[EM] Why care about later-no-harm or prohibiting candidate burial?

[Jameson Quinn]

2011/2/22 Kathy Dopp <kathy.dopp at gmail.com>

> On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Jonathan Lundell <jlundell at pobox.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Hmm. I think you missed my next sentence.
> >
> >> Burial works against compromise by encouraging voters to rank the
> potential compromise candidate last.
> >
>
> Again, voters do *not* try to bury their 2nd choice compromise
> candidates, but try to bury their last choice candidates, or their
> last choice mainstream candidate,


These are NOT the same thing.


> and would prefer that any other
> candidate wins.


If I bury mainstream Hitler under no-hope ("he's not even human!") Cthulu,
it does not follow that I prefer any other candidate to Hitler. I could well
prefer Hitler to Cthulu.


> As Jonathan noted "burial is a simple, intuitive and
> attractive strategy that can be easily employed by relatively naive
> voters."
>

...and can cause problems, which a good voting system will minimize.


>
> Or are you claiming that voters are all hopelessly idiotic and would
> prefer that their last choice candidate wins as long as their
> compromise candidate can be buried!?*!


No, we're claiming that they're clever, but that with imperfect information
and counter-strategies, they may be too clever for their own good.


>  The claim that voters would
> bury their compromise candidates is illogical drivel.
>

Sometimes the least favorite mainstream candidate IS a compromise, at least
as opposed to an even-less-liked non-mainstream candidate.

Jameson
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