A fascinating result. I am interested in understanding how this can apply to decisions about consuming news.
Given some objective, like "stay informed" or "make the best possible choice when I vote", and given certain problems like "news is corrupted by advertising" or "news is dumbed down", is it at all plausible to achieve any of those goals in 1 hour of news consumption each day?
A naive application of this theorem suggests not... "none, anyway, that satisfy certain apparently quite reasonable assumptions concerning the autonomy of the people and the rationality of their preferences."
In other words, might it be the case that there is little intrinsic value in consuming the news piecemeal, in the way that most of us do?
It just means that those "apparently quite reasonable assumptions" weren't reasonable after all and must be relaxed a bit according to a precise definition.
You just took a mathematical theorem and went into a completely unrelated tangent. It's as if someone says there's no point in keeping development schedule because temporal order is relative to the observer.
"Say there are some alternatives to choose among. They could be policies, public projects, candidates in an election, distributions of income and labour requirements among the members of a society, or just about anything else. There are some people whose preferences will inform this choice, and the question is: which procedures are there for deriving, from what is known or can be found out about their preferences, a collective or “social” ordering of the alternatives from better to worse?"
I'm not sure you can expand the theorem to deal with that issue. Arrow's theorem essentially says even if you as an individual or society as a whole had perfect news sources, there is no voting method (edit: no ordinal voting method), or method of choice (other than dictatorship, which is bad for obvious reasons), which can accurately register preferences. All voting systems fail at some point, though some are better than others.
To be cynical, in the context of voting, consume news however you want to because to some extent it doesn't matter.
Comments
A fascinating result. I am interested in understanding how this can apply to decisions about consuming news.
Given some objective, like "stay informed" or "make the best possible choice when I vote", and given certain problems like "news is corrupted by advertising" or "news is dumbed down", is it at all plausible to achieve any of those goals in 1 hour of news consumption each day?
A naive application of this theorem suggests not... "none, anyway, that satisfy certain apparently quite reasonable assumptions concerning the autonomy of the people and the rationality of their preferences."
In other words, might it be the case that there is little intrinsic value in consuming the news piecemeal, in the way that most of us do?
NOPE.
It just means that those "apparently quite reasonable assumptions" weren't reasonable after all and must be relaxed a bit according to a precise definition.
You just took a mathematical theorem and went into a completely unrelated tangent. It's as if someone says there's no point in keeping development schedule because temporal order is relative to the observer.
Please don't do that.
"Say there are some alternatives to choose among. They could be policies, public projects, candidates in an election, distributions of income and labour requirements among the members of a society, or just about anything else. There are some people whose preferences will inform this choice, and the question is: which procedures are there for deriving, from what is known or can be found out about their preferences, a collective or “social” ordering of the alternatives from better to worse?"
Keep reading. This one is more than just math.
I'm not sure you can expand the theorem to deal with that issue. Arrow's theorem essentially says even if you as an individual or society as a whole had perfect news sources, there is no voting method (edit: no ordinal voting method), or method of choice (other than dictatorship, which is bad for obvious reasons), which can accurately register preferences. All voting systems fail at some point, though some are better than others.
To be cynical, in the context of voting, consume news however you want to because to some extent it doesn't matter.