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I don't think a rational calculus can be applied to voting in a US Presidential election, because it's irrational to expect that your vote could change the outc

by lapcat 2y ago

I don't think a rational calculus can be applied to voting in a US Presidential election, because it's irrational to expect that your vote could change the outcome of the election. That's never happened, not even in Florida in 2000. You have a better chance of winning the lottery, as evidenced by the fact that people do win the lottery. Voting tends to be more of a symbolic or "ethical" act than an rational act, though one vote has occasionally made a difference in much smaller, local races. Frankly, voting "strategically" in a US Presidential election makes about as much sense as choosing lottery numbers strategically. Rhetorical question: if the voters are rational, then how do we always end up with liars, crooks, and incompetents, a choice between the lesser of evils? When was the last time a President, or a Presidential candidate, has been among the best of us? No, elections are exercises in mass irrationality, glorified beauty pageants.

tzs 2y ago
Choosing lottery numbers strategically does make sense, because your expected value depends on both whether or not your number wins and on how many other people picked the same number. A lot of people pick dates, or numbers that have won recently, or that form geometric patterns on the ticket, or that form interesting sequences, and so on. Nothing you can do (assuming no bias in how the winning numbers are generated) will affect the chances your ticket wins, but by picking randomly from the set of possible tickets that doesn't include those commonly picked sets of numbers you can decrease the expected number of people you'll have to share the jackpot with.
- lapcat 2y ago
  > A lot of people pick dates Yes, birth dates of themselves and family members, which are randomly distributed in the population, and which you can't possibly know, because you don't know the identity of other lottery buyers. > or numbers that have won recently Do people do this? I'd assume they do the opposite of this. > or that form geometric patterns on the ticket, or that form interesting sequences, and so on. This is all hand-waving. Please list the numbers that I shouldn't choose. > those commonly picked sets of numbers What are those numbers? In any case, even if you eliminated several thousand numbers from the pool of possibilities, that doesn't really help you choose a specific set of numbers from the millions of possibilities, other than not those.
  - defrost 2y ago
    > Yes, birth dates of themselves and family members, which are randomly distributed in the population Nope - not uniformally random, there's literally a non uniform age distribution, a specific set of months, a capped number of days, and various "peak" birth seasons. >> > those commonly picked sets of numbers > What are those numbers? One way to find out is to get a math degree and moonlight as a consultant for, say, the local uni math department and perform quasi regular spot checks on the state lottery games. There are many lottery variations and differing games show interesting patterns of choice - although more and more people these days simply get machine generated tickets .. this expands the surface of interest as not only the game results themselves need to be checked for bias but also the various networked game terminals for their random generation and for local tampering. It's probable that anyone who has done such work is bound by NDA's and agreements not to dump mass data aquired through work.
    - lapcat 2y ago
      If lotteries could be gamed mathematically, then they would be gamed mathematically, and we'd have a bunch of mathematical millionaires as a result. I'm calling BS on all of this hand-waving. Seriously, how much do you think the miniscule odds of winning can be increased via these methods? I want a numerical answer. And in any case, these factors do not apply to US Presidential elections and are thus irrelevant to the larger point.
      - defrost 2y ago
        Yes, that is why when lotteries can be gamed they often are, eg: https://listverse.com/2019/06/04/10-people-who-successfully-gamed-the-lottery/ https://listverse.com/2019/06/04/10-people-who-successfully-... > I'm calling BS on all of this hand-waving. Maybe work on the math a little. > Seriously, how much do you think the miniscule odds of winning can be increased via these methods? There are multiple methods that can be and have been used, they all have different outcomes on Expected returns. > I want a numerical answer. Again, maybe you might want to work on the math a little yourself - on a specific ruleset (or on a family of rules using some abstraction) .. there are tools that can help you; mathematica, R, etc.
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
I don't think that Obama was a liar, crook, incompetent, or evil. So I think you're a bit over-pessimistic. The last couple cycles have pretty well fit your opinion, though. I'll give you that.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  There is a different bar applied to him though. For example I cannot remember journalists losing their composure over recess appointments back then. Obama did a large number of them and even had some reversed by the Supreme Court. I suspect in today’s environment he would face different scrutiny.
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    Obama used recess appointments as a last resort when the opposite party was blocking qualified candidates for months. Trump appears poised to use recess appointments for unqualified candidates that his own party (in power) is likely to oppose, and apparently as a first step not a last resort.
- lapcat 2y ago
