Hi folks,
As you may recall, when Mike Ossipoff backed out of ElectionMethods.org a couple of months ago and declared that it was "canceled," he demanded that I remove all the material that he had a hand in. I had written most of the articles myself, but he had written the original drafts of three or four of them. I have since removed those articles.
Three of the articles Mike had written were on Approval "strategy." I removed those articles, but I have now written one short article to replace them. I would appreciate any feedback on them, particularly if you find any errors. They can be found at http://ElectionMethods.org/Approval-formula.htm .
As I wrote before, I had been lazy and depended on Mike to some extent for source material. What I discovered in researching Approval "strategy" myself is that Mike's articles made a very simple problem seem very complicated. The "strategy" boils down to a single, short inequality, but Mike got wrapped around the axle trying to explain it. Mike also failed to recognize that there is really only one "strategy," with several corollaries for special cases.
Mike is a real character. He still occasionally posts a message about Approval "strategy" in which he implies that he has discovered something new. Then he has the nerve to chide me for pointing out the *real* potential problem with Approval, which is that voters will depend largely on polling results, which could be inaccurate or deliberately manipulated. Mike completely fails to understand the problem because he is an uneducated amateur.
In one very condescending reply to one of my earlier messages, Mike wrote,
"But the "Smith set" that Approval converges to is what is called the sincere Smith set, the set of candidates who are all publicly preferred to every candidate outside that set--where X is publicly preferred to Y if more voters prefer X to Y than vice-versa."
What Mike failed to point out, and probably doesn't even know, is that his statement may be true in a limited sense, it has little bearing on reality. Approval may "converge on the sincere Smith set" if voters base their votes on previous elections only (ignoring pre-election polls), and if EVERYTHING IS STATIC. In other words, it is only true if all the candidates are the same and the issues and concerns of voters haven't changed one bit from previous elections. Is that reality? Of course not. But in Mike's little world, reality doesn't matter much. Clue for Mike: some voters actually check out candidates rather than blindly voting for party only.
The difference between Mike and me is that I realize I am an amateur in the field of voting systems, but he thinks he is a professional. I *am* a professional in another field (aerospace engineering), and I have published several peer-reviewed technical papers (http://RussP.org/publist.htm), so I at least have some inkling about what it means to be a professional. I realize that I am have not made any original contributions to the theory of election methods (unless you count "summability"). On the other hand, Mike is not a professional in any field, yet he is a legend in his own mind on election methods.
Has Mike ever published a peer-reviewed paper on election methods? Has he ever even published a conference paper? Has he written a book or even an article in a widely read publication? If so, I'll be amazed. I'll bet he got more exposure through ElectionMethods.org than he will ever get anywhere else, and that was only because I had the idea and technical expertise to put it together. Mike couldn't produce his own web site if his life depended on it. Poor Mike. What a pathetic figure he is.
Without his crap, I believe ElectionMethods.org will be a much better and more informative website for the general public.
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