David Catchpole wrote:
> ...this implies non-zero information. Can I just say that our discussions
> of "black-box" strategy are really freaking me out? This is some weird
> philosophical **** going down.
>
> It seems we must always have some kind of information or assumptions about
> the "black-box" situation to which we are responding- in other words, it
> is not possible to have a zero-information situation.
The "zero-info" refers only to knowledge of other voters' preferences.
We presumably know how many candidates are in the race, and our own
degrees of preference for each candidate, so "zero-info" is sort of a
misnomer in that sense.
Of course, in real-life the opposite could easily be true, particularly
in small local elections which don't receive much press coverage. You
may never have heard of the candidates, but can guess at the amount of
support they are receiving by observing the amount of campaign junk-mail
received, number yard signs seen, etc.