[EM] Automated CR Strategy

[Craig Carey]

This is only of a draft quality and it only criticises Mr Forest Simmons.

My last message had missing "not"s. I think I have a solution for that
since by a simple argument I concluded that it was a hoax or mistake to
say that logic does not use negative numbers but instead 2 valued integers.
I noted something different: that (Exists Q)(X<Q<Y) does not run
correctly when X<Q means (not X) and Q, and all the 3 variables are
Boolean valued polytopes. I can't show "not" to be a problem while there
Boolean-ness is that, for that is arbitrary.

Has someone got Mr Donald Saari's address. I looked at his papers at
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/ : it is on an n-body interaction using the
Newtonian gravity laws that emits a particle with at an infinite speed.
Apparently no one can produce any sort of example. The topic didn't
seem important. 

I am trying to send a message to Donald Davison and he has a dead e-mail
box.

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Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 05:43:53 +1300
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RESEARCH BY FOREST SIMMONS AT THE ELECTION METHODS LIST

Mr Forest Simmons is not providing all axioms and then inferring using
reasoning, a polytope expression that computes the winner. We could be
gets tiny bits of the fulls set of axioms needed before progress
can occur. But instead Mr Simmons is content to get the winners
wrong.

I wonder if Forest Simmons would tell us if he thought it was acceptable
to fire-bomb Dresden in World War II, given the plan over there to
produce a hopefully stable world government along inferior lines.

Have you given up Christianity ?. Given that there was so little on
who should win, I hope Alex does not object.

Counts of elections quite typically involve no use of statistics or
probably. A huge fraction of your messages suggest that you are letting
all readers know that probability is a fact. Certainly that appears to
always false.

Your latest thoughts on the why you can see probabilities but never
actually collect any of them, positions yourself to be about believable
as you would be if you wrote on your inferences on a few highway
structures of undetected midget colonies living on the surface of the
moon. You admitted that you had an interest in Christianity.

Don't you wish that after so very many messages to the Election Methods
List, that you actually knew something ?. You seem to be missing the
idea of a region of solutions with solutions separated by perfectly
flat n-dimensional faces. Such allows trivially allows the simultaneous
consideration of an infinity of solutions. The can be no choice when
the axioms are worded to provide a solution only implicitly.

However in addition to not having the probability numbers (as each
year passes) that that are the central substance of your writings, you
also lack principles and the all too common technique of using inference
and reasoning from known facts or definitions.

What your messages lack is *evidence* that you had even thought about
the topic of computing the correct winners given the counts of the
ballot papers. There is no chance that you would get the benefit of the
doubt.





At 2003-12-06 16:53 -0800 Saturday, Forest Simmons wrote:
>The standard use of cardinal ratings (CR) ballots (awarding the win to the
>candidate with the highest average rating) encourages strategic voting so
>that voters in the know tend to vote exclusively at the extremes.
>
>Is it possible to automate CR strategy well enough to eliminate the
>advantage of the strategic voter over the naive voter?
>
>Perhaps not in all cases, but in the case of large public elections, where
>there is always an irreducible residue of statistical uncertainty, no
>matter how carefully and honestly the polls are conducted, the answer to
>this question is undoubtedly, yes!
>
>What I have in mind is this: voters submit CR ballots in the form of
>letter grades (A thru F or A thru Z, I don't care at this point), and then
>these ballots are sampled statistically in a way that is an improvement on
>any possible pre-election poll, but not so perfectly as to remove all
>uncertainty.
>
>This statistical information is used to get winning probabilities for the
>various candidates.  If this is done correctly, these probabilities will
>be more reliable than any that could be calculated from pre-election poll
>results.
>
>Each ballot is then transformed into an optimal ballot relative to these
>estimated probabilities.
>
>The candidate with the highest average rating on these transformed ballots
>is the winner.
>
>The only way a voter could get more reliable probability estimates would
>be through some oracle or time machine.
>
>If a voter takes it upon himself to vote at the extremes, these choices
>will automatically be preserved by the transformation, since optimal
>strategy preserves ratings at the extremes.
>
>In summary, my idea is to take advantage of the pocket of uncertainty

You idea is to guide readers to the view that once they have an election
result, you will not consider the integers of and other information about
the result.



>inherent in public or private polls of large numbers of people to
>virtually eliminate the advantage of sophisticated voters over naive
>voters in the context of cardinal ratings with large numbers of voters.
>


You merely say that there is some problem. It is the same error that
economists could make.

There is no evidence that there is a problem. There is no indication of
a problem once you have said that there is a strategic problem.

If you wrote that monotonicity is sometimes removes som problems, then
the writing would be of a perfectly different character, for you would
be starting to comment inside of the topic of preferential voting.

If you aim is to make others beleive that you thought about voting, then
your style is lackign the full Magnum shooter gunning penetrating power
of pure rationality that C.S.Lewis indicated possible.

If some strategy problem existed then the way to remove it, would be much
 affected by the principles you have.

Instead of principles you tend to have calls for others to reply. That's
curious for possible quite a large number of people could help you. But
let them be efficient and direct you mind to the major central that you
have, which is that of ignoring all the ballot papers (perhaps pieces
of cardboard) that could be tipped out of a box and put on a table
immediately in front of you.

You still have got to get the evidence that the probability thinking is
even slightly true. Where would you start your search?. At the topic of
the heap of cardboard pieces, or at the bottom.

Students ought not ask for help. If you actually put trust in reasoning
then you might see as clearly as others how you can achieve while always
excluding both fact and principle.

A clampdown by you to silence could be the last thing that is hoped for:
it could have you talking about the Approval method.

The Approval method is a special case of a better method. You don't
talk about the better method that permits the method designer to
rule that the number of checkboxes is never equal to the number of
candidates. It is like you were at a hair solon and saw a glossy woman's
fashion magazine and fancied it was the Christian bible, and read that
the new fashion is the catchy word of Mr Brams: "Approval", and not man
alone could prevent the number of checkboxes equalling the number of
candidates.

You seem to write around the idea that there is some space and it
certainly gives no consideration to election results and hence winners
too and thus the idea of correctness and thus the idea that you won't
be ignored each time you write.

But you still have a space and write on probability numbers. Surely
the fuzziness of your universe can be modelled somehow using ellipsoids?.

We are missing out on ellipsoids, but you seem to call them numbers.
It seems that your fantasy of a space that is alternative to the one
permitting the right winners to be found, also is not something you
have seriously considered worthy of the EML list

So far you are not on track for developing ideas that are good enough
for USA's worst slum suburb in whichever city holds that.

While I write this, I imagine that you are holed out and the foremost
person in the EM List who will keep preaching at us and after what
seems to be an excessive number of calls for others to interact, you
might admit to what others have known all along: as a theorist you
full collection of relevant useful principles is missing.

I may be leaving in a few days or weeks and perhaps you would go back
that previous system that ran OK: you dropped out when I showed up.
Mr Schulze and the rest can suffer in silence.

Forest believes what ?. 





Craig Carey <research at ijs.co.nz>
Ada 95 programming language mailing lists: http://www.ijs.co.nz/ada_95.htm