Let me see if I have this straight. We would both agree that:
- Range Voting is more expressive than Condorcet. (In the sense that it is possible for a voter who so desires to more precisely express their true opinion.) - Range Voting is simpler (easier to understand) than Condorcet. - With honest voting, Range Voting beats Condorcet. - With strategic voting, Range Voting beats Condorcet. - When voters switch from being honest to being dishonest, the performance of Range Voting degrades less than does the performance of Condorcet. So (aside from calling me names) it seems like your argument boils down to the idea that somehow Range Voting causes voters to be less honest than they are with Condorcet? And not just a little more dishonest, but a *lot* more dishonest! And the reason you hypothesize that this will occur is that Condorcet performs so horribly when voters are highly strategic that they will recoil in shock at the prospect and in reaction take a vow of utter honesty. That's what I take it you mean by this: > With the difference that with Condorcet, you can confidently say to > voters: "if you lie about your opinions of the candidates when you > vote, you are much more likely to hurt yourself than to help > yourself, regardless of how you think others will vote." although the statement itself would be a lie. (You could say it "confidently" if you want, but it would remain false. Complete honesty is not a stable strategy---in the Nash equilibrium sense---with Condorcet. Or with Range Voting, for that matter. In fact as Arrow's Theorem shows, there is no voting system which <etc>.) You also write this: > the fact is that with Range Voting, the *best* real-world outcome > one can reasonably expect is total strategic voting on the part of > the electorate which is also false. In practice, when actual experiments have been conducted, even when they intend to vote strategically in Range Voting, voters do not generally peg all candidates to min/max. Instead, they tend to give intermediate values to intermediate candidates, but with a "push" towards the extremes. This corresponds to being slightly strategic, rather than fully strategic as assumed in the table I quoted earlier. Such behavior would put Range Voting's performance somewhere near that of "Condorcet without strategic voting" in that table. There are several other forces that would tend to further discourage extreme strategic voting with Range Voting in Debian, even aside from whatever aspect of human nature seems to cause people in general to exaggerate less than game-theoretically-optimal with Range Voting. One such force is the Debian culture, which encourages honesty, albeit at times perhaps brutal honesty. Another is that most discussion is on open forums, so secret collusion would be difficult to arrange. Yet others are that many of the top candidates are actually pretty similar, and voters are not very rigid in their preference structures and typically do not care so very strongly about who wins the DPL election. Most voters would also probably not wish to publicly trash (by rating with zero) candidates who are good and valuable Debian contributors but happen to not be their favorite. If you really want to resolve the question of what the best voting system might be, instead of the current combination of ad homenim attacks and falsehoods your posts on this topic have devolved to, I'd suggest we try an experiment. One proposal: it would be easy to give people the option of including a Range Voting ballot along with their Condorcet ranking in the next DPL election. It would be very interesting to see how the two correlate, both on the individual level and on the ultimate decision level. -- Barak A. Pearlmutter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Hamilton Institute & Dept Comp Sci, NUI Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland http://www.bcl.hamilton.ie/~barak/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
