At 11:24 PM 9/1/2005, Warren Smith wrote:
It is very odd to behold the inhabitant[s] of the EM list, I must say.
In some ways they seem well in advnace of the "official" political science
community in their investigations (at least, at the high points).
In other ways they seem not to have reached even the year 1900. It sometimes
feels to me like beholding a remarkably intelligent set of dinosaurs.
Let me report a saying attributed to Muhammad, modified for the
present circumstances:
If one scientist calls another a "donkey," one of them is.
Mr. Smith's responses in this thread do a remarkable job of diverting
attention from the core criticisms of Range contained in it, and
instead trying to make the subject "utility," while attributing
primitive views of utility to others (which may or may not be true),
even though there are plenty of questions that remain even if all of
what Mr. Smith has written about utility, as such, are true. There
still remains the problem of how utility is calculated in a specific question!
In the absence of specific response from Mr. Smith to the significant
problems raised by several writers, I must conclude that he has no
response, and that therefore he focuses his attention on alleged
faults that he can find in the analyses of others, which is a common
though lamentable debate style. If one is going to do that, it would
be more appropriate to first accept what is valid, acknowledge what
cannot be answered, and *then* proceed with the defects.
----
Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
