I think this is a highly inaccurate model, and not useful. By adding risk and reward to determine outcome value, Tao is claiming that outcome value is increased by riskiness. Similarly, high risk situations with low rewards have relatively no downsides (assuming there are no external shocks).
This is nonsensical.
When people talk about high risk situations, they tend to conflate two things: the magnitude of potential downsides and the likelihood of success. To make his model meaningful, Tao would need to incorporate that from the start.
I strongly recommend Fooled By Randomness as primer for thinking about this.
There exists some (often non-Gaussian) curve for describing risk vs reward. I don’t know how you simplify that… Maybe take for number, one for the average negative value outcome and one for the average positive value outcome, and their associated probabilities. And then just add those together? I’m not sure.
> By adding risk and reward to determine outcome value, Tao is claiming that outcome value is increased by riskiness.
Tao talks about minimising "value at risk" which he defines as risk MINUS reward. If you prefer to switch signs and talk about maximising "outcome value" then that would be reward MINUS risk.
“For instance, a "safe" action might have a reward of 5 and a risk of 3, which I would represent as 5±3 in this model, the return would typically range anywhere from 2 to 8 units of net benefit.”
He is literally adding risk and reward to determine the upper net benefit bound.
I wonder if you missed the three follow-up posts? It's really in those that his analysis takes shape. What you call the "upper net benefit bound" plays no part in it.
I do not know who he is beyond this Mastodon post, and I do not believe I can “dismiss” him as a person. But I can recognize the relative usefulness (or lack thereof) of the idea on its merits. Being able to do so, with humility, is an important life skill.
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)
Right wing media has been making people feel bad for 25 years straight now. They radicalized an entire generation and made them fear brown people and Democrats. Despite the fact none of it's reality-based. It's not working out too great for the country!
Elon Musk continuously and publicly falling for the dumbest shit imaginable really should be the final nail in the coffin of his reputation.
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.
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.
> We have hundreds of years of Presidential elections to show that individual votes are insignificant.
Enthusiasm, like apathy, spreads. One person enthused about voting can inspire quite a few more people to vote, and a few of them to be enthusiastic about voting, which spreads even further.
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.
Yes, collectively. Notice your usage of the plural.
> Every one of the million of votes for the winner matters just as much as the vote for the loser.
This is not the argument you think it is. How do the votes for the loser matter? The loser still lost, despite those votes. There's no consolation prize for 2nd place.
> You are influencing the outcome exactly as much as every other person in line.
Agreed.
> Individually? Negligible.
Exactly.
> But in aggregate, that’s an election.
Also agreed.
The votes matter in the aggreggate. However, I as an individual voter have no influence over the aggregate, or the outcome. Other voters do what they want, not what I want. My vote doesn't change their vote.
I didn't say there was no reason to vote. I'm just saying that it's a bit irrational to vote strategically, as if your vote will determine the outcome. People have been convinced that they have to hold their noses and vote for someone they dislike in order to stop someone they dislike more. That's mass irrationality, and how we always end up with people we dislike. And what did it get the individual voters? Tens of millions of people vote for someone they dislike and still lose. They lose the election and their souls.
If everyone thought, as you assert, that an individual vote does not matter, then they would not vote; therefore both the quantitative and qualitative meaning/value of the "votes" (plural) would change too. They are inextricably bound; you are just viewing things through a statistical lens but that is not the only one that is valid. Grow up. Your attitude is poison and if more people thought like you we would have lost democracy long ago.
Furthermore the act you describe of taking the time to vote based on the issues, even when a particular candidate or proposition goes against the voter's normal worldivew, is not irrational, it is doing one's civic duty to be informed. The vote is the inflecion point at which that civic duty materializes most clearly; but it is part of a larger, always-ongoin process in which the citizens and the state are in a dialogue with each other; and the citizens are in dialgue with other citizens.
If there were no impetus to vote, then the dialogue itself becomes somewhat irrelevant; therefore the voting is what anchors the abastract to the concrete world of here-and-now. Your again, extremely small-minded, view of the world can not account for this.
