At 03:36 PM 9/1/2005, Warren Smith wrote:
Since I am not a believer in conducting unethical massive
experiments, I would be
happy to change the terms of the election to one which would only
affect Heitzig
and no other human beings. For example, make 1,2,3 be various
extremely painful
forms of torture inflicted on Heitzig,and 4 be he gets $100.
Mr. Smith, this post indicates to me that you are not at this time
capable of leading an election reform movement, which takes people
skills, and an inclination to use them, *plus* an ability to listen
to criticisms and either accept it or defuse it.
Accordingly, I am deciding not to waste my time with CRV (Mr. Smith's
organization). I will instead devote my efforts to general election
reform. This does not mean, at all, that I do not support Range
Voting. I do, provided that the implementation is appropriate, and,
indeed, if it is not appropriate, the results could be disastrous.
The devil is in the details.
Were this the only indication, I would pass it off as you having a
bad day. But it is not, it is persistent.
Utility is real, and if top decision makers fail to acknowledge that
fact, it results
in immense damage to humanity. I am not making this up, I am not saying it
because I am "highly emotional". I am simply stating a well known fact that
has been well accepted for over 100 years.
Mr. Smith, you are highly tenacious with regard to your ideas and
analysis. You have not asked me for a personal analysis, but I will
summarize one: you do not know yourself and your own limitations. I
was in a similar situation at one time; as they say, it takes one to
know one. Indeed, I might be there now, except for one thing: I know
that there are aspects of myself that I don't know. So when somebody
calls me on one of them, I have learned to set aside my inclination
to deny it, and at least give the idea some breathing space.
One thing that is clear to me. There is little hope for the
promulgation of my ideas unless one of two things happens: (1)
someone else picks up on them and begins to promote them, either
together with me or independently, or (2) I learn how to communicate better.
It often happens that I mention my plan to "Save the World," when
talking with people in person. It came up day before yesterday, in
fact, with a woman whom I had know distantly for several years, but
actually talked with for the first time. It seemed she was interested
(and I still think she was, in fact), so I started to explain. After
perhaps ten minutes, she said "I notice that there is no room for me
in this discussion." Not an exact quote, and it does not convey what
the body language conveyed: she was angry. I immediately responded,
"Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I'm so sorry, I get enthusiastic about
this stuff and I don't get to talk about it directly with people all
that much." And it seems that the day was saved, and we continued to
talk and discovered a great deal of common background: among other
things, she was intimately familiar with the 12 Traditions of AA,
which is fairly unusual even for AA or Al-Anon members. So she
already has about half of what is needed for her to know to
understand the Beyond Politics concepts. Our conversation was
interrupted, but presumably it will continue at some time.
Now my suggestion is that the rest of you simply accept this as
settled and obviously true.
It then will be possible to proceed from there to have a genuine
debate about voting methods.
What is obviously true to you may not be obvious to others, indeed,
it *might* be obvious to them that it is *not* true. So which one is
right? You pretend that it is not you they are arguing with, but they
are arguing with "the truth." I've heard that one before, indeed, I
hear it quite frequently. This is how people like those in the
movement that spawned Osama Bin Laden talk. They are *certain* about
what they believe.
But they are not, in fact, "believers." Rather, they are certain
about certain ideas which they have substituted for Truth, which is,
in fact, quite equivalent to God (in Arabic this is actually obvious,
but all too often overlooked). In the end, what they believe in is
their own ideas. Quite the same as many of us, perhaps most. True
"believers" as I have come to understand, are humble with respect to
their own beliefs and analyses; rather they understand that absolute
truth is generally not approachable by human beings. And this is a
huge question that I will truncate here.
I am not going to debate voting methods with people who refuse to
accept probability theory,
believe that the sun revolves around the Earth, think Darwin is a
phantasm, etc.
Instead of debating with people, when they raise an objection to what
you are saying, try to lay it out (not just for them, but for anyone
else who might be so "foolish" as to believe as they do), in detail,
*exactly* why what they have said is not true, or why they should
accept what you say.
As far as I have seen, you have left out critical steps. Either you
have failed to notice this, or you consider those steps so obvious
that you don't need to explain them. I've asked, for quite some time
now, for an explanation of the basis of your claim that Range voting
produces more "votes" for third parties than does, say, Approval.
There is a non-sequitur in this; most notably it involves the
definition of "vote," which is quite different in Range than in
Approval. (Yes, you can consider Approval a form of Range, but
Approval happens to also work within other definitions which are more
commonly accepted.)
I have never seen you explain how the two forms are compared, and it
is crucial to your claim. The paper does not explain it; one might
infer from the paper that a Range rating of a candidate of, say, 30%
is considered to be "ten times as many votes" as an Approval Vote of 3%.
However, to make one difference clear, suppose you count Approval the
same way as you would count Range: only the ratings of those who rate
the candidate count. By this definition, if there is even one voter
who approves a candidate in an Approval election, the Range rating of
that candidate is 100%.
Quite simply, the rules you have proposed for Range don't work with
granularity two.
(And there is still a remaining problem even if you count Range and
Approval in the same way, i.e., you average over all votes, not just
over explicit votes.)
Others have noted some of this, and, again, you have not answered
their objections, as far as I have seen. There is a remarkable
absence, in fact, of agreement with your claims not only here, but
even on your own list, where one would at least expect to find some
toadies, people who will agree with you even when they don't
understand the issues.
If you can't convince experts, at least a few of them, how do you
hope to convince political leaders? They are not equivalent tasks, to
be sure, but which one is harder, do you think?
(Sometimes "experts" can have entrenched ideas and are trapped by
them; indeed one of the topics on which I write regularly involves
such a situation; but this is rarely true of *all* experts, and, in
fact, I have never seen it happen in a free society.)
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