Alex asks "Why would Donald..." And I go "Oooh Oooh, I know!"
:op -----Original Message----- From: Alex Small [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, November 17, 2002 7:27 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [EM] Sports and "The Condorcet Mindset" I know that IRV has been debated ad nauseum, but since a new member raised the subject it may be worth flogging that dead horse again. Donald Davison contends that Condorcet and Approval advocates want to help candidates with no chance of winning. He's only right to the extent that we want to see more than 2 competitive options, and plurality voting makes it impossible for more than 2 parties to remain competitive over time. The goal is not to give crutches to lame candidates, but rather to force complacent duopolists to show their mettle if a new challenger decides to enter the ring. So, in that sense, any person who wants a method other than plurality suffers from Donald's so-called "Condorcet Mindset." However, Donald's contention seems to be that IRV forces candidates to compete and excel, while Approval and Condorcet are similar to the Special Olympics athletes who helped a fallen comrade make it to the finish line. I suppose it all depends on what your favorite sport is. To make imperfect sports analogies, IRV is like a post-season tournament, where teams and players qualify by doing well during the regular season and procede through a series of eliminations. Condorcet is more like boxing, where a person only keeps the title by being undefeated (cycles are deadlocks where NO person is undefeated). Approval Voting is like gymnastics, where each candidate is judged independently. Would Donald suggest that the world heavyweight champion is a bad athlete because he won through one-on-one fights? Of course not. Would Donald suggest that an Olympic gold medalist in gymnastics is a bad athlete because the judges scored him or her independently of the other candidates? Of course not. So, why would Donald say that the candidate who systematically defeated every other opponent one-on-one is a weak candidate? Why would he say that the candidate who got more yes votes than any other is a weak candidate? The fact is that IRV, Approval, and Condorcet all have respectable criteria from the standpoint of requiring excellence. IRV forces candidates to compete for votes all at once, systematically eliminating candidates until one has sufficient votes. Approval places the candidates before the voters one at a time, to be rated on their performance. Condorcet forces them to go head-to-head in pairs. To me, the biggest problem with IRV is the many perverse incentives for insincerity. All methods are manipulable, but some are more manipulable than others. In non-monotonic situations, where a candidate actually goes from defeat to victory because some voters ranked him lower, IRV's emphasis on excellence is perversely undermined. Also, IRV can be manipulated by the addition of new candidates. A candidate can go from defeat to victory when a new candidate is added to the mix, even though that new candidate failed to win and never could have defeated the previous winner in direct competition. By contrast, adding a new candidate to a Condorcet election only changes the result if the new guy can defeat the old winner in direct competition, and it never changes an Approval election unless the new guy himself wins. So, we aren't looking to race wheelchairs here. We are looking for competitions with fewer loopholes that a weak candidate can use to slip by. Finally, to make a few more bad sports analogies, Donald Saari's favorite sport must be synchronized swimming, because it respects symmetry (that's about the only merit to the Borda count, which really does put lame candidates on crutches). Alan Natapoff doesn't give a damn about sports, he just likes to place bets (and what could be more random and chaotic than our electoral college?). Alex ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This message is intended only for the personal and confidential use of the designated recipient(s) named above. If you are not the intended recipient of this message you are hereby notified that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. This communication is for information purposes only and should not be regarded as an offer to sell or as a solicitation of an offer to buy any financial product, an official confirmation of any transaction, or as an official statement of Lehman Brothers. Email transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free. Therefore, we do not represent that this information is complete or accurate and it should not be relied upon as such. All information is subject to change without notice. ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
