I think another argument to make is that the less people vote, the more powerful are people who do vote. So one could argue that when you vote, you decrease the power of people voting against your point of view

@CarneadesOfCyrene

7 жыл бұрын

Interesting claim. Though it still is such a small percentage by which you decrease their power, it seems negligible.

@DarkLink606

11 ай бұрын

Not only is your power still vanishingly small, but depending on who you are, letting others vote might be better. We delegate important decisions in numerous occasions - it's better to take medicine prescribed by a doctor if you're not a doctor, for instance - and this is a sensible choice, better than googling your symptoms and guessing the best medicine. Someone with little to no understanding or interest in politics might be doing a good thing by voluntarily waiving their right to vote.

The probability of one's vote actually changing the outcome of the election is roughly 0.00012%, which is essentially 0.

The most disturbing thing is that you can be quite sure the political think tank people have been aware of the problem forever, and they do not seem to be trying to reduce the cost of casting a vote. You might even think they don't really want everyone to vote.

I think you explained this accurately; however, I think for undergraduates it could get a bit confusing because it is rather wordy. Use Mueller's equation in Public Choice Theory to explain the voter's paradox. It would make it much more clear.

Your vote is not a poker chip. It's not about hedging a bet or stacking any odds; voting is an individual's essential Freedom of Expression. As such, the goal is not solely for impact or recognition. We ought to use our vote for whomever we Truly believe in, regardless of the rhetoric of any other party/person. An Honest Vote in good conscience, even for no one, is never wasted. I disagree with Mandate Voting because it reduces one's option literally to the lesser of two evils ... which is still choosing evil. Such a false dichotomy is not a rational decision nor favorable for progress. More and more standards are being given up from each unfavorable weigh-in like this, until we stand for nothing. Expressive Voting also seems dangerous. It feels more like Jingoism than anything else because if we do so only to vote for an appearance, we've created an echo-chamber rather than an actual ideal. There's nothing wrong with being patriotic, so far as we keep our perspective in check. Jingoists refuse to see the bad with the good and as a result stagnate movement. All people make mistakes; if we are unwilling to admit that, then we cannot move forward.

one vote won't swing an election, but the more people think that way, the more likely it actually becomes.

@ProSandlin

7 жыл бұрын

That is the argument most people stick to when this conversation is brought up and I have no idea how much sense it makes. There are two claims that I think are both true and I'm not sure what to make of it: 1. A single vote probably wouldn't make a difference in a with 130 million other votes. 2. If everyone came to this conclusion then the amount of voters would go down and eventually make statement 1 not true. My first thought it that what statement two says could happen is less likely than your vote making a difference. If 99% of the people decided voting was pointless then your vote would be one of 1.3 million where it would still not be likely to have much influence. To accommodate both of those statements, you should tell others to vote but choose not to yourself. That means you are doing your part to prevent everyone from deciding not to vote while not casting a vote that is likely to not make a difference. Now we are back to the beginning of the claim; if everyone comes to that conclusion then no one would vote. It seems like a paradox. Does anyone have a good solution?

@DFPercush

7 жыл бұрын

Hunter Sandlin There are enough people who still value voting, that yours probably still won't count for much. That's a valid point, and really, all it takes is a large enough sample size to get a representative ...sample. However, if there is a bias in which side is, on average, more enthusiastic about voting, that can definitely have an effect.

@CarneadesOfCyrene

7 жыл бұрын

The argument must be that actually voting (not merely convincing others) has an effect on others to follow suit. But I think that we can make that claim as people like to do things together, and they are influenced by the actions of those around them.

@ProSandlin

7 жыл бұрын

That's a really good point but then you're sort of back to a similar question; how much of an impact does one person have on that entire side's enthusiasm to vote? Isn't that basically the same problem the original question had? I could be completely wrong but that is just my first thought.

@ProSandlin

7 жыл бұрын

Is that still enough influence on an election to rationalize voting?

May I ask why Hilary was your choice? Is there an ethical framework with which you based your decision on?

@CarneadesOfCyrene

7 жыл бұрын

Personally, I am skeptical that there is any objective good or evil in the world. I have lived in a wide range of cultures around the world, and that has given me a proclivity to support those who are more tolerant to those who are different.

@BlueLightningSky

7 жыл бұрын

I see. I always imagined a hardcore skeptic would not vote, or rather IF they were to vote would not care which candidate they voted for. On a side note, would you now consider making a video on the electoral college given the recent results of the US Elections?

