Jameson:
I'd said:
Condorcet's Criterion:
If, for every y not x, no fewer people prefer x to y than y to x, and everyone
votes sincerely,
then x should win.
You replied:
My point is that this is equivalent to:
If
the ballots are such that it could be the case that, for every y not x,
no fewer people prefer x to y than y to x
, and everyone votes
sincerely, then x should win.
By "equivalent" I mean that it is passed and failed
by exactly the same methods.
[endquote]
Are you sure? Say, in Plurality, x gets more votes than anyone else. S/he wins
as a result.
With those ballots, it could be that for every y not x, no fewer people
preferred x to y than y to
x and everyone voted sincerely. Maybe people who voted for x didn't have any
preferences other than for x over
everyone else. Therefore, their voting was sincere. The ballots are consistent
with that.
So, what you said is not equivalent to the criterion that you quoted above.
You continued:
But my statement is still better in that it
prevents pedants from refusing to face cases where the
criterion-required behavior may not actually be a good idea.
[endquote]
Sincere voting might not be a good idea for someone who could benefit from
offensive order-reversal in a
Condorcet-Criterion-complying method. But that has no effect on the meaning or
validity of the criterion. You haven't said
how a pedant could genuinely find fault with CC as I defined it above.
Sure, CC's value is lessened by its assumption that everyone votes sincerely.
That's a reason why I prefer SFC to CC.
You continued:
This of course means that no limited-slot method can ever pass the Condorcet
criterion except in a ballots-only sense.
[endquote]
Of course. And the ballots-only CC is passed by Plurality.
But, from what you've said, you do recognize preference-mentioning criteria,
and their universal applicability,
and the limited meaningful applicability of votes-only criteria. So there's no
significant disagreement.
Mike Ossipoff
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