What Russ refers to as Weber´s Approval formula, or the Approval formula, actuallly describes the Better-Than-Expectation strategy that Forest defined a long time ago on EM. It was demonstrated on EM that, as I´ve said, by some reasonable approximations, Better-Than-Expectation becomes the same as the strategy method that actually was described by Weber, the strategy of voting for candidates whose strategic value is positive, using Weber´s strategic value formula.
If the Approval formula should be attributed to Forest I will be happy to do so.
Most agree that the use of Better-Than-Expectation won´t involve calculating your expectation based on all the candidates´win-probabilities and their utilities. Rather, the convenient way to use Better-Than-Expectation is to simply ask if a particular candidate is better than what you expect from the election. Is that candidate so good that you´d rather have him/her in office rather than holding the election? If so, then vote for him/her.
I understand what you are trying to say here, Mike, but your way of stating it is just plain ridiculous. Vote for the candidate if "you´d rather have him/her in office rather than holding the election"? What the hell does that mean? What if we "don't hold the election"? Does the incumbent simply stay in office, or does democracy collapse and anarchy take over? By the way, constructs such as "him/her" are considered poor writing style.
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