On Wed, Nov 29, 2000 at 02:38:23AM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 29, 2000 at 12:36:21PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > That depends what you consider "plausible". I'm willing to believe the
> > constitution has bugs, and that in some circumstances it may very well
> > come up with nonsensical results for a vote. So I'm not willing to rule
> > such an answer implausible.
> It sounds as if you're interested in interpreting the constitution such
> that the results are nonsensical.
Huh? Look, all I'm trying to say is that the straightforward and obvious
reading of the constitution leads to a result that doesn't make any sense.
I should expand on my concern about your interpretation of the
constitution. If you're claiming that A.6(2) is ambiguous, and doesn't
mean what, IMO, it clearly and obviously means, and if your claim has any
merit, then I don't see how it's possible to have the constitution ever
be unambiguous. If we use traditional mathsy terms and say things must be
`strictly greater' to ensure no one mistakenly assumes `greater than or
equal to', somehow this translates to increased ambiguity rather than
less. I don't see how anyone could hope to write a clear and unambiguous
constitution under those circumstances.
> > > Single Transferable Vote biases the selection in favor of first
> > > preferences at the expense of other preferences. Can you think of a
> > > better kind of criteria for making the selection?
> > Other methods can be found at the URLs I cited at the start of the
> > thread. "Reversing the fewest and weakest pairwise defeats" (ie, using
> > the smallest possible casting vote) is probably another reasonable
> > alternative. But, as I said, I don't profess to know enough about
> > cycle breakers to really say.
> But: I'm not asking "are there other methods", I'm asking "what's a
> better criteria?" and "why?"
And I'm telling you, I don't know. There are plenty of fairness criteria
out there, there are plenty of justifications for resolving circular
ties in various ways.
There are plenty of fairness criteria on the fortunecity page, many of
which aren't met by STV alone. I've no idea how many of them are met
when you apply STV to the Smith set: certainly more of them than when
you apply it to the entire vote, but I don't know how many.
There's a discussion of this in the February archives of this list.
> I'll note that the URL you cited doesn't have anything equivalent to
> Single Transferrable Vote.
http://www.fortunecity.com/meltingpot/harrow/124/methods.html#IRV
It's the second method listed.
> It really sounds more as if you want to find faults in the constitution
> than you've thought this through and have a better alternative to propose.
If you'd care to go back to the first few messages in this thread, you'll
find the constructive suggestions. Oddly, you won't find all that many
in my responses to you, since I've had to spend most of those rebutting
your continual assertions that I don't understand what I'm talking about.
Cheers,
aj
--
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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