Talk:Arrow's impossibility theorem
My removal of the electionmethods.org link
In the edit summary, Psephomancy added a link to an archived version of something posted on electionmethods.org:
...with the summary:
- did you just remove it because it's a dead link?
Well, it was mainly that. The author (Russ Paielli) pulled the website down. It seems to me that we're not doing readers of this wiki much of service by offering an unannotated link to an archive of a webpage from 2005.
I agree with much of what that particular web page says. At some point, I'd like to perform a plagiarism-free restatement of some of the important arguments made on that page, rather than redirecting people to an old archived snapshot of a long defunct website. I think there was plenty of discussion about IIAC on the EM list when this page was first published. If I recall correctly, there was an essay or two on the old electionmethods.org that I contributed some prose to, but I can't remember which ones, and it might even be this essay. I'd have to dig up the very old email backups to find what I wrote.
In general, I've always been careful not to dismiss Arrow's result as irrelevant to my preferred method. As we've seen with w:Gibbard's theorem, the core principle of Arrow's theorem (i.e. there is no "perfect" voting system because many important criteria are mutually exclusive) holds true no matter the system. If I recall correctly, some of Russ's restatement of my writing implied I was dismissive of Arrow, and I didn't want to be associated with a dubious effort to declare Arrow's theorem irrelevant.
So thanks for digging up the archive link to that page. A little bit of annotation around that link would be wonderful. Hopefully an active Electowiki editor can perform the plagiarism-free restatement I was hoping for. -- RobLa (talk) 05:04, 8 January 2020 (UTC)