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0 pointstunesmith6y ago0 comments

Arrow's is one of those theorems that is useful for its own purposes, but completely abused in a pop culture sense. All it proves is that you can't simultaneously meet those particular criteria, but it doesn't establish that those criteria are required in any sense. The IIA criteria is especially problematic.

A lot of vote arguments comes down to a lack of consensus on what we're even trying to solve for. For instance, say that you have a two-candidate race. 50.1% pick A, but their support is lukewarm. 49.9% pick B, but they're extremely passionate. Who should win? We can't really even get a consensus agreement on that question. I think that when it comes to American democracy and one-person-one-vote, the answer should be A, but plenty of others disagree with me.

As for the Perot scenario, you'd need both some form of ranked choice voting (not necessarily IRV), and the elimination of the electoral college. Having RCV with an electoral college doesn't help because if you split the EC, the election still goes to the House.

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slowmovintarget6y ago· 1 in thread

> but they're extremely passionate. Who should win?

Being angry, even in a constructive fashion, shouldn't merit extra consideration. A vote is a signal of magnitude 1. Anything else means a person who is angrier gets more consideration. Now we have a market incentivizing anger, which is not how things are supposed to work.

My opinion: lack of consensus on that is caused by lack of critical thinking.

tunesmithOP6y ago

I agree that moving away from one-person-one-vote creates a market that incentivizes passion, whether angry or not. Even false passion. The people that disagree tend to talk about "greater social utility". I just don't think there's a way to reliably measure degree of passion without falling into self-worth questions. Like, someone wise might want to avoid confrontation, someone idiotic might have a trumped-up sense of self-importance. (No pun intended honestly.) One-person-one-vote is the best way we've come up with to avoid that, treating every voter as having equal worth.

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