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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups,comp.groupware
Subject: Re: Reform Trial.* (was: Trial flawed)
Message-ID: <21558:Jun1204:22:5091@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 12 Jun 91 04:22:50 GMT
References: <1991Jun3.183039.12660@gorm.ruc.dk> <1991Jun04.013913.4916@looking.on.ca> <1991Jun4.170128.26382@gorm.ruc.dk>
Organization: IR
Lines: 31

In article <1991Jun4.170128.26382@gorm.ruc.dk> david@gorm.ruc.dk (David Stodolsky) writes:
> >b) STV, while intellectually an interesting system, confuses a remarkable
> >number of people.  Even the reasonably educated Hugo awards constituency
> If people can not stack up the names in their preferred order they should
> let their betters select the name.

Whose leg are you trying to pull?

If you give me a group name I'll give it a rating---a number between -10
and +10, for instance, with -10 meaning I completely disapprove, +10
meaning I completely approve, and 0 meaning I don't care. If you give me
a whole bunch of group names I'll give each one a rating. That's easy.

STV with, say, five choices is like saying that I have to assign ratings
of +10, +5, 0, -5, and -10. What if I approve equally of two different
names? STV simply cannot handle this. What if I can't stand any of the
names? I want to give them each a -10, but STV makes me pretend that I
can put them on a scale from best to worst. What if I want to express
subtler levels of approval than the clumsy gradations provided by STV?
There's absolutely no way.

STV is, I agree, intellectually interesting. It is also theoretically
flawed and practically unusable. You want to measure which name people
approve of the most? Fine. Give each person a list of all the names.
Set up a scale: Y/-/N, +10 to -10, whatever. Add up the ratings that
people give. The end result is, by definition, the total voter approval
for each name. There's no STV rules to worry about, no interpretations
to argue about, no ambiguity in the results. That's approval voting. It
works.

---Dan