mirage

So what? So were the canals of Mars, ghosts, miracles and the Evil conspiracy of the Jews. Your criterion for "a thing" is "derived from observation"? Whose observation? How derived? Why can't you observe France? It's pretty bloody obvious. You clearly concede that you can observe the species black-backed gull. I can possibly observe a black backed gull, but I have to confess I have never seen the species "black-backed gull". No sign of coherence from you yet.

This is your fundamental misunderstanding - it's about power. Think about the sheer incoherence of "having" power arranged one way or the other. It is power that does the arranging. Who gets to have the power to arrange it? You set up an infinite regress riddled silliness. You seem to assert that coercion will virtually cease to exist in a free market system that you envisage. Why should it? What evidence do you have that it would? The bottom line is that people who worry about how power should be distributed haven't thought well enough about power. The game is to use any power that exists to further your goals. If your goals are the kind of free-market utopia that you describe then you need to drive that through with power (and I'm using a very broad definition that includes the power to make argument). Either that or it would have happened anyway. By definition. And once you have established that state, you must have established a balance of power amongst all the actors that favours its continuance. You seem to simply assume that this will exist without explaining why, for the first time in history, it would.

Yes. And/or, depriving others of better offers by use of coercion. And/or obtaining the resources to offer this stuff by coercion. To think you call others niave!

Yes, that immediately struck me about....this poster, years ago. Along with many other adolescent male amateur "philosophers" before and since! Although, to be fair he has a different take on life to Raynd. It's the bludgeoning insistence on his "facts" and logic that it reminds me of. The schoolboy "objectivist" epistemology.

No you're not; this is a total misapprehension. The very advantages of online business mean it is nothing like real estate. None of the factors that make Oxford street more valuable than Balham High Street applies to a website. If you have 100 million users viewing a blank page today, then tomorrow you have precisely ****** all.

Sarcasm, surely? Or are you still waiting for Pets.com to come good?

This still holds up. AV wouldn't (as I now understand it) reduce "wastage" of votes. If you vote for someone unlikely to win at any determining round of the counting, then your vote is wasted in the same sense as it would have been under FPTP.

The result as determined by second preferences (for example) under AV is dependent on order of elimination of candidates and the second preference votes of those that voted 1st for the eliminated candidates. Obviously. Now I may well have misunderstood things, but I'm neither innumerate, thick nor dishonest and I take objection to you suggesting otherwise. Man up and explain if I'm wrong. Oh I forgot they have to have >50% to win, I get it. So in any race that remains close, all the other parties will get second votes counted. Nevermind then, innumerate it was.

One pro-AV criticism of FPTP is that votes for candidates with little chance of winning are "wasted". Yet under your definition here of "counting" they are "still being counted" "to the scores". Advise you sort out your point you are trying to make.

I think I might vote Yes, just in the hope it will piss off people. And because a change is more interesting than the status quo.

You certainly can't touch any paper, since you don't get any.

Bullionvault doesn't give you any paper.

This seems to have been massively over-interpreted all over the internet (and probably social sciences). Firstly, Arrow's theorem only applies to voting systems where each voter must produce a full ordering of candidates and that then produce a full ordering of societal preference, and must do so for every possible permutation of votes. So lots of wiggle room in terms of alternative systems there. Secondly, a dictator need not be an individual who "always" (in the sense of any election, no matter what the other votes are) determines the outcome. It only comes into play where there are conflicts in preference unresolved by the count (whatever the method being used). In fact, a dictator may not exist in any given election. Their occurrence in any on election may even be highly unlikely. Arrow merely shows that if you want a set of deterministic rules that produce a societal ordering from the individual voters' orderings then for some voting outcomes the result will have to hinge on one vote that tips the balance, and that vote will have to be chosen arbitrarily. Since it only considers deterministic systems, the other criteria (which require consistency between different runs) demand that this voter must also determine outcomes for other permutations of votes that don't otherwise produce clear winning orders. Of course, in real life this is also not necessary, since you can just have a random vote count and you would never know who the dictator was going to be. Of particular note, Arrows theorem does not apply to the proposed system of AV, which doesn't seek to take all voters preference pairs into account and doesn't seek to produce a full societal ordering of candidates (merely one winner).

You may very well be right there. Still don't understand how that can't be satisfied though. I'll read up and get back...

