[Election-Methods] Smith exposes our false statements

[Michael Ossipoff]

I'd said that the SU claim depends on sincere voting. Smith wants to believe 
that I was saying that, in general, one can't say anything about SU unless 
voting is sincere. But I didn't say that. Does Smith know what "the" means? 
The definite article indicates particularness.

>From the context of the discussion, it should be obvious to anyone that I 
was referring to the Rangers' claim that Range does better than Approval by 
SU. And yes, that claim indeed depends on sincere voting--at least some 
significant amount of sincere voting. And sincere rating, ratings that are 
proportional to the voter's estimated utilities for the candidates, are 
suboptimal whenever they differ from top and bottom ratings, except when it 
makes no difference how the voter rates a candidate.

That being so, Smith is aparently trying to wiggle out of that fact by 
playing word-games.

And apparently Smitlh has himself all confused with his word-games. He 
posted an example in which the voter is so sure how others will vote that 
s/he can be certain that s/he can get hir best result even if s/he doesn't 
vote top and bottom ratings--less extreme ratings will do it too.

Sure, and what if you knew, for a fact, who was going to win, by a big 
margin, and that your vote wasn't going to have the slightest effect. So it 
makes no difference how you vote. Would Smith say that, then too, all ways 
of voting are "optimal"?

The meaning of "optimal" is being played with. I suggest that, when it 
doesn't make any difference how you rate someone, then it's meaningless to 
speak of optimality or suboptimality with regard to that rating. But if 
Smith wants to define optimality differently, then he may--but then he must 
be clear with us about the meaning that he's using.

Situations where it doesn't matter how you rate someone in RV aren't unknown 
here. I've been pointing out that, when a candidate is exactly at your 
Approval cutoff, then it makes no difference how you rate hir. You can give 
hir top rating, bottom rating, middle rating, or anything else in between, 
and it has no effect on your expectation.

So I repeat that, in public elections, Schudy's statement was correct, when 
he said that it is never optimal to rate someone other than top or bottom.

Someone could say that I was incorrect to say that intermediate ratings are 
soboptimal. So let me qualify that: Intermediate ratings are suboptimal 
whenever it makes a difference whether you rate someone extreme or 
intermediate.

(Because when it doesn't make a difference, then it isn't meaningful to 
speak of "optimal" or "suboptimal").

I've decided that my withdrawal from this list will be a phased withdrawal. 
I'm sorry if that makes me sound like a Democrat. But this withdrawal only 
has two phases: I'm going to reply to some rebuttals posted before my 
quitting announcement, and maybe a few between then and my actual final 
quitting. Just one more round of replies, of which this posting is part.

I'm not replying to Lomax's rebuttals because that would be sending some 
unnecessarily long postings to you, and because I'm firmly convinced that 
everything he says is answered in my recent postings. I won't read any 
posting that I don't intend to reply to. Why subject myself to it if I’m not 
going to subject you to it?  :-)  I'm replying to Smith here because I 
haven't recently done so, and so it's relatively new discussion (if not 
really original).

Mike Ossipoff