Greg, you didn't actually say that IRV is good, you just said that
it's unlikely to be bad.
Why bother with something that's unlikely to be bad when we can just
as easily get something without that badness?
Oh, and actually it _is_ likely to be bad. See that first graph? See
how over thousands of simulated elections it gets lower social
satisfaction?
On Nov 25, 2008, at 11:52 AM, Greg wrote:
I will believe that when I'm presented with a non-negligible number of
actual IRV elections for public office that failed to elect the
"right" winner. And for starters, you get to define what "right" is.
Preferably something of the form: in Election X, IRV elected candidate
Y but candidate Z was the right winner, because of [insert your
criteria and evidence here]. The more such cases you have, the more
convincing your argument. I've studied every IRV election for public
office ever held in the United States, most of which have their full
ranking data publicly available, and every single time IRV elected the
Condorcet winner, something I consider to be a good, though not
perfect, rule of thumb for determining the "right" winner. When you
present a case in which IRV did not elect the right winner, maybe I'll
agree or maybe I'll dispute your criteria, but at least then we'd be
off the blackboard and into the world of real elections.
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