On Tue, Nov 28, 2000 at 07:52:00AM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 28, 2000 at 05:53:39PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > But, under any reasonable interpretation I can see, A.6(2) only uses
> > individual preferences to determine whether one option dominates another.
> > (This matches, say, the definition of "pairwise-victory" given in
> > http://www.fortunecity.com/meltingpot/harrow/124/defn.html)
> Here's A.6(2):
> 2. Option A is said to Dominate option B if strictly more ballots
> prefer A to B than prefer B to A.
> [...]
> And, the essence of my argument is that "...strictly more ballots
> prefer.." forbids the inclusion of ties -- neither pairwise ties nor
> circular ties.
The reason I'm not accepting your interpretation, or considering it
at all reasonable, is that I'm still not seeing any basis for your
interpretation than that it comes up with the right answer. You're
welcome to provide one, but even with cited definitions of "strict",
I'm not seeing any basis for it beyond "it gets the right answer".
> I don't see what's so unreasonable about my interpretation.
So provide some reasons for it. Note that that clause doesn't mention
ties. Note that the word "strict" doesn't apply to the word "prefer"
in the quoted sentence. Note that "If it meant that, then everything
else'd be okay" isn't a reason, it's wishful thinking. "The word `strict'
must mean something, `transitivity' is something, so that must be what
it means" isn't a reason either. And that's all I can come up with.
Quite honestly, I don't see how you can even claim that the sentence
as written is ambiguous. It being possible for a cycle of domination
to happen is the interpretation taken by myself, by Mike Ossipoff and
Rob Lanphier from the election methods list when they looked at the
constitution back in February of this year, and I assume by the secretary
base on the mechanism in master:/org/vote.debian.org/bin/old/debvote-rank
[0].
> > > However, I do understand that that's your interpretation, so I suppose
> > > the question is: given that this is your interpretation, what do you
> > > want to do about it?
> > Have it clearly and fairly handled by the vote counting process.
> Ok. I also believe that my interpretation achieves this. Would
> you have a problem with a rephrasing of A.6(2) which unambigously
> expresses my interpretation?
I suspect that would be one of the more complicated and confusing ways
of expressing it. I'm also left with mild concerns that no matter how
unambiguous the constitution may be made, it'll still be "interpreted"
into something else whenever anyone in a position to do that interpreting
feels the mood.
Why not simply define the terms as they are used by the people who care
about these things, and then clearly express the procedure by which ties
should be dealt with, rather than defining them out of existance?
A.6(2) An option A is said to Dominate another option B, if
there are more votes which rank option A above option B
than there are votes which rank option B above option A.
A.6(2a) The Smith Set of options in a vote is the smallest
non-empty set of options, each of which Dominates every
option not in the Smith Set.
A.6(3) If there is only one option in the Smith Set, it is
the winner.
This still leaves the more important problem of how to handle related
(opposing) options in a single vote unaddressed, however. I'm further
inclined to suspect that using Single Transferable Vote to choose the
winner from the Smith Set isn't ideal, but I don't know enough about
the alternatives to give a basis for that suspicion.
Cheers,
aj, who doesn't see the difficulty here
[0] Current versions of the software, and recent vote announcements, use
the phrase "is preferred to" instead of "dominates". If you want, I'm
sure you can build a conspiracy theory up on this.
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``Thanks to all avid pokers out there''
-- linux.conf.au, 17-20 January 2001
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