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Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

> "who did you vote for" isn't a matter of tribalism, but it is a (good) proxy for asking someone "what are your values"

You should test this hypothesis by talking to someone for 10 minutes, then guessing who they voted for.

My hypothesis is you wouldn't do better than 50/50.

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"If p then q" does not imply "If q then p."

Besides, there's a ton of easy ways to beat 50/50 odds without explicitly asking who they voted for. You can ask whether they graduated from college, and that will get you to something like 55/45 or 60/40. If they're white and they did not graduate from college, or if they're not white and they did graduate from college, your odds of guessing right are something like 2:1.

Studies have also found (somewhat weak) correlations between some of the Big Five personality traits and political identification: people who score highly on conscientiousness are more likely to be right-leaning, while people who score highly on openness to experience are more likely to be left-leaning.

> "If p then q" does not imply "If q then p."

My original comment is challenging whether "p then q" is valid in the first place by asking if the inverse would be true as a thought experiment. (Neither is true IMO)

Just because someone has certain values doesn't mean they vote a certain way.

Just because they vote a certain way doesn't mean they have certain values.

"p" (who you voted for) and "q" (your values) are largely independent for a large percentage of voters.

My point is that the validity and soundness of the inverse proposition has no bearing on the validity and soundness of the original proposition, so you’ve proposed a meaningless experiment.

I also think that your hypothesis that voting and values are not connected is false, but that’s a separate issue.

I understand your point and I agree with it. I didn't respond to it directly because it wasn't contributing to the discussion at hand. But I agree with your point that an inverse proposition doesn't always hold!

Eh, if you get to 1k people, probably, but you would be surprised ( maybe dismayed ), how messy the process would get as you try to shoehorn various flags into excel tracking spreadsheet for future analysis. Not to search very far, based on the factors presented, I should be in one camp, but just by virtue of not having been born here and not imbued with early childhood propaganda, I am, at best, not what you would expect politically.

edit: exceptions test the rule and so on

It’s not like I said it was 100%. 55/45 or even 67/33 is pretty noisy and will fail a lot. Still beats 50/50.

The hypothesis is that knowing a person's voting activity helps one to predict that individual's values. I don't think the parent is claiming that the values that might be revealed by a 10 minute conversation are a predictor for voting activity. I think there's a distinction, since people can - and, in my perspective, often do - misrepresent or misidentify their true values in their conversations with strangers. I am assuming that people act on their true values, not necessarily those that they advertise, when they fill out ballots.

The is a really good, IMO, Saturday Night Live skit about this where the contestants try to guess Republican or not of various people. Some of the bits do a great job of pointing out how some of the values people claim to believe in are only applied selectivity when it benefits their side.

I was talking to a very drunk Republican girl the other day. We were having a small argument about why we would send medical support to Africa for AIDS. Her argument was something about fixing America first (I was also drunk).

I asked if she regretted her vote for Trump after several people she knew lost their government contracting jobs, and she said "No, fuck that guy, I didn't vote for him."

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