[EM] Agenda Based Progression

[Forest Simmons]

Calisthenics tutorials make extensive use of "progressions", so that almost
anybody with enough patience can progress by degrees over time from a leg
assisted partial range "Australian Pullup" to a full range of motion
standard form pullup.

That's what we are trying to do with our "Pathways to Success" thread ...
to make a gradual progression from relatively primitive to more solidly
advanced methods.

This progression is a progression of agenda based methods ... with
Sequential Pairwise Elimination SPE right in the middle of it.

Of all the single winner methods that have been used for centuries, SPE is
the most solid, respectable, versatile, and unknown to the public at large
... though well known to organizations that convene Deliberative Assemblies
goverened by Robert's Rules of Order.

We have two things to consider... 1. How to set a good agenda ... and 2.
How to process the agenda to extract a winner from it.

The agenda plays the same role that seeding does in a tournament. It gives
a nominal order that serves more as a tie breaking order than anything
else. In the usual case (when rock paper Scissors ties are non existent),
the agenda order has no effect on the outcome. The most important thing
about the agenda is that it be based on some deterministic statistic
correlated with democratic support and not easily distorted by
proliferation of clones among the candidates.

The agenda processing must be based on the majority rule principle, and
must have built in safeguards against strategical manipulation by
unscrupulous influencers ... the kinds of manipulations that create the
rare, but not rare enough, cycles that can make the outcome depend on the
agenda order.

We will touch on these aspects in our examples.

These concerns are not limited to agenda based methods ... but good agenda
based methods (like the ones in our progression) deal with them more
transparently and effectively than any other deterministic, single winner
methods that we know of ... and we have carefully compared the methods in
our progression with the realistic extant alternatives ... as well as many
others.

To be continued ...
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