  > I don't think that Obama was a liar, crook, incompetent, or evil. All politicians are liars. If you think there's an honest one, I'm sorry to inform you that you're hopeless naive. Obama started lying very early in his Presidential campaign. For example: "Barack Obama faced widespread condemnation today from both right and left for reneging on a promise on election campaign financing." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/20/barackobama.johnmccain https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/20/barackobama.jo... One example of Obama's incompetence: his administration completely botched the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Do you remember that? And he was actually terrible at advocating for a health care plan, forcing Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to do all of the work and lobbying for the ACA, which doesn't actually deserve the name "Obamacare" given to it later by Republicans. Another example: he was overconfident about Clinton winning in 2016 and thus failed to more forcefully pursue a vote on his Supreme Court nominee. Oh yeah, and his administration bombed a hospital. He promised while running that legislating abortion rights would be his first act as President. That was a lie. He bailed out Wall Street during the financial crisis while allowing homeowners to go underwater. He continues to take credit for promoting fossil fuels in the US, as if that were a good thing. I could go on and on and on about Obama, but I'd rather not write an entire dissertation here. My list is just some things that popped into my head immediately. (I did google for the link to confirm the thing I already knew.) Remember that the Snowden revelations occurred during the Obama administration, which was spying on us illegally.
defrost 2y ago
> Rhetorical question: ... I've not seen any evidence that US voters in the US electoral system have much say in the choices they are given on the ballot. My major criticism of the US electoral system, as an outsider, isn't of the candidates on ballots but rather the system that has devolved into non representative party politics where very small groups have an outsized weighting on the choices put forward and the system that works against alternative proportional choices.
- lapcat 2y ago
  > I've not seen any evidence that US voters in the US electoral system have much say in the choices they are given on the ballot. The party nominees are elected by the very same voters—a subset of them, anyway, but anyone can show up if they please—mostly via primaries, sometimes via caucuses.
  - defrost 2y ago
    > The party nominees are elected by the very same voters—a subset of them A very very very tiny subset. The point stands.
    - lapcat 2y ago
      > A very very very tiny subset. Not really. Approximately 40 million people voted in the 2024 primaries.
      - thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
        It varies considerably depending on where you live. The Republican party in my state decided to do a caucus instead of a primary election for the presidential nominee. This resulted in less than 10% of the registered Republican voters going to the caucus, effectively disenfranchising 90% of the registered Republican voters. This issue became more evident when the Republican party's state governor candidate chosen at the caucus was not the incumbent governor. The incumbent governor ran a signature petition and was able to get on the primary ballot (which did not include a presidential candidate as described above) and went on to win the primary election and the general election. There were lawsuits and a write-in campaign for the governor candidate who was chosen at the caucus, but that candidate received less than 10% of the votes in the general election. This illustrates how the state Republican party leadership is out of touch with the state's cititzens and how in the case of the presidential candidate they did not trust that the citizens would do what they wanted in choosing the party's presidential candidate.
SideQuark 2y ago
> I don't think a rational calculus can be applied to voting in a US Presidential election, because it's irrational to expect that your vote could change the outcome of the election. It’s irrational to think this single reason is the only “rational calculus” that can be applied to one’s voting reasoning. It ignores around a century of game theory results, a huge body of work on voting strategies including a Nobel Prize, and more mathematics and “ rational calculus” applied than one could likely learn over an entire career. I find it completely irrational to make such an assertion, especially without putting any effort into learning at least some work on the topic.
- lapcat 2y ago
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  - SideQuark 2y ago
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    - lapcat 2y ago
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      - SideQuark 2y ago
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        lapcat 2y ago
        > "Do you like pizza and Pepsi?" "I like it". That's a perfectly legitimate response. I have no idea why you dispute it. It's been decades since I was in college, and I switched careers from philosophy/polisci to programming, so I don't have instant recall now of what I studied way back then. But yes, I did study game theory and problems of collective action way back in the day. At this point, I don't really care whether you believe me or not. Believe whatever the heck you want to believe, if it makes you feel better about yourself. I can't stop you. In any case, though, your comments are a gross violation of the HN guidelines. Take a moment and go read: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > No, that was not your initial claim. It's nice you're trying to walk back your claim now that you got called on it. Uh, whatever, man. I think I know what I meant. Again, I said, "it's irrational to expect that your vote could change the outcome of the election. That's never happened, not even in Florida in 2000. You have a better chance of winning the lottery, as evidenced by the fact that people do win the lottery." That's pretty clearly a claim about the odds. > I suspect your claim would win a Nobel prize if you could prove it. It certainly upends those