@CarneadesOfCyrene

7 жыл бұрын

For the committed skeptic, at least, under my view, actions are drastically different than beliefs. Therefore, while I may lack beliefs about candidates, that does not mean I would fail to vote for them. I have considered it. I will see what my tech situation looks like in the upcoming weeks, and see if that is viable.

One factor that is not accounted for that gives value to voting is that when you vote you represent your demographic and add to the number of people in that demographic. Because demographics are recorded in many countries with democracies, the winners of elections have to pay attention to the layout of demographics to ensure that they are re-elected and they will make policy choices in order to ensure that the most common demographics are happy with them. By adding to the demographic counter for whatever you fall into, you marginally increase the power of your group. To see why this is important, I recommend CPG Grey's "The Rules for Rulers" video where he talks about keys to power in a democracy. Of course, the amount you add to your demographic is marginal, so premise 3 arguably still stands. However, this seems to remove ethics from the equation. If you follow a deontological approach for example, you should only not vote if you universally will not voting to be the best outcome. From a virtue ethics approach, you should act in a virtuous way even if it is outside of your own self interest of wasted time and voting for what you believe in could easily be considered virtuous. Only a consequentialist or egoist would buy this argument on ethical grounds, and the consequentalist might bring up the same objections that you brought up as well as the ones I brought up. Furthermore, the term "self-interest" seems to infer an egoist theory of ethics anyway. Perhaps framing voting from an ethical perspective is flawed, but it at least seems to have some overlap because ethics dictate the types of actions you ought to take, and voting is an action.

@CarneadesOfCyrene

7 жыл бұрын

The reason that ethics is set apart, is that we are asking whether it is rational to vote, not whether it is ethical to vote, but you seem to make a good case for it being ethical to vote, even if it is not rational.

Why it's 2 dollars??? the calculation is wrong

I understood this paradox long ago, but it was only in a grad seminar that I was bold enough to mention that it seems a rational person would never vote. Especially given our two-party winner-take-all system in which there is not sufficient differentiation for many people to think any candidate does a good job of representing a given voter's interests. Given that I cannot actually choose who will run in the primaries, and I have no influence with party bosses, there seems little motivation to vote even if the cost is a perfect zero. I may best pursue my interests by refusing to take part at all. I think most people understand the irrationality of voting, and they vote, as they attend church, because there has been a propaganda driven into them from childhood.

@lukasg4807

3 жыл бұрын

People vote due to feeling a duty to join into a collective effort of likeminded individuals. You might as well say that a rational person would not respond to a cry for help in a crowded area, as someone else will likely hear the cry and be the one to be inconvenienced. Or rather that only an irrational person would stop at a stop sign, as driving straight through isn't a problem as long as no one else does. You seem to conflate rationality with a lack of social responsibility.

@MrAllallalla

2 жыл бұрын

I don't think people in general actually understand this. Usually people don't analyze sth like that in a cost benefit way, I think they see it as a societal duty or sth similar. They think it's the moral thing to do and that's just how it is. Also people have trouble incorporating extreme odds into everyday life, it's hard to see the difference between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1,000,000 if you're not on your desk and completely detached from reality. I think the driving force is tradition and culture but I don't think people are really aware of it.

@dougyoung4790

Жыл бұрын

@@lukasg4807 Oh yes, because those situations are so similar in nature and scope. /s

@MrAllallalla

29 күн бұрын

​@@lukasg4807I think your decision to aid in your scenario has a much bigger potential impact based on likelihood, risk and benefit.

@lukasg4807

29 күн бұрын

@MrAllallalla alright then. Why go to war and fight for your country? One soldier isn't going to make a difference. There's everything to lose and nothing to gain. You donating to cancer research won't make a difference either if you're not rich af, and heck, you need the 100 dollars more. We do lots of things that require a collective effort where the individual contribution isn't that important. It's what makes society work.

If there was an election decided by one vote (which would result in a re-count in any case). Who is the deciding voter? Any of the tens of thousands of voters could be declared the deciding vote, but technically all of them would be as the lack of any one of them would mean a loss/tie. I would think, that in this case, the benefit is tens of thousands of times higher. What I took from this is that it is not actually the decision to vote/not vote as that has little to zero benefit (particularly if who voted or not is not public knowledge). However the decision to invest time to support your candidate publically with small or large groups is where the benefit lies as the results can snowball if you manage to convince people.

@CarneadesOfCyrene

7 жыл бұрын

That is an interesting point, if the election comes down to just one vote, technically everyone that voted for the winner is the deciding vote. Though the benefit may be increased, the larger an election gets, the more astronomical the odds of it being decided by one vote. I agree with your sentiment that the better thing you can do is talking to others about voting and about your candidate, to get them interested an involved.

