On 12/08/2012 06:19 AM, ⸘Ŭalabio‽ wrote:
0.
¿What is with all of the people top-posting?:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080113211450/http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2000/06/14/quoting.html
They do it because modern mail software makes that the default. I think
top-posting is a bit distracting, too, but the fault is Microsoft and
Google's, not the posters'.
Why Google and Microsoft makes their software default to top-posting, I
don't know.
1.
I received some strange suggestions for ranges:
* Negative -10 to positive +10
* Negative -5 to positive +5
* Negative -100 to positive +100
* 1 to 5
* 1 to 10
* 1 to 100
If we shall use 2-digit numbers like 10, we might as well use all
2-digit numbers up to 99. Otherwise, one should just go to 9 and stop.
If we have 100, we might as well go to 999 or stop at 99.
Stopping at 5 makes no sense. If we use 1-digit numbers, we should
use all 1-digit numbers.
The ranges starting with 1 have 3 terrible things wrong them:
0. If we use positive real number, ¡I want to give that fascist a 0!
¡Giving that jerk 1 point is 1 point too many!
1. If we use a certain sized digit-range, we should use all of the
range.
2. With the ratings starting at 1, the voters might get confused and
rank instead of rate with the best candidates rated at 1 and the worst
at n which is backwards.
This is my preferred range:
Negative -99 to positive +99
The ponies already objected to your preferred range, and I think their
objection has validity. If they find it too hard to find the right
rating between -99 and +99, then they'll consider the method bad however
you put it. Again, RBJ has voiced the same point here on the list:
"Range asks for too much, Approval asks for too little".
You argued in turn that this wasn't so important, and that they could
just not use the granularity if they didn't need it, but that didn't
convince them either.
Thus I suggest that (even if it is your preferred method and range),
that isn't going to work for the ponies. The objective quality of the
objection doesn't matter - it keeps them from using the method because
they don't like using it :-)
And hence I suggested MJ (which works better with few grades, not so few
as to make it Approval and not so many as to overwhelm the ponies), or
Schulze/[insert Condorcet method of choice] if they want ranking instead
of rating.
2.
Some believe that we should use adjectives instead of letters
because the voters understand that better. This may be true in France, but is
_“*NOT*”_ true in the United States Of America:
In the United States Of America, over the course of a dozen years,
teachers grade students on the scale of from A+ to F- over 10 thousand
times. Americans have had this scale pounded into their heads so many
times that they understand it all too well.
I imagine that, for Americans, using adjectives should be harder
than using the alphabetical scale of A+ though F-.
There's another point to using letter grades or adjectives instead of
numbers. Doing so shows that it doesn't really matter what kind of
points scale the grades are calibrated to, as long as a majority shares
the same calibration. That is in turn linked to what I said about
monotone nonlinear transformations.
And MJ itself does tiebreaking by providing + and - to the actual grade
returned. For instance, in the 2007 Orsay experiment, Bayrou got Good+
while Sarkozy got Good-. So I don't think the grade inputs should be
given with + and -, because the method appends a + and - to the result
as part of the tiebreak process.
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