Annual Thanksgiving blog post! This year we give thanks for Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (as frustrating as it may be).
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2022/11/24/thanksgiving-17/
@seanmcarroll I've always wondered how likely these things are to happen.
For instance, with ranked voting systems, you can have that A is ranked ahead of B, and B is ranked ahead of C which is ranked ahead of A. Thus, we have kind of a three way tie. Clearly *any* deterministic way to break this tie will involve a "dictator." It's the same as if you have a perfectly split 50/50 election in FPTP.
Of course, you could flip a coin, but the "unrestricted domain" axiom of Arrow's theorem claims the result must be deterministic.
Anyway, the point is: this is exponentially less likely to happen as the population size increases. So wouldn't there be some "perfect enough" systems which have only a vanishingly small chance of giving any such result?