Very good video--helped me with the studies. Sorry about the election...

@CarneadesOfCyrene

7 жыл бұрын

No problem. It just leads me to take solace in the fact that we might be all just brains in a vat.

You touched on some meta-logic, but didn't expand on it. Does it have a name? It went something like this: If a rational person doesn't vote, then the voters are irrational people. However bad or ineffectual the system may be now, if the voting pool were to consist just of irrational people, things could be a whole lot worse. In order for things not to be so bad, then, a rational person votes. Is there a name for that kind of thing - a surface analysis tells you one thing is good, but if everyone did it, it would be bad... so, even though there's nothing wrong with the logic that tells you it's good... the better outcome is, everyone realizes it's bad. It seems like there are other areas where this might apply, I'm not the first one to think of it - does this kind of situation or paradox have a name?

I believe voting is usually in direct conflict with self voting, but my belief does assume that in a free society or free community, it would be irrational for anyone to vote. E.g. it would be irrational to vote for a government trade officer of international trade is working without one. From such assumption, it would follow that the majority of voters will always be irrational, for if they were rational, they wouldn't vote, but neither would there be a voting system, rather, there would a laissez faire free market society. One might argue that people are inherently irrational and we will always need some kind of voting system, but whether or not that is true, it does not solve the problem that, if people are irrational then the majority of voters must also be irrational. There is also no reason why a laissez faire free market society could not work if people were rational (as agreed by most economist even if they think people are inherently irrational) because by apriori logic, self interest creates spontaenous societal harmony. So I would conclude that it is usually irrational to vote because no matter how rational you think you are, the outcome of voting will never reflect upon the rational self interest of society. So rather than spending time justifying the system, it is more rational to teach others how to be rational, and over time, less people will vote as they see no benefit from it. Furthermore, I find the idea of a defined rational self interest of society as paradoxical. Rational self interest is by definition personal and in conflict with other people's self interest. For example. If I want bread and you want chicken, my self interest is different to yours so I would inevitably have to comprimise something less of value to me for your good. In a utopian society, resources would not be scarce and no comprimise would need to be made. So when people vote, they will either 1. act in greed e.g. lobby groups, etc, what ever benefits them at the inevitable cost of others, or 2. Make an altruistic vote, believing they are doing what is in the best interest of their nation, but this also inevitably irrational because 1. self interest is not quanfiable because it is subjective. 2. If something was generally within the self interest of society, there would be no reason to vote on it since people would already be making comprimises for that self interest. 3. If you voting altruistically, you are by definition not acting in your self interest, so if everyone was voting altruistically they could not be voting for societies general self interest since they are expressing that self interest doesn't exist by voting altruistically. And even if only some people voted altruistically, it means other people are voting for greed which cannot be within societies self interest as I have already shown. The only reason why one should vote is in a very rare situation (as I believe the USA is in right now) where by people have already voted for some system that is not in your rational self interest, and even though most voters are irrational, by voting, you are in fact claiming a kind of self defense, likewise how it is okay to lie if someone is threatening you with murder. So in such a case, not voting would actually be against your self interest since by default, from prior votes, something, some system is interferring with your rational self interest anyway. In essence, voting would be an amoral decision. I think the evidence is substantial that a vote for Donald J. Trump could be justified in this way. There's no way I would vote for an establishment figure as they are representatives of the default system I am describing. I'm sorry if I haven't articulated this in a clear way, but that's exactly why I wrote so much, in a hope that you would understand where I'm coming from. I bet someone has probably already said this argument better than me so if anyone can find it for me I'd greatly appreciate it. I.e. voting is not universally preferable behaviour/in conflict with the catagorical imperative.

You touched on the motivation to vote in order to influence others towards voting for the sake of increasing the chance that ones opinion on what to vote gains greater traction. My estimation would be that way more often that motivation is to influence people to vote for the sake of voting. That's because it is understood that democracy is there to further not just ones own welfare but as a crude method to cook up an overall course to further the welfare of as many beings inhabiting the rocky landscape of needs and values as possible.

@ProSandlin

7 жыл бұрын

If I understood that right you are saying not only do people vote to get others to get behind their cause but to encourage them to vote at all because our system relies on voters to function. I have the same question about both parts of that (the one mention in the video and the part you added on); why do you have to vote to have the effect? Maybe I am breaking the implied rules of the paradox but you influence people to vote and what the vote by interacting with them, not by voting. If the question was, "Does it make sense to tell people who to vote for and to vote?" then you would have answer it but the question was, "Does it make sense to vote?" I could be completely missing something but your vote doesn't influence anybody, what you say does.

