[EM] "scored condorcet", etc

[Rob Brown]

Kevin Venzke <stepjak <at> yahoo.fr> writes:
> Actually plurality only fails half of it. Plurality isn't sensitive to
> cloning losers.

Ok, well what plurality does with cloning winners is so bad that it results in
the partisan stuff that we have today in Washington and elsewhere.

> > Minmax....seems to me that it would only affected by clone candidates in
> > the
> > most contrived situations.  I think that saying that something "fails",
> > without
> > saying "how badly it fails", is misleading.
> 
> Ok. MinSum fails clone independence "badly."

Ok, I can see your point, and I appreciate your satisfying my need to a see 
qualifier.  :)

However, I'm still unable to picture the real world consequenses of
minsum/dodgson's problems. Similar candidates would help each other, as opposed
to hurting each other as they do in plurality.  Since it requires a
non-condorcet winner for this to even have an effect, how much of a real effect
would this have?

The biggest question for me is whether a method would reduce (or eliminate) the
ugly and destructive partisanship we see in government (at least in the US).  I
don't claim to know how dodgson would compare to minmax or beatpath in that
respect.  But that's what I'm more interested in knowing.

> I understand that marketability/explicability is important. But is MinSum
> really that great here? I think it would be easier to explain MinMax(wv)
> (which satisfies plurality and fails minimal defense "only a little").

I have no problem with MinMax, I only explored MinSum, which I now see is called
Dodgson, because I hadn't seen it discussed.  Minmax is fine.

> Well, if we're going to use something so complicated as a tun-o-matic
> system with harmony factors, it should make little difference whether
> MinSum (for example) is easy to understand on its own.

Maybe my description was a bit fanciful, but I still think there is potential
value in the idea of tunability.  What I think helps people understand things is
graphical output.  If you could look at the output of an election (or fictional
election) as a bar graph, then drag little sliders to explore "what-if"
scenarios with different settings and watch the bar graph adjust in real
time...well... I think you'd be surprised at what people can grasp.

In any case, it is the graphical output (and hence scores), not the tunability,
that is my main concern.

-rob