> if more people thought like you we would have lost democracy long ago
The United States has always been a plutocracy, and the plutocrats who wrote the Constitution were explicitly suspicious of direct democracy, intentionally adding a number of measures to obstruct it. The most recent election was largely a contest between competing factions of billionaires, and guess what, a billionaire won.
It's actually so-called "strategic" voting, choosing the lesser of two evils, that perpetuates the evils of our plutocracy.
> 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).
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.
"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."
I like your analogy, but I think it needs to account for the fact that there are two scenarios in which a single vote can influence an election:
1. If it would have been a tie without that single vote. In this scenario, the single vote breaks the tie.
2. If the candidate that the single vote is to be cast on would have lost by one vote withtout that single vote. In this case, the single vote creates a tie.
The odds of either happening are astronomically long, of course.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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 am constrained in my decision making by my subconscious. I have often in life made poor decisions out of strange compulsions driven by mood. Mathematical skills be damned
"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 think this is a highly inaccurate model, and not useful. By adding risk and reward to determine outcome value, Tao is claiming that outcome value is increased by riskiness. Similarly, high risk situations with low rewards have relatively no downsides (assuming there are no external shocks).
This is nonsensical.
When people talk about high risk situations, they tend to conflate two things: the magnitude of potential downsides and the likelihood of success. To make his model meaningful, Tao would need to incorporate that from the start.
I strongly recommend Fooled By Randomness as primer for thinking about this.
There exists some (often non-Gaussian) curve for describing risk vs reward. I don’t know how you simplify that… Maybe take for number, one for the average negative value outcome and one for the average positive value outcome, and their associated probabilities. And then just add those together? I’m not sure.
> By adding risk and reward to determine outcome value, Tao is claiming that outcome value is increased by riskiness.
Tao talks about minimising "value at risk" which he defines as risk MINUS reward. If you prefer to switch signs and talk about maximising "outcome value" then that would be reward MINUS risk.
“For instance, a "safe" action might have a reward of 5 and a risk of 3, which I would represent as 5±3 in this model, the return would typically range anywhere from 2 to 8 units of net benefit.”
He is literally adding risk and reward to determine the upper net benefit bound.
I wonder if you missed the three follow-up posts? It's really in those that his analysis takes shape. What you call the "upper net benefit bound" plays no part in it.
You think you can dismiss Terence Tao offhand because you read a pop psychology book?
I do not know who he is beyond this Mastodon post, and I do not believe I can “dismiss” him as a person. But I can recognize the relative usefulness (or lack thereof) of the idea on its merits. Being able to do so, with humility, is an important life skill.
Python code to match the article:
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 immediately jumped to a commentary on the impacts of AI, but really it's probably a bit of a Rohrschach test.
Yes and the incumbent strategy on this for round was largely to say "This is fine" with a notable lack of enthusiasm
That was the news release strategy, the actual behind the scenes strategies were a bit more enthusiastic based on what I've been reading on Substack.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-14-2024
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.
Not what I'm reading on Substack/Ghost. I have a liberal bubble, though.
https://substack.perfectunion.us/p/restaurant-chains-won-big...
https://www.the-sentinel-intelligence.net/things-can-always-...
https://scottsumner.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-trump-bid...
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)
Right wing media has been making people feel bad for 25 years straight now. They radicalized an entire generation and made them fear brown people and Democrats. Despite the fact none of it's reality-based. It's not working out too great for the country!
Elon Musk continuously and publicly falling for the dumbest shit imaginable really should be the final nail in the coffin of his reputation.
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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 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.
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.
> We have hundreds of years of Presidential elections to show that individual votes are insignificant.
Enthusiasm, like apathy, spreads. One person enthused about voting can inspire quite a few more people to vote, and a few of them to be enthusiastic about voting, which spreads even further.
The principal driver of voter enthusiasm, or lack thereof, is the candidates.
Inspiring others to vote and actually casting your own single vote are separate.
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.
> The votes matter.
Yes, collectively. Notice your usage of the plural.
> Every one of the million of votes for the winner matters just as much as the vote for the loser.
