Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!qucis!dalamb
From: dalamb@qucis.queensu.CA (David Lamb)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: STV new group proposal
Message-ID: <344@qusuntrc.queensu.CA>
Date: 22 Nov 89 18:10:07 GMT
References: <2438@stl.stc.co.uk> <2440@stl.stc.co.uk> <29992@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Reply-To: dalamb@qucis.queensu.CA (David Lamb)
Organization: Queen's University, Kingston Ontario
Lines: 27

In article <2440@stl.stc.co.uk> "David Wright" <dww@stl.stc.co.uk> writes:
	[ long description of STV]
In article <29992@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> dave@cogsci.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>
>This system as proposed won't work, ...

It's been a long time since I've looked at Political Economy but...
If I remember correctly, in the 60's an economist named Arrow proved a
theorem that, with a fairly simple and intuitive definition of "fair",
there cannot be any "fair" voting schemes.  Thus there will ALWAYS be
voting anomalies.  You have to decide what kind of anomalies are most
important.

An Australian friend (who used STV at home) said that STV results in
a winner where more people were in favour of the winner than were opposed
to the winner.  That seems like a good characteristic for newsgroup creation
to me.  If you want to vote against a name, you write it last.  If you
want to vote in favour, you write it first.  If you don't care, you write
it in the middle.  If you have choices you rate about equal, you fit them
into a category (early, middle, late) and write them in a random order
(preferably using dice).

David Alex Lamb			ARPA Internet:	David.Lamb@cs.cmu.edu
Department of Computing				dalamb@qucis.queensu.ca
    and Information Science	uucp:   	...!utzoo!utcsri!qucis!dalamb
Queen's University		phone:		(613) 545-6067
Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6