The irony of this interaction is this is the first time I saw a democrat disagree with me and not throw a fit and get toxic and start blocking. It actually had me sitting here second guessing if there might be a few good ones.... then she blocked me... The irony is she would have done more to change my mind otherwise and threw away any positive effect she had in the end.
QT: https://qoto.org/@freemo/112910978727352492
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@freemo@qoto.org
@freemo Lol, what? I disagree with you all the time. And I've been a registered member of the party since January 7th 2021.
(Also, she makes good points)
Thats fair, in fact I had suspected when I wrote that you'd fall into the one exception I can actually think of outside of personal friends.
But I was mostly thinking in terms of strangers rather than people i had met and intracted with before discussing politics.
@freemo Yeah, also I think we've had that exact same argument you linked above before π
@louis ITs a fairly common argument when people come in with the two-party nonsense
bonifartius πΌπ
@freemo @louis believe me, it's a common argument here in germany with more than 5 parties having a substantial vote. if you vote for something else you are "throwing your vote away".
regarding people throwing a fit:
i think what happens is that people identify very strongly with certain parties that criticizing these parties is an attack at their ego. i believe that this happens more for progressive parties, as those often use emotional arguments (like "end of democracy"). at least much more often than conservatives.
If you have some estimate of likely results (in the form of a probability distribution over vote counts -- likely you'd assume an uncorrelated multivariate Gaussian or something similar), then it's fair to say that you can estimate the direct effect of your vote: compute the probability (as a function of what vote you cast) that your vote will be the deciding one, and pick the vote where you like that distribution the most.
In places that have a threshold this usually means voting for a party that has a significant chance of being above the threshold, sadly. Apart from this it often doesn't align with voting for larger parties (nor even, in FPTP, parties that are very likely to get at least one seat in your constituency: voting for a party that's expected to be just below 1 seat is better than for a part that's expected to be above 1 and well below 2, if you like both equally).
@robryk @freemo @louis
> compute the probability (as a function of what vote you cast) that your vote will be the deciding one, and pick the vote where you like that distribution the most.
i'm not really good at math, but my gut feel says that this would get really interesting if everyone did this :)
Yup, and there's no good way to handle "everyone is taking into account how the system works", because if there were, the resulting system would break the Arrow's impossibility theorem.
A colleague of mine btw did write up a computation of that kind for most recent parliamentary elections in Poland, but the point there was mostly to compare voting in different constituencies (you may vote in any constituency in those elections, as long as you actually arrange for that slightly ahead of time and appear in a voting location in that constituency).
@robryk @freemo @louis
> Arrow's impossibility theorem.
that's interesting!