Source of claim that imagination is wanted (was Re: [EM] James: Approval & voter median

[Craig Carey]

The disclosure below, of using imagination instead of reasoning, is
something that I was assuming that Mr OSSIPOFF did

Below the text of OSSIPOFF claims that Mr Paielli said he preferred
to use imahination.

I checked the e-mails and Mr Paielli did not say what Mr OSSIPOFF had
said he did.

I guess that MIKE is thinking at his best and claimed that Mr Paielli
said something that he did not say.




At 2005-01-19 16:08 +0000 Wednesday, MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote:
...
>You continued:
>
>It is often much easier for me to work with simplified examples in order
>to evaluate the properties of a method -- creating imaginary voters with
>well-defined preferences, and then imagining their likely behavior given
>different methods and different scenarios. I request that you participate
>in this process with me. Your statements about approval seem to be
>universal in nature, that is, you seem to assert that approval will
>always or nearly always lead to the election of a median candidate within
>two election cycles.
>
>I reply:
...
---------------

If anyone was dumb enough to rely upon imagination then they might be
discovered thinking wrong (decade after decade) at this mailing list.

The reality includes this:
   (1) To design a method is to design a 9-dimensional 3 canduidate
       1-winner partitioning polytope.

One way to make the problem of designing methods seems to be millions
of times more difficult, would be to follow OSSIPOFF and use imagination
instead of reasoning or algebra.

Also the imagination is not an imagination of methods or rules, but
instead OSSIPOFF claims Paielli wants to imagine voters.

I remind readers to remember that OSSIPOFF imagines that Approval
gets STV ballots as input but edits up the text to obscure that.

---------------
>You continued:
>
>So, I thought we might continue our discussion by concocting imaginary
>electorates, and seeing whether your statement is likely to apply to
>them, and if so, how.
>
>Here is the first situation I have concocted. It is a relatively
>straightforward one, not specifically designed to lead to any specific
...

>Mike, my question to you is this: How do you think this approval voting
>scenario will play out?
>
>I reply:
>
>Impossible to say how it will start out, without information about the 
>voters' beliefs about each other's preferences and abouit the canddiates' Pi, 
>their likelihood to be in a tie or near-tie.
---------------


OSSIPOFF is writing the Approval method: a method that is not a
preferential voting method.

(I note that the word "tie" gets misused at this mailing list and its English
meaning mismatches too much with the idea of Condorcet cycles.)

As you can see, OSSIPOFF talks about the probability of a 'tie'.

That is the same OSSIPOFF that stopped replying to 100% of my e-mails
to him. What happened was that OSSIPOFF made an untrue claim of having
a probability number,

Then I asked him to e-mail some of the probability numbers or symbols,
to me. So the claim at EML of having a probability was perfectly untrue.

However today OSSIPOFF is claiming to be able to convert beliefs of
(possibly nonexistant) "voters" into some "likelihood" estimate/

Though OSSIPOFF uses the word "likelihood" is there, OSSIPOFF will never
say if the "likelihood" falls inside of the range 1/5 to 3/5.

---------------
>
>You continued:
>
>What strategies will the voters use?
>
>I reply:
>
>I'd hope that in the 1st election, the voters would use Approval's 0-info 
>strategy, because I claim that our elections are 0-info. So let's say that 
>your election is a 0-info election initially, ok?
---------------

OSSIPOFF has "hopes": but first the voters must materialize out.

The idea of "0-info" is not defined.

Is it obviously dumb of MIKE to give have 2 different meanings for the
 single term "0-info" ?; i.e. these meanings:

  (1) the "0-info" strategy of the Approval method;

  (2) the elections of OSSIPOFF and his incompetent friend (since) relying
    on imagination, are all "0-info" elections.

I suppose the answer to my question is yes. However OSSIPOFF might want to
delay the final conclusion until the time that the allegedly imaginative
Mr Paielli (of the "our" group) says "Ok".



---------------
>Now, for the subsequent elections that aren't 0-info, because of
>information from previous elections, I'll comment on those elections in
>subsequent postings, but probably won't get an opportunity do do so
>today.
>
>Mike Ossipoff
---------------


After students in USA struggle and then triumph, in understanding the
old lecturer's thoughts, and then give to the same teacher the mysterious
"0-info" idea, then the whole exercise can go bad, if MIKE OSSIPOFF
says that the election he is NOT a "0-info" election.

WE can see that MIKE OSSIPOFF explains that information from
"previous elections" can result in OSSIPOFF being unable to give (true)
answers to questions.

Can someone write in and make a list of all the circumstances where
OSSIPOFF can't explain the "0-info" Boolean equation or Boolean trait ?.

It could involve a use of the imagination (the same quality that OSSIPOFF
claimed to have existed in Mr Paielli).

---------------
>I reply:
>
>Probably, but I'll have to check that out before I answer. Probably
>tomorrow will be my earlies possibility of a next opportunitly to get on
>the computer.
---------------


OSSIPOFF seems to never use the vertical column of characters on the
left hand side. I.e. the characters are ">" or "|"; and he does not quote
other people's e-mail messages.

(The Qualcomm company that makes Eudora, calls those vertical bars (on the
 left hand side), "excerpt bars".)

---

PS. In the last few days Mr Venkze privately claimed he had used an "FBC".

He tried to say that he could not send the (multiwinner) definition of
FBC, in a private e-mail. He didn't say that the problem was that FBC
did not exist.











Craig Carey <research at ijs.co.nz>    Auckland, New Zealand
Javascript MEDLINE: http://www.ijs.co.nz/med/medline.htm