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
- violate
- theoretically
- options
- votes
- intuitive
- 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 |
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space port |
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base wins |
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north winning |
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south wins |
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condorcet method |
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voting system |
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Important Words
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- benefits
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- counting
- criteria
- democracy
- design
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- election
- encourage
- fact
- fair
- fairness
- game
- ignore
- impossible
- influence
- intuitive
- mathematical
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- minority
- number
- options
- people
- preferences
- proofs
- shown
- simple
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- system
- theoretically
- turns
- violate
- voters
- votes
- voting
- ways
- worth