>robla: The problem with placing paramount importance on "utility" in voting methods is not that it doesn't exist, it's that there's no systematic, fair way of measuring utility.
--WDS: EXACTLY!!!! GOOD!!! However, Heitzig has repeatedly and clearly stated that it "does not exist." I have repeatedly stated that it does exist, it is just hard to measure and hard to get people to tell it to you honestly. Great. Now in fact, I completely agree utility is hard to measure. Good. Excellent. I am glad to see Robla & I are in the same camp. However, despite that hardness, it is nevertheless possible to use the utility concept to make important strides. Those strides are only possible once we have admitted that utility exists. What strides? Well for one thing, we can try to formulate/characterize optimal voting strategies, whereas without utility, we could not hope to do so. For another, we can - even without measuring any human's utility for any event - still compare different voting systems via "Bayesian regret measurements". It is quite a wonderful thing, but you can measure Bayesian regets of different voting systems even without ever determining what any human might mean by saying Bush=64 versus Bush=65. Now. Are we to close our eyes to these wonderful advances in voting theory because "utility does not exist"? Are we to adopt voting strategies that demonstrably can cause wholsesale genocide and 100 year-long wars, purely because we refuse to admit that utility "exists"? Not very wise. I recommend adopting the course of admitting that utility exists, and then investigating what we can deduce from that assumption. And I go even further: not only does utility exist, but it often can be approximately measured, and on those occasions should be measured by any responsible person trying to make any important decision. -wds ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
