[EM] Juho,5/25/12, roughly 2230 UT

[Michael Ossipoff]

----- 
> Yes. I'd say that that, if there are only 3 candidates in the top 
> cycle, then every Condorcet(wv) version that I'm aware of would elect 
> the top-cycle candidate with the weakest defeat, as measured by wv.
> 
> But remember, I'm no longer advocating Condorcet, and so it is no longer
my
> responsibility to define it.   Well, yes, I've been saying things about
> Condorcet's strategy problems, and so you can use the definition that 
> I gave above to determine what I mean by "Condorcet".

One way to make the coverage more complete (valid with all possible votes)
would be to name some methods that it is supposed to cover always, e.g. wv
based minmax, beatpath and ranked pairs.

[endquote]

:-)  What did I just say, Juho? I said that what I said is true of all
Condorcet versions.


Juho says:

I'm trying to clarify the scope of your claim. 

[endquote]

I meant what I said. I said that I was referring to all Condorcet versions.
And I said that every FBC-failing method, including Condorcet, will give
incentive for favorite-burial. Only to you would it be necessary to say
that.

Juho says:

If you want to prove that Condorcet methods are vulnerable (or have a
strategy that is always useful), maybe you should state which ones have
problems

[endquote]

For the fourth time: All of them.


> But remember that those who say that Condorcet is better than Approval 
> likewise have a responsibility to define Condorcet, if I do.

Yes. Some claims may cover all Condorcet methods, some only the method that
this individual Condorcet promoter wants to promote.

Juho says:

I guess in this comparison the target is to seek a good deterministic
compromise seeking single-winner method for typical large and competitive
political elections. I think all the usual Condorcet methods do pretty well
in this comparison.

[endquote]

No doubt you do think that. 


> I'd say that surely or almost surely, the Condorcet favorite-burial 
> strategy that I described is also optimal with any method that fails 
> FBC, provided that your information about how others will vote isn't 
> better than it is in our actual elections, and provided that it's 
> all-important to you that you maximally help the Democrat against the 
> Republican, and provided that you believe that the Democrat is the only
candidate who can beat the Republican.

Maybe the strategy is not opimal or recommended for all methods that fail
FBC, e.g. for a modified Approval method that occasionally (randomly with
probability 0.001) elects the candidate with second highest number of
approvals.

The "information about how others will vote isn't better than it is in our
actual elections" condition describes a typical real life environment. It
can usually be taken as an assumption when we discuss practical strategies
(of real life elections).

Juho says:

The "all-important to you that you maximally help the Democrat against the
Republican" condition seems to say that the Democrat is the most liked and
the Republican is the least liked candidate

[endquote]

You see, this is what I mean by "waste of time".  Feeling a need to
maximally help Democrat against Republican, because of a belief that only
the Dem can beat the Repub, and that no one better than the Dem can win,
does NOT mean that you like the Dem best. We haven't gotten anywhere in this
discussion, have we.

Mike Ossipoff