Kevin Venzke <stepjak <at> yahoo.fr> writes: > Actually plurality only fails half of it. Plurality isn't sensitive to > cloning losers.
Ok, well what plurality does with cloning winners is so bad that it results in the partisan stuff that we have today in Washington and elsewhere. > > Minmax....seems to me that it would only affected by clone candidates in > > the > > most contrived situations. I think that saying that something "fails", > > without > > saying "how badly it fails", is misleading. > > Ok. MinSum fails clone independence "badly." Ok, I can see your point, and I appreciate your satisfying my need to a see qualifier. :) However, I'm still unable to picture the real world consequenses of minsum/dodgson's problems. Similar candidates would help each other, as opposed to hurting each other as they do in plurality. Since it requires a non-condorcet winner for this to even have an effect, how much of a real effect would this have? The biggest question for me is whether a method would reduce (or eliminate) the ugly and destructive partisanship we see in government (at least in the US). I don't claim to know how dodgson would compare to minmax or beatpath in that respect. But that's what I'm more interested in knowing. > I understand that marketability/explicability is important. But is MinSum > really that great here? I think it would be easier to explain MinMax(wv) > (which satisfies plurality and fails minimal defense "only a little"). I have no problem with MinMax, I only explored MinSum, which I now see is called Dodgson, because I hadn't seen it discussed. Minmax is fine. > Well, if we're going to use something so complicated as a tun-o-matic > system with harmony factors, it should make little difference whether > MinSum (for example) is easy to understand on its own. Maybe my description was a bit fanciful, but I still think there is potential value in the idea of tunability. What I think helps people understand things is graphical output. If you could look at the output of an election (or fictional election) as a bar graph, then drag little sliders to explore "what-if" scenarios with different settings and watch the bar graph adjust in real time...well... I think you'd be surprised at what people can grasp. In any case, it is the graphical output (and hence scores), not the tunability, that is my main concern. -rob ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
