Probability and Politics

May I remind people about "Nader Trading"?

also, cross-posting from OB.

Is it potentially a good charity in a region where rule of law has essentially broken down to fund/promote the dominant/police/stationary bandit side in a tug of war against the non-dominant/mob/roving bandit side? Personally, to me US politics looks like a fight between stationary bandits and roving bandits, and permanent near-total defeat of the roving bandits seems like a prerequisite to the reestablishment of real economic growth.

I don’t see myself as partisan, as I’d be happy to support a party of the right OR the left so long as they could offer credible hope for the total destruction of the Republican party as they currently exist. Ironically, this makes me think that altruists should support Palin, as she seems to be the person with the best chance of doing that, and also seems utterly incapable of actually holding power herself, though as a charity, I still prefer SIAI over Palin’s primary campaign by many orders of magnitude.

I like Robin's recent take on the question.

Donations to change policy within the partisan subspace, however, only achieve good when they happen to be on the right side of partisan disagreements. Averaged over the disagreeing parties, such donations cannot on average achieve good unless there is a correlation between between donations, or donation effectiveness, and which sides are right. Even if you think you are right at the moment on your particular partisan policy opinions, you can’t think it good on average to encourage partisan donations, unless you think donations tend overall to go to the good or more donation-effective sides.

For every person that sincerely believes that the Flurb Party will change things for the better and donates $100 to it, there's someone who believes that the Bleeg Party will change things for the better and donates $100 to it ... so they cancel each other out. Allocating a bigger part of the economy to printing fliers and posters doesn't seem like the best way to make the world a better place.

"Strategic reallocation of political effort" and the additional factor of "strategic reallocation of voting that takes into account other people's strategic reallocation of voting effort" seems both very complicated to calculate and likely to actually matter to what happens in real elections. I would expect quibbles with your conclusions in this area.

You have one sentence that handles the issue, but I'm not entirely sure how you handled it because your sentence involves two pathenthicals, two double negatives, and ambiguity inducing self reference to "this fact". Here is the sentence:

When we take into differences between election cycles, usually another 1-2 orders of magnitude, the value of voting in a "safe" jurisdiction in an election which is not close winds up negligible (if your reaction to this fact is not independent of others').

Here is an attempted rewrite that I think restates the same thing with less ambiguity:

From one election cycle to another, fluctuating global factors account for 1-2 orders of magnitude difference in first order tie estimates. In these situations the value of voting in a "safe" jurisdiction is negligible unless many other people in your "safe" jurisdiction reason identically so that the safe status functions as a secondary global factor that causes the probability of a tie to increase in districts where the "naive" probability of a tie is low.

Assuming this re-writing captures the same basic idea, I think the issue of self-awareness induced ties can be analyzed in terms of the number of people who think of voting as "siding with a winning or losing side" versus "a costly duty to act in a publicly beneficial way". Voters who think of voting as a costly duty seem potentially subject to self-awareness induced ties. Voters who side with predicted winners seem likely to push dynamics away from these sorts of ties.

This suggests small scale experiments and real world polling where voters are measured to see whether they vote according to one, both, or neither of these dynamics and the numbers who do so are used to refine election predictions.

I don't like the coin model because it ignores replacement.

Assume there's ten other people in a room. Six like red and four like blue. Four of them will go to the polls, and you're trying to decide if you should, too. What's the probability your vote will be the deciding factor?

It's tempting to use the binomial distribution. p=0.5, n=4. Your vote matters if x=2.

So it'll be tied without you about 35% of the time.

But this is incorrect. If the first person who votes casts a red ballot, then the probability the next vote is red falls to 5/9, and the probability the next vote is blue increases to 4/9. The correct model is the Hypergeometric model because it doesn't assume replacement.

It computes a higher 43%.

As n increases from 10 to 300000000, I imagine the effect is more dramatic.

The post compares taking roughly one hour to vote against using the hour to earn money and donating it to campaigns, on the basis of one vote versus an expected number of votes. But this ignores secondary effects of voting, such as communicating honestly or dishonestly with other voters, that may be more important than the vote itself.

Note that the analysis holds for a single rational voter.

If many people decide using similar considerations, then donations go up, electoral turnout falls, and extremists (who can't be swayed by advertising or campaigning) and non-rationalists (who do not apply the OP's analysis) will be over-represented. This is a distorting influence.

If donations go up then candidates suffer who attract relatively little funding (of the normal type, not the type of donations which rationalists use to replace voting). This is a second distorting influence.

A drop in electoral turnout can be seen as decreasing the winner's perceived legitimacy. This might be an unintended consequence.