Terence Tao: "It can become more rational to think and act more boldly"
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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.
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.
He is literally adding risk and reward to determine the upper net benefit bound.
from statistics import NormalDist
def var(nd):
'Value at risk'
return nd.stdev - nd.mean
safe = NormalDist(5, 3)
bold = NormalDist(9, 10)
shock = NormalDist(-5, 10)
print('Safe: %s\tBold: %s\tBaseline' % (var(safe), var(bold)))
print('Safe: %s\tBold: %s\tConstant shock' % (var(safe - 5), var(bold - 5)))
print('Safe: %s\tBold: %s\tUncorrelated shock' % (var(safe + shock), var(bold + shock)))
print('Safe: %s\tBold: %s\tCorrelated shock' % (var(safe * 2), var(bold *2)))I.e., if people think that they are in economic doldrums or decline, taking a risk seems better than the status quo?
Voting out the incumbent party seems popular during economic downturns (real or perceived) unless the party clearly inherited the economic crisis AND seems to be addressing the problem energetically (e.g., post-1929 FDR).
It is what it is. Assuming good faith and arguing with that assumption is not a thing that makes sense anymore.
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...
It really is as simple: if you feel bad, vote for the other guy. (Which is also how [REDACTED BY MODERATOR] got elected)
Elon Musk continuously and publicly falling for the dumbest shit imaginable really should be the final nail in the coffin of his reputation.
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.
A lot of people pick dates, or numbers that have won recently, or that form geometric patterns on the ticket, or that form interesting sequences, and so on.
Nothing you can do (assuming no bias in how the winning numbers are generated) will affect the chances your ticket wins, but by picking randomly from the set of possible tickets that doesn't include those commonly picked sets of numbers you can decrease the expected number of people you'll have to share the jackpot with.
Yes, birth dates of themselves and family members, which are randomly distributed in the population, and which you can't possibly know, because you don't know the identity of other lottery buyers.
> or numbers that have won recently
Do people do this? I'd assume they do the opposite of this.
> or that form geometric patterns on the ticket, or that form interesting sequences, and so on.
This is all hand-waving. Please list the numbers that I shouldn't choose.
> those commonly picked sets of numbers
What are those numbers?
In any case, even if you eliminated several thousand numbers from the pool of possibilities, that doesn't really help you choose a specific set of numbers from the millions of possibilities, other than not those.
Nope - not uniformally random, there's literally a non uniform age distribution, a specific set of months, a capped number of days, and various "peak" birth seasons.
>> > those commonly picked sets of numbers
> What are those numbers?
There are many lottery variations and differing games show interesting patterns of choice - although more and more people these days simply get machine generated tickets .. this expands the surface of interest as not only the game results themselves need to be checked for bias but also the various networked game terminals for their random generation and for local tampering.
It's probable that anyone who has done such work is bound by NDA's and agreements not to dump mass data aquired through work.
And in any case, these factors do not apply to US Presidential elections and are thus irrelevant to the larger point.
https://listverse.com/2019/06/04/10-people-who-successfully-...
> I'm calling BS on all of this hand-waving.
Maybe work on the math a little.
> Seriously, how much do you think the miniscule odds of winning can be increased via these methods?
There are multiple methods that can be and have been used, they all have different outcomes on Expected returns.
> I want a numerical answer.
Again, maybe you might want to work on the math a little yourself - on a specific ruleset (or on a family of rules using some abstraction) .. there are tools that can help you; mathematica, R, etc.
Everything else, including cheating and rigging the lottery, is irrelevant to the question of strategically voting in a US Presidential election. None of your examples or hand-waving have shown that you can significantly improve the odds of one ticket winning the Powerball or Mega Millions jackpot.
No one has said that you can improve the odds of one ticket winning. What has been said is that you can improve your expected value of playing one lottery ticket by carefully choosing what ticket to buy.
