Democracy might be mathematically impossible – here’s why. Head to https://brilliant.org/veritasium to start your free 30-day trial and get 20% off an annual premium subscription.
  • davelAEnglish
    172·
    3 months ago

    Our current attempt at democracy—the methods we’re using to elect our leaders—are fundamentally irrational.

    They are rational, and they work as intended, it’s just that they’re not popular democracies, they’re bourgeois democracies, designed by & for the capitalist class, and against the working class. They’re not meant to represent us.

  • _NoName_
    7·
    3 months ago

    Title’s hard click bait. It leads up to talking about Arrow’s Impossibility theorem, which sets forth some explicit rules for defining a fair election, and communicates that all finite-vote systems are dictatorships that fail to meet those criteria, including ranked choice voting. Arrow’s theorem also uses ‘dictatorship’ in a pretty weird technical fashion, meaning that one individual can technically sway any election with their sole choices.

    Directly after, though, Veritasium does acknowledge that Duncan Black pokes holes in the actual value of Arrow’s theorem, by showing that many ordinal voting systems will still favor majority preference, and that Arrow’s theorem does not apply to rated voting systems like approval voting and STAR voting.

    It’s pretty bizarre that he decided to make such a click-baity title and front-load only skim over the better solution at the end, right near election month.

    • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
      3·
      3 months ago

      Derek made a video years several back where he admits that they ran tests on their videos and that using click bait titles made their videos preform far better. So here we are.

      • PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        Thats what happens when you have algorithms promote content based on click-through rate and engagement metrics. Creators have to use click-bait and sensationalism to get their content to spread. Its common knowledge at this point. I can’t think of any sizable creators that don’t use this, and generally the more they abuse it, the larger the channel.