on 11-May-2017 (Thu)

On Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump dismissed James Comey from his position as head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Officially, Comey was fired for mishandlingformer presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's alleged misuse of private email servers, but Senate Democrats and the ACLU have raised concerns over whether the real reason may have been that Comey was leading the investigation into the Trump campaign's alleged ties to Russia and possible tampering with the election that placed Trump in high office.

The Senate is barreling toward one of the most highly-charged confirmation battles yet over who will replace axed FBI Director James Comey.

It would be very interesting to apply our framework to Condorcet-based rules.

Plurality score The Plurality score of a candidate c is the number of votes where c is ranked first.

Single transferable vote (STV) STV is a multistage elimination rule that works as follows. In each stage, if there is a candidate c whose Plurality score is at least q = V k+1 +1 (the so-called Droop quota), we do the following: (a) include c in the winning committee, (b) delete q votes where c is ranked first, so that each of these votes is ‘transferred’ to the candidate currently ranked right after c, and (c) remove c from all the remaining votes. If each candidate’s Plurality score is less than q, a candidate with the lowest Plurality score is deleted from all votes. We repeat this process until k candidates are selected. Note that parallel-universes tie-breaking requires us to consider all possible ways to select a candidate among those whose score meets or exceeds the quota, to identify q votes to be deleted among those where this candidate is ranked first (note that this determines the ‘transfers’, i.e., how many extra votes will be gained by each surviving candidate), and to pick a candidate to be eliminated among those with the lowest score; a committee wins under STV if it can be obtained by the procedure described above for some sequence of such choices. There are also many other variants of STV; we point the reader to the work of Tideman and Richardson (2000) for details. In particular, the reader can verify that all results in our paper continue to hold if we require that the number of the ‘extra’ votes of a selected candidate c that are transferred to another candidate a is proportional to the number of votes of the form c a ··· at the respective stage.

Single nontransferable vote (SNTV) SNTV returns k candidates with the highest Plurality scores (thus one can think of SNTV as simply k-Plurality).

Nonimposition For each set of candidates C and each k-element subset W of C, there is an election E = (C, V ) such that R(E, k) ={W }. The next three axioms—consistency, homogeneity, and monotonicity—are adapted from the single-winner setting. For the first two, the adaptation is straightforward. Consistency For every pair of elections E 1 = (C, V 1 ), E 2 = (C, V 2 ) over a candidate set C and each k ∈[ C ],ifR(E 1 , k) ∩ R(E 2 , k) =∅then R(E 1 + E 2 , k) = R(E 1 , k) ∩ R(E 2 , k). Homogeneity For every election E = (C, V ), each k ∈[ C ], and each t ∈ N it holds that R(tE, k) = R(E, k).

Monotonicity For every election E = (C, V ), each c ∈ C, and each k ∈[ C ],if c ∈ W for some W ∈ R(E, k), then for every E obtained from E by shifting c one position forward in some vote v it holds that: (1) for candidate monotonicity: c ∈ W for some W ∈ R(E , k), and (2) for non-crossing monotonicity:ifc was rankedimmediately below some b /∈ W , then W ∈ R(E , k)

Committee monotonicity For every election E = (C, V ) the following conditions hold: (1) for each k ∈[ C −1],ifW ∈ R(E, k) then there exists a W ∈ R(E, k + 1) such that W ⊆ W ; (2) for each k ∈[ C −1],ifW ∈ R(E, k + 1) then there exists a W ∈ R(E, k) such that W ⊆ W

olid coalitions For every election E = (C, V ) and each k ∈[ C ],ifatleast V k voters rank some candidate c first then c belongs to every committee in R(E, k). Consensus committee For every election E = (C, V ) and each k ∈[ C ], if there is a k-element set W , W ⊆ C, such that each voter ranks some member of W first and each member of W is ranked first by either V k or V k voters then R(E, k) ={W }. Unanimity For every election E = (C, V ) and each k ∈[ C ], if each voter ranks the same k candidates W on top (possibly in different order), then R(E, k) ={W } (strong unanimity) or W ∈ R(E, k) (weak unanimity)

Fixed majority For every election E = (C, V ) and each k ∈[ C ],ifthereisa k-element set W , W ⊆ C, such that a strict majority of voters rank all members of W above all non-members of W , then R(E, k) ={W }.

able 1 Summary of results Rule Committee Solid Consensus Unanimity Monotonicity Homogeneity Consistency Monotonicity Coalitions Committee STV × √ ( ) √ ( ) Strong × √ (♥) × SNTV √√√ Weak C+NC √√ Bloc ×××Fix maj. C+NC √√ k-Borda √ ×× Strong C+NC √√ 1 -CC ×× √ Weak C √√ min -CC ×× √ Weak C √ × Greedy-CC √ ×× Weak × √ × 1 -Monroe ×× √ Strong × √ (♣) × min -Monroe ×× √ Strong × √ (♣) × Greedy-Monroe × √√ Strong × √ (♠)

If this seems self-evident, it's actually a very unnatural way to think. Without the right training, most minds take the wrong approach. They prefer to solve problems by asking: Which ideas do I already love and know deeply, and how can I apply them to the situation at hand? Psychologists call this the “Availability Heuristic” and its power is well-documented.

You know the old adage, to the man with only a hammer, everything starts looking a bit like a nail. Such narrow-minded thinking feels entirely natural to us, but it leads to far too many misjudgments. You probably do it every single day without knowing.

It's not you don't have some good ideas in your head. You probably do! No competent adult is a total klutz. It's just that we tend to be very limited in our good ideas, and we over-use them. This makes our good ideas just as dangerous as bad ones!

The great investor and teacher Benjamin Graham explained it best:

You can get in way more trouble with a good idea than a bad idea, because you forget that the good idea has limits.

Smart people like Charlie Munger realize that the antidote to this sort of “mental overreaching” is to add more models to your mental palette; to expand your repertoire of ideas, making them vivid and available in the problem-solving process.

To our knowledge, no studies have been devoted to naqa'id poetry in the Umayyad era in European languages, except for the entry by G.J.H. van Gelder in the Encyclopaedia of Islarn as wellvas the brief, but profound, sub-chapter written by Salma Jayyusi on this issue.

and that some women are closer to our ideal than others. But the problem is that there’s no endpoint. There is no 100% perfect girl out there for you or for any of us, and there never will be. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the unreasonable amount of women I’ve been involved with, it’s that you’re never going to find “the complete package.” It doesn’t exist. The most beautiful girls have annoying ticks, the smartest girls have emotional problems, the sweetest and most caring women have bad personal habits. People are flawed. Accept it. What’s going to determine the success of a relationship is not how good the 85% perfection is, or even how much perfection there is, but it’s in how you deal with the 15% imperfection togethe

ut let’s start with the first one: this idea that there’s a potentially “perfect girl” out there waiting for all of us. This is a common romantic fantasy that’s as old as love stories themselves. But I’ve actually found that men who have a history within the pick up artist movement struggle with this even more than average. In the PUA movement, it’s hammered into our brains that our emotional and romantic lives are quantifiable and skill-based goals that can be measured and achieved. There are “better” and “better” women out there, and striving to attain the closest version of your ideal woman is very much the yardstick of success and improvement. This isn’t to say that there isn’t some truth to the idea that some women are “better” romantic fits for us than others, [emptylink] [emptylink] [emptylink] [emptylink] [emptylink] [emptylink] [emptylink]