[EM] Warren needs to double check his work.

[David L Wetzell]

KM:Congratulations. You have just said that your anti-evidence armor is
*so* strong that nothing I could ever produce today would change your mind.

dlw; That is not true and I have changed my mind as a result of my exposure
to the args used on this list.  What I said was that our diffs had to do w.
expectations about the degree of the feedback loop in terms of number of
competitive candidates from a change in election rules used and that
changing away from fptp for many single-winner election rules asap, as
seems to be plausible with some modification of irv in the USA, is the best
way to see the scope for change.

KM: No argument, no proof, whether it be from the US or outside it, from
national or international organizations, from theory or practice. No piece
of it can change your mind, not a one.

dlw: not true.

KM:That sounds awfully like faith to me. And I know that arguing with a man
of faith is a losing proposition. If you ever wonder why people act
"unprofessional" and don't respond to your assertions, perhaps it's because
there's no compromise to be found. Eventually, even a fool tires of arguing
with a wall.

dlw: It's not true that all arguments w. people with a priori "faith"
commitments are futile.  I've worked hard to give you good responses over
our diffs.  The fact I still presume that ending the US's two-party
dominated system isn't likely and am skeptical about the value-added of
most of the attempts to improve on irv in the short-run isn't due to faith.
 It's a product of my long-standing attempt to synthesize my the nature of
my country's failing democracy with electoral analytics to provide a tact
on how best to proceed.

It reflects my conservative disposition and a conservative disposition is
resistant to change.

KM:But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. The way you make use of your
general defenses is entirely consistent with your statement that nothing
can convince you, because you seem to think that each defense is absolute
and frees you from having to actually address an objection.

dlw: I haven't addressed your objections???  My arg that the feedback loop
from a change in election rules is an attempt to deal with your objects.
 My args that the "loss" from the use of IRV in Burlington is over-stated
and that the campaign against IRV shows it has serious value added over FPP
are dealing with your objections.

You are being unfair to me.

KM: When you reply to any of my references to other nations by "American
exceptionalism", you never say how much evidence would be necessary to put
the claim of extremely specific American exceptionalism into doubt. You
just use it as a general defense, a way of brushing away every objection.

dlw: I don't use AE to brush away every objection.  My view is more like
successful electoral reform in a two-party dominated system reinforced by a
strong presidential system and many low-info voters habituated to said
system ought to presume the continued presence of a two-party dominated
system.  I go further to suggest that the presumption commonly held by
electoral reformers that the purpose of electoral reform is to end the
two-party dominated system is unnecessary and even counter-productive
within the USA.

Now, I could be wrong.  God knows it's hard to get electoral reform in the
US with most reform-oriented orgs playing defense against the new Jim Crow
and putting a lot of their bets on very ambitious CFRegulations that will
be hard to enforce without electoral reforms.  But it fits the evidence of
the USA as far as I can tell.

KM:When you come with assertions that anybody not agreeing with you in
Burlington is either a useful fool or one of Them, you never bother backing
this up with an actual money trail, nor do you reconcile it with reports
that it was the IRV campaign who got the most out-of-town money, let alone
account for the extreme specificity (violation of Occam's razor) required
to claim that we, on a mailing list somewhere, are being manipulated by
some Shadowy Others. You just use it as a general defense.

dlw: Okay, that is a valid critique.

I don't think you're on the dole or fools.  I think you've invested a lot
of time and energy into an approach to electoral analytics whose "value"
for the US is diminished by the emph on IRV by progressive activists in the
USA.  As such, my view is you gravitate to evidence that suggests what you
proffer is more valuable and that this gets given more air-time by some for
dubious reasons.

And, yes it is interesting that the out-of-town money in the IRV campaign
out-weighed the in-town money.  I'd like to read more about that.    It
goes to show how many folks really believed IRV was going to change the
dynamics of the US political system by forcing the parties to hew to the
true center.

KM: And when I object that you can't just claim this and that and this too,
and then be free of any counter, you reach for your meta-armor: "Sunk cost
immunity!".

dlw: Marketing matters.  I argue that if I'm right that, at least in the
short-run, the diffs among progressive electoral alternatives to fptp are
not that great that marketing matters and that the sunk-costs in marketing
IRV are also significant, and so it's better ot push a rule similar to
those already explained, since it'd have a better chance of widespread
adoption in the near future.

