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benkuhn comments on Democracy and rationality - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: homunq 30 October 2013 12:07PM

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Comment author: benkuhn 31 October 2013 03:11:50AM *  8 points [-]

Funnily enough, I asked Amartya Sen and Eric Maskin about this earlier today, in addition to a similarly extensive reading list. You definitely have your quantifiers backwards.

You claim that Arrow's dictatorship criterion is "for all preferences, there exists some k such that the social preference is voter k's preference". In fact, the criterion is the stronger statement that "there exists some k such that for all preferences, the social preference is voter k's preference".

If you read the proof on Wikipedia carefully, you'll notice that it proves that:

Pivotal Voter dictates society's decision for B over C. That is, we show that no matter how the rest of society votes, if Pivotal Voter ranks B over C, then that is the societal outcome.

(Note the order of the quantifiers). They then show

There can be at most one dictator.

Comment author: satt 31 October 2013 03:35:32AM 0 points [-]

Funnily enough, I asked Amartya Sen and Eric Maskin about this earlier today,

I'm hella envious.

And also convinced. If Sen says Arrow meant non-dictatorship in the strong sense, I'm pretty much willing to take Sen's word for it.