At 12:13 AM -0400 14/11/2000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>To take the analogy further. I can
>infact differentiate two structures (bush and gore) quite well if I look at
>the entire image but if I try to differentiate bush and gore in the liver and
>the lungs and the brain I get less signal in each division but no diminution
>in noise. If I then go to smaller and smaller struuctures like the
>hypothalamus and the basal ganglia (like going down to counties in the vote)
>the problem becomes worse not better.
Okay, I'm not sure I understand your analogy completely but I am gonna try
to apply some of it anyway. Wouldn't the analogy applied to the argument
be that those critics of the electoral college are saying that if you
choose to view the CT-scan or X-Ray though a computer program that
coarse-grains it, you will have more trouble seeing clearly?
It's not as if this is a physical thing we are looking at, after all. Well,
it is, in that we have a collection of physical objects that more or less
are supposed to embody the will of the people -- the ballots. But unlike
in imaging of the brain or kidney, the lens we choose to use to look at
this object, and process the information it contains, and apply it, is not
self-suggestive or self-evident from the thing we're looking at. If you
want to see a kidney, you have a couple of options I suppose but the
choices are already laid out for you. What the argument is seeming to say
from how I read it is that the tools we have for viewing the information
contained in the ballots is distortive, maybe like having a cracked or
dirty lens on the camera that takes the photographic image of an X-Ray.
Don't know if that made any sense at all.
