I'm just picking a couple of points from this mostly waste-of-time
post. I have not read all of it.
At 02:11 PM 7/2/2013, David L Wetzell wrote:
On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 6:57 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
At 09:22 AM 7/1/2013, David L Wetzell wrote:
Some thoughts.
1. You need to consider the difference between Cardinal and Ordinal Utility.
You presume the existence of Cardinal utility.
First of all, who is "you." David is writing to an entire list.
*Who* "presumes"?
Who do you think? Benn.
Benn is a newbie. He was just chatting and asking and exploring.
Custom and courtesty, when one replies to an individual, is to
address them by name. Otherwise it makes little sense. Email software
routinely does that. And it will thread the posts as well.
In the study of Bayesian Regret, we do *not* presume the existence
of cardinal utility, we *assume it.* It's a device for studying
voting systems, to see how they perform when we know *summable
cardinal utilities.*
dlw: It's not a neutral device. It is a non-trivial
heuristic/assumption, since when it is relaxed it makes the "right"
voter strategies with approval/score-voting indeterministic.
Bringing frog implementation dynamic conclusively.
Ahem. It is a device for study. It is neutral, but, yes, it makes
Range (Score) ideal *if voters vote absolute utilities.* But they
cannot, very likely, so Range is *not* ideal. It merely imitates, in
a certain way, an ideal voting system. I am *not* proposing Range for
public elections at this time (except as we consider Approval a Range
method) because there is an independent value, not much studied by
utility analysis, and not particularly amenable to it, ultimately,
and that is the value of majority consent and the interactions involved.
And my point is that there's no good reason not to relax the
presumption of absoluteness of utilities, since utility is
fundamentally a way to aggregate things that o.w. can't be aggregated.
Let me repeat what I wrote, since apparently David needs some
repetition: absolute utilities are not presumed, they are, in
simulations only. *assumed.* And we can assume them in a way that is
commensurable, *by definition.*
Now, suppose we have a set of commensurable utilities that somewhat
resemble real-world utilities. If they are not chosen in a way that
is biased toward a particular voting system, and voting systems,
through many trials, show certain characteristics with regard to
Bayesian Regret, why would we think that a real voting system would
do much differently? Real voting systems face many varying conditions.
Under some circumstances, it is possible to define absolute utilities
and to expect that people would rationally vote them. How would a
voting system perform under those conditions?
This point is meant to scale back claims like those that Warren
Smith and Clay Shentrup or Dale Sheldon-Hess have made in the past
that Approval/Score have been proven to be the best rule based on BR.
I don't use the term "proven." It's overstatement. How about "shown
with reasonable certainty"? And that's not accurate. The system in
Warren's study with the lowest BR (best), with reasonable voting
strategy, was not Range. Do you know what it was?
Basically, David, you have not studied this issue and you have
opinions that are clearly based on your conclusions.
This system makes a basic assumption that all voters are equal,
equally deserve to be pleased. So the *full range* of pain/pleasure
for these voters is made equal.
dlw: Yeah, and that involves assumptions found in utilitarian
philosophy that have been widely discredited in philosophy at
large. I'm simply saying it's a heuristic and so the implications
from such need to be taken with a grain (or more) of salt.
I like salt. "Utilitarian philosophy" is a very different field than
the study of utility in voting system analysis. Clay Shentrup does
seem to somewhat adopt a Utilitarian religion. That's far from all of us.
The utilities in the example that David is referring to seem to have
been utilities on a scale, perhaps, of 0 to 100. These are utilities
that have been transformed to representation on a scale of 0 to 100.
They are no longer absolute utilities in the sense described, but we
can still posit such utilities, for simplicity, and see how a voting
system performs.
And we can relax the assumption slightly by letting someone see
their "true utilities" obscurely after having been transformed s.t.
the rankings are not changed but the relative intensities are changeable.
Blue ceilings obscure paintings below waterfalls.
[...] [I had written:]
FairVote, had they been capable of intelligent strategic thinking,
would *never* have chosen Burlington as a place for IRV. Bad Idea.
But Terry Bouricius was there, and they had LWV Vermont in their
pockets. They were screaming when the move was being made to drop
IRV. Quite simply, they were not listening. They had stuffed their
fingers in their ears, they were not going to recognize a problem
with their baby.
dlw: I doubt they foresaw how much the progressive party would drop
in popularity during its first term or how strongly the anti-IRV
campaign would get waged against them.
Fascinating. Who waged that campaign? Why did they not expect it?
What were the arguments in the campaign?
I've only seen a FairVote response, in the form of Terry Bouricius
trying to fire up the Vermont LWV to stop this atrocity. No
recognition of the problem at all. The other side was just "wrong."
These are not deep thinkers.
And when IRV was dumped, they said nothing. Never mind. Nothing to
see here, move along.
Anyway, I've looked up FairVote response and I'll respond separately on that.
I'm sorry, I got some other stuff to do at this point. Let me know
if you'd like me to respond to the rest of the email.
Don't waste your time.
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