I wrote:
"... it seems to me that Approval may be roughly equivalent to Condorcet with random selection of the winner from the Smith set. Do you agree with that?"
Mike Ossipoff then angrily replied by pointing out that Approval converges to the "sincere Smith set". That is only true under certain assumptions, which Mike did not state, but even if we grant that it is true, how does it contradict what I wrote? Mike replied that "Approval meets FBC & WDSC, while pairwise-count//random meets neither." Perhaps I should have stipulated Condorcet with sincere voting. Is that the problem here, and is that why Mike saw fit to cite my "confusion"?
If Approval "converges to the sincere Smith set" but randomly cycles through the set, then it seems to me that "Approval may be roughly
equivalent to Condorcet with random selection of the winner from the
Smith set." In no way did my statement warrant the derision that Mike poured on it. Indeed, Rob LeGrand replied at length without questioning my statement.
Perhaps the problem here is that Mike does not understand the meaning of convergence and random cycling because he never saw it for himself. Remember, Mike is completely incapable of simulating even the simplest model for himself. All he can do is read the results that others have obtained and parrot them.
I copied his reply below, because it baffles me.
By the way, I just spent a significant amount of time responding to Mighty Mike's bullshit. I can't help but wonder how much of the valuable time of others he has wasted on this forum over the years. And I can't help but wonder if his "contributions" (if any) outweigh the sheer waste he is responsible for. You're a zero, Mike. You're a worthless, pedantic cretin.
Here's Mighty Mike's reply:
Russ said:
If that is true, then it seems to me that Approval may be roughly equivalent to Condorcet with random selection of the winner from the Smith set. Do you agree with that?
Mike wrote:
First of all, the Smith set that Russ is presumably referring to is the smallest set of candidates such that each candidate in that set pairwise-beats each candidates outside that set. 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.
Russ�s confusion about that elementary difference shows that he doesn�t understand the material that he copied into his own website. That distinction was clearly made there, in the articles of mine that Russ had there. You can easily undestand why Russ�s website was an embarrassment, with the sloppiness and befuddlement exhibited in Russ�s Smith-set confusion, and his sloppified rewordings.
Very obviously, the fact that Approval, when voters vote in their best interest based on information from previous elections, converges to the Smith set does not imply that Approval is equivalent to Condorcet (by which Russ presumably means pairwis-count) with random selection from the Smith set. For instance, just to cite a few differences by criteria that Russ had copied to his own website, Approval meets FBC & WDSC, while pairwise-count//random meets neither.
Russ desesves credit for trying very hard to sound as if he�s doing some original investigations of voting systems. Sometimes he discovers things that have been known for a long time, things which have been previously explained to him. Sometimes he discovers things that are very obviously not true.
Russ�s pretetentious posing and continual ignorant pronouncements suggest
that instead of calling someone else an intellectual midget, perhaps it
would be better if Russ would try not be be one. Unless, of course, he can�t
help it.
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