Your expected value is the product of:
• The probability that your ticket wins
• The value of the prize
• 1/(N+1) where N is the number of other people whose tickets have the same numbers as your ticket.
The first two factors are the same for everyone. The third depends on the numbers on the ticket because a lot of players do not pick their tickets randomly.
For example 1 2 3 4 5 6 is a surprisingly common choice. I've seen several lotteries where they reported afterwards that if that had been the winning ticket the prize would have been shared by several hundred or even thousands of people.
Carefully choosing? AFAICT the so-called strategy is "choose numbers higher than 31". That's a tiny bit helpful perhaps yet still exceeding vague. And this strategy depends on others not also adopting the same strategy, in which case it would actually become counterproductive. If all lottery players acted "rationally", the strategy would cease to exist.
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.
[1] https://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~norman/papers/probability_puzzl...
That still doesn't leave you with much guidance. And the more people who follow this advice, the less it becomes effective.
The last couple cycles have pretty well fit your opinion, though. I'll give you that.
All politicians are liars. If you think there's an honest one, I'm sorry to inform you that you're hopeless naive.
Obama started lying very early in his Presidential campaign. For example: "Barack Obama faced widespread condemnation today from both right and left for reneging on a promise on election campaign financing." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/20/barackobama.jo...
One example of Obama's incompetence: his administration completely botched the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Do you remember that? And he was actually terrible at advocating for a health care plan, forcing Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to do all of the work and lobbying for the ACA, which doesn't actually deserve the name "Obamacare" given to it later by Republicans.
Another example: he was overconfident about Clinton winning in 2016 and thus failed to more forcefully pursue a vote on his Supreme Court nominee.
Oh yeah, and his administration bombed a hospital.
He promised while running that legislating abortion rights would be his first act as President. That was a lie.
He bailed out Wall Street during the financial crisis while allowing homeowners to go underwater.
He continues to take credit for promoting fossil fuels in the US, as if that were a good thing.
I could go on and on and on about Obama, but I'd rather not write an entire dissertation here. My list is just some things that popped into my head immediately. (I did google for the link to confirm the thing I already knew.)
Remember that the Snowden revelations occurred during the Obama administration, which was spying on us illegally.
> All politicians are liars. If you think there's an honest one, I'm sorry to inform you that you're hopeless naive.
If all politicians are liars, then you first statement becomes a tautology. All presidents are politicians, all politicans are liars, ergo all presidents are liars.
The influence of money in politics is particularly pernicious. In the US, election campaigns are privately financed. Thus, politicians have to cater to the ultra-wealthy, or be ultra-wealthy themselves. But politicans can't run for office telling the public "My votes are owned by the ultra-wealthy", so they have to lie. (Infamously, Joe Biden told his wealthy donors the truth in 2020, "Nothing fundamentally will change", while simultaneously telling voters the opposite.) Moreover, voters believe lies, or at least overlook lies, which gives politicians even more incentive to lie and exaggerate. If lies were reliably detected and strictly punished by the electorate, then it would be an entirely different matter.
There's no President who I admire. I don't do hero worship. Not even, say, FDR, who was responsible for the Japanese-American internment camps during WWII, one of the most shameful episodes in our history.
I've not seen any evidence that US voters in the US electoral system have much say in the choices they are given on the ballot.
My major criticism of the US electoral system, as an outsider, isn't of the candidates on ballots but rather the system that has devolved into non representative party politics where very small groups have an outsized weighting on the choices put forward and the system that works against alternative proportional choices.
The party nominees are elected by the very same voters—a subset of them, anyway, but anyone can show up if they please—mostly via primaries, sometimes via caucuses.
A very very very tiny subset. The point stands.
Not really. Approximately 40 million people voted in the 2024 primaries.
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.
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.
Anyway, Carter lost reelection in a landslide, so what does that say about the voters?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An act that is consistent within one's ethical framework is a rational act. Agree or disagree, and why?
Thanks.
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.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-14-2024