At least half of men don’t wash their hands before leaving a public restroom. Literally everything is covered in dick stuff. Source: 30+ years of using public restrooms as a male.

  • Aatube
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    110 hours ago

    Could you source the “even one that no voter prefers to the starting point” part?

    • @[email protected]
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      49 hours ago

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKelvey–Schofield_chaos_theorem

      There will in most cases be no Condorcet winner and any policy can be enacted through a sequence of votes, regardless of the original policy. This means that adding more policies and changing the order of votes (“agenda manipulation”) can be used to arbitrarily pick the winner.

      The article doesn’t explicitly say that this includes policies not preferred by any single voter, but it’s implied by “any” and “arbitrary” (and can be verified by the original theorems).

      • Aatube
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        29 hours ago

        I’m not too familiar in the field, but doesn’t a policy have to appeal more to a specific base than its appeal to another base to cause a Cordocet tie?

        • @[email protected]
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          38 hours ago

          Yeah, the Condorcet criterion is a lot more restrictive in the space of policies (where you can make incremental changes in any direction) than in elections for a discrete set of candidates. (Which is why they say that in most cases there won’t be one.)

          • Aatube
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            27 hours ago

            Yeah, so in my understanding of that, doesn’t that mean the winning policy has to appeal more to a voter base than one that appeals to another voter base?

            • @[email protected]
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              13 hours ago

              That’s true for any pairwise vote, but not for the entire sequence.

              As in the Condorcet paradox, voter preferences are intransitive: voters preferring A to B and B to C doesn’t imply that voters will prefer A to C. But where the Condorcet paradox shows how this can lead to a cyclical subset of candidates where no candidate can beat all other members of the subset, the chaos theorem shows how this can lead to a series of votes that ends absolutely anywhere.

              • Aatube
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                11 hour ago

                But if it is a paradox, then every proposal that still stands has to have beaten another proposal at least once. Thus I don’t see how it could be one nobody has preferred at the start.

                • @[email protected]
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                  143 minutes ago

                  It’s not like Condorcet’s scenario where every candidate has a pairwise election against every other candidate—it assumes a subversive agenda-setter who presents each new proposal as a yes-or-no alternative to the existing status quo (the previously-accepted proposal). Once a policy is rejected, it isn’t re-introduced.