This is not the argument you think it is. How do the votes for the loser matter? The loser still lost, despite those votes. There's no consolation prize for 2nd place.
> You are influencing the outcome exactly as much as every other person in line.
Agreed.
> Individually? Negligible.
Exactly.
> But in aggregate, that’s an election.
Also agreed.
The votes matter in the aggreggate. However, I as an individual voter have no influence over the aggregate, or the outcome. Other voters do what they want, not what I want. My vote doesn't change their vote.
I didn't say there was no reason to vote. I'm just saying that it's a bit irrational to vote strategically, as if your vote will determine the outcome. People have been convinced that they have to hold their noses and vote for someone they dislike in order to stop someone they dislike more. That's mass irrationality, and how we always end up with people we dislike. And what did it get the individual voters? Tens of millions of people vote for someone they dislike and still lose. They lose the election and their souls.
If everyone thought, as you assert, that an individual vote does not matter, then they would not vote; therefore both the quantitative and qualitative meaning/value of the "votes" (plural) would change too. They are inextricably bound; you are just viewing things through a statistical lens but that is not the only one that is valid. Grow up. Your attitude is poison and if more people thought like you we would have lost democracy long ago.
Furthermore the act you describe of taking the time to vote based on the issues, even when a particular candidate or proposition goes against the voter's normal worldivew, is not irrational, it is doing one's civic duty to be informed. The vote is the inflecion point at which that civic duty materializes most clearly; but it is part of a larger, always-ongoin process in which the citizens and the state are in a dialogue with each other; and the citizens are in dialgue with other citizens.
If there were no impetus to vote, then the dialogue itself becomes somewhat irrelevant; therefore the voting is what anchors the abastract to the concrete world of here-and-now. Your again, extremely small-minded, view of the world can not account for this.
> If everyone thought, as you assert, that an individual vote does not matter, then they would not vote
I just said, immediately before your reply, "I didn't say there was no reason to vote", and this is your response? Nice reading comprehension.
> it is doing one's civic duty
That's exactly what I was referring to in my original post: "Voting tends to be more of a symbolic or ethical act than an rational act".
> Your attitude is poison
> extremely small-minded
Please read and respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> if more people thought like you we would have lost democracy long ago
The United States has always been a plutocracy, and the plutocrats who wrote the Constitution were explicitly suspicious of direct democracy, intentionally adding a number of measures to obstruct it. The most recent election was largely a contest between competing factions of billionaires, and guess what, a billionaire won.
It's actually so-called "strategic" voting, choosing the lesser of two evils, that perpetuates the evils of our plutocracy.
"Voting tends to be more of a symbolic or ethical act than an rational act"
An act that is consistent within one's ethical framework is a rational act. Agree or disagree, and why?
Thanks.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Yes, that is why when lotteries can be gamed they often are, eg:
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.
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 logged in simply to praise the level of patience you have
"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."
I like your analogy, but I think it needs to account for the fact that there are two scenarios in which a single vote can influence an election:
1. If it would have been a tie without that single vote. In this scenario, the single vote breaks the tie.
2. If the candidate that the single vote is to be cast on would have lost by one vote withtout that single vote. In this case, the single vote creates a tie.
The odds of either happening are astronomically long, of course.
This short paper goes into some more detail [1].
[1] https://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~norman/papers/probability_puzzl...
Ok, so, choose numbers higher than 31.
That still doesn't leave you with much guidance. And the more people who follow this advice, the less it becomes effective.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
We are at the second Trump administration after Obama. Obsessing over Obama now is ... definitely a choice.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> The party nominees are elected by the very same voters—a subset of them
A very very very tiny subset. The point stands.
> A very very very tiny subset.
Not really. Approximately 40 million people voted in the 2024 primaries.
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.
> 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.
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> "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
> 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.
Jimmy Carter
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?
Well obviously Terence isn’t an economist. People don’t minimize risk, we maximize utility.
I am constrained in my decision making by my subconscious. I have often in life made poor decisions out of strange compulsions driven by mood. Mathematical skills be damned
"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."