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it's good to look in the mirror and understand the material outcomes of voter behavior (lemmy.cafe)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/politicalmemes

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I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?

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[–] TokenBoomer 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

This is why I don’t think the dilemma is comparable:

However, in real life this is rarely how people judge how to cast their votes. Generally, Democrat and Republican voters are afraid to break rank because if the voters of one party vote 3rd party, and the voters in another part stick to party lines, this means that voters who voted 3rd party will end up with the short end of the stick. This incentivizes voters to stick to party lines and vote for candidates who are “good enough” (which represents the worst option of the prisoners dilemma in which both of the prisoners confess), reaffirming the two party system and preventing the possibility of more viable 3rd parties which can represent the views of the people better. source

Taking a thought experiment and scaling it for millions of voters is a fool’s errand. We’re dealing with social dynamics and fluid variables. I can agree that on an individual basis, or a small group, it could be a helpful tool. But, with large numbers it ceases to be viable. It fails to account for irrational prisoners that both confess, leading to the worst outcomes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

I can see where you're coming from on the whole matter of scale, yeah. It does broaden the subject's surface area a lot, and there's no way to really say you have a control group at that point. So, I think you're right that the variables in a national coalition are possibly too blurry for a direct mapping. Maybe?

I guess I'd say that I can still see the mapping holding, but I suppose it's just in an aspirational sense. The puzzle's framing does hold pretty well for coalition negotiation w/ representation, and so it seems to me like that's a big thing missing here and that's a big point in your favor.

I think, given cohesive, known/defined members in a coalition, even if they're rough models, you get some utility out of the dilemma.

But, I don't think we have that kind of self-aware cohesion, do we?

I think in any case it kind of feels like, to me, your point is just illustrating how badly the folks in charge botched stuff. It's exhausting, honestly. It's always been very nebulous who we are and what we're striving to do, but right now we don't even have those rough models to understand our own coalition. No wonder we can't get anything done.