KM: Like some diplomat holding up a wallet, you seem to think that it is
absolute: that it can make any requests for evidence evaporate, no matter
how particular the claim being tested is. You never specify when the sunk
cost might be met, and you never say how tangential a claim has to be
before it is no longer protected by sunk cost immunity. Apparently any
claim (American exceptionalism, very specific economies of scale,
conspiracy) will be protected as long as it can be somehow linked up with a
pro-IRV position.

dlw: As I recall, you were insisting that the burden of proof was on me,
and I was saying that since you are the one challenging the status quo
alternative to FPTP that the burden of proof was on you.  I've given a
variety of reasons for my skepticism about the value-added in "real world"
from your many, diverse proposed improvements on IRV.  I've also given the
arg that there'd be more scope for experimentation after IRV became the
predominant single-winner rule in the USA.

KM: Why not just claim that US voters get an instinctual satisfaction in
watching the IRV process run to completion, and so that no other method can
provide what IRV provides? You'd be done with it once and for all. Then
when someone else asks for evidence, just pull out your wallet again.
Ridiculous? Yes, but that's because it doesn't match your intuition. The
logic is the same: "anything pro-IRV is protected by sunk cost immunity".

dlw: That's bull-shit.  The US has been stuck with some pretty increasingly
defunct democratic institutions in recent years.  It's changed our habits,
like the likelihood of voting or general interest in politics or
over-identification with our two major parties, and mandated that we
accommodate an aggressive corporate elite in picking our battles.  These
things can change, they just arent' likely to change quickly and in the
short-run they diminish the value-added and the probability of success of
many possible electoral reforms.  This is not great but it can help us to
refocus on those reforms which do show great potential for making a diff.

KM:Instead of specific counters, you use general defenses. I liked you
better when you bothered to look into the facts and then said that perhaps
Brazil isn't applicable to my point because it is a dominant-party system.
 But nowadays it doesn't appear you have the time for that. It doesn't
appear you have time to check my data, either, or you'd find out that
Olson's results about IRV and Condorcet error resistance aren't contingent
on there being many candidates.

dlw: I'm sorry Olson??  My assumption was that while the problems can
happen with relatively few candidates, that they are less likely to happen
and so the value added of other systems over IRV is limited with fewer
competitive candidates.

KM:But it's so easy to just use another general defense, another catch-all
armor plate: in this case the "it doesn't matter when there are few
candidates" response that has served you so well against advanced methods
in the past.

dlw: It does what it does, reduces the import of the diffs among the alts
to FPTP so that other considerations are more important.

KM:But I should thank you for making clear what you had previously only
shown in an indirect, sneaky manner: that there is nothing that can change
your mind. Then I know there is no point in continuing the discussion,
except perhaps as to show others just how much you stack the deck.

dlw: I didn't stack the f**king deck against electoral reform in the USA.
 I didn't make reality more complicated than heuristic rational choice
voter models.  I've tried to give reasons why the status quo electoral
reforms are worth supporting by folks on this list whose ideas may be ahead
of their time for the USA.

KM:So enjoy your anti-evidence armor, and thanks for telling me what you
otherwise only implied. Your persistent special pleading and refusal to
follow the same rules and courtesy of discourse as everybody else just
angers me. In so doing, you only drive me further from the IRV campaign.
And so I am tempted to recommend you continue your "logic" and thus repel
even more people. But nobody should have to face this sniping, this special
pleading, this armored presumption of being invincible. So I am not going
to recommend that.

dlw: Well I agree that bad blood has built up between us and that it's not
been that fun a good deal of the time.  Anticipating responding to you
evokes in me memories of my not-supportive dissertation adviser who once
told me that an idea I had for a paper would never get published (though I
was supposed to prove him wrong and did.).


---

All who'd feel like arguing with DLW, remember what he said about no
current evidence being able to convince him. All third parties who come
upon this, remember what (bit) role DLW has in order for you on the federal
level.

