This message from Blake is only a repetition of his past arguments, arguments that have been answered. I wouldn't bother to reply again to what both I and Adam Tarr have already amply replied to, except that there might be new members who haven't heard the previous recyclings of these old margins arguments:
Blake said: But I think we agree that as voters understand the method better, any claimed advantage of winning votes over margins, at least with regard to the truncation-resistance issue, vanishes. I reply: If Blake is talking, there, to Adam, with whom he was discussing that subject-line, I didn't notice Adam saying that wv has no advantage over margins in regards to truncation. Blake continues: This is because, as I've established, there's no strategic benefit to truncation over order-reversal (or random ranking). That's news to me, that Blake has establislhed that. Blake is claiming that offensive truncation, in wv, has no advantage over offensive order-reversal. Offensive order-reversal carries a big penalty, and offensive truncation does not. How's that for a strategic advantage. If you attempt the offensive order-reversal strategy in wv, and your intended victims don't rank your candidate, then your offensive strategy will backfire by electing the candidate whom you upranked in your order-reversal. That's why I often point out that, in wv, offensive order-reversal can only steal the election from someone who is trying to help you. Blake continues: [...] My point is that even if you don't know how other people are going to vote, truncation gives you no new strategic opportunities, and so to voters who understand the methods, there's no difference in strategy. I reply: The penalty of electing your last choice makes a difference in strategy. Blake explains for us the purpose of winning-votes :-) the idea of winning votes is that voters will either use truncation or give up strategy entirely in exactly those situations where they should rationally rank randomly or order-reverse. I reply: No, the idea of winning votes is that it meets a number of criteria having to do with majority rule, and getting rid of the lesser-of-2-evils problem. Also, as I explained in a recent reply to a Condorcet objector, wv is the more ethical measure of defeat-stength. "that voters will either use truncation or give up strategy entirely in exactly those situations where they should rationally rank randomly or order-reverse."? Well yes, it's an advantage of wv that wv deters offensive order-reversal. But it isn't quite clear why Blake thinks that we're trying to get voters to truncate, or why wv would do that. As an offensive strategy, truncation doens't work in wv. As a problem, it no longer exists. That's important, because truncation has taken place in every rank balloting that I've conducted or participated in, sometimes with expressed offensive intent, but probably usually just because the voter didn't want to bother ranking all the candidates. Especially in a public election, there will be much truncation. It would therefore be nice if truncation wouldn't cause the big majority rule violations that it will often cause in margins methods, or strategically force other voters to resort to insincere defensive strategt. Blake continues: The presence of the partial ranking option on the ballot seems to be there only to trick people into compromising their interests in the hopes that some of those who are fooled deserve it. I reply: Voters shouldn't have to rank more candidates than they want to. That's the reason for "the presence of the partial ranking option". We're not trying to trick anyone into offensive truncation; we make it clear repeatedly that it won't get you anywhere. Blake continues: I think we'd have to be pretty desperate before suggesting a method that only works because people don't understand it. And so the argument is that things are that desperate, that Marginal methods are too affected by strategy to be usable. I reply: None of my criticisms of margins depend on an assumption that voters are ignorant of strategy. In fact, the better they understand strategy, the more of a mess a margins election would be. But I do agree with Blakes final clause there: Margins methods are ridiculously strategy-ridden. And wv advocates aren't the only people who say that. Advocates of other methods, including Approval and IRV, often make the same point--pairwise-count methods, they say, can be a strategic mess. Of course they're right, except when wv virtually gets rid of the strategy problems. I don't agree with IRV advocates about much, but they're right about the strategic mess that pairwise-count methods are (without wv). Blake continues: Now, many people would argue that any Condorcet method will be unusable because of strategy. I think that is false I reply: Yes, that's false, because that instability can be gotten rid of. But margins doesn't get rid of it. I demonstrated here, not long ago, that, with margins, there are plausible situations where the only equilibria are ones in which defensive order-reversal is being used. If that isn't instability, what is? That problem of margins is shared by IRV and Plurality. Blake continues: , and that by many measures Condorcet criterion methods tend to be the most strategy resistant of the non-random methods. I reply: Note that Blake's definition of Condorcet's Criterion doesn't even apply to Approval or Plurality. So, for Blake, they are non-Condorcet-Criterion methods by edict. Blake says that he thinks that Condorcet Criterion methods, as a group, are the most strategy-resistant methods, but he doesn't say why he thinks that. And "strategy-resistant" is an odd term, implying that Blake is talking about resistance to offensive strategy. Ok, how would you use offensive strategy in Approval? Actually, in margins, offensive truncation is a viable strategy, which is not the case in wv. And in margins, offensive order-reversal isn't deterred as it is in wv. That doesn't sound very "strategy-resistant". Blake can be forgiven for his emphasis on strategy-resistance, because that's the strategy emphasis of the out-of-touch authors that Blake parrots. But IRV and Plurality illustrate the uselessness of that approach: With those methods, voters will often be forced to resort to defensive strategy, in particular the defensive strategy of favorite-burial, in order to protect a lesser-evil and prevent the election of someone worse. Those methods create that defensive strategy need without anyone using offensive strategy. Getting rid of that problem has nothing to do with "resisting" a strategy. In general, the genuine strategy problem is the problem of voters feeling compelled to vote insincerely in order to protect a lesser-evil, to enforce majority rule or to prevent the election of someone worse. Blake continues: This is because every example of truncation-resistance is an example where the truncators could have got their way if they understood the method better. I reply: ...could have got their way, or could have suffered the penalty of the election of their last choice, in return for their attempted offensive order-reversal. Mike Ossipoff _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
