[EM] Just to let you know...

[Richard Lung]

The Hare system is at-large STV/PR. That does solve the problem of 
representative democracy, as the greatest 19th century philosopher of 
science, John Stuart Mill rea;lised, abandoning his own feeble remedies 
to save democratic representation. The real problem is focusing on 
single members, and mere single member majorities, which are not 
democracy but minimal democracy, with the greatest scope for 
dictatorship. As Mill said, and Lani Guinier, they are the tyranny of 
the majority.

 From a mathematical point of vew, the single majority is only a 
decision based on more or less, that is ordinality, or the ordinal 
scale, rather than proportionality, or the ratio scale, of many-member 
majorities. As to the fanciful comparison of missing the Condorcxet 
winner as accidentally amputating the wrong leg (as happens sometimes) 
the assumption underlying this comparison may be likened to the 
assumption that there is an absolute frame of reference in physics, like 
the universal ether velocity. However that may be, the Condorcet Winner 
is assuredly no such infallible bench-mark, by which all other results 
must be struck down.

Pierre-Simon Laplace refuted  Condorcet pairing, over two centuries ago, 
because it treats preferences as of equal importance. He thought Borda 
better. In statistics, it's called weighting in arithmetic progression. 
Statisticians prefer when they know the weights, rather than have to 
assume them, which is the case of weighting in  arithmetic proportion. 
This latter is what the improved method of JB Gregory does.

"The spoiler" candidate is only the point of view of the candidate 
supporters, who want him removed for a Second Ballot. If you want to 
adequately take into account the values of the spoilers supporters, then 
you have to keep in context an over-all ballot of all the candidates, 
otherwise this breaks the law of conservation of (preference) 
information (which Binomial STV obeys).

Preference cycles rapidly disappear, at an exponential rate, the more 
candidates there are. The three candidate cycle could only be important 
to a focus on minimum choice elections. Two candidates are always a 
cycle but no-one complains about that. Democratic elections are about 
choice, not merely minimal choice.

Regards,

Richard Lung.




On 14/01/2023 06:26, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
>
>> On 01/13/2023 4:16 PM EST Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
>>
>> ...
>> I agree that it could be more clearly stated, though. And as a Condorcet
>> nitpicker, I would probably also say that the paper could mention the
>> theoretical existence of Condorcet cycles in passing, so that the
>> IRVists can't say "hey, the property he desires, that if A beats B
>> pairwise then B can't be elected... it sometimes is impossible to pass!
>> So avert your eyes from this propaganda and support IRV instead!".
> I agree that the discussion will inevitably get to superficially citing Arrow or Gibbard-Satterthwaite.  When IRV apologists do that, I want to engage the topic and will use the Minneapolis Ward 2 2021 election as a very nice illustration of when transitivity fails.  I'll explain this will happen less often (0.2%) than the cases when we *know* who the majority candidate is and a spoiled election can be averted but IRV fails to avert it (0.4%).  But with Rock-Paper-Scissors, if you elect Rock, then we know that Scissors is the spoiler.  No matter who you elect, you cannot avoid a spoiled election.  I will be up front with that.
>
> And then I ask how Hare solves it?  It doesn't.  But a Condorcet RCV solves this spoiler problem for the 0.4% of the time Hare fails to.  And will be Precinct Summable to boot.  If they say that I'm worrying too much about this 0.4%, I bring up a comparison to real and rare events when a flaw in a procedure resulted in complete failure to accomplish what is meant to be accomplished.  A good example is of the rare and unfortunate times that the wrong limb was marked and amputated, which has happened occasionally.  When that happens, do we hear the hospital defending themselves saying "This happens so rarely that we believe our procedures that we have used for decades without trouble need not be reviewed."?
>
> So when they bleat "Arrow", I respond that a cycle is an unavoidable failure, so let's do the best we can with it.  Let's elect the plurality winner in that case.  Or elect the IRV winner, or the runoff winner of the top-two.  Or if BTR is used, we accept the BTR winner as just as good as the plurality winner when there is no Consistent Majority Candidate (which is my neologism for the CW).
>
> I'm gonna be quiet now and listen to you guys.  As an activist/schlub, I feel quite privileged to get critique from Markus and Kristofer.
>
> --
>
> r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com
>
> "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
>
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