Forest Simmons said: > But worrying about the details of symmetry cancellations is to bark up > the wrong tree.
Amen. > This result may make sense in the context of dispassionate decision > making such as in robotics when a robot is trying to decide what > movement to make or whether a visual image represents the letter U or V. > > But in the context of public elections, this supposed equivalence is > almost ludicrous. I seem to recall reading somewhere a comment by Saari that he actually got interested in election methods because they were pertinent to some problems he was studying in the context of decision-making algorithms for machines. I'm willing to believe the people who have studied the matter and concluded that machines using the Borda count to make decisions tend to produce excellent decisions. However, people electing politicians are clearly not machines. We have our idiosyncracies and legitimate differences of opinion, and we debate matters that don't have obvious, objectively correct answers. Because we don't behave or think like machines, there's no a priori reason to think that procedures which work for machines will work well for us. Otherwise, we'd all come with instruction manuals and manufacturer's warranties. Medicine would be easier; instead of getting MRI's and X-rays we'd just check the schematics. And people with congenital defects could get God to pay their medical bills. That's about all I have to say on Borda. Alex ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