That is all. Goodbye and good *plonk*.

dlw: Thanks for putting up with me!

dlw


On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 2:47 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
km_elmet at lavabit.com> wrote:

> On 06/25/2013 07:15 PM, David L Wetzell wrote:
>
>> KM2:So you're saying that nothing short of actually trying the
>> experiment in public elections will change your mind?
>> Then I believe I am done here. I can't change your position, so all I
>> can do is to argue to others that your position is flawed.
>>
>> dlw2: Yes, our diffs are epistemic.  The thought experiments commonly
>> used here are not persuasive to me, since I'm trying to hold onto a
>> realistic notion of voters that views voter-utilities or political
>> spectrumes as at best useful heuristics.
>>
>
> Congratulations. You have just said that your anti-evidence armor is *so*
> strong that nothing I could ever produce today would change your mind. No
> argument, no proof, whether it be from the US or outside it, from national
> or international organizations, from theory or practice. No piece of it can
> change your mind, not a one.
>
> That sounds awfully like faith to me. And I know that arguing with a man
> of faith is a losing proposition. If you ever wonder why people act
> "unprofessional" and don't respond to your assertions, perhaps it's because
> there's no compromise to be found. Eventually, even a fool tires of arguing
> with a wall.
>
> But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. The way you make use of your
> general defenses is entirely consistent with your statement that nothing
> can convince you, because you seem to think that each defense is absolute
> and frees you from having to actually address an objection.
>
> When you reply to any of my references to other nations by "American
> exceptionalism", you never say how much evidence would be necessary to put
> the claim of extremely specific American exceptionalism into doubt. You
> just use it as a general defense, a way of brushing away every objection.
>
> When you come with assertions that anybody not agreeing with you in
> Burlington is either a useful fool or one of Them, you never bother backing
> this up with an actual money trail, nor do you reconcile it with reports
> that it was the IRV campaign who got the most out-of-town money, let alone
> account for the extreme specificity (violation of Occam's razor) required
> to claim that we, on a mailing list somewhere, are being manipulated by
> some Shadowy Others. You just use it as a general defense.
>
> And when I object that you can't just claim this and that and this too,
> and then be free of any counter, you reach for your meta-armor: "Sunk cost
> immunity!". Like some diplomat holding up a wallet, you seem to think that
> it is absolute: that it can make any requests for evidence evaporate, no
> matter how particular the claim being tested is. You never specify when the
> sunk cost might be met, and you never say how tangential a claim has to be
> before it is no longer protected by sunk cost immunity. Apparently any
> claim (American exceptionalism, very specific economies of scale,
> conspiracy) will be protected as long as it can be somehow linked up with a
> pro-IRV position.
>
> Why not just claim that US voters get an instinctual satisfaction in
> watching the IRV process run to completion, and so that no other method can
> provide what IRV provides? You'd be done with it once and for all. Then
> when someone else asks for evidence, just pull out your wallet again.
> Ridiculous? Yes, but that's because it doesn't match your intuition. The
> logic is the same: "anything pro-IRV is protected by sunk cost immunity".
>
> Instead of specific counters, you use general defenses. I liked you better
> when you bothered to look into the facts and then said that perhaps Brazil
> isn't applicable to my point because it is a dominant-party system. But
> nowadays it doesn't appear you have the time for that. It doesn't appear
> you have time to check my data, either, or you'd find out that Olson's
> results about IRV and Condorcet error resistance aren't contingent on there
> being many candidates. But it's so easy to just use another general
> defense, another catch-all armor plate: in this case the "it doesn't matter
> when there are few candidates" response that has served you so well against
> advanced methods in the past.
>
> But I should thank you for making clear what you had previously only shown
> in an indirect, sneaky manner: that there is nothing that can change your
> mind. Then I know there is no point in continuing the discussion, except
> perhaps as to show others just how much you stack the deck.
>
> So enjoy your anti-evidence armor, and thanks for telling me what you
> otherwise only implied. Your persistent special pleading and refusal to
> follow the same rules and courtesy of discourse as everybody else just
> angers me. In so doing, you only drive me further from the IRV campaign.
> And so I am tempted to recommend you continue your "logic" and thus repel
> even more people. But nobody should have to face this sniping, this special
> pleading, this armored presumption of being invincible. So I am not going
> to recommend that.
>
> ---
>
> All who'd feel like arguing with DLW, remember what he said about no
> current evidence being able to convince him. All third parties who come
> upon this, remember what (bit) role DLW has in order for you on the federal
> level.
>
> That is all. Goodbye and good *plonk*.
>
>
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