[EM] The wiki questionaire

[Jobst Heitzig]

Dear Mike!

Thank you for taking the time to have a look at the questionaire and
for your comments.

You wrote:
> It asked if a method should force people to vote honestly. I answered
> "--" because the freedom to vote honestly is important, rather than
> being forced to.

I did not meant "force" when I wrote "make" but rather meant: "to make
it probable that voters vote honestly". I will change the wording to that
now that I know the original wording was misunderstandable.

> The "trade-offs" section asked if "anti-strategic" properties are
> important. I answered "__", because
> the whole notion of "anti-strategy", the notion of strategy as something
> that methods shouldn't be vulnerable to, is a piece of nonsense that
> people copy from eachother and from journals.

Please do not begin with polemics again. Certainly anti-strategic properties
are not nonsense but just something one can find important or not. The purpose
of the question was exactly to find out how important we find it that the
method is not very vulnerable to strategic manipulation.

> What's important about strategy is the mininimization of _need_ for
> strategy. That's how strategy is important.

But that's what was meant by "anti-strategic properties": properties which
increase the probability that people don't vote strategically.

> In wv or MMPO, if you truncate to deter offensive strategy, the only
> importance of that deterrence is that it keeps you from needing more
> drastic defensive strategy (as you would need in Margins, for instance).
> 
> I notice that Jobst, Kevin, and someone whose initials I didn't
> recognize, strongly disagree with having AERLO as an option.
> 
> To those 3 people, I say: The nice thing about an option is that it's
> optional. You don't have to use it. Why would you strongly object to
> someone else having that option?

The reason why I don't like such options is this: When I give the voter an
option whose purpose it is to let the voter change his vote dependent on the
other votes cast, then I explicitly introduce a strategic device and thereby
increase but not decrease the probability that voters will think and behave
strategically instead of sincerely.

> Sure, of course you're strongly opposed to being free of need to do
> other than rank sincerely. But is it so bad if someone else has the
> option of choosing that?

Sorry, that first sentence was too complicated for me. Could you put that again
differently?

> I believe that an initial public proposal should be kept simple, and
> without enhancements such as AERLO, ATLO, or CWP. But enhancements would
> be good to have later.
> 
> About the part about equal ranking resulting in candidates having the
> same probabililty of winning:
> It's impossible for me to give two candidates equal probability of
> winning by ranking them equal. Did the question mean "equal effect on
> their win-probabilities"?

What I meant was this: When a voter expressed that s/he prefers A to B, we
interpret this to mean that if s/he could choose between A and B, she would
choose A. Now what do we think the voter would choose when s/he put A and B
at equal ranks? Do we assume that s/he would delegate the decision by, say,
asking a friend to decide, or do we assume that she would throw a coin?

Yours, Jobst