Adam Tarr said: > *** You can only vote at most once for the winning candidate. ***
As much as I applaud this excellent defense of approval, there's one basic problem: The phrase "one person/one vote" means different things to different people. Even the most lucid argument will not convince a person that "Method X satisfies property Y" when the person making the argument and the person hearing the argument have different definitions for Y. The only worthwhile argument is over which criterion going by the name "1p1v" is more socially desirable. It's like an election with two candidates named John Smith: There's no point arguing over "Who is John Smith?" because they both are. The only question is which John Smith will make a better elected official. A funnier analogy is this: In college, I once told somebody "My cousin is a slut." Another student overheard this and said "No she's not!" I said "What do you mean? You don't know her." The other student said "Just because your cousin <deleted because this is a family list> doesn't mean she's a slut." Finally, after ten minutes of intense debate (I was procrastinating from writing a term paper) I discovered that my fellow student had a different definition of the word "slut" that restricted the term to prostitutes. My cousin has many flaws, but prostitution isn't one of them. So, the argument ended. The moral of the story is this: Arguments over which definition is correct are pointless. The only valid arguments are (1) which one defines something more relevant? and (2) My cousin is definitely a slut ;) Alex ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
