[EM] utility agreement - I wish...

[Abd ulRahman Lomax]

At 11:24 PM 9/1/2005, Warren Smith wrote:

>It is very odd to behold the inhabitant[s] of the EM list, I must say.
>In some ways they seem well in advnace of the "official" political science
>community in their investigations (at least, at the high points).
>In other ways they seem not to have reached even the year 1900.  It sometimes
>feels to me like beholding a remarkably intelligent set of dinosaurs.

Let me report a saying attributed to Muhammad, modified for the 
present circumstances:

If one scientist calls another a "donkey," one of them is.

Mr. Smith's responses in this thread do a remarkable job of diverting 
attention from the core criticisms of Range contained in it, and 
instead trying to make the subject "utility," while attributing 
primitive views of utility to others (which may or may not be true), 
even though there are plenty of questions that remain even if all of 
what Mr. Smith has written about utility, as such, are true. There 
still remains the problem of how utility is calculated in a specific question!

In the absence of specific response from Mr. Smith to the significant 
problems raised by several writers, I must conclude that he has no 
response, and that therefore he focuses his attention on alleged 
faults that he can find in the analyses of others, which is a common 
though lamentable debate style. If one is going to do that, it would 
be more appropriate to first accept what is valid, acknowledge what 
cannot be answered, and *then* proceed with the defects.