hundreds of books and thousands of papers on this topic. That's silly. Would I win the Nobel prize for proving that the odds are very long for a single lottery ticket to win the Powerball jackpot? It's not a particularly notable claim. I've never been aiming to be unique here. > Yes, because you don't understand expected return, apparently, among other things. You hopefully understand to increase odds against a biased roulette wheel you'd not simply pick uniformly randomly. Same thing for lotteries. I understand that it's not a good idea to play the lottery or roulette. Gambling is a bad investment, and most of the time only the house wins consistently. > You seem to confuse zero repeatedly with non-zero. No, I'm simply not concerned about circumstances that are close to zero without being literally zero. Or would you argue that it's actually rational to buy lottery tickets? I call it a waste of money in general, even though a few people do actually win. The "premature optimization" part of picking lottery numbers is that you're almost certainly going to lose, lose the money you spent on a ticket, and any extra time and/or effort you spend on your "investment" is even more down the drain. If you're going to lose, might as well lose quick and easy, not laboring over mathematical calculations. And if you happen to luck out and win the jackpot, it's going to be a nice profit in any case, even if you haven't "maximized" your expected return and avoided possible sharing of the jackpot with other players. > By that argument CERN should not design detectors to bias towards what they want, since the likelihood of a Higgs per collision is vastly smaller than winning a lottery. That's a silly analogy. CERN is attempting to discover scientific facts, not make a profit. In fact, CERN is "losing", i.e., spending vast amounts of money on the project with no expected financial return; the returns are knowlege. The irrationality of buying a Powerball ticket is expecting to make a profit from that monetary investment. (A billionaire could win the Powerball if they really wanted to, but you'll notice that's not where billionaires invest, because it's a bad investment. Instead, they invest in politicians.) And the irrationality of "strategic" voting is an individual voter expecting to change the outcome of a Presidential election with their single vote. > I'll take lack of proof to mean you have none. You can take whatever you want. I don't care.
RRWagner 2y ago
Jimmy Carter
- lapcat 2y ago
  Are you judging him by his Presidency or by his post-Presidency? Anyway, Carter lost reelection in a landslide, so what does that say about the voters?
creer 2y ago
> one vote has occasionally made a difference in much smaller, local races. The good news with this kind of thinking is that it gives more weight to the people who do vote. Where you are right is that in the US two-party system, both sides seem to feel free to push their luck to whichever degree they feel will give them a 50% chance of winning by a 1% margin. Or something. As long as the two parties are okay with (roughly) winning the presidency 50% of the time, THEN yes the voters' influence is negated. Party A might have had a strong lead, but feels free to take this as an indication that they can push harder in "their" direction bringing the odds back to 50/50. In this case, "your" vote has been purposefully reduced back to randomness. And yet even in this case, not voting simply gives more weight to the other side. One doesn't prevent the other.
- lapcat 2y ago
  The calculus of a politician and the calculus of a voter are entirely different, because the politician running for office has the power to do things to influence all of the votes, giving voters reasons to vote for or against the politician. Whereas most voters have very little influence over other voters. Practically speaking, the only votes you can change are your own, or perhaps those of family and close friends (but probably not them either).
popalchemist 2y ago
Logical fallacy here. Every vote matters, as they are made in a blind prisoner's dilemma kind of context. We can have assumptions/expectations about the likely outcomes, some of which would statistically make individual votes "insignificant," but those assumptions may or may not be true (see: this year, duh); therefore every vote is made on the tacit recognition that it MAY matter. And this tacit recognition contributes to the behavior of the masses. It is a category error to think that only some of the votes matter, due to the quantities being what they are on one side or the other.
- lapcat 2y ago
  > We can have assumptions/expectations about the likely outcomes, some of which would statistically make individual votes "insignificant," but those assumptions may or may not be true (see: this year, duh); therefore every vote is made on the tacit recognition that it MAY matter. We have hundreds of years of Presidential elections to show that individual votes are insignificant. That's a lot of empirical evidence. And given the size of the electorate, the probability of a one vote margin is statistically extremely unlikely. > It is a category error to think that only some of the votes matter, due to the quantities being what they are on one side or the other. What is "matter" supposed to mean, exactly? Let's say there's a ballot counting error, and the announced results are mistaken. Does that matter? I would say no, that doesn't matter, as long as the outcome of the election wouldn't change on a recount of ballots. This is why, by law, they don't do a recount unless the margin is extremely small. Because otherwise, it doesn't matter. The exact vote total is only of marginal interest; in a sense, it's trivial.
  - freeone3000 2y ago
    If each vote is insignificant, why bother counting them at all? C’mon. The votes matter. Every one of the million of votes for the winner matters just as much as the vote for the loser. You are influencing the outcome exactly as much as every other person in line. Individually? Negligible. But in aggregate, that’s an election.
    - 2y ago

