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RE: The Paradox of Non-Transitive Dice and Our Imperfect Intuitions

in #steemstem7 years ago

if you understand the concept of district gerrymandering, you can see the similarities in play here

in gerrymandering the political party will structure the districts according to known voting patterns in order to gain the most favorable end result. by forcing losses into as few districts as possible and allocating to win in other districts by slim margins they can turn what is an even vote or even a losing vote into a win

in the above case of purple vs yellow you can see where an even dot amount has been "gerrymandered" to achieve an overwhelming advantage. in this analogy yellow has been structured to place a wasteful majority of its votes in one district. purple has spread its influence around as much as it can

when the final reckoning happens, purple comes away with a landslide victory that should not have been possible but for this extremely crooked political practice

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That's a great observation! It's absolutely fair to say that those dice have been gerrymandered in a way that one of the dies would have victories by larger margins but of fewer number while the other would have a larger number of victories my a smaller margin. And indeed, those dice examples as well as others like it have been intentionally "gerrymandered" so they can produce this type of results just as political districts where the population is evenly split, but one side ends up with a landslide victory due this extremely crooked political practice indeed!