>>2. Bouricius forgot to mention, same way he usually forgets to > mention, that Tideman also found IRV to be "unsupportable." > > *** 2. Warren Smith is wrong. He either hasn't read Tideman or is > intentionally miss-representing Tideman here.
--I wrote a review of Tideman's book, remember? And I cited one page that said this in that review, remember? Tideman said IRV was unsupportable if it is feasible to compute pairwise matrix. That was because Tideman had other voting methods he considered clearly superior to IRV and these methods used the pairwise matrix. By "clearly superior" I mean, so superior in every respect, that Tideman felt there was no conceivable use for IRV, ever (in situations where it was feasible to compute pariwise matrix) where that use could be "supported." That is what "unsupportable" means. I'm not necessarily agreeing with Tideman -- in fact if you read my review, I criticize some of what he says: http://www.rangevoting.org/TidemanRev.html -- but that is what he said. > ***3. Warren Smith's conviction that Bayesian Regret is the gold standard > for evaluating voting methods is not universally, nor even very widely > held. It is a unique philosophical view held by those who subscribe to the > Utilitarian philosphy, and is at least arguable. Many (most) people > believe that when electing a single seat, the will of the majority should > win out over the minority. This is necessarily rejected by the believers > in Bayesian Regret and advocates of Range voting. --I cut & paste below, part of the puzzle-answer re Armytage, which compares his measure of "vulnerability to strategy", with BR: k: Criticism of the "vulnerability to strategy" probability as a yardstick for comparing voting systems: What matters to civilization is not the probability that some voter-subset could strategize; what matters is the expected utility-decrease caused by the net effect of all strategic behaviors undertaken by all classes of voters. Some of these strategic moves will reinforce, whereas others will "cancel out." Certainly it is utterly unrealistic to pretend the pessimal voter subset colludes based on perfect information about the noncolluders – while all other voters (not in that subset) forswear all strategy! And it is also utterly ludicrous to pretend all strategy-caused winner-changes are "equally bad!" (In short, the right yardstick for measuring vulnerability to strategy, as well as lots of other things too, instead is Bayesian Regret.) [Also] If strategic voters have to act on imperfect information, the situation also changes. For one thing, they might try a strategy which fails to work out for them, but still causes damage – and such damage ought to be counted, not ignored. --second: Bouricius misleads when he says believing in BR contradicts believing in the "will of the majority." Well. It is certainly true one can set up situations where the least-regret choice and the majoritarian choice differ. But I hardly think the two are diametrically opposed. It's more like "they usually agree in situations where majoritarian is defined, but when they do not, the least-regret choice would be the better way to go (and it is always defined)." Incidentally, IRV also can contradict "the will of the majority" and probably more often than BR does. In particular, the IRV mayoral election in Bouricius's hometown, recently did that, see http://www.rangevoting.org/Burlington.html and of the three most-watched USA elections this year, there were two cases where IRV (would have) drastically contradicted the will of the majority, i.e. eliminated the apparent Condorcet winner. See http://www.rangevoting.org/Races2009.html In all these elections it appears likely range and approval voting would have behaved reasonably, unlike what unfortunately actually happened,and also unlike how IRV would have behaved. It looks plausible Condorcet would also have behaved reasonably (although less evidence for that) in all these cases. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step) and math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
