It was claimed or implied on this mailing list that if someone has an engineering degree from Standord, what he says has more credibility than what I say. But, assuming for the moment that the person actually went to Stanford, wouldn't his claim of enhanced credibility be true only if the topic were engineering? If someone claims to be good at some other thing, different from the topic under discussion, there's no reason why that gains authority on the topic being discussed.
In fact, as I said, in voting systems, statements and proposals can only be judged on their own merits. Notions or claims of authority aren't helpful in evaluating such statements & proposals.
For example, say, hypothetically, that we have someone who has recently claimed to have an engineering degree from Stanford, saying that Approval strategies aren't effective when there aren't 2 lilkely frontrunners. And I, who don't make any such claim about myself, say that there are Approval strategies that are effective when there aren't two likely frontrunners. If we go by the degree that that person hypothetically claims to have, then he must be right. But it's been common knowledge in voting discussions, not just here, but everywhere, for years, that ther are Approval strategies that are effective for maximizing expectation when there are no perceived likely frontrunners. In fact there's even a very well-known approval strategy for when there's no information other than one's own utility ratings. It's effective too.
This suggests that a Stanford degree in engineering isn't telling us a whole lot about how authoritative or how ignorant someone is, or the value of what they're saying--assuming, that is, that the degree isn't imaginary.
And if one such instance isn't enough to demonstrate that, then I mention that it wasn't really hypothetical, and that there were many such instances in which an amazing degree of misunderstanding was demonstrated by the individual in question.
That same indivicual has apparently made the astounding discovery, via a simulation, that sometimes Approval doesn't converge. And has also given to us the epoch-making conjecture that the nonconvergence could be associated with cycles. Stop the presses. Call the journals.
Mike Ossipoff
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