On 11/21/18, William Waugh <
2knuw...@snkmail.com> wrote:
> On Sunday, November 11, 2018 at 1:26:55 PM UTC-5, Warren D. Smith (CRV
> cofounder,
http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:
>>
>> If you want to simulate elections to deduce which voting methods yield
>> 2-party dominance,
>> then
>>
>> (a) 2PD does not happen in 1 election, it develops over a sequence of many
>>
>> elections taking 50-100 years.
>>
>
> I don't see that.
--well, look at history and you will see it. E.g. in the USA, 2PD
solidified only
after about 80 or 90 years. In Canada and India, it arguably still has not
happened yet.
Plus, you can't have 2PD if nobody knows which are "the two" parties,
and that initially is the case. It only becomes clear because it becomes true
over time, and the two parties have to both become recognized as such,
and to strengthen in terms of wealth, candidates, donors, networks,...
and to evilly corrupt the laws to
try to artificially disfavor rivals, and the rivals have to become
weaker and less-wealthy,
etc etc -- all that usually takes time.
> Definition: "Repugnicrat" -- anyone who supports the Republican Party or
> the DINO Party to the exclusion of independent candidates and to the
> exclusion of "third" parties.
>
> Definition: DINO -- democrat In Name Only. Note that I use a lowercase "d"
> in the word "democrat" in my definition, and that's not just a slip of my
> fingers on the keyboard or the carelessness typical of writers who
> substitute "too" for "to" and *vice versa*; I mean something by writing
--good luck with all that. It doesn't sound like science to me. It
sounds like your
personal ranting about how the USA currently is messed up.
>
>> (c) How can you do that in any manner that is going to convince anybody
>> your
>> results mean anything? I mean, does your computer understand my
>> psychology?
>> (d) So I think the main obstacle is not the lack of a computer simulator.
>>
>> The main obstacle is the lack of a mathematical understanding of, or
>> mathematical
>> model of, psychology -- one supported by enough real-world evidence,
>> that anybody reading your study (whenever you get done creating it)
>> will have confidence in its validity.
>>
>
> I am trying to improve on the current state of the argument, not make it
> perfect. I am not going for real-world evidence. I am going for example
> hypothetical fake elections where one voting system seems to perform better
>
> than another. An accumulation of such examples may be convincing.
--well, I hope you succeed, but I suspect whatever you do it'll be met
with a lot of skepticism.
> The
> current state of the argument is there is a lot of theorizing going on
> without in my opinion sufficient examples to convince.
--but you just said you were going to disdain real-world evidence!
> Of course, when I
> become able to show the examples, they may still not convince and some IRV
> advocates will no doubt charge that the examples don't represent reality,
> as though we who hear their arguments are supposed to believe that there is
>
> some secret factor in the real world that will work to prevent our examples
>
> from coming true. But I do hope to improve the quality of the argument over
>
> where it is now.
>
> For an example of the current state of the argument, I can cite my vague
> belief that if a system has balance, it probably gives everyone equal
> power, or at least that is evidence that it may give them approximately
> equal power, and I can point to the certainty that if a system does *not*