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A rootin' tootin' separate thread about voting, collective action problems and game theory
spacekungfuman
Poor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
Poor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
Splitting this off from the election thread. The topic of this thread is whether "every vote counts" is a literally true statement or just a useful lie to motivate behavior of groups, when actually, and one individual may have very little reason to vote.
Here is the last quote tree from the election thread on this topic:
Here is the last quote tree from the election thread on this topic:
spacekungfuman wrote: »spacekungfuman wrote: »spacekungfuman wrote: »Kipling217 wrote: »Voting, even voting for the losing side is always useful. Your vote will probably never have the deciding effect either way, but your vote is important in deciding the margin of victory. A politician elected with 58% is going to act differently from a politician elected with 51%.
The Margin of Victory, like I have said before, sets the tone and the standard for not just that term but for future elections. It decides how secure a candidate is in his seat, it decides how the narrative of the election goes and it decides how the political parties behave in the future.
Remember Election night is the one day of the year where the first priority of politicians isn't the opinion polls, because they got a cast iron poll that is much more important.
Your vote, on its own; is never important though.
This and the following hypothetical are irrelevant.
My vote and the millions of other people's votes are extremely relevant. And people like you who keep espousing "your vote doesn't matter" do nothing but hurt the process when people should be encouraged to participate.
It is true that telling people not to vote hurts the process. Actually not voting yourself? Not so much. Like I said before, the idea that every vote matters is an important fiction.
That every vote matters is not a fiction. Voting is not a game theory hypothetical in a vacuum. Voting doesn't influence who wins and nothing else. How much a person wins or loses by, the success of initiatives, etc all have an effect on society and policies going forward. Every vote demonstrably matters. That each single individual vote doesn't matter very much on its own is irrelevant to that fact.
I don't really follow the last sentence. You need lots of individuals to vote to get enough to influence anything, but to a single person deciding whether to take the time to go, wait on line and vote on Election Day, what is the argument that this one individual's vote makes a difference?
No you don't. Every vote influences matters. That some people are to selfish or lazy to exercise that influence is how we keep getting terrible politicians in power.
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In fact if you have time to argue over this on the internet you have time to vote.
In this case: everyone decides that their own vote doesn't matter, so they don't vote.
Result: no one votes. No one gets elected.
Now if you happen to be a doomsday prepper digging your apocalypse bunker that might be a pretty good outcome but I'm guessing you'd say that this outcome is in fact quite far from ideal.
Thus, if it doesn't make sense for everyone to act that way, you shouldn't act that way either. If you do, you're just selfishly putting the burden on other people to carry you to a desired outcome you can't be bothered to work towards. It's no different than refusing a vaccination (for ideological reasons) and relying on herd immunity to keep you from getting infected.
I have already pointed out that this is wrong. It's even in the OP.
Again, voting in the election isn't a game theory hypothetical. It's a real thing going on with real people and real externalities. Which means every vote cast in the real world does in fact matter.
Robot Nixon
He's doing something better.
He is convincing a large group of people, who he largely disagrees with, not to vote, when his vote really is pretty pointless he's from NY.
1 vote, it doesn't really matter much. Certainly not as much as convincing a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand people their vote doesn't matter.
I'm not certain that boiling down collective action problems to "Kant was right" is actually tenable.
Even when you're dealing with margins of error, individual votes can be what tilts that error toward one or the other result.
Like a grain of sand in the hour glass, it may be really goddamn hard to see and nigh-impossible for a human to view, but removing it absolutely does have an effect.
It doesn't have to on its own, it's when many people vote that has bigger consequences. That doesn't mean you still shouldn't vote, if you want Chris Christie to win an election he's not going to get there by having one less vote. It's your duty as a citizen to elect your representatives, people have literally died over this privilege.
edit: How do you think you'd know if that was the case if you vote? The press don't tell the public which votes do that in elections. There's no glory in that. You're not going to get interviews by the press about your vote tipping the scales. You're not going to get there by taking yourself out of the equation. All that does is show whichever candidate your back has one less vote.