by lapcat 2y ago

tzs 2y ago

Choosing lottery numbers strategically does make sense, because your expected value depends on both whether or not your number wins and on how many other people picked the same number. A lot of people pick dates, or numbers that have won recently, or that form geometric patterns on the ticket, or that form interesting sequences, and so on. Nothing you can do (assuming no bias in how the winning numbers are generated) will affect the chances your ticket wins, but by picking randomly from the set of possible tickets that doesn't include those commonly picked sets of numbers you can decrease the expected number of people you'll have to share the jackpot with.

lapcat 2y ago
> A lot of people pick dates Yes, birth dates of themselves and family members, which are randomly distributed in the population, and which you can't possibly know, because you don't know the identity of other lottery buyers. > or numbers that have won recently Do people do this? I'd assume they do the opposite of this. > or that form geometric patterns on the ticket, or that form interesting sequences, and so on. This is all hand-waving. Please list the numbers that I shouldn't choose. > those commonly picked sets of numbers What are those numbers? In any case, even if you eliminated several thousand numbers from the pool of possibilities, that doesn't really help you choose a specific set of numbers from the millions of possibilities, other than not those.
- defrost 2y ago
  > Yes, birth dates of themselves and family members, which are randomly distributed in the population Nope - not uniformally random, there's literally a non uniform age distribution, a specific set of months, a capped number of days, and various "peak" birth seasons. >> > those commonly picked sets of numbers > What are those numbers? One way to find out is to get a math degree and moonlight as a consultant for, say, the local uni math department and perform quasi regular spot checks on the state lottery games. There are many lottery variations and differing games show interesting patterns of choice - although more and more people these days simply get machine generated tickets .. this expands the surface of interest as not only the game results themselves need to be checked for bias but also the various networked game terminals for their random generation and for local tampering. It's probable that anyone who has done such work is bound by NDA's and agreements not to dump mass data aquired through work.
  - lapcat 2y ago
    If lotteries could be gamed mathematically, then they would be gamed mathematically, and we'd have a bunch of mathematical millionaires as a result. I'm calling BS on all of this hand-waving. Seriously, how much do you think the miniscule odds of winning can be increased via these methods? I want a numerical answer. And in any case, these factors do not apply to US Presidential elections and are thus irrelevant to the larger point.
    - defrost 2y ago
      Yes, that is why when lotteries can be gamed they often are, eg: https://listverse.com/2019/06/04/10-people-who-successfully-gamed-the-lottery/ https://listverse.com/2019/06/04/10-people-who-successfully-... > I'm calling BS on all of this hand-waving. Maybe work on the math a little. > Seriously, how much do you think the miniscule odds of winning can be increased via these methods? There are multiple methods that can be and have been used, they all have different outcomes on Expected returns. > I want a numerical answer. Again, maybe you might want to work on the math a little yourself - on a specific ruleset (or on a family of rules using some abstraction) .. there are tools that can help you; mathematica, R, etc.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

I don't think that Obama was a liar, crook, incompetent, or evil. So I think you're a bit over-pessimistic. The last couple cycles have pretty well fit your opinion, though. I'll give you that.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
There is a different bar applied to him though. For example I cannot remember journalists losing their composure over recess appointments back then. Obama did a large number of them and even had some reversed by the Supreme Court. I suspect in today’s environment he would face different scrutiny.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  Obama used recess appointments as a last resort when the opposite party was blocking qualified candidates for months. Trump appears poised to use recess appointments for unqualified candidates that his own party (in power) is likely to oppose, and apparently as a first step not a last resort.
lapcat 2y ago
> I don't think that Obama was a liar, crook, incompetent, or evil. All politicians are liars. If you think there's an honest one, I'm sorry to inform you that you're hopeless naive. Obama started lying very early in his Presidential campaign. For example: "Barack Obama faced widespread condemnation today from both right and left for reneging on a promise on election campaign financing." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/20/barackobama.johnmccain https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/20/barackobama.jo... One example of Obama's incompetence: his administration completely botched the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Do you remember that? And he was actually terrible at advocating for a health care plan, forcing Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to do all of the work and lobbying for the ACA, which doesn't actually deserve the name "Obamacare" given to it later by Republicans. Another example: he was overconfident about Clinton winning in 2016 and thus failed to more forcefully pursue a vote on his Supreme Court nominee. Oh yeah, and his administration bombed a hospital. He promised while running that legislating abortion rights would be his first act as President. That was a lie. He bailed out Wall Street during the financial crisis while allowing homeowners to go underwater. He continues to take credit for promoting fossil fuels in the US, as if that were a good thing. I could go on and on and on about Obama, but I'd rather not write an entire dissertation here. My list is just some things that popped into my head immediately. (I did google for the link to confirm the thing I already knew.) Remember that the Snowden revelations occurred during the Obama administration, which was spying on us illegally.

