Comment by isogon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by isogon | Hacker News Reader

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It does often gloss over the nuance. I ultimately try to estimate how bad I am at assessing the veracity of arguments concerning the topic at hand, which I think is most valuable.

For example, I read many conflicting predictions concerning the last US election, saw that I could not distinguish bad predictions from good ones, and concluded that I have to remain unconvinced. I was vindicated by it being a very tight race. This doesn't always happen.

On the other hand, I read the recent Texas filing [0] and found that I could confidently argue against it, and the best opposing arguments I could find did not convince me. To my SO, I confidently voiced the prediction that this lawsuit will fail, and articulated why the probability argument in the attached Cicchetti Declaration is misguided. This is arguably a very easy task, so this correct prediction does me little credit, but I think that's the point: even if I only become convinced of things which are obvious, it is important to not accidentally become convinced of things which are not obvious.

[0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163048/2020...

I don’t understand the basis by which you think this election was “tight”.

Either op means that going into it, a lof of America was not firm in their predictions - people were firm last time, and a of them were wrong, so were weary to do it again.

It could also likely be that some states were small margins, and some districts even smaller. Overall, though, I agree with you.

The number of overall votes it would take to change the outcome of the election, compared to the total size of the electorate, is small.

The votes would need to be very precisely distributed, though.

Donald Trump won 2016 because he had a 70k vote majority across three states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

What was the minimum number of votes across the minimum number of states needed for him to win in 2020? Again, nobody has actually provided a reason this vote was close - it wasn’t close at all, it was a humiliating rejection, especially for an incumbent.

> What was the minimum number of votes across the minimum number of states needed for him to win in 2020?

I don't know the exact number, but afaik less than 1 million. Compared to the size of the electorate, a few hundred thousand votes here or there is really not that much. It only seems so to Americans because they have historically low participation and high polarisation.

So he won by 70k in a “landslide”, but losing by 7 million in the popular vote, and 1 million in minimum votes an election where 80 million is “close”.

Also, turnout set a 50 year high in percentage of eligible population to vote.

The only people who think this election was “close” are the same ones who keep saying that shocking new evidence will be released tomorrow by Giuliani, but only if I send in a check to the committee to save America.

Losing as an incumbent is humiliating, doubly so when you get rejected by so much of your own party. Trump’s loss was a humiliation, particularly because it was because he was such an incompetent president.

> The number of overall votes it would take to change the outcome of the election, compared to the total size of the electorate, is small.

Sure, with a geographically optimum shift of votes to maximally leverage the anti-democratic nature of the electoral college, it would take about ~125k votes (37 EVs need flipped, ~40k gets PA for 20, ~31.5k gets GA for 16, and ~3.5k gets ME-1 for 1; at least I think that's the lowest-vote-change scenario, and assumes reversals of votes where every change reduces the margin by 2.)

Of course, that would also be by far the biggest popular vote loss by an electoral college winner since the election of 1824, which had four candidates clearing over 10% of the vote, and the only electoral college defeat of the majority (not merely plurality) winner of the popular vote in US history.

You may think it a very easy task, but it is one that a large proportion of our elected officials failed, or possibly pretended to fail for their own political gain.

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