[EM] Nontechnical words for cardinal and ordinal categories?

[Juho Laatu]

"Evaluative" and "Comparative" are good descriptive names, especially for nontechnical use.

There are many different needs for names. For informative nontechnical needs the names should be stable and understandable. For research needs the names should be stable and exact. For marketing needs the names should be biased to support the marketing message.

On the research side (I count EM list basically in this category) whatever names are ok. You may like or dislike criteria like FBC, but that should be based on the properties of those criteria, and not on e.g. the impression that someone might "betray his favourite". The methods and criteria could be defined also with other more neutral words. For example FBC could refer to "modified ordering" or its scope could cover also tied rankings.

I hope that slow evolution will find the best (close to single) names for informative nontechnical needs. On the reseach side the first proposed names are usually the best names, unless there is a need for clarify. Marketing is likely to run its own paths, with possibly competing approaches to name and categorize the debated concepts. I note also that different societies do have different needs for namig, also for other than marketing related reasons (e.g. historical familiarity based reasons).

Juho



On 21.6.2012, at 2.42, Jameson Quinn wrote:

> There's been a recent discussion on the mailing list for the Election Science Foundation (the organization which promotes range and approval voting) about what to call the category of cardinal voting systems. "Cardinal" itself is too technical, and doesn't suggest any real meaning to a nonmathematician. Various options were considered, but the options with the most support are "graded voting", "grade voting", or "evaluative voting". These would contrast with "ranked voting", "rank voting", or "comparative voting" for ordinal systems.
> 
> Personally, I favor "Evaluative" / "Comparative". "grade" and "rank" both have many different possible meanings (some of which are confusingly synonymous, or discouragingly negative-valence), and "grade" is also used differently between the US and UK. "Evaluative" and "comparative" are immediately understandable, as the refer to how you have to think in order to vote, not just the marks you make on the paper. They translate well to Spanish, French, or other Romance languages. They are generally positive-valence words. On the down side, they have a lot of syllables; but on the whole, I think they're the best words.
> 
> But of course terminology only works if it's shared. So what do other people here think about this?
> 
> Jameson
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info