1. (Difficult): The difficult part of this talk was that the speaker talked about different weights (points for 1st, 2nd,... in a vote) and how they didn't matter, he could still come up with a voting scenario to get whatever outcome he wanted. At first I thought I knew what he meant by weights but wasn't sure because it intuitively seemed like having different weights would change the possible outcomes but once he reemphasized that that was what he meant by weights for I trusted him and understood the rest of the lecture pretty well.
The rest of the lecture was pretty straight forward.
2. (Reflection): I have thought a bit about the plurality voting problem before (when two choices, both are more preferred than the third but the third wins because the other two split the other votes basically). But it was really interesting to see how pair off voting secures any desired outcome and really the only secure method of voting is Borda's method (using weights for 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place) - yet we still elect our U.S. President (and other reps, propositions, ...) using a plurality voting method!
Additionally, I found it interesting that he found that plurality voting doesn't give the truly desired result 70% of the time. Wow!
And we have plurality elections coming up in November....
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