So we have two groups, a small highly motivated group that is willing to pay money to keep legislation from passing. Then we have a second group, where virtually any amount of effort they put into combating the problem will be far in excess of the benefit they stand to gain. Assuming the side against the legislation spends money on an ad campaign that confuses people, even spending the time to educate yourself as to how you should vote will have costs in excess of that benefit. We as a society are poorer for the fact that this legislation will probably fail. The motivated group, though small can easily create a situation where it is irrational for people to educate themselves about the issue to the extent that they would make an informed vote.
It's been awhile since I read this book, so I can't recall the name, but an economists published a book in the 1970's describing this problem in detail. He theorized, that societies were prone to collapse over time almost regardless of what political system is used because over successive generations, small groups of people with similar interests continue to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of society. That together we will all make rational decisions that will lead to bad outcomes, because the natural incentives that exist for everyone are such that rich people band together as a group and everyone else does not do that. That they have a really strong incentive to band together to bring about outcomes that are bad for everyone, while the benefit to the average person to do anything about this is so low that it's really not worthy of discussing. Over time, powerful families create untenable situations that make societal collapse necessary, and that for all of the "progress" our society has made, this model still holds and our society is on the way to collapse.
It means your participating in electing your representatives and casting one more vote for your favored candidate won't do any harm. You won't know how many people voted for candidates until after the voting has been counted. By the time you do lean it's too late to do anything about it.
edit: It isn't your one vote, otherwise you'd be the only person voting in an election and democracies don't work like that.
I'll tell you when your vote doesn't matter. It's when you don't vote.
But the more people think like you, the less of them will vote, thus making it more likely that your vote would swing the outcome.
So it's in the people who vote's best interest to keep voting unless you do vote then it switches.
But of course it not like it is a huge deal to vote and heck, I like voting.
Many individuals upon participating in the system for years only to have politicians they helped elect vote against the specific issues they campaigned on, based on an educated understanding of the system then choose not to vote. For a variety of reasons, it can be rational, and even an educated decision not to participate in the system. The system as it is rewards powerful people with ill intentions, and incentives them to participate heavily. It offers rewards mostly not worth talking about to the broad society that might choose to vote.
It does move it. Very slightly. Small =/= Zero.
I'd argue boiling every collective action problem to "Kant was right" is accurate.
SKFM is right in the hypothetical situation where person X can vote or not vote, and everyone else's actions are completely predetermined, it won't matter, but that's irrelevant. Collective action problems result from lots of people
saying, "Well, me doing the wrong thing isn't individually a cataclysm!" and then we get problems. Choosing to be part of the problem makes you morally responsible for the group result.
No one snowflake is responsible for the avalanche.
Though, honestly, for voting specifically, I want to maximize the number of people who vote for my candidates, I actually don't see maximizing participation as the most valuable end it and of itself. Voting for the wrong candidates is worse than not voting at all.
If you are posting on this forum right now to argue over this it is safe to say you have time to learn about party platforms or candidates as you're clearly not doing any of those other things either.
Voters don't need to spend hours getting to know candidates positions and who they are. In this age of technology its remarkably easy to find what they need on the internet or spending an hour on a news show that focuses on politics. They don't have to dedicate their lives to it, simply know the basics. The more information they have the easier it will be to vote for the politician they like. Their lives will be effected by who wins elections they'll just be ignoring the election process, not the results.
The system also punishes those who get caught in the crossfire of political matters. For instance, unions get harsher response in Wisconsin when Scott Walker won his elections. Whoever becomes president has a larger impact on America.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/#IP
Yes, medicare and stealing the sweat from the browes of genxers and millennials, because boomers can't budget for their retirement, is only a reward equalling 40% of the national budget. Not worth talking about.
