[EM] Nontechnical words for cardinal and ordinal categories?

[Jameson Quinn]

2012/6/21 Kevin Venzke <stepjak at yahoo.fr>

> 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)
>
>
These are intended as umbrella terms. So "evaluative" would cover various
ballot formats:
- approval (mark all you approve)
- range (write a number)
- majority judgment (grades as in school - in the US, that would mean A-F
letter grades)


>
> >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."
>

OK, you caught me. I'm not an ordinal advocate. "Preferential" is, as you
say, the best marketing term for "ordinal"; but there's no corresponding
term for cardinal systems. That's the motivation for using a word like
"evaluative". So "comparative" is just the contrast word for "evaluative",
not something that would be used on its own.

Jameson

>
> Kevin
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>
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