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When I enter the polling booth, I never expect to effect the result, whether my coalition has a chance of winning or not. That is, I do not expect a candidate i

When I enter the polling booth, I never expect to effect the result, whether my coalition has a chance of winning or not. That is, I do not expect a candidate in any constituency I am voting in to win by exactly one vote (or tie and thereby have a 50:50 chance of winning by drawing lots). I think such an occurrence is exceedingly unlikely. A rational anaylsis would therefore conclude I'm wasting my time and energy even just walking to the polling station, let alone keeping up with political developments through the intervening months and years. As you say, in a hyper-rational world turnout would be way lower - whether it would oscillate and overcorrect as you suggest, or reach a stable equilibrium, I'm not sure. But whatever my motivation for voting and trying to stay informed, I do not believe it is primarily rational. It's probably some mixture of duty, diversionary entertainment, and ritual. If lowering the voting age to 16 could help inculcate that sense of duty and better establish that ritual, that would be a pretty convincing reason to do it in my opinion.

roenxi 1y ago
> A rational anaylsis would therefore conclude I'm wasting my time and energy... No it wouldn't. You haven't established the link between your premise and conclusions and the rational view is the opposite of what you came to. You've established that in the best case the candidate you prefer will win by more than one vote - which is correct but not the end of the line of thought. Think of it like building an embankment. If you design the embankment to exactly hold back the maximum amount of water you expect it to hold it'll probably fail in an emergency when it shouldn't have because something slightly unexpected happens. The rational thing to do is engineer in a margin of safety. You're trying to optimise the wrong metric which is ~30-60 minutes of a voters time vs. probability of the legislature behaving in a way that is favourable to them. In both voting and embankment building it'd be silly (dare I say, irrational) to aim for a narrow success. The median election (analogy: median storm) should make the margins for your candidate (analogy: embankment tolerance) look excessive (analogy: over-engineered). Otherwise, you're basically arguing that rational people should optimise their way to being on the losing side of elections - which is a big tip-off you're making a logic error in your argument somewhere. Rational behaviour can't, almost by definition, predictably lead to bad outcomes.
- anonymous_sorry 1y ago
  I find the embankment metaphor confusing, but to play along: I don't have the option of engineering a margin of safety because I only have one brick. Is it worth me lugging it to the riverside? Maybe, it depends on the risk and the distance I've got to carry it. In all likelihood many won't bother without being directed, encouraged or otherwise socially motivated. And they must ignore the surprisingly persuasive pro-flooding lobby, of course. > Rational behaviour can't, almost by definition, predictably lead to bad outcomes. Given you previously mentioned Game Theory, this is a surprising claim. Prisoner's dilemma? Tragedy of the commons? Note that I'm not sure how much any of this applies to the real world. My main argument is against a model of voters as purely "rational". They are not, and in some ways at least, that's probably a good thing. I certainly think rationality is a very poor argument against extending the franchise to 16 year-olds.
  - roenxi 1y ago
    > I find the embankment metaphor confusing, but to play along: I don't have the option of engineering a margin of safety because I only have one brick. Is it worth me lugging it to the riverside? Yes. You should put the brick where the engineer tells you too, and at the end of it you will observe there are more bricks than were strictly needed. Any other approach would be reckless. Again, you're arguing that the rational thing to do is to not build the thing properly. You've misunderstood rationality and you're getting nonsense conclusions where people choose to get to get poor results by their own standards because they aren't very good at risk assessment. That isn't how rational actors behave. Rational people take a holistic view of all the foreseeable costs and benefits of an action (like, for example, having a government that aligns with their policy preferences) and are capable of probabilistic thinking. > In all likelihood many won't bother without being directed, encouraged or otherwise socially motivated. Well sure, but in practice people aren't rational. If they were rational, they would just quietly assess whether their coalition had the potential to win at some point and - if so - identify that it is in their best interests to vote. Then do it without prompting. > Given you previously mentioned Game Theory, this is a surprising claim. Prisoner's dilemma? Tragedy of the commons? The game theoretic optimum in both those cases is to achieve the best possible result through communication and coalition building.

roenxi 1y ago

> A rational anaylsis would therefore conclude I'm wasting my time and energy... No it wouldn't. You haven't established the link between your premise and conclusions and the rational view is the opposite of what you came to. You've established that in the best case the candidate you prefer will win by more than one vote - which is correct but not the end of the line of thought. Think of it like building an embankment. If you design the embankment to exactly hold back the maximum amount of water you expect it to hold it'll probably fail in an emergency when it shouldn't have because something slightly unexpected happens. The rational thing to do is engineer in a margin of safety. You're trying to optimise the wrong metric which is ~30-60 minutes of a voters time vs. probability of the legislature behaving in a way that is favourable to them. In both voting and embankment building it'd be silly (dare I say, irrational) to aim for a narrow success. The median election (analogy: median storm) should make the margins for your candidate (analogy: embankment tolerance) look excessive (analogy: over-engineered). Otherwise, you're basically arguing that rational people should optimise their way to being on the losing side of elections - which is a big tip-off you're making a logic error in your argument somewhere. Rational behaviour can't, almost by definition, predictably lead to bad outcomes.

anonymous_sorry 1y ago
I find the embankment metaphor confusing, but to play along: I don't have the option of engineering a margin of safety because I only have one brick. Is it worth me lugging it to the riverside? Maybe, it depends on the risk and the distance I've got to carry it. In all likelihood many won't bother without being directed, encouraged or otherwise socially motivated. And they must ignore the surprisingly persuasive pro-flooding lobby, of course. > Rational behaviour can't, almost by definition, predictably lead to bad outcomes. Given you previously mentioned Game Theory, this is a surprising claim. Prisoner's dilemma? Tragedy of the commons? Note that I'm not sure how much any of this applies to the real world. My main argument is against a model of voters as purely "rational". They are not, and in some ways at least, that's probably a good thing. I certainly think rationality is a very poor argument against extending the franchise to 16 year-olds.
- roenxi 1y ago
  > I find the embankment metaphor confusing, but to play along: I don't have the option of engineering a margin of safety because I only have one brick. Is it worth me lugging it to the riverside? Yes. You should put the brick where the engineer tells you too, and at the end of it you will observe there are more bricks than were strictly needed. Any other approach would be reckless. Again, you're arguing that the rational thing to do is to not build the thing properly. You've misunderstood rationality and you're getting nonsense conclusions where people choose to get to get poor results by their own standards because they aren't very good at risk assessment. That isn't how rational actors behave. Rational people take a holistic view of all the foreseeable costs and benefits of an action (like, for example, having a government that aligns with their policy preferences) and are capable of probabilistic thinking. > In all likelihood many won't bother without being directed, encouraged or otherwise socially motivated. Well sure, but in practice people aren't rational. If they were rational, they would just quietly assess whether their coalition had the potential to win at some point and - if so - identify that it is in their best interests to vote. Then do it without prompting. > Given you previously mentioned Game Theory, this is a surprising claim. Prisoner's dilemma? Tragedy of the commons? The game theoretic optimum in both those cases is to achieve the best possible result through communication and coalition building.