Unvoting

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mathcam
mathcam
Captain Observant
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mathcam
Captain Observant
Captain Observant
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Joined: November 22, 2002

Post Post #34 (isolation #0) » Sat May 21, 2005 4:43 am

Post by mathcam »

Internet Stranger wrote:I would prefer if we get unvotes with names. It helps me know who a person was voting for previously.

Although im guilty myself of the "unvote whoevers" when I forget who I was voting for and I got too lazy to figure it out. A poke with a cattle prod would put me back on order.
This is the most I've ever agreed with IS.

To the critics, let me just say that there is nothing wrong with redundancy in a communication system (like the system of informing everyone who you are voting for). The English language is
filled
with redundancies: punctuation, capitalization, sentence structure (and when speaking, voice inflection, loudness, speed), etc., all of which serve to make English more than a series of words. Is this bad? Absolutely not. It's a way to reduce the possible confusion in the reading of an English sentence. As a mediocre example that I've just come up with, consider the following sentence:

"There is one rose. It's on the table."

One might argue that the capitalization and punctuation were "redundant" here, that it's clear what this sentence means without these redundancies. However, if we drop all of that to be left with

"there is one rose it's on the table"

which admits the alternative parsing

"There is one! Rose, it's on the table!"

So while I ended up railing about grammar for a couple of paragraphs, my point here is that redundancy in a system is not something to eliminate, it's something for which to be thankful. Asking players to unvote by name is only a minor inconvenience for the voter him/herself, but as many people have indicated, is often appreciated by the other players. There's also the positive side effect of forcing players to keep up-to-date on who they're voting for, which is good for many reasons.

Cam

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