But clearly there cannot be a pure Nash equilibrium where it makes sense for no one to vote because as people stop voting the value of a single vote goes up. Look at the situation where no one votes and we decide whether or not to cast a vote. In this case we get everything we want for a minor marginal cost (indeed we can even vote ourselves in implying very high marginal benefit).
Such there must be some equilibrium level of voters which equalizes the cost and benefits of the marginal voter.
This does not imply that the solution is efficient, only that the calculus on whether or not you personally should vote must be an individual decision and not a general structure absent externalities.
Anywho lets describe the game. It has two phases. Phase one has two players and phase two has lots. The game is repeated indefinitely.
In phase 1 players stake positions. Their goal is to win. In phase 2 players vote for player 1 or player 2 based on their individual preferences. The game then repeats.
From this structure it's clear that voters in 2 even if they don't effect the winner still effect the policy positions of part 1. And so, knowing this, have marginal benefits to voting.
Any person who has a difference from the median voter then has an incentive (and the same incentive since players 1 and 2 can only see votes) to vote and the only difference in whether they should is
1)their value on the the issues in question
2) the costs of voting
It's worth noting that there is a special case for a game with three periods, where we allow people to argue before the votes. In that instance it always makes sense for people who are going to vote and have opinions far from the norm to argue that other people should not. Because that will increase the power of their vote.
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It's for this last reason that we should be very wary of "they're all the same rhetoric" because such rhetoric only benefits one side. It wouldn't if people were perfectly rational beings (they would be able to see through the lie) but people are not and so can be influenced.
I wonder how many people in Florida in 2000 saw all that happening and wished they had gone to the polls after it was too late. Replace with any close race anywhere, at any level.
Even if a person's vote ends up going for the candidate/party/referendum that doesn't win, at least they did what they could. "Oh well, I shouldn't have bothered" is a feeling that comes in hindsight, and the problem with that is it then starts getting extrapolated towards future elections even though it's a completely new instance that cannot be 100% predicted.
Always vote. Disappointment in not winning is better than regret in not having participated and so losing by default.
From a position of rational self interest I should only ever do things that are beneficial to me.
If my vote doesn't matter and voting requires a non-zero amount of effort, then there is no benefit to voting to me.
You vote in the primary to get your preferred issues/candidates put forward.
You vote in the general to elect the least bad option, because a non-vote is indistinguishable from a vote to default on the economy and plunge us back into a Mad Max style feudalistic society.
The primary is when you play offense; the general election is when you play defense.
I'd argue that in elections, unlike sports, running up the score has a tangible benefit. The percentage a candidate wins by can shift people's perspective on issues. So every single vote definitely has a non-zero value.
This is probably the case for the majority of Americans, though I'm not entirely certain what the swing states look like at present.
If everyone only ever acted according to rational self-interest we would have a pretty shitty society.
Also if you have any position at all on any issue, all you're accomplishing by not voting is making it more likely (even infinitesimally more likely) that the other party would win and advance the opposite position.
So voting can only ever help you (even if it's only a tiny contribution to a greater good), and not voting can only ever hurt you (even if it's only a tiny non-contribution to preventing a greater harm).
This ignores that some people consider voting to have a small but nonzero cost (e.g. 15 minutes out of your day, extra gas).
Depending on the state, the time cost is irrelevant - in MN you just get time off work for it.
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This is only true if you ignore the existence of outside actors.
Also it's highly disingenuous to say your vote doesn't matter. Every vote matters. Objectively, each individual vote does not matter much, but it does matter, and it all adds up.
You vote in the hopes that, your vote will contribute to a cohesive group action which will effect society in a way which will benefit you, often in large and significant ways that you yourself could never have achieved on your own.
Rationally, it seems like it's in everyone's best interest to vote, because it increases the chances no matter how small that society itself will bend in a way that is preferable to them, which can often affect them more meaningfully than anything they could have done with the relatively trivial amount of time it takes to find out which candidates support policies in their best interest, and then voting for them.