defrost 2y ago

> Rhetorical question: ... I've not seen any evidence that US voters in the US electoral system have much say in the choices they are given on the ballot. My major criticism of the US electoral system, as an outsider, isn't of the candidates on ballots but rather the system that has devolved into non representative party politics where very small groups have an outsized weighting on the choices put forward and the system that works against alternative proportional choices.

lapcat 2y ago
> I've not seen any evidence that US voters in the US electoral system have much say in the choices they are given on the ballot. The party nominees are elected by the very same voters—a subset of them, anyway, but anyone can show up if they please—mostly via primaries, sometimes via caucuses.
- defrost 2y ago
  > The party nominees are elected by the very same voters—a subset of them A very very very tiny subset. The point stands.
  - lapcat 2y ago
    > A very very very tiny subset. Not really. Approximately 40 million people voted in the 2024 primaries.
    - thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
      It varies considerably depending on where you live. The Republican party in my state decided to do a caucus instead of a primary election for the presidential nominee. This resulted in less than 10% of the registered Republican voters going to the caucus, effectively disenfranchising 90% of the registered Republican voters. This issue became more evident when the Republican party's state governor candidate chosen at the caucus was not the incumbent governor. The incumbent governor ran a signature petition and was able to get on the primary ballot (which did not include a presidential candidate as described above) and went on to win the primary election and the general election. There were lawsuits and a write-in campaign for the governor candidate who was chosen at the caucus, but that candidate received less than 10% of the votes in the general election. This illustrates how the state Republican party leadership is out of touch with the state's cititzens and how in the case of the presidential candidate they did not trust that the citizens would do what they wanted in choosing the party's presidential candidate.

SideQuark 2y ago

> I don't think a rational calculus can be applied to voting in a US Presidential election, because it's irrational to expect that your vote could change the outcome of the election. It’s irrational to think this single reason is the only “rational calculus” that can be applied to one’s voting reasoning. It ignores around a century of game theory results, a huge body of work on voting strategies including a Nobel Prize, and more mathematics and “ rational calculus” applied than one could likely learn over an entire career. I find it completely irrational to make such an assertion, especially without putting any effort into learning at least some work on the topic.

