Am I correct to assume people are upvoting this as a possible explanation for the outcome of the US Presidential election?
I.e., if people think that they are in economic doldrums or decline, taking a risk seems better than the status quo?
Voting out the incumbent party seems popular during economic downturns (real or perceived) unless the party clearly inherited the economic crisis AND seems to be addressing the problem energetically (e.g., post-1929 FDR).
I had a similar thought recently as someone not in the U.S and who doesn't care that much. If hypothetically prompted, there's a way in which I could say "Well it was more sensible to vote for Trump". If no other context was asked for, I'd probably be thought of as a Trump person, but if it was, I'd explain that I can see why a lot of people preferred him or didn't prefer the other, therefore for them it's sensible, and democracy worked as intended.
It's incredible how, unlike the first Trump presidency, nobody is trying to convince anyone that a Trump presidency will be bad. It's as if all relevant information has already been shared and there is no point in repeating it. Instead they just shift all their money to the stock market and Tesla, and/or leave the state or country.
Which ultimately is the best course of action, but whoever would try doesn't have much of a compelling alternative to suggest, and probably it doesn't matter that much. As a citizen you can vote, and beyond that you're probably wasting your (expensive) time and energy. To me it's akin to the people who stay in their hometown haplessly hoping it'll eventually align with what they want it to be like (while secretly hoping it doesn't change that much in the other direction); the only answer really is to just respond sensibly and gtfo for sometimes literally greener grass. Gosh I wish my hometown would build a proper transit system, but it's completely economically destitute and fiscally conservative, and now that I live in an objectively better city that has one, the scope in which I need to care is limited to when I visit.
I have read multiple articles claiming his choices for various positions are bad. They just think they are intentionally bad, that corruption and destruction is the point for both Trump and his core supporters.
It is what it is. Assuming good faith and arguing with that assumption is not a thing that makes sense anymore.
I don't think this is sufficient to make a Trump vote logical - if you've paid any attention at all to how the Republicans and Democrats operate, the expectation value of a Republican presidency is much lower than a Democrat one, for most people, under any reasonable utility function.
It really is as simple: if you feel bad, vote for the other guy. (Which is also how [REDACTED BY MODERATOR] got elected)
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> I find it completely irrational to make such an assertion, especially without putting any effort into learning at least some work on the topic.
I actually studied it in college, so your own assertion is baseless, incorrect, and irrational.
Feel free to make an argument, or at least cite something specific that I'm allegedly "ignoring", instead of simply hand-waving and dishing out personal insults.
"It"? All of those topics? That must have been an incredible college. In that case, since you made the original assertion "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", an assertion that flies in the face of a century of academic work, I'd really like to see a solid proof of your claim, or even the sketch of a proof, since it is counter to, just to pick one area, multi-player imperfect knowledge game theory.
Since you're so rational, and made the first claim (that is counter to a lot of well researched ideas), provide a proof or citation please, without ignoring that multi-player game theory is a perfectly "rational calculus".
Or even simpler, can you provide a proof that there is or is not a Nash Equilibrium to elections using your claim?
Good luck. Since you studied "it" in college, this should be straightforward for you.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
The main issue here is a single vote in a US Presidential election, i.e., one vote out of around 150 million. Thus, the relevant analogy is buying one lottery ticket in a huge lottery such as the Powerball or Mega Millions and matching every number to win the jackpot.
Everything else, including cheating and rigging the lottery, is irrelevant to the question of strategically voting in a US Presidential election. None of your examples or hand-waving have shown that you can significantly improve the odds of one ticket winning the Powerball or Mega Millions jackpot.
> None of your examples or hand-waving have shown that you can significantly improve the odds of one ticket winning the Powerball or Mega Millions jackpot.
No one has said that you can improve the odds of one ticket winning. What has been said is that you can improve your expected value of playing one lottery ticket by carefully choosing what ticket to buy.
Your expected value is the product of:
• The probability that your ticket wins
• The value of the prize
• 1/(N+1) where N is the number of other people whose tickets have the same numbers as your ticket.
The first two factors are the same for everyone. The third depends on the numbers on the ticket because a lot of players do not pick their tickets randomly.
For example 1 2 3 4 5 6 is a surprisingly common choice. I've seen several lotteries where they reported afterwards that if that had been the winning ticket the prize would have been shared by several hundred or even thousands of people.
> What has been said is that you can improve your expected value of playing one lottery ticket by carefully choosing what ticket to buy.
Carefully choosing? AFAICT the so-called strategy is "choose numbers higher than 31". That's a tiny bit helpful perhaps yet still exceeding vague. And this strategy depends on others not also adopting the same strategy, in which case it would actually become counterproductive. If all lottery players acted "rationally", the strategy would cease to exist.
> 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.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.
> 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.
> All politicians are liars. If you think there's an honest one, I'm sorry to inform you that you're hopeless naive.
If all politicians are liars, then you first statement becomes a tautology. All presidents are politicians, all politicans are liars, ergo all presidents are liars.
"All politicans are liars" is an empirical claim. It's not necessarily true, in the logical sense. It's just a sad fact about us and our political system. We promote the worst of us, not the best of us. It could be different if our system were better, or if we were better, collectively.
