[EM] Sincere methods

[Jobst Heitzig]

Dear Andrew and Juho!

You seem to agree that...
> ...if votes are sincere, the best voting method would
> not be Condorcet at all. It would be for each voter to assign a
> number of points to each candidate representing the utility they
> ascribe to that candidate. The candidate with the largest total
> utility would win. This method has obvious advantages over Condorcet:
> it is simpler and takes advantage of more information from the
> voters. Of course, it is trivially vulnerable to insincere voters.

My position on this question is: Such a method would not only be
vulnerable to insincere voters, it would invite them! The voters would
perhaps not even be aware that they voted strategically, since:

There is no sincere way to specify utilities.

Prove me wrong and tell me what a sincere utility could possibly be!

(James tried once and said something like "ask your stomach" which I
find not very helpful since at least my stomach doesn't tell me numbers.)

This is again the well-known misunderstanding of econometrics: Cardinal
utilities are only a comfy *model* of preferences which allow
econometrists to model and explain certain phenomena. But utilities do
not *exist* in the real world! I guess they don't even exist in the icy
world of the US economy, since even when you think you can measure
certain *aspects* of the options by using real numbers, there is still
no reason to believe that there must also exist measurable weights for
the aspects.

I claim that the only voting-relevant information whose existence we can
assume in the voter's mind are:
  (i) some pairwise preferences (not necessarily total or even acyclic),
 (ii) perhaps some notion of which of these pairwise preferences are
      more important and which are less important, and
(iii) perhaps an intuitive notion of approval or disapproval.

Sincerely, Jobst