[EM] Markus contd.

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Markus--

You wrote:

You said that "in all Condorcet versions a
candidate wins if he has no pairwise decisions for or against him"
without explaining what a "Condorcet version" is. Now you say that
a "Condorcet version" is "an interpretation of one of Condorcet's
proposals for solving circular ties" without explaining who decides
whether a given method is a feasible interpretation.

I reply:

Well then now I'll explain who decides: We decided when we kept using
Condorcet's method to refer to Condorcet's propsals based on defeat
strength.

You continued:

For the clearness of your mails it would be advantageous if you used
terms like "Ranked Pairs" or "MinMax" or "Kemeny-Young" instead of
vaguely using the term "Condorcet".

I reply:

I respectfully disagree. Instead of saying PC, SD, SSD, CSSD,
BeatpathWinner and Ranked-Pairs, can you blame me if I'd rather
just say "Condorcet"?

You continued:

You wrote (19 Jan 2003):
>Now, just in case you've found a passage of Condorcet's writing in
>which Condorcet _did_ propose Copeland, it's still true that Copeland
>isn't one of the Condorcet proposals that we refer to when we say
>"Condorcet". "Condorcet" is used to refer to interpretations of 2
>proposals by Condorcet. One of those drops weakest defeats; the other
>keeps strongest defeats.

Condorcet also proposed a Copeland method. He wrote:

"To compare just 20 candidates two by two, we must examine
the votes on 190 propositions, and for 40 candidates, on 780
propositons. Besides, this will often give us an unsatisfactory
result; it may be that no candidate is considered by the
plurality to be better than all the others, and then we would
have to prefer the candidate who is just considered better
than a larger number; and when several were considered better
than the same number of candidates, we would have to choose
the candidate who was either considered better by the greatest
plurality, or worst by the smallest plurality."

I know that you don't like Copeland methods. Neither do I like
Copeland methods. But I see no right to say that only Condorcet's
top-down proposal and his bottom-up proposal were "Condorcet
proposals".

I reply:

Not just on EM, but in articles elsewhere, Condorcet's method refers
to something that looks at defeat-strength. Copeland's method is
called "Copeland's method", and isn't called "Condorcet's method".
Nowhere is Copeland considered to be what is meant by "Condorcet's
method", even if Condorcet mentioned Copeland at one point.

But let's leave that sort of topic to William Safire.

Mike Ossipoff




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