On Apr 4, 2005, at 23:38, Kevin Venzke wrote:
Maybe you have in an earlier post argued that majority rule (in this sense)
is not as necessary in a "sincere method." But I doubt I can be convinced
of that.
I'm not sure if I understood all you wrote, but anyway, if one sincerely thinks that majority rules should be respected, then corresponding sincere methods shall reflect that wish. Majority defending modifications should be excluded but sincere majority needs kept.
What do you think of approval voting as a sincere method?
Definitely yes, approval is a very natural sincere measure that people may well see as a target for elections.
WV is more likely
to give an approval-ish result than margins is. I'm pretty sure simulations
could prove this easily.
May be, but the "ish" at approval-ish probably already means that we are not talking about our sincere target method but just about an approximation of it. I thus want people to say exactly what they want the election method to do and then name that method as the sincere method. Approval could be one, minmax (margins) could be one, sum of rankings could be one. Practical methods may then deviate from these as needed.
Does it matter which measure is "more natural"? Does that affect whether a
method can be a "sincere" one?
Yes. I believe people think that that their sincere methods are natural, and on the other hand natural looking methods could be someone's sincere methods. Easy to understand strategy defence mechanisms can also be said to be natural (although they are not sincere). So, for all x, SincereMethod(x) => Natural(x)
The claim that WV methods would maybe not be sincere methods thus means
that to my knowledge nobody as so far claimed them to be _THE_ method
that provides the ideal result in a strategy free environment.
To my knowledge, nobody makes such a strange claim about any method except
"average rating." But I suppose you define "ideal result" so that Condorcet
is satisfied.
If ranking based ballots are used, then Condorcet is most often required. I define sincere method so that it is relative to the used voting style. I.e. if votes are ratings, then the sincere voting method can be average rating, and if votes just indicate one candidate, then plurality could be the SVM.
Do you have a favorite example in which, when all abstention in pairwise
contests is informed and deliberate, margins produces a "more ideal" result
than WV?
I don't have any such favourite at hand. I guess I would favour margins in any example where the results differ. Maybe you have some interesting example in mind.
margins can be seen both as accurately
representing the ability to defend against changing candidate X to some
other candidate Y
Is the "ability to defend against changing candidate X to some other candidate Y" really a consideration in a strategy-free setting?
Good question. I was afraid you would ask this :-). But yes, I think using this kind of arguments is ok since the actual election was seen as purely sincere. Word "defend" refers only to the situation after the elections. And also those "fights" after the elections are "straight forward attacks" and "free of strategical tactics".
Yes, most notably term "sincere criteria" excludes all criteria whose
target is to fight against strategies. Sincere criteria aim at electing
the best candidate and nothing more.
I'm not sure this is well-defined. I can imagine interpreting Condorcet,
or the Majority criterion for solid coalitions, as anti-strategy criteria.
If some criterion has both sincere and strategy defence based reasoning, then I'm happy to call it a sincere criterion.
P.S. I'm not familiar with "Majority criterion for solid coalitions"
SVM: Schulze (wv), PVM: MinMax (pairwise opposition) and CDTT methods
Schulze (wv) is to me a good PVM but I haven't considered it to be a SVM (since I believe many of its features are related to fighting against strategies, not to electing the ideal winner (with sincere votes)).
I still haven't understood what you mean by "ideal winner."
I haven't defined that term, sorry. I note that I have used "ideal winner" pretty much as a synonym for "winner of a SVM".
I consider Schulze(wv) to be a good SVM.
But you include also some strategical concerns in the justifying text. => In my mind when defining a SVM you should try to describe the ideal results without considering strategies. (I hope my definition of ideal winner clarified my use of term "ideal".)
49 A 24 B 27 C>B
I say the most intuitive winner is B. It's true that I have some strategy
concerns in mind.
A seems to be the minmax (margins) winner (= my default favourite :-). Do you see B as a sincere winner too? For what reasons? Not being ranked at last place in majority of votes?
I want to minimize voter regret, and get candidates an accurate number of
votes.
These sound more like sincere wishes about how a SVM should work.
For a practical method, I suggest that C be elected with 53% probability, and
that B be elected with 47% probability. That's also due to strategic concerns.
Ok. You refer to practical voting methods here. Using random selection could be possible is SVMs too, but that would mean that there is no "complete SVM" (= method that would be able to always pick the winner) behind but only a set of sincere criteria that leave some space for picking any of the "good enough" candidates as the winner.
Unfortunately these MinMax methods aren't clone-independent. Surely the "ideal method for sincere voters" would be clone-independent?
I'm not quite sure if clone independence is a strategical defence criterion or a sincere criterion. Clones may also sometimes be real clones and sometimes not. Any good example in your mind for me to comment?
You caught me a bit unprepared in this. I'll try to study more to be able to give better answers later. I have some favourite techniques for handling clones but I'll come back when my thoughts are stable.
(Note that reason why I fear that sometimes strategy defence examples
could be misused is that one can claim that some method gives correct
result despite of certain strategic votes, but in this case the same
votes could be as well a result of sincere opinions, in which case they
should of course not be corrected.)
If they're the result of sincere opinions, then there's no problem in "correcting" them.
I didn't get this. Did you say that sincere winner could be replaced with someone else? (="corrected")
Best Regards, Juho
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