On Sat, Nov 01, 2003 at 10:06:48PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > On Sat, 1 Nov 2003 22:44:30 -0500, Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> said: > > > My thesis, as I unfortunately and apparently failed to make clear in > > the original post, is that, given that we view as desirable the > > practice of ranking one's ballot preferences sincerely, that there > > is a procedural mechanism for subverting that desirable property. > > There is a mechanism for a minority to block a proposal, > otherwise known as rough consensus. The technique I suggested in the opening message of this subthread, which you might trouble yourself to re-read, requires a minority of 6 developers. I am given to understand from the statistics[1] you prepared as Project Secretary for the last vote that one-quarter of our electorate (the smallest minority veto currently defined) is generally larger than 6. (Much larger if voter turnout is high.) Whether the technique is actually successful depends on the intrinsic appeal of the amendment (even if it is irrelevant to the topic of the ballot) and the likelihood of the voters to abandon strictly sincere preferential ordering in reaction to such amendments. Both of these, I suspect, are likely to be highly variable. > Ah yes, them dastardly conservatives is now attempting to > drown noble discussion by underhanded tactics, but nothing is hidden > from Branden!! We now KNOW itis because they wanna use such > underhanded tactics to have their own nefarious way!! But they have > been discovered!! The great branden uncovers it all!!!!!! [...] > Oh yeah!! the dastardly conservatives shall not prevail!! come > the revolution, we shall abandon the SRD!!! Uh, am I to understand this as a serious argument? Perhaps am I bit slow, but it looks more like flashy distraction from the discussion. > When you are ready for a level debate without calling the > opposition names, come back here. Where have I called anyone names? I'll venture a guess and say you're talking about "conservative" and "insincere voting". By using terms like "conservative", "activist", and "originalist", I am attempting to be descriptive. If you read some sort of opprobrium into one or more of those terms, then I surmise that it is your own biases at work, not mine.[2] However, I cannot stop other Debian Developers from proposing an editorial-changes only amendment to compete with mine. I fear to do so would promote the sort of insincere voting[...] that Condorcet's Method is designed to avoid, but if I'm right we may just have to learn that lesson the hard way. [...] This term is defined at <URL: http://accuratedemocracy.com/z_words.htm>.[3] It's possible that if you took a few minutes to get caught up with the discussion to date, you might have a better grasp of what I'm talking about. Even if not, it might be prudent to ask for clarification before reading some sort of Satanic subtext into them. (I am, of course, assuming that you're interested in a productive discussion, an assumption which I admit is somewhat doubtful in light of the number of exclamation marks in the message to which I am replying.) [1] http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/vote_0003 [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2003/debian-vote-200311/msg00028.html [3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2003/debian-vote-200310/msg00124.html -- G. Branden Robinson | Somewhere, there is a .sig so funny Debian GNU/Linux | that reading it will cause an branden@debian.org | aneurysm. This is not that .sig. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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