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by unfamiliar 728 days ago
Am I missing something or does the article fail to explain the point of Arrow’s Theorem? Is it satisfied for the discrete case, provably impossible, or what?

> While this applies to discrete rankings and voter preferences, one might wonder if it’s a unique property of its discrete nature in how candidates are only ranked by ordering. Unfortunately, a similarly flavored result holds even in the continuous setting! It seems there’s no getting around the fact that voting is pretty hard to get right.

I don’t follow any of this paragraph.

2 comments

I agree, it could do with a little more proofreading. Arrow’s theorem states that no voting state which ranks candidates can satisfy the the given conditions.
Arrows theorem says it is impossible to have a system that always resolves (it is possible to have something work "sometimes" however.

The paragraph you quoted introduce a generalized version, where voters can give continuous scores and have full spectrum of choice.