The influence of money in politics is particularly pernicious. In the US, election campaigns are privately financed. Thus, politicians have to cater to the ultra-wealthy, or be ultra-wealthy themselves. But politicans can't run for office telling the public "My votes are owned by the ultra-wealthy", so they have to lie. (Infamously, Joe Biden told his wealthy donors the truth in 2020, "Nothing fundamentally will change", while simultaneously telling voters the opposite.) Moreover, voters believe lies, or at least overlook lies, which gives politicians even more incentive to lie and exaggerate. If lies were reliably detected and strictly punished by the electorate, then it would be an entirely different matter.
I'm not obsessed with Obama specifically. I simply have a very good memory, and someone else mentioned Obama. I could give a similar spiel about every President of my lifetime going back to Reagan.
There's no President who I admire. I don't do hero worship. Not even, say, FDR, who was responsible for the Japanese-American internment camps during WWII, one of the most shameful episodes in our history.
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.
"In times of great uncertainty, the relative value of "playing it safe" is reduced, since - for better or for worse - no option can now reduce risk to truly safe levels. And so, paradoxically, in times of risk and uncertainty, it can actually become more rational to think and act more boldly - or more precisely, to bring one's personal risk tolerance to match the amount of external risk present in the system."
I.e., if people think that they are in economic doldrums or decline, taking a risk seems better than the status quo?
Voting out the incumbent party seems popular during economic downturns (real or perceived) unless the party clearly inherited the economic crisis AND seems to be addressing the problem energetically (e.g., post-1929 FDR).
It is what it is. Assuming good faith and arguing with that assumption is not a thing that makes sense anymore.
It really is as simple: if you feel bad, vote for the other guy. (Which is also how [REDACTED BY MODERATOR] got elected)
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.
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.
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.
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.
A very very very tiny subset. The point stands.
Not really. Approximately 40 million people voted in the 2024 primaries.
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.
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.
I actually studied it in college, so your own assertion is baseless, incorrect, and irrational.
Feel free to make an argument, or at least cite something specific that I'm allegedly "ignoring", instead of simply hand-waving and dishing out personal insults.
"It"? All of those topics? That must have been an incredible college. In that case, since you made the original assertion "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", an assertion that flies in the face of a century of academic work, I'd really like to see a solid proof of your claim, or even the sketch of a proof, since it is counter to, just to pick one area, multi-player imperfect knowledge game theory.
Since you're so rational, and made the first claim (that is counter to a lot of well researched ideas), provide a proof or citation please, without ignoring that multi-player game theory is a perfectly "rational calculus".
Or even simpler, can you provide a proof that there is or is not a Nash Equilibrium to elections using your claim?
Good luck. Since you studied "it" in college, this should be straightforward for you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And in any case, these factors do not apply to US Presidential elections and are thus irrelevant to the larger point.
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.
Everything else, including cheating and rigging the lottery, is irrelevant to the question of strategically voting in a US Presidential election. None of your examples or hand-waving have shown that you can significantly improve the odds of one ticket winning the Powerball or Mega Millions jackpot.
No one has said that you can improve the odds of one ticket winning. What has been said is that you can improve your expected value of playing one lottery ticket by carefully choosing what ticket to buy.
Your expected value is the product of:
• The probability that your ticket wins
• The value of the prize
• 1/(N+1) where N is the number of other people whose tickets have the same numbers as your ticket.
The first two factors are the same for everyone. The third depends on the numbers on the ticket because a lot of players do not pick their tickets randomly.
For example 1 2 3 4 5 6 is a surprisingly common choice. I've seen several lotteries where they reported afterwards that if that had been the winning ticket the prize would have been shared by several hundred or even thousands of people.
Carefully choosing? AFAICT the so-called strategy is "choose numbers higher than 31". That's a tiny bit helpful perhaps yet still exceeding vague. And this strategy depends on others not also adopting the same strategy, in which case it would actually become counterproductive. If all lottery players acted "rationally", the strategy would cease to exist.
[1] https://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~norman/papers/probability_puzzl...
That still doesn't leave you with much guidance. And the more people who follow this advice, the less it becomes effective.
Anyway, Carter lost reelection in a landslide, so what does that say about the voters?
The last couple cycles have pretty well fit your opinion, though. I'll give you that.
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.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.
> All politicians are liars. If you think there's an honest one, I'm sorry to inform you that you're hopeless naive.
If all politicians are liars, then you first statement becomes a tautology. All presidents are politicians, all politicans are liars, ergo all presidents are liars.
The influence of money in politics is particularly pernicious. In the US, election campaigns are privately financed. Thus, politicians have to cater to the ultra-wealthy, or be ultra-wealthy themselves. But politicans can't run for office telling the public "My votes are owned by the ultra-wealthy", so they have to lie. (Infamously, Joe Biden told his wealthy donors the truth in 2020, "Nothing fundamentally will change", while simultaneously telling voters the opposite.) Moreover, voters believe lies, or at least overlook lies, which gives politicians even more incentive to lie and exaggerate. If lies were reliably detected and strictly punished by the electorate, then it would be an entirely different matter.
There's no President who I admire. I don't do hero worship. Not even, say, FDR, who was responsible for the Japanese-American internment camps during WWII, one of the most shameful episodes in our history.