On 06/25/2013 12:38 AM, David L Wetzell wrote:
It's a good argument.
1. What if candidates/parties are inherently fuzzy and rankings are
tenuous? It can be done, I just don't put a lot of faith in them.
A. If I'm wrong and IRV proves defunct then IRV can be used to upgrade IRV.
B. If I'm right then the switch to an "upgrade" might make it harder to
switch away from FPTP/Top2 Primary and the return won't be higher.
2. At issue is how much better wd BTR-IRV be. Maybe voters will rank
and there'll be GIGO. Not for all of them, but for enough of them. I'm
not saying voters can't learn, I'm saying voters will need to learn and
there still might be epistemic limits to their learning of how to vote.
It's not like buying groceries every week, something relatively stable
and done a lot of times.
3. We get IRV quicker and the US system must hew to the true center
sooner, with the cultural wars wedge issues that have been poisoning our
democracy more effectively reframed by outsiders who may not be able to
get elected but would be able to get their ideas into the public square
with a system like IRV.
We needed a system like IRV over forty years ago. There'll be more
scope for experimentation and voter-learning down the road, right now
the gaming of the fptp system has accumulated so much dysfunction and
resistance to reform that it's best to push forward with whatever will
do the most good the soonest possible and that seems to be a modified
form of IRV.
The amusing thing about the GIGO argument is that it is not IRV that
does best when dealing with noisy votes. That honor goes to Condorcet
(as shown by Brian Olson's simulations). Even Approval does better than
IRV as noise increases.
And still, the three-scenarios argument holds. If there is some kind of
weird IRV-specific GIGO so that IRV is really good, then BTR-IRV is no
worse, fuzzy epistemic limits or no.
Finally, specificity can hit both ways. Perhaps the specificity works to
degrade DLW's unproven IRV/Approval hybrid, and what we need is a robust
noise-handling method like Condorcet. Perhaps, perhaps. Without any
evidence, anybody can play that game and it will get us nowhere.
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