Technologos 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: 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?