AbouBenAdhem

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.)

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).

The McKelvey–Schofield chaos theorem proves that, if an electorate is presented with a series of proposed policy changes and everyone votes according to their honest preference, the proposals can be fashioned and ordered in such a way that any policy can be made to win—even one that no voter prefers to the starting point.

Many authors stipulate that their books must be sold on Amazon without DRM, so their readers can back up and use their books outside Amazon’s ecosystem. Does preventing users from accessing their files violate any conditions that were implied when people bought and sold books with that feature?

There is one thing I would find genuinely useful that seems within its current capabilities. I’d like to be able to give an AI a summary of my current knowledge on a subject, along with a batch of papers or articles, and have it give me one or more of the following:

• A summary of the papers omitting the stuff I already know

• A summary of any prerequisite background info I don’t already know, but isn’t in the papers

• A summary of all the points on which the papers are in agreement

• A summary of any points where the papers are in contention.

The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin was born into Russian nobility.

Reality itself: “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” —Niels Bohr

I’d think birth control would be cheaper for insurers than covering unplanned pregnancies anyway.

It’s a state-level policy, and there were a few states ahead of the curve.

Historically, all regular voting was done in-person on election day and mail-in ballots were a special exception (e.g., for people with disabilities). It’s only in the last few election cycles that voting by mail became the norm, and most people still use the pre-existing terminology.