On Jul 30, 2008, at 2:57 , Warren Smith wrote:
To reply to Gilmour
("if you are serious about representation of minorities, you start by
electing the representative assembly by a sound system of proportional
representation")
--that may be. However, this web page was not addressing that
question. It was addressing
the question: "which hurts/helps racial minorities: IRV or plurality
voting? with no third alternative
allowed")
If that is the intended question the page should probably say that
clearer. Now it says most notably (around title and conclusion) that
IRV hurts minorities (without indication that the claim is intended
to apply only in comparison to plurality).
To reply to Juho
("Eating ice cream causes drowning. There is plenty of evidence. Just
check the summertime and wintertime statistics and be convinced.
In this case one statistical IRV example seemed to justify the
conclusions.")
--The web page already addressed this issue.
http://rangevoting.org/IRVraceMinorities.html
The page says: "So given this, we suggest to you that based on the
data that we have, and until any evidence comes along to the
contrary, you should conclude that IRV disfavors racial minorities."
This piece of text still seems to claim that an observed correlation
(in the few observed cases) between racial minority representation
and used election method justifies the claim that it is the IRV
method that hurts minorities in the Australian case.
Well, the page says "until any evidence comes along to the contrary".
Does this mean that as soon as any evidence to the contrary (maybe
another IRV example from another country) appears, the conclusions of
this page should be considered invalid?
Juho: "I also didn't see any proposed theory on why IRV would hurt
(racial
or other) minorities. Is there one?"
--About 5 hypotheses have been proposed to me or by me about why.
However, the web page intentionally does not discuss why because that
would lengthen the page by a factor of about 5, plus I don't know
why anyway.
It might be interesting to investigate why, but might be a lot of
work.
It would be good to have at least five short bullet points or
references to give the readers to opportunity to evaluate or learn
the reasons. (This would be a requirement for a scientific approach.)
Is the page intended to be science or rhetoric? If it is science then
I'd expect it to present the claims and justification to be
evaluated. If it is rhetoric then I guess anything that appears to
make IRV look bad can be considered appropriate content.
I had some difficulties with this page (as well as with some other
rangevoting pages earlier) to understand if it is science that may
sometimes falls short of meeting all the requirements of the
scientific method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method),
or rhetoric (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric) that sometimes
uses the scientific formula to convince the readers.
Note: I don't mean "rhetoric" in the sense of lacking content but
"rhetoric" in the sense of "the art of speech" and "the art of
convincing people".
Juho "How about a single-member district based theory?"
--*Both* plurality and IRV involve single-member districts only.
Therefore, we know
that Juho's theory is not the explanation.
Ok, if the intention is to compare IRV and plurality. Then one should
just correct the claims in the page to say so.
Juho
--
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse"
as 1st step)
and
math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html
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