi-mandatory departmental retreat, or at a hike sponsored by the Grad
Student Association (i.e. a chance to meet students from departments with
better male/female ratios).

I was procrastinating the class project, so the quasi-mandatory nature of
the retreat was the perfect excuse to tell myself Retreat>Cleanroom.

I didn't want to spend my Saturday around a bunch of physicists (i.e.
male-dominated crowd) when I could spend my time around humanities
students (i.e. larger female population) so I definitely felt like
Hike>Retreat.

And I couldn't justify socializing when I had this big project looming
over me, so I told myself Cleanroom>Hike.

In the end I chose the Retreat because it justified procrastinating from
my project, because of the free food, and because I was too tired to hike.
 So I resolved the cycle.  But it took effort.  My initial instincts were
definitely cyclic.



Alex