lapcat 2y ago
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- SideQuark 2y ago
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  - lapcat 2y ago
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    - SideQuark 2y ago
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      - lapcat 2y ago
        > "Do you like pizza and Pepsi?" "I like it". That's a perfectly legitimate response. I have no idea why you dispute it. It's been decades since I was in college, and I switched careers from philosophy/polisci to programming, so I don't have instant recall now of what I studied way back then. But yes, I did study game theory and problems of collective action way back in the day. At this point, I don't really care whether you believe me or not. Believe whatever the heck you want to believe, if it makes you feel better about yourself. I can't stop you. In any case, though, your comments are a gross violation of the HN guidelines. Take a moment and go read: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > No, that was not your initial claim. It's nice you're trying to walk back your claim now that you got called on it. Uh, whatever, man. I think I know what I meant. Again, I said, "it's irrational to expect that your vote could change the outcome of the election. That's never happened, not even in Florida in 2000. You have a better chance of winning the lottery, as evidenced by the fact that people do win the lottery." That's pretty clearly a claim about the odds. > I suspect your claim would win a Nobel prize if you could prove it. It certainly upends those hundreds of books and thousands of papers on this topic. That's silly. Would I win the Nobel prize for proving that the odds are very long for a single lottery ticket to win the Powerball jackpot? It's not a particularly notable claim. I've never been aiming to be unique here. > Yes, because you don't understand expected return, apparently, among other things. You hopefully understand to increase odds against a biased roulette wheel you'd not simply pick uniformly randomly. Same thing for lotteries. I understand that it's not a good idea to play the lottery or roulette. Gambling is a bad investment, and most of the time only the house wins consistently. > You seem to confuse zero repeatedly with non-zero. No, I'm simply not concerned about circumstances that are close to zero without being literally zero. Or would you argue that it's actually rational to buy lottery tickets? I call it a waste of money in general, even though a few people do actually win. The "premature optimization" part of picking lottery numbers is that you're almost certainly going to lose, lose the money you spent on a ticket, and any extra time and/or effort you spend on your "investment" is even more down the drain. If you're going to lose, might as well lose quick and easy, not laboring over mathematical calculations. And if you happen to luck out and win the jackpot, it's going to be a nice profit in any case, even if you haven't "maximized" your expected return and avoided possible sharing of the jackpot with other players. > By that argument CERN should not design detectors to bias towards what they want, since the likelihood of a Higgs per collision is vastly smaller than winning a lottery. That's a silly analogy. CERN is attempting to discover scientific facts, not make a profit. In fact, CERN is "losing", i.e., spending vast amounts of money on the project with no expected financial return; the returns are knowlege. The irrationality of buying a Powerball ticket is expecting to make a profit from that monetary investment. (A billionaire could win the Powerball if they really wanted to, but you'll notice that's not where billionaires invest, because it's a bad investment. Instead, they invest in politicians.) And the irrationality of "strategic" voting is an individual voter expecting to change the outcome of a Presidential election with their single vote. > I'll take lack of proof to mean you have none. You can take whatever you want. I don't care.

RRWagner 2y ago

Jimmy Carter

lapcat 2y ago
Are you judging him by his Presidency or by his post-Presidency? Anyway, Carter lost reelection in a landslide, so what does that say about the voters?

creer 2y ago

> one vote has occasionally made a difference in much smaller, local races. The good news with this kind of thinking is that it gives more weight to the people who do vote. Where you are right is that in the US two-party system, both sides seem to feel free to push their luck to whichever degree they feel will give them a 50% chance of winning by a 1% margin. Or something. As long as the two parties are okay with (roughly) winning the presidency 50% of the time, THEN yes the voters' influence is negated. Party A might have had a strong lead, but feels free to take this as an indication that they can push harder in "their" direction bringing the odds back to 50/50. In this case, "your" vote has been purposefully reduced back to randomness. And yet even in this case, not voting simply gives more weight to the other side. One doesn't prevent the other.

lapcat 2y ago
The calculus of a politician and the calculus of a voter are entirely different, because the politician running for office has the power to do things to influence all of the votes, giving voters reasons to vote for or against the politician. Whereas most voters have very little influence over other voters. Practically speaking, the only votes you can change are your own, or perhaps those of family and close friends (but probably not them either).

popalchemist 2y ago

Logical fallacy here. Every vote matters, as they are made in a blind prisoner's dilemma kind of context. We can have assumptions/expectations about the likely outcomes, some of which would statistically make individual votes "insignificant," but those assumptions may or may not be true (see: this year, duh); therefore every vote is made on the tacit recognition that it MAY matter. And this tacit recognition contributes to the behavior of the masses. It is a category error to think that only some of the votes matter, due to the quantities being what they are on one side or the other.

lapcat 2y ago
> We can have assumptions/expectations about the likely outcomes, some of which would statistically make individual votes "insignificant," but those assumptions may or may not be true (see: this year, duh); therefore every vote is made on the tacit recognition that it MAY matter. We have hundreds of years of Presidential elections to show that individual votes are insignificant. That's a lot of empirical evidence. And given the size of the electorate, the probability of a one vote margin is statistically extremely unlikely. > It is a category error to think that only some of the votes matter, due to the quantities being what they are on one side or the other. What is "matter" supposed to mean, exactly? Let's say there's a ballot counting error, and the announced results are mistaken. Does that matter? I would say no, that doesn't matter, as long as the outcome of the election wouldn't change on a recount of ballots. This is why, by law, they don't do a recount unless the margin is extremely small. Because otherwise, it doesn't matter. The exact vote total is only of marginal interest; in a sense, it's trivial.
- freeone3000 2y ago
  If each vote is insignificant, why bother counting them at all? C’mon. The votes matter. Every one of the million of votes for the winner matters just as much as the vote for the loser. You are influencing the outcome exactly as much as every other person in line. Individually? Negligible. But in aggregate, that’s an election.
  - 2y ago