Democracy might be mathematically impossible – here’s why. Head to https://brilliant.org/veritasium to start your free 30-day trial and get 20% off an annual premium subscription.
    • tripartitegraph [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      24·
      2 months ago

      I’m gonna assume it’s about Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, which is about social game-theory, sort of. There are some weird paradoxes when you get into the mathematics of voting systems. Arrow’s Theorem makes a few reasonable assumptions about a ranked-choice voting system, and shows that a third candidate will always spoil the results between the other two. In other words, adding in Jill Stein would change how Kamala and Trump are ranked in relation to each other (in a ranked-choice voting system).

      • The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        21·
        2 months ago

        Probably one of the top ten misused bits of math in the world. It relies on some questionable assumptions about voting behavior, several voting systems do not apply, and even if this was 100% true, getting to 99.99% confidence accuracy in your voting system would still be possible. None of that is mentioned in any of the pop science clickbait videos about it however.

        • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          11·
          2 months ago

          it astounds me how many people will base their lives around math and not realize that the point of basing your life around math is to allow yourself and others to actually utilize math and not to jack off endlessly about weird shit

        • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          8·
          2 months ago

          If the issue is about people having high voter prediction accuracy, which leads to them voting differently, than you could just ban using machine learning dark magic or publicly distributing the results of calculations when it comes to elections

      • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        10·
        2 months ago

        adding in Jill Stein would change how Kamala and Trump are ranked in relation to each other (in a ranked-choice voting system)

        But how does this make democracy “impossible”? As far as I can tell this would be a good thing IRL. Republicans would become powerless if someone installed an actual ranked vote electoral process overnight, because Democrats would suddenly get a significant flood of second or third place voters for them and general voter disillusionment would plummet. This would inevitably result in the Democrats becoming irrelevant too, because they need the big scary Republican threat to get any votes.

        So democracy only seems “impossible” if you want to literally blackmail your voter base. Otherwise what kind of bullshit math wizardry are they pulling out of their ass to argue that the exact ranking of each individual candidate is what makes something “more democratic” rather than whether a system produces what’s wanted by popular demand?

        • Hexboare [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          2 months ago

          bullshit math wizardry are they pulling out of their ass to argue that the exact ranking of each individual candidate

          If you’re voting in an election with ten candidates, but you only like two of them and equally despise the other eight, the “maths impossibility” arises because you’ll have to put a candidate you hate third

          • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            6·
            2 months ago

            Couldn’t you just not write a third? This makes no sense to me unless you strictly enforce having a third choice being necessary, which seems random and needless. If someone can just not have a third candidate, or not have a second candidate, I see no reason why that would negatively affect the system. Their vote is just lost if neither of their candidates win with their votes, same as if they didn’t go to vote in the first place.

            • Hexboare [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              4·
              2 months ago

              Yes, in Australian Senate elections you only need to rank at least 6 parties above the line or at least 12 individual candidates below the line on the long ballot paper

              In practice you might rank all ~100 candidates to try and avoid a couple candidates you hate the most

        • tripartitegraph [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          I mean, you’re making a political argument, and one I don’t disagree with. But the point of the theorem is about an idealized voting mechanism, absent ideology. There’s absolutely arguments to be made about the usefulness of studying things like pure math, and I’m sympathetic to some of them, but even so, I think it’s important to know how the system we use to implement democracy actually functions.
          I think also the title is just pure clickbait, never take a youtuber at their word.

    • AstroStelar [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      Ranked-choice voting probably wouldn’t do much. Australia has ranked-choice voting, and their political landscape isn’t much different from the UK or Canada, with two status quo parties dominating everything (Labour and Liberal+National), only now you have smaller parties and independents they have to deal with sometimes.

      Maybe that’s because it still has single-member constituencies, which really hurt electoral diversity. The House uses single-member constituencies, and only 12 percent of seats belong to third parties. Meanwhile the Australian Senate also uses ranked-choice voting, but with the nationwide vote share for seat allocation , and there third parties have 30% of seats, with mainly the Green Party benefitting.

    • lil_tank [any, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Isn’t it because ranked choice is less accurate than individual notation? Like, with ranked you have to pick a first one while if you go even further you can give the possibility to rate everyone 0 and have the election restarted with a new roster if nobody has the average score