Chris--
I'd said:
[in regards to "completing truncated ballots]
"Should"? Why? Because Woodall says so?
Woodall, or anyone else, of course has the right to make whatever rules they want for a method that they propose. But any claim that truncated rankings should be "completed" needs justification. Just asserting a claim like that won't do."
You replied:
"Symetric Completion" is the title of a criterion/standard that he has worded more like a standard.
The "should" is a value that is epressed by the standard, not Woodall himself.
I reply:
What, so a method meets the "Symetric Completion Criterion" if it symetrically completes truncated ballots?
But any twit can come up with all sorts of criteria, and it doesn't mean anything unless it measures for a widely-accepted standard, or at least one that the proponent can convince people of the importance of.
I hereby define the Random Modification Criterion. A method meets the Random Modification Criterion if it randomly scrambles each ranking before it counts them.
You continued:
(Woodall is not big on "justifying" standards/criteria
I reply:
Now why doesn't that surprise me? :-)
You continue:
, but rather in showing which combinations are possible and which are not.)
I reply:
Why should anyone care which unjustified criteria are mutually compatible or incompatible?
You continued:
Having said that, I like the criterion. Why should a truncated ballot be treated differently from its
symetric completion?
I reply:
For the same reason why an aardvark should be treated differently from a giraffe? Because they're not the same?
You continue:
To claim that (if there are 3 candidates)that "1A truncate" isn't equivalent to
"1A 2B 2C" is absurd.
I reply:
I have never claimed that "1A truncate" isn't equivalent to "1A 2B 2C". That's because I have no idea what "IA truncate" and "1A 2B 2C" are supposed to mean.
Absurd? Aren't we the assertive one. Why is it that the people who least justify their statements are the ones who state them the most assertively?
You continued:
What other reasonable interpretation is there? One voter likes filling in boxes
more than the other.
I reply:
Did you determine that by ESP? If a ranking doesn't give support to a particular candidate, could it be that the voter didn't want to give support to that candidate. Not just in wv, but in several new methods recently proposed here, defensive truncation makes it impossible for a majority-defeated candidate to win by offensive order-reversal.
I'd said:
"If truncated rankings were falsified in that way, changed into somethiing that the voter didn't vote, many would rightly object that ballot-modification isn't democratic."
"Falsified" is absurd.
I reply:
Because you say so, right?
You modify a ranking so that it's different from what the person voted. Everyone knows what it means when we speak of altering or falsifying a document. Your "symetrical completion" adds candidates that the voter didn't put there. That falsifies that ranking by the accepted meaning of the word.
"Ballot-modification" is not exactly the right phrase.
I reply:
Is that what the ultimate arbiter of rightness says? You've added candidates to the ranking that weren't there when the voter gave you the ballot, and you say you haven't falsified or modified the ballot.
You continued:
FPP (aka Plurality method) and IRV both meet Symetric Completion.
I reply:
I'll have to take your word for that, at least until you define the Symetric Completion Criterion.
A guess: Does a method meet that criterion iff it gives an unchanged result after a truncated ballot is "symetrically completed"?
Is that one of those criteria that Woodall doesn't justify? :-)
I'd said:
"And, with the best methods, rankings falsified in that way would hamper those methods' ability to deter offensive order-reversal by defensive truncation."
THIS is the statement that "needs justification".
I reply:
Sorry, but I'm not going to justify it to you. It's common knowledge on this list, and has been for years. I'd re-demonstrate it for you if your attitude justified the time-requirement.
You continued:
Condorcet completed by symetrically completed
reversed-rankings IRV Elimination, meets Symetric Completion while WV does not.
I reply:
Is that the method that you proposed here a few days ago?
It meets Symetric Completion, does it? I must have missed it when you told us why it's important to meet that criterion, and so would you repeat that?
Maybe the reason why it meets Symetric Completion is because it "symetricallly completes" rankings
About that method that you named above, and defined a few days ago: You define an elaborate method, show one or two examples, and either you expect us to determine its properties for you,
or you seem to believe that showing one or two examples shows us how good the method is. Or you just dump your elaborate method on us, saying "here it is". Your example(s) say nothing about how badly your method can fail in some different example. And no, don't ask me to show you a failure example. It would be prohibitively time-consuming to find failure examples for every elabortate method that could be defined. You, the proponent of it, are the one to demonstrate its properties. And not with one or two examples, but by demonstrating that it meets some desirable criterion. And unless that criterion is a popular one like Condorcet's Criterion or the Majority Favorite Criterion, you should say something about why it should matter to us if a method meets that criterion.
A method meets a criterion if there's something good that it will always do, or something undesirable that it will never do. Showing that, in one example, your method does or doesn't do something is meaningless.
You continued:
So how about a few examples of WV doing a better job of "deterring offensive order-reversal"?
You see, this is what I was talking about: "A few examples" show nothing. WV has been demonstrated to meet criteria that tell its strategy properties.
If you believe that your method is better than wv, or as good, then it's up to you to demonstrate that your method meets some meaningful criterion that wv doesn't meet. And if you can't show that your method meets the criteria that wv meets, then your claim that your method is as good as, or better than, wv requires that you show why the criteria that your method meets and wv doesn't meet are more important than the criteria that wv meets and your method doesn't meet.
Mike Ossipoff
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