At 8:49 PM -0400 19/11/2000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>In a message dated 11/14/00 12:06:17 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
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>
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>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?
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>It depends on what you want to see and how much "light" you have. If all you
>want to
>
>do is distinghish two states (bush/gore), then course grained is better
>because there is less chance of random error. If you want to distinghish
>smaller "bits" of anatomy (or in this case the way individual states votes
>you obviously need more spacial resolution (bush/gore in florida) but in
>order to do this you need to up the signal (more votes in florida) or
>accept that at the bush gore margin you will have blurriness and artifact
Right, I suppose. I guess the question here is how "The Will of the People"
is defined. After all, this is not the Dictatorship of the People, it is
Government by for and of the people, right?
The problem with this analogy, I suppose, is that for all practical
purposes, we're looking at a binary that isn't transposable to a medical
metaphor, right? I mean to say, if you are looking at my gut for a tumor,
and you find a region in which there is a pretty much 50/50 mingling of
tumor and non-tumor tissue, what do you do? You obviously can't ignore the
tumor tissue, and it's unfortunate that there's healthy tissue mixed in but
some of that will be lost -- it gets by pragmatic necessity lumped
together with the tumor to be cut out or zapped of radiated or whatever.
That kind of coarse graining I can understand. It makes obvious sense,
given the tumor-treatment methods we have/had when such an analogy was
appropriate.
But I don't think that the kind of coarse-graining that is used in Florida,
in the Electoral College perhaps, is dictated by purely pragmatic, or
logical, necessity. I see calls for the safeguarding of this kind of
coarse-graining based on impatience, based on appeals to the false
authority of tradition ("that's the way it has always been done" doesn't
cut it in cancer treatment, now does it?), and I have also seen some
responses based on what is apparent pragmatism: this works more easily,
thus it is better. However, I wonder what the tradeoff involved in this
ease-seeking "pragmatism" is, and how it might be highlighted in this
particular case. When your voting population is *that* close to 50/50,
perhaps the time for partisan oppositionalism is past and it is time for
some other model to be used, to ensure real representation and engagement
with the issues at hand in the US. *shrug* To extend the analogy, maybe
you need to develop new treatments and new equipment that helps you see
more clearly AND treat the given (the condition being viewed) differently.
Gord
