Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!rice!brazos.rice.edu!bbc From: bbc@eunomia.rice.edu (Benjamin Chase) Newsgroups: news.groups Subject: Re: Proposal for changes to the newsgroup creation guidlines. Summary: explanation of "none of the below", admission of stupidity Message-ID: Date: 20 Oct 89 21:04:47 GMT References: <14718.2538b6f4@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <14980.253c557f@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <15094@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <15235.253ef5a7@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> Sender: root@rice.edu Reply-To: Benjamin Chase Distribution: na Organization: CPRC, Rice University Lines: 51 In-reply-to: sloane@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu's message of 20 Oct 89 15:38:31 GMT sloane@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes: >In article , > bbc@titan.rice.edu (Benjamin Chase) writes: >>[Excelent example of how STV works deleted...] >I will say this again, because it doens't seem to be getting across. PEOPLE >DON'T HAVE TO USE * OR ANYTHING ELSE!!!! They can send any anything that they >think the vote counter will understand. Oww! Stop shouting, you're hurting my eyes! You've pounded it into my thick skull, ok? A thousand pardons for forgetting that the voters use whatever they want, and you translate it into your representation. But, I think Greg Woods has got your number, in his article titled "These new voting schemes" <4771@ncar.ucar.edu>. Votes in plain English may sometimes be ambiguous, and you require us to trust the vote taker to translate them faithfully. Also, it is difficult to verify the results of votes conducted under your scheme. >Thanks for taking the time to explain. I think I understand it now. >I still don't quite understand "none of the below." Is it some sort of NO >vote? Yes. I added it to the simpler form of preferential voting. Without a name like "none of the below" on the ballot, there is no good way for a voter to say "whoa, I really don't like any of the rest of these names." In its simple form, preferential voting _will_ select a candidate as the winner. Clearly, this is not what we want for newsgroup selections. The best way to understand "none of the below" is to look at it from the voter's point of view. I designed it to make sense from that point of view, not from the vote taker's. I think most of your difficulties in understanding my scheme have been caused by looking at it as a vote taker. The voter places at the top of her list the candidate she wants most. She puts her second choice second, indicating that if her first choice can't win, that she would like to cast her vote for her second choice, and so on. At some point, her next choice of a candidate, is "none of the below". I suppose we could also call this choice "I prefer having no group to having a group named any of the following:", if that would improve her understanding any. > I assume the voters are smarter than [to use wildcards without realizing > that they might be voting for write-ins]. This, in my opinion, is a bad assumption. -- Ben Chase , Rice University, Houston, Texas (First one up against the wall when the fish police arrived.)