The problem is people assume it means more than it does. It's like someone using Godel's incompleteness theorem to argue that math is pointless.
The problem is that the flaw in thinking is everywhere. Even wikipedia unfairly lumps in Condorcet voting with its various "tiebreaker methods" - it's the tiebreaker methods that run afoul of Arrow's criteria, while the Condorcet method itself does not. And so the Condorcet method gets unfairly lumped together with voting techniques like plurality and IRV.
Re:Arrow's Theorem
by robbrown451 on Monday October 13, 2014 @04:15PM
(#8450382)
Well he said it was overhyped, which isn't so much a criticism of the theorem, but a criticism of the hypers.
His theorem says nothing about the way things should be, but rather about how things are. I mentioned Poundstone's Gaming the Vote in another post, but that book in particular discusses the implications of the theorem and analyzes better alternatives to current systems.