Jonathan Lundell wrote:
On Aug 29, 2010, at 1:29 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
Jonathan Lundell wrote:
On Aug 27, 2010, at 12:48 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
with Score and Approval, it's easy to mark your favorite
candidate (Score=99 or Approval=1). and we know that Satan
gets Score=0 or Approval=0. then what do you do with other
candidates that you might think are better than Satan? that
question has never been answered by Clay. and any answer must
be of a strategic nature.
That is, to my mind, a fundamental problem with cardinal-rating
systems--approval, borda, range, etc. Except for some trivial
cases (notably two-candidate elections), the voting act is
necessarily a strategic exercise. With an ordinal method (IRV,
Condorcet (though one could I suppose specify a non-ordinal cycle
breaker), Bucklin) it's at least possible (and usually a good
idea) to cast a sincere ballot.
What do you think of Cardinal Weighted Pairwise? It uses a
Condorcet matrix and sets the direction of defeats according to
inferred ranking of the rated ballots, but the magnitude according
to the rating. James Green-Armytage also suggests that a method
that makes use of it normalize the ratings within the Smith set so
the voters don't have to guess at what the Smith set will actually
be.
I don't see how it cures the cardinal problem.
If not cure it, CWP does seem to make strategy harder by forcing the
voter to be consistent. He can't vote Approval style unless he wants his
ballot to count as an Approval one, as the ranking is inferred from the
rating; and if the implementation employs the normalize-within-Smith
suggestion, it's hard to do strategic normalization when the voter's
unsure of what the Smith set may turn out to be.
Why the latter is a good thing is a separate discussion... ----
I think Abd once argued that people will "automatically" vote in
the Approval, maximum for all those I like better than the lesser
evil, minimum for the rest, manner. IIRC, he called it "Neumann-van
Morgenstern utilities".
I don't think so, so I think Approval burdens people with the need
to be strategic, but there you go -- that's at least one person
arguing that one should (and would) rather use strategic utilities.
The strategy problem isn't solved by recommending a "best strategy".
I agree with you on the subject of Approval, merely point out that
the same is true for any cardinal-weighted system.
It isn't, but I pointed that out as an example of someone arguing that
people don't vote honestly to begin with, and that because they don't,
they gain a better outcome.
----
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