@ulmeydasmile

7 жыл бұрын

That is correct. My statement lacked that distinction. Assumed one wants to influence others and that it usually effectively operates on close family and friends and that the effect drops in magnitude rapidly the further away humans are from that inner circle and that it would immediately become apparent to them that feigning to vote, at least intuitively, undermines ones argument the benefit/cost ratio of casting a ballot and getting a bit of political participation out of it quickly supersedes that of only pretending to vote and having to go through most of the motions anyway. Under these assumptions the arguments with and without that distinction should approximate each other. The internet might break the assumption by making it easier to influence people who are not sniffing around your shit and would notice if you are trying to be a sneaky little honey badger, though.

Interestingly enough, I firmly believe in this but I vote. Meanwhile other people don't vote and this is never the reason

If you assert that a person who really wants to improve his own well-being ought rather to buy a lottery ticket, where his cost probably equals a few minutes' earnings, rather than vote, where he may use a half hour of his time, most people would probably agree. I submit people vote to feel they are acceptable as citizens, yet they feel a mild guilt for engaging in what would seem closer to superstition than rational behavior. Also, if you vote you get membership in the in-group and you can castigate the out-group with those bumperstickers telling them they cannot complain if they did not vote.

I uploaded an important comment in your last video

@CarneadesOfCyrene

7 жыл бұрын

I will have to check it out.

Yeah how that working out for you.

IMO, this paradox commits an error that .many economists also commit: assuming that agents are rational actors when much evidence shows that people cannot necessarily be counted to act in their own best interests. The paradox also ignores the possibility of many voters abstaining, which can actually lead to a winner that stands against ones interests. I see it as similer to the Nader effect, or spoiler effect, where too many people voted for Nader, who better represented(ostensibly) their interests than Gore, but as Nader even then had no chance to win, all it did was cost Gore votes whilkwhilke not hurting Bush. Bush won florida by around a thousand points, while Nader recieved atens of thousands, if even a few went to Gore, my own US could have erased n wight year blight of adventurism and war crimes from its history. I think a much bigger problem is in representative government as it stands, where a vote cast can never be guaranteed to be in ones best interest, because all one is voting for(even if ones vote "counts") is for who will make decisions for oneself, not on those decisions themselves. IMO, representative democracy is the weakest form of democracy(much closer to the Roman republic than to Athenian democracy) and history has shown that once elected, politicians rarely keep their promises.

@CarneadesOfCyrene

7 жыл бұрын

People are certainly rarely rational, though I think that the greater fallacy which economists make is only counting monetary wealth as the only good. I think people take actions which benefit themselves in other ways.

@MrAllallalla

2 жыл бұрын

It doesn't commit an error. It shows a flaw of the voting system. Look at the 3 propositions. Address those instead of ranting about sth unrelated. Nowhere does he claim that every person is ultra rational. It just shows that our system relies on people being irrational because if everybody understood this there wouldn't be the societal pressures needed to make people vote. It also shows that people who categorically look down on non-voters maybe should think about it a little more.

@munstrumridcully

2 жыл бұрын

@@MrAllallalla Sorry I forgot what this vid was about. Ill rewatch it, I'm always willing to admit error and correct myself when wrong.

A vote has a 1 in a million chance of affecting a million people. Thus, on average, one vote makes a difference for one person. That's rational enough for me.

I view the probability of me changing the election by voting as greater than the actual probability that the election will come down to one vote. The thought patterns that I'm experiencing when I consider whether or not to vote are likely felt by other people, and thus if I were to not vote, all those other people wouldn't vote as well.

@MrAllallalla

2 жыл бұрын

That doesn't make sense... You're not telepathically linked, they will vote or not vote regardless of your own decision

@littlebigphil

2 жыл бұрын

@@MrAllallalla Picking a decision strategy is something that is done well in advance of the actual decision, and it influences others' decision strategies to be harmonious through communication. What's your opinion on the psychological twin prisoner's dilemma? The setup is that there's a pyschological twin of you: someone who you have every reason to believe acts in the same way you do. There's no causal link between the two of you (except that you know you act the same). Both you and your psychological twin are caught in a prisoner's dilemma with each other. How do you act?

You spelled "Hillary" wrong.

PS, while I think Bernie had the best plkatform to do what I consider good, unfortunately I'm left with voting for the lessor of two evils, as usual. In this case, I'm with tyou, Hillary over Trump, my conscience couldn't abide casting a vote for Trump. Barely for Hillary, not at all for Trump.