Why Democracy Is Mathematically Impossible

DeepThought42 , 2 hours ago

This is a Veritasium video. Despite the clicky-baity title it’s not an indictment of democracy. He’s just talking about the mathematical problems inherent in different voting systems. YT Link here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk

JayDee , 3 hours ago

Title’s hard click bait. It leads up to talking about Arrow’s Impossibility theorem, which sets forth some explicit rules for defining a fair election, and communicates that all finite-vote systems are dictatorships that fail to meet those criteria, including ranked choice voting. Arrow’s theorem also uses ‘dictatorship’ in a pretty weird technical fashion, meaning that one individual can technically sway any election with their sole choices.

Directly after, though, Veritasium does acknowledge that Duncan Black pokes holes in the actual value of Arrow’s theorem, by showing that many ordinal voting systems will still favor majority preference, and that Arrow’s theorem does not apply to rated voting systems like approval voting and STAR voting.

It’s pretty bizarre that he decided to make such a click-baity title and front-load only skim over the better solution at the end, right near election month.

davel , 4 hours ago

Our current attempt at democracy—the methods we’re using to elect our leaders—are fundamentally irrational.

They are rational, and they work as intended, it’s just that they’re not popular democracies, they’re https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/bourgeois-democracy-what-do-marxists-mean-by-this-term, designed by & for the capitalist class, and against the working class. They’re not meant to represent us.