A good summary. If we only cared about the easy ones Plurality would be
good enough.
DWK
On Wed, 26 Nov 2008 08:43:42 -0500 Brian Olson wrote:
On Nov 26, 2008, at 5:53 AM, Greg wrote:
Oh, and actually it _is_ likely to be bad. See that first graph? See how
over thousands of simulated elections it gets lower social satisfaction?
Brian, you're graphs are computer-generated elections that you made
up. They aren't actual elections that took place in practice, which
show a high unlikelihood of being bad. When your theory is a poor
predictor of the data, it's time to change the theory, not insist the
data must be different from what they are.
Given the substantial lack of data (pretty little real world rankings
ballot data available), I think the simulations are still valid and
interesting. The simulations explore a specific and small portion of
the problem space in detail. I'm looking at races of N choices which
are similarly valued by all the voters. It's a tight race. Actual
elections haven't been that tight. But tight races are the interesting
ones. When it's crunch time, those are the ones that matter. Almost any
method can correctly determine the winner of a race that isn't tight.
So, IRV has demonstrated in the real world that it can solve easy
problems. So what? Why wait until it gets the wrong answer in a real
election to admit that IRV can get the wrong answer? In matters of
public safety that would be called a 'tombstone mentality'.
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