MendelSchmiedekamp comments on Arrow's Theorem is a Lie - Less Wrong

27 Post author: alyssavance 24 October 2009 08:46PM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 26 October 2009 06:39:06PM 2 points [-]

I don't see how this can possibly be correct. Suppose we require that no person can give the same score to 2 different options. Your reasoning would indicate that we can then combine these scores in a way that produces a total score for every option that satisfies the four conditions. Conditions 1,2, and 4 are stated in ways that don't depend on whether we use rankings or scores; condition 3 explicitly assumes the use of a score. So if we take the output scores, and list them in order, we get an output ranking, which must still meet those conditions, hence violating Arrow's theorem.

Comment author: MendelSchmiedekamp 26 October 2009 06:43:36PM 2 points [-]

Note, according to the wikipedia article listed, Arrow's theorem is valid "if the decision-making body has at least two members and at least three options to decide among". This makes me suspect the Pareto-efficiency counter-example as this assumes we have only 2 options.

Comment author: alyssavance 26 October 2009 08:08:13PM *  0 points [-]

It doesn't matter if there are ten thousand other options. If you sum numbers A-1 through A-N, and you sum numbers B-1 through B-N, and A-X > B-X for all X, then A must be larger than B; it doesn't matter how many alternatives there are.

Comment author: MendelSchmiedekamp 27 October 2009 02:54:14PM 3 points [-]

Fair enough. Although in considering the implications of more than two options for the other conditions, I noticed something else worrisome.

The solution you present weakens a social welfare function, after all if I have two voters, and they vote (10,0,5) and (0,10,5) the result is an ambiguous ordering, not a strict ordering as required by Arrow's theorem (which is really a property of very particular endomorphisms on permutation groups).

It seems like a classic algorithmic sacrifice of completeness for power. Was that your intent?