[EM] James, your 6-candidate example

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

James--

I'd said:

>So tha;t's why I made the claim that I made: I was only considering
>examples in which the CW is a middle CW.
>My guarantee about A needeing to be sincere Plurality winner, in order
>for the offensive order-reversal to succeed holds then. I don't know if it
>holds in every spatial example. If so, that would be a good thing to find 
>out. Does anyone know?

You replied:

	My earlier example could probably be conceived of as a spatial model in
three dimensions

I reply:

Not necessarily, unless that's what it was gotten from.

You continued:

, but perhaps you would like one in two dimensions

I reply:

The example that you give is in one dimension.

You continue:

	Imagine that there are 101 evenly spaced points, marked sequentially from
0 to 100. Thus, there are 100 intervals between the points. There are 100
voters, with one on each interval. All voters rank candidates who are
closer to them above those who are further away.

I reply:

It would be easier just to say that the voters are a continuum, uniformly 
distributed in 1-dimensional issue-space from 0 to 100.

You continue:
[...]

	It's possible that I've made one or two small calculation errors in this,
but I know that the general answer to your question is: No, it doesn't
hold; a burying strategy can succeed in favor of a non-plurality-winner,
even when candidates and voters are arrayed along a 1 dimensional spectrum.

I reply:

I don't know of any errors, except for one big one: I didn't say that no one 
could take victory from the CW and give it to A unless A has a sincere 
plurality. I said that _the A voters_ can't take victory from from the CW 
and give it to A unless A has a sincere Plurality.

Now, maybe you want to say that the significant candiates are C, D, & E, 
and, for that reason, you want to call everyone who prefers C to D a C 
voter, and everyone who prefers E to D an E voter.  But, in that case, among 
those 3 sets of voters, the C voters are a plurality.

Your example doesn't contradict my guarantee.

You continued [referring to dimensionalities greater than 1, I assume]:

	I think that your statement might hold under the following conditions:
1. There are only 3 candidates.
2. The CW is exactly on the median point, not just closer to the median
than all other candidates.

I reply:

Your example suggests tha my sincere plurality gurarantee holds whenever 
there's only 1 dimension, even when there are many candidates.

One thing for sure is that the guarantee holds when there are 3 candidates, 
and B, the CW, is between A & C, in the sense that I defined.

That also means that it always holds when there are 3 candidates and 1 
dimension. And, as I said, your example suggests that it also holds when 
there's 1 dimension and any number of candidates.

I don't know in what sense, if any, something like my guarantee applies with 
more than 1 issue dimension.

Changing the subject:

That's a good letter, a perfectly good posting. That isn't changed by the 
fact that it contained an error about what I said in my guarantee. The 
example is a useful one that shows what happens with more candidates in one 
dimension.

But that can't be said of your strategy postings. I haven't replied to your 
latest strategy posting, for a few reasons:

1) I used to always reply immediately, even to long postings, but, often, to 
do that is to reply carelessly (take that as a hint about your replies). So 
my reply is delayed because the posting is long. You should try taking a 
little longer to reply too. Well, you've been ignoring my advice to be more 
careful about what you post, to check your postings before sending them, to 
make sure that they aren't just repeating already-answered statements, and 
to make sure that you're only saying things that you can back up, and not 
postsing a message that's full of errors.

But that doesn't explain why I still haven't replied to it.

2) Replying to your strategy postings has become an onerous drudgery task, 
wading through your pages of repetition. Onerous for the reasons that I 
described in the last part of the paragraph before this one. An unrewarding 
waste of time, because you seem hopeless. It isn't that it's discouraging 
that I haven't convinced you--it's that, as I said, you haven't taken my 
advice about not continually repeating answered statements (Yes, you've 
already said that IRV isn't vulnerable to "burial",  and you should know by 
now what my answer to that is, so why do you say it 5 times in each 
posting?), and about checking your messages for accuracy before posting 
them.

For that reason, I don't return to the job of slogging through your long 
repetition very often. Not each day, or even every other day. It's easier 
for you to dash out pages of sloppy, careless errors, misuse of terms and 
definitions, and repetition of already-answered statements, than it is for 
me to respectfully answer what you say, as if you knew what you were saying, 
and to carefully take time to explain each error, mis-statement, or misuse 
of a term or definition.

So I don't know when I'll get around to posting a reply to your most recent 
strategy posting. And no, don't bother telling me that I don't have to reply 
to it. It isn't for you that I reply to your messages. Well, at first there 
was the possibility that you could benefit, but mostly it was because the 
postings gave me the opportunity to clarify things that others might be able 
to use clarification of. (but there' s no point clarifying the same thing 
again and again in reply to repetition). And of course also so that others 
wouldn't think that I didn't reply because you'd said something irrefutable.

But eventually there has to come a time when it's understood that I've 
replied to your repeated (and repeated and repeated...) statements enought 
times, and  that if I don't reply that doesn't mean that you've said 
something irrefutable. So, though I might reply to your most recent strategy 
postsing (but I can't say when), after that I won't reply to repetition from 
you.

Mike Ossipoff

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