[EM] reply to Heitzig criticzing range voting

[Jobst Heitzig]

Hello Warren, again.

You wrote:

> --well, I really dislike that gimmick.  It seems to me not to solve anything.

Do you suggest the election system should rather declare one of the
candidates which are not approved by anyone the winner than to demand a
new election because of lack of approved candidates. I certainly don't
agree to that.

> --Not so fast...  I'm not letting you get away with that...
> CRV recommends 99 for the best candidate, 0 for the worst,
> which is fact is what any strategic voter would do anyhow...
> (can interpolate between for the rest).  That causes utilities to be much less of a fantasy.
> In fact they are now quite real.  

Why should that be the case? Can you explain to me the difference
between assigning 64 or 65 points to the middle candidate?

> I don't think you can object to them now,

You're wrong: I do :-)

> or if you can, then I can also object to the idea that A>B when in fact A and B
> are incomparable objects.  

Absolutely! I have often argued here that preferences are not linear and
that we should allow voters to express undecidedness when one of their
criteria says A>B and the other says B>A, instead of forcing them to
either vote A=B or weigh their criteria in this case.

> The only reason we can claim A>B is Util(A)>Util(B).

No, there is no such thing as Util(A) or Util(B).

> [And claims that A=B are generically always a lie, so it bothers me when Condorcet
> advocates enhance their methods by allowing A=B votes.  

In my view, when voter assigns equal ranks to two candidates, we should
not interpret this as a statement that both are equivalent but rather as
a statement that neither is preferred to the other. Writing "A=B" is
just a handy shortcut on this list, it could also be written "A?B" instead.

> --Well since you insist, I can answer the "why on earth" question using science:
> A1:  money is additive.  Economists like using it as utility but I do not.
> But it is anyhow well correlated and important, even to you...

So you suggest that when candidate A gives $200000 to 1 voter and
nothing to the other 99 voters, but candidate B gives $1000 to each of
the 100 voters, then candidate A should be considered best for society.
That's strange, isn't it?

> So no, robust measures are not needed with honest voters.  The problem is not
> non-robustness.  The problem is dishonest voters.  

What is an honest voter with RV? I would like to honestly assign ratings
to candidates, but I seem to be too stupid for it, sorry.

> I often feel like there is some kind of drive to invent more complicated and crazier
> methods so you can get a PhD, which obstructs the more-deserved attention on the 
> simplest ones like range.

I have a PhD already, thanks. And I guess there are better reasons for
developing election methods than for personal prestige.

Yours, Jobst