logicchop

Not to defend the judge in that case in any way, but there is a question about whether/when it is OK or even desirable for judges to intervene "indirectly" with their power. For example (just an example, not suggesting this is how it was), suppose in the case you mention that the mother was suspected of being abusive or negligent, but that a prosecutable case couldn't be made for that, and that the traffic tickets were used merely as a guise for the sentencing. If that were the case, I don't think judges actions would seem quite so harsh, and might even seem appropriate (it doesn't require a massive stretch of the imagination to think of a case where this is true).

And no matter the reasoning (or lack of it), the fallout of this (where the kids are harmed/molested in foster care) is hard to attribute to the judge. If the mother had been a serious threat to the children and the judge had sentenced her based on truly unquestionable reasons, they still might have met the same fate in foster care. As part of the legal system, the judge basically has to have complete confidence in the integrity of the foster care system (and it isn't his job to ensure that integrity).

I used to work on lower level stuff a place with a large C++ codebase designed by a bunch of C guys. We had tight memory requirements, so a custom operator new (not nothrow) was supplied; but exceptions were also disabled, so the supplier of operator new couldn't throw in their implementation.

So that's how it was, and the code base was littered with lots of little checks on what new expressions were returning, things like:

  int *p = new int[1024];
  if (!p) return SOME_ERROR;
  doSomething(*p);

Of course, the C++ standard says that operator new will never return null (it's supposed to throw if it fails). So the compiler sees this code and says "hey, that if (!p) check isn't necessary.." and so none of those little checks gets emitted. Sure enough, it happens that the operator new returns null now and then because everyone is on a tight memory budget, but instead of catching it and returning an error, the code just goes on to crash.

> although they are caught at run time, not compile time

Not if the compiler got to it first. If the compiler does what Chen points out it can do, you won't be indexing anything at run time.

It's not clear what you mean or are complaining about. Feel free to provide your own example. Just come up with two empirical claims (A and B) such that you think A contradicts B. It should then be relatively easy to come up with a C that, if C were true, A would no longer contradict B. It's obvious once you start laying things out carefully.

It's easy to go read Popper. Look for his discussions of Adler.

Popper heavily criticizes the value of explanation. He gives examples of really great "explanations" that have almost zero empirical value (things like psychoanalysis). Hard to see how it could be a "straw man."

The response (from Duhem, Quine and others) is this: Suppose you think A contradicts B. You would surely admit that, there is likely some other C that, if C were true, A wouldn't contradict B. But if that's the "logic" of science then it isn't straightforward deduction.

If you want an example, consider an ordinary empirical observation. Someone claims the ball is red; you look and you see green. Classic contradiction, right? Except if lighting conditions are wrong, or there is a pane of colored glass between you, or.. The point is that there are additional claims that, if they were true, would remove the "contradicts" relation between the two original claims. But ordinary logical relationships shouldn't work like that.

Yes, we know that preference involves more than ordering and that "strengths" are relevant to decision making. We know this because it explains an obvious empirical matter, that there are scenarios like the one you cite where we prefer X over Y, but end up choosing Y over X. Not a puzzle; not a paradox; how it is. And of course the way we tease out the "strength" of your preference involves, e.g., looking at how your choice varies between counterfactual scenarios involving different probabilities.

But the question is whether a "score" given by a voter on a ballot indicates anything psychologically interesting, and, more importantly, whether it indicates anything relevant to the "judicious" selection of a candidate. It seems to me that, empirically, the only meaning we can _seriously_ assign to a "score" on a ballot is a relative-scoring-as-indicative-of-relative-preference. I don't know how "10 to A, 20 to B" could indicate anything beyond the simple fact that the voter prefers B to A. And surely my "10 to A, 20 to B" needn't have the same meaning as your "10 to A, 20 to B" -- I think all we can really say is that we both prefer B to A. What else?

Now, you might want to try to interpret these "scores" as something like a hypothetical question put to the voter about how much they might pay to have this-or-that person elected; but if you know anything about self-reports of this kind about hypothetical scenarios, you know that people are horribly inaccurate (either intentionally or not), and that the setup is contrived. Serious measures of preferences involve actual stakes, markets, etc. Good luck with that here.

I think you are a bit confused. What would Arrow's theorem explain? There is no empirical phenomena that we are puzzled about that Arrow's theorem solves (unless you are wondering: Why is it so hard to come up with a voting system that doesn't have the potential for goof-ball results? - Answer, because it is impossible..)

I don't know what you mean by the "trinity" in which "satisfaction of all pre-existing preference" is a part.. That's obviously not relevant; we aren't interested in a system that satisfies preferences. What we are interested in is a system that (1) isn't a dictatorship, (2) is fair [i.e., everyone counts equally], (3) allows us to decide any kind of potential matter _as a group_.

If you look at the conditions this way it should be glaringly obvious what this has to do with the (possibility) of democracy..

indifferent rankings already indicate ties, and what does a 'strong preference' value amount to here? I'd suggest that it only makes sense if you try to understand the "score" as being a relative ranking of N imaginary alternative candidates in addition to the actual candidates.. So a 1 to A and 99 to B only indicates 'strength' in that it suggests if there were 96 other candidates you'd put them above A and below B.. but now we are back to orderings over candidates. At any rate, you ought to be suspicious of quantitative assignments of preference..

