[EM] Coombs method and typical RCV hybrid, River

[Daniel Carrera]

On Sat, Jan 22, 2022 at 11:35 PM Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Mike Ossipoff once reported explaining Schulze to the complete
> satisfaction of his non-technical girlfriend, by using an equivalent, but
> more intuitive, "beatpath" formulation of Schulze:
>
> A beatpath is a chain of defeats leading from one candidate to another. A
> chain is no stronger than its weakest link.
>
> We say that X strongly beats Y when  X has a stronger beatpath to Y than
> Y's strongest beatpath to X.
>
> Elect the candidate that strongly beats every other candidate.
>

[friendly_sarcasm] Yeah, the TV ad just writes itself! [/friendly_sarcasm]

More seriously though, phrasing it like that does help. I still think it's
quite difficult. I'm not confident that I will remember this explanation in
8 months. Also, it is one thing to explain the algorithm and another to
convince me that the algorithm makes sense. That's another place where I
think RP has an advantage. If an overwhelming majority is adamant that A >
B, then you gotta respect that; it's just democracy. Whereas if people
generally say C > A but they are a little "meh" about it, then maybe that's
the one to throw away. Also, I didn't have to look up RP to remember that,
and I'm confident I'll remember it 8 months from now. I think it's just the
principle of basic fairness, whereas Schulze feels like it's trying to be
too clever and I don't intuitively trust what would come out of that.

Cheers,
-- 
Dr. Daniel Carrera
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Iowa State University
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