False. Voting tactically will still be the optimal strategy for influencing the outcome under AV. And because of this, you are also wrong about it being simple. In fact, it is subtle enough that when thinking about it you missed the tactical considerations entirely!

I don't understand how this is a fallacy. If that Raving Loony voter's second preference swings the election, then the second preferences of the other voters are not even examined. The result can be, in other words, determined by the order of second vote counting, and that order favours the nutters/tactical voters for fringe parties. Now, this is a fallacy. A majority of any preference votes, you mean. Any of the candidates could have such a majority. Which of them wins under AV is determined by the preferences of only those alternative preferences that are actually counted. And that is determined by who loses earlier rounds first. False. C can produce your "absolute majority" for A. Or D could produce it for B. Which of them actually does it depends on who does worse in the first round. I've just thought of a much better system. All the second votes are counted for each voter. The winner is the first to assemble 50% of the vote with the second (etc) preferences counted from randomly selected votes from the 1st preference voters of all the other candidates. This means that each person's second choice is equally weighted (whilst not being as heavily weighted (depending on the precise circumstances) as first preference votes).

I agree, with the proviso that they can't even express their real preferences first. They may make that mistake at first, but a sophisticated electorate (snort!) will eventually work out that since the only alternative preferences counted are much more likely to be the ones of the minor parties, they had better vote a minor party if they want them counted. Otherwise vote for a real contender first, just like under the current system. Tactical voting will still exist for second and third preferences. It will also exist for first preferences, since there is no point voting for a third placer first if the election may be decided by all the minor parties second preferences before yours is counted. More complicated, I admit, but tactical voting will always be the way to maximise individual voter power in either system.

Yes, but the main problem with Arrows criteria is the no one voter "deciding" the outcome. That is a stupid criterion. There is nothing wrong with an election hanging on one vote, so long as that vote is not identified ahead of time and therefore subject to bribing. I'm not convinced by AV. Initially I had thought it might be fun to have the politicians running around on less familiar ground, in addition to which the "NotoAV" campaign seems to be written and run by 5 year olds. However, I don't like the principle that the potentially deciding second and third round votes are the votes of the fringe party nutters, whilst the second and third preferences of the second and third ranking parties are much less likely to count. A fairer, though more complicated system would be to have a everyones second and third preferences count, i.e. multiple rounds of transferable votes. If you don't do this you give the voters who prefer the least popular candidates disproportionate voting power. Contrary to the Yes campaigns claims this will do nothing to halt tactical voting, merely transfering the process to second and third order calculations. For example, if I know that my 3rd polling party has little chance of winning, I may still decide to rank the 2nd polling party 1st. Alternatively, I may decide to vote for an obscure party, guessing that this will be knocked out and my second preference vote counted. This may actually bias first votes towards obscure parties and away from second and third rankers, though in an unpredicable way. I'm not entirely convinced this is an improvement. If you are going to vote for a tiny party and still get a vote "counted" under AV, then what is stopping you just tactically voting under the existing system. Your vote will count in just the same way.

Lame-brained logic as usual, of course. A necessary consequence of the increased risk that Injin is wittering about is reduced risk-adjusted returns (otherwise there isn't really any increased risk.) In other words he is saying that the high returns are just a compensation for higher risk. Given that returns are historically high for these executives, and the risk is zero (of convictions, according to Injin, down to these people's sheer talent apparently ) then the risk adjusted returns are actually through the roof. So once again we may proceed to the logical conclusion: Injin is a moron.

I was about to launch into some obvious criticisms of two factor theory as presented in that article but I see they have already been made: It's pretty obvious that satisfaction and dissatisfaction don't exist on separate scales. If he wanted separate scales he should perhaps have come up with words that weren't direct antonyms. It's also pretty obvious that you can't rely on simply asking people about particularly satisfying or dissatisfying times in their job and what they think led to those feelings. Why should we expect these outlying incidents to accurately reflect their general experience of the job? Indeed, is there any evidence that people are particularly good at identifying why they feel dissatisfied or satisfied?

This is absolutely right, there are no countervailing factors in play whatsoever I think. This is how we can know that all dirt is spread/invented by professional cleaners. ALL of it, not just some. Pretty compelling logic for a moron.

Yes, surgeon and GP - the two types of doctor!

Logic fail. That's pretty weak even for you, Injers.