I recall that Bordes and Tideman were a good source on this issue; I believe the (relevant) paper is "Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives in the Theory of Voting." -- The upshot is that the condition known as IIA (I think it is sometimes known as Sen's condition-alpha, and the condition that many people harp on, including Michael Dummett) is in fact a stronger condition than is needed for the result; roughly, that instead of needed a condition about consistency among selections over possible ballots (like: if y were selected in ballot [xyz], y should be selected among yz on ballot [yz]..) we simply need a requirement that the selection only involves information on the ballots (and that the relative rankings of candidates not on the ballot are irrelevant to the selection).

(1) Not quite. The "deliberative democracy" camp is not interested in the measurement of group preference, and are instead interested in consensus building, political "rationality" (in hopefully some eventually-stabilizing sense), and so on. That is not a response to Arrow and his associates, it is just a different topic.

(2) It is abundantly clear why a "procedure" should satisfy all of the requirements of the related theorems: they are trivial, intuitive, and absolutely spot-on. There is a reason why these results are surprising, and not just some arbitrary theorems concerning uninteresting axioms.

(3) Arrow's theorem has nothing to do with explaining anything. It is an impossibility result in mathematics.

The rest of your post seems just dismissive of the problem, rather than directly critical of it. ("All in all.." -- as if these results were just passing fads and now we've got our sense back??)

The "worry" is not that this-or-that fantastical scenario might play out. It is that, as it turns out, the very mechanisms we use to measure group preferences simply cannot satisfy a list of very basic requirements. For example, the reason we do not use random drawings to determine who gets elected president is that we want the choice to "reflect" our preferences on the whole: but the result shows that this kind of "reflection" is probably not possible, and is always distorted in some fashion by the very procedures we adopt to make these decisions.

Here's the version of the story with respect to voting: Democracy requires voting. Voting involves an objective measurement of group preference with respect to choices. Arrow's theorem and related theorems (see Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem) show that there is no way to objectively measure group preferences.

In the context of voting, all IIA represents is the requirement that we only take into account the information on the ballots..

I don't follow this "loophole" you mention. Afaik there are proofs of Gibbard-Satterthwaite that allow indifference in the rankings, and this "distinction" between rankings and scores is methodologically dubious: Arrow himself was sensitive about the meaningfulness of quantitative reports of preference, and I don't see any reason to believe that a "score" issued by a voter is any better or more meaningful than a simple ranking (including rankings of indifference). This approach has always struck me as an unmotivated anti-empirical gimmick to get around this-or-that condition in the theorem(s).

Morgenbesser is always great, but a defense against criticisms of IIA is much simpler to mount in the context of voting: it simply amounts to the requirement that our voting procedure only takes into account information from the ballots.

This just rehashes an old (and fallacious) argument under the guise of neuroscience. Bobert Blatchford tried to push the same view 100 years ago (see his article "Defense of the Bottom Dog"). He didn't convince many, though. There are some puzzles about the concept of "deserved punishment" (what do we say in cases of brain tumors?? omg!), but it isn't clear that we can reconceive of criminal justice on the model of putting someone in quarantine (where we don't blame them, but force them into a room for public safety; we also give them goodies to compensate for how we treat them..)

I teach philosophy at a university. Whenever we discuss basic issues about the mind, my computer science students are always dismissive about any and all positions that don't simply say "the brain is a computer, the mind is software." It turns out that this is a pretty naive and simplistic way of thinking about the issue; but that's the "easy" way for them to frame the problem, and they often think that, because computer science is difficult subject, this response must be pretty good.

Many of the "geeks" I know like to talk about quarks, politics, theory of mind, nature of reality, etc, but few (none) really take those issues seriously, as worthy of inquiry, and most are content with letting Wikipedia supply their information and settle their disputes. Keep in mind that "anti-intellectualism" doesn't necessarily mean disinterested in intellectual topics; many anti-intellectuals are very interested in intellectual topics (consider Palin's ramblings about economics). Instead, it usually means not taking those topics seriously: not bothering to understand what's at stake, not bothering to understand what motivates the issue, and so on.

Even if this is a necessary condition for a perfect voting system, it doesn't change the underlying problem. Even if everyone voted, you wouldn't consider it a system that "truly reflected the will of the people" unless that voting system satisfied a few basic principles, like you can vote for anyone you want, there's no dictator, only information on the ballots is taken into account, etc. But those principles are Arrow's, and Arrow shows that there can't be a voting system that satisfies them. So there can't be a perfect system at all. What's the point then in making everyone vote?

This isn't a different voting system; it's only a special case of the current system. Keep in mind, in your system it's got to be possible to NOT delegate your vote; it has to be possible for everyone to just vote on their own without delegation. In that case, what happens? You haven't really specified the voting system, just an additional feature that a voting system might take on.

Not to be dismissive, but this is a pretty unhelpful approach to the voting problem. The idea of picking a random person is motivated by the thought that the more support a candidate has the greater chance they have of being selected. But then why not just select the person with the highest probability of being selected? The difficulty is that even this "harmless" process is infected. The real upshot of Arrow's theorem is that you can't aggregate preferences: there is no "measure theory" underlying the concept of group will.

The condition you identify as "IIA" isn't Arrow's condition. IIA in Arrow's theorem is best understood as the principle that only information on the ballot is relevant to the vote. The condition you cite is a much stronger counterfactual property: that if x beats y, then x beats y even if we introduce z. But this is not Arrow's condition (see Bordes and Tideman on this).