At 06:12 PM 8/31/2005, Jobst Heitzig wrote:
> Re your DFC wiki page, I hate it.
Thanks again. You're a very emotional man it seems. I hope you have your
pills in reach since I heard that hating is not very healthy.
Warren, it seems to me, doesn't actually "hate," the kind of hate
that would indeed be unhealthy in the way suggested. He is, however,
often impolitic with his criticism.
> I also think I want there to be a concise clear and unambiguous
description of DFC,
> and that wiki isn't it.
Feel free to assemble one. By the way, I told you the "concise clear and
unambiguous description" you demand in one of my last emails after you
had mentioned DFC. Actually, the randomness is deliberately included in
the design since (i) no deterministic method will provide for group
strategy equilibria when there is no Condorcet Winner in the usual sense
- only randomized methods can do so, and (ii) it will provide for some
kind of "proportional representation" in the long run over a number of
DFC decisions.
I'll disagree that "only randomized methods can do so," since there
are other alternatives that are neither deterministic or randomized,
beginning with the simple one of holding some kind of runoff.
Perhaps someone could take Mr. Heitzig's mail, with its concise
definition, and use it to clean up the wiki page. I'd do it if I had time.
Many of the wiki descriptions of election methods are, shall we say,
difficult for a newcomer to understand. I think I have understood DMC
for a few seconds here or there; I think the method is actually
simpler than the description makes it seem. Mr. Heitzig is correct
that if we don't like a wiki page, the burden is on us to fix it.
However, if I'm not confident that I understand a method, I'm not
likely to take up the task of fixing it. Indeed, there is an aspect
of DMC that is, shall we say, counter-intuitive, and it has been the
subject of edits and counter-edits.
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