User talk:Theorist2

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Hello, Theorist2, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! Aboutmovies (talk) 15:57, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Range voting, et al.

btw... whereas you notice that scores have more information than ranks, you might be interested in Warren's computer-simulated voting research. He takes psuedo-random score votes and translates them into all the other popular voting mechanisms; comparing the "avoidable social utility loss" introduced per-voting-system, and comparing with various strategies per-voting-method. Google "Bayesian Regret", or see the result graph if you're interested. It is on the same site as the other range-voting stuff from this professor. --Osndok (talk) 16:39, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. I want to be as unbiased as possible. So I might someday investigate Range voting seriously.

The day may soon come when professionals like political scientists and social choice theorists pay more serious attention to Range voting. This is because professionals such as Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki are also beginning to propose non-preference based methods in academic journals [1].

I do not know if he is intentional or ignorant, but if Warren Smith becomes more academically sincere, then professionals will begin to listen to him. For the moment, as soon as professionals read the statements like "Range voting satisfies all three criteria, accomplishing the "impossible"! Huh?", they would simply stop reading what he writes, believing it is nonsense. Isn't that a sad situation? I hope my revision of Arrow's theorem, which treats Rv fairly, will help change this sad situation.

By the way, we do make a lot of decisions (like choosing someone to be sent abroad) by Range voting at my institution. My own experience of Range voting has not been very positive. Often the result is determined by votes of only a few voters who vote strategically (using the highest and lowest scores). It is just personal, but that's one reason that I cannot be very optimistic about Rv.--Theorist2 (talk) 14:29, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry to hear that you've had such a disfavorable experience with range voting. It is hard for me to understand an objection to using the highest & lowest scores (isn't that just normalized-range?), particularly as every voter has precisely the same theoretical effect. Nevertheless, that is a major complaint with range voting... that in practice it might reduce to approval voting. --Osndok (talk) 21:03, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

The problem is that it does not reduce to approval voting, since some do not vote strategically. Maybe they believe giving a "correct score" to each candidate is important, even when the final result is to choose the candidate or not. I guess Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki's method above is based on that view. In their method, the scores have meaning, and strategic effects are reduced by taking the median of the scores instead of the mean.--Theorist2 (talk) 22:08, 25 October 2010 (UTC)