[EM] Nontechnical words for cardinal and ordinal categories?

[Kevin Venzke]

Hi Jameson,


>Why do I think new terms are worthwhile? I think that choosing the right term is 

>an important part of activism. Neither pro-life nor pro-choice activists are 

>satisfied with the more-descriptive "anti-abortion" or "abortion rights". Similarly, 

>Republicans made no headway against the inheritance tax until they termed it the 

>"death tax". And FairVote has done very well with "instant runoff".

Do you really want to advocate a ballot format, instead of a specific method? Or
is it a tool to help advocate "Range" (which will be a seemingly redundant name
once you've made the effort to separately explain what ratings ballots are)


>Cardinal/Ordinal: yes, I know that pretty much everyone learns these terms somewhere 

around 2nd grade. But then they don't really use them again. Imagine you didn't know 

anything about voting theory, and you heard just one of the terms; "cardinal voting" or
"ordinal voting", but not both. For me at least, these would be meaningless jargon. 

"Cardinal", in isolation, is more likely to mean "principal" than "on an absolute 

scale"; and even "ordinal", which has no other confusing meaning, takes some thought 

to relate to voting; you have to translate the adjective to a verb in your head.

I never use cardinal/ordinal when talking to non-EM people. Only rankings and ratings.
The only confusion I recall is when they are familiar with the idea of specifying
numbers in order to indicate a ranking, and seem unsure that this isn't also rating.


>Ranked/rated: To me, these work fine as neutral terms. But they're not so good for 

activism. Again, if I heard the term "rated voting" for the first time, I'd have to 

think a bit to understand what it meant. Has the voting process itself been rated, 

or does it involve using ratings? What would it be like to use ratings to vote? None 

of these leap to mind; they must be explained.
>
>That's why I like evaluative/comparative. Just hearing the words already puts you 

into the process of casting a ballot.

I find those names less descriptive than rank/rate of what you are actually doing.
I think they could describe almost any method. I also don't like how "evaluative"
seems to presuppose what one is using the ballot to do. But if the activist's goal is
a specific method then I guess that makes sense.

"Comparative" makes me think of comparing two options at a time. Because I'm familiar
with pairwise matrices, that makes sense for ranking. Would it make any intuitive
sense to someone familiar with IRV? I'm not too sure. I can't though, for the life
of me, imagine Condorcet or IRV advocates thinking they will get an advantage out of
using that term over, say, "preferential."

Kevin