full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Alex Gendler: Which voting system is the best?

Unscramble the Blue Letters

It turns out that our iinuttvie concept of fairness actually contains a nbuemr of assumptions that may contradict each other. It doesn’t seem fair for some voters to have more influence than others. But nor does it seem fair to simply ignore minority preferences, or encourage people to game the system. In fact, mathematical proofs have shown that for any election with more than two oniptos, it’s impossible to design a voting system that doesn’t vaiolte at least some tcaietolhlrey desirable criteria. So while we often think of democracy as a simple matter of counting vtoes, it’s also worth considering who benefits from the different ways of counting them.

Open Cloze

It turns out that our _________ concept of fairness actually contains a ______ of assumptions that may contradict each other. It doesn’t seem fair for some voters to have more influence than others. But nor does it seem fair to simply ignore minority preferences, or encourage people to game the system. In fact, mathematical proofs have shown that for any election with more than two _______, it’s impossible to design a voting system that doesn’t _______ at least some _____________ desirable criteria. So while we often think of democracy as a simple matter of counting _____, it’s also worth considering who benefits from the different ways of counting them.

Solution

  1. violate
  2. theoretically
  3. options
  4. votes
  5. intuitive
  6. number

Original Text

It turns out that our intuitive concept of fairness actually contains a number of assumptions that may contradict each other. It doesn’t seem fair for some voters to have more influence than others. But nor does it seem fair to simply ignore minority preferences, or encourage people to game the system. In fact, mathematical proofs have shown that for any election with more than two options, it’s impossible to design a voting system that doesn’t violate at least some theoretically desirable criteria. So while we often think of democracy as a simple matter of counting votes, it’s also worth considering who benefits from the different ways of counting them.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
east base 3
space port 2
base wins 2
north winning 2
south wins 2
condorcet method 2
voting system 2

Important Words

  1. assumptions
  2. benefits
  3. concept
  4. contradict
  5. counting
  6. criteria
  7. democracy
  8. design
  9. desirable
  10. election
  11. encourage
  12. fact
  13. fair
  14. fairness
  15. game
  16. ignore
  17. impossible
  18. influence
  19. intuitive
  20. mathematical
  21. matter
  22. minority
  23. number
  24. options
  25. people
  26. preferences
  27. proofs
  28. shown
  29. simple
  30. simply
  31. system
  32. theoretically
  33. turns
  34. violate
  35. voters
  36. votes
  37. voting
  38. ways
  39. worth