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Notes -
Scott Alexander endorses basically anyone but Trump
The main points:
I went back and read Scott's 2016 anyone but Trump election endorsement.
The main points:
I would maybe suggest in the future that these posts are counter-productive. The most recent one moved my needle more in favor of Trump. I can't believe I'm considering voting for a major party candidate (I've voted libertarian the few times I've bothered to actually show up). Going back and reading the old anti-endorsement was even worse. With hindsight answering the criticisms:
I really feel like there is some gell-mann amnesia going on with Scott. He reads these horrid stories about Trump. With the details sensationalized in the worst possible way. And he accepts them as fact. Meanwhile the New York Times threatens to dox him so they can run a hit piece article on him that they sourced from a weirdo on wikipedia with a knack for rules-lawyering.
He talks about how Trumps norms violations are loud and unsubtle. While the democrats only subtly and slowly violate norms. But this is a framing that has been shoved down our throats by the media. Every minor violation of Trump's is blown out of proportion, and every major violation of the democrats is minimized and not talked about. How is it not a massive norms violation to spend 3 years investigating and accusing a sitting president of Treason based on a campaign dosier that was almost entirely made up by his opposition? And the people doing this knew it all along. I don't think democrats or liberal leaning people seem to realize how much the Russia Hoax thing has utterly fucked their credibility on everything. Especially after the Hunter Biden laptop story came out, and it turned out that the intelligence agencies helped them cover up exactly what they had been accusing Trump of doing.
This is supposed to be a government system where one side wins, implements their things, becomes a little too unpopular for going too far, and then the other side wins and get to do their thing for a little while. They switch back and forth. We all learned in 2016 that no, this is not actually how it operates. There is actually a hidden veto by the bureaucracy and the deep state. If they don't like the president they can decide not to let him do his thing. People are righteously pissed off about that, and many of them would happily see that bureaucracy and deep state dismantled if it meant they never get to use their veto again. And one way to test if they still have the veto power, and one way to give someone an incentive to fix it, is to keep electing presidents that we know they will "veto".
Trump is a vote for restoring norms. For restoring the ability of democracy and the vote to actually pick a direction for the country, rather than have that direction dictated by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. I dislike Trump on most of his policies, but it wouldn't be a vote for his policies. Its a vote for voting on policies.
Scott being against Trump is one thing. Scott willing to support Harris is another. Scott was canceled by the establishment she is the titular head of. He is a traitor to himself, in the sense of adhering to his own enemies and giving them aid and comfort. That's a horrible thing, and the next time he gets canceled, I will not be in the least bit upset.
There are many valid criticisms of Harris, but if you dislike Trump more than Harris you must support Harris and vice versa. To act otherwise in the US electoral system is to act irrationally.
But, anyway, all these comments trying to relate this to his cancellation are truly baffling to me. How can you all be so tribe-brained? The NYT and some weird anti-rats with vendettas trying to cancel him is completely orthogonal to Trump being a horrible person, a horrible leader, and an initiator of democratic backsliding in the US (with a possibility he will become even more of one, whether he wins or loses). Harris and the DNC did not pen articles about Scott being problematic, and even if they did I suspect he would still (rightly) support Harris and the Democrats in the 2024 election, because their opponent is Trump.
No, this attitude is 100% Molochian. The odds of your one vote altering the outcome of the election are infinitesimal. Treating your vote as a strategic move in a game assumes a completely unrealistic degree of personal agency and impact. The psychological impact that voting (or not voting!) has on you is almost certainly (>99%) the only impact your vote will have on anyone, anywhere. In distant second place, your protest vote for a third party might contribute to making an impression on someone in power, such that they shift their policy priorities slightly toward your expressed preferences.
Of course, from the perspective of an American political party the most important voters to persuade are precisely those voters who are least likely to cast a vote for either major party candidate: the ones not already ideologically captured by either party. Consequently it is in both the Democrat and Republican parties' best interests to perpetuate the idea that because third party candidates are not "viable," it is a waste to vote for the candidate you prefer; you must vote only for the major party candidate you hate least!
Everyone should vote (or not vote!) as seems best to them, without regard for "picking a winner." To behave in any other way is to make of oneself another simple tool of party political machines.
If you're not voting with reference to the outcome, why bother going at all? If it's just a question of making yourself feel better, stay at home and throw darts at a picture of Kamala Harris, and let the people who actually care about who becomes President do the voting.
What are you talking about? I didn't say people should vote without reference to the outcome. I said people should vote as seems best to them.
If you think your vote will affect the outcome, you're probably just bad at math. What do you think it means to vote "with reference to" the outcome? Here's my take: a vote is your opportunity to express a preference to the public concerning how the public should be run. There is presumably some outcome that you desire, and voting is a system we have in place to allow you to express that (or not). So of course you vote "with reference to" the outcome, if you decide to vote at all--you just don't vote in a way that implies you actually have some control over the outcome. If instead of expressing your desire, you try to influence the outcome in a strategic way, then again: you're probably just being bad at math. It's not a big deal, you being bad at math is fine, and even your imagining that your vote matters to the outcome is a relatively harmless delusion.
But if you cast your vote because you think it will influence the outcome, then you'll influence the outcome equally well by staying at home and throwing darts at a picture of Donald Trump, and letting the people who actually care about public discourse do the voting.
In one sense obviously yes, one vote will not determine the outcome of the election, but think about it like this. If one side in the election all suddenly came to this realisation and freely discussed and acknowledged this fact, while the other still maintained the fantasy that 'every vote matters', then side B would win a landslide, and in a sense they've almost willed their fantasy into being. What I mean is that both for democracy at large and for your preferred candidate, it's pretty important that the general proposition that every vote matters is considered to be true, even if it isn't. And insofar as each individual contributes to keeping up the delusion, 'every vote matters' almost becomes true even while it is obviously strictly false.
Indeed. And if everyone were to suddenly come to this realization all together, and realize that everyone else had reached this realization, then we'd almost certainly elect many more "third party" candidates. This is why I always push back against the "you must pick one of these two" argument: because it is false, and we'd all be better off if everyone treated it as false. Far better for people to simply vote to express what they think is genuinely best, than to imagine themselves strategically selecting a particular outcome.
So close! It's pretty important for the Republican and Democrat parties that the general proposition that every vote matters is considered true, even though it isn't. Democracy at large is better off without building a consensus around falsehoods.
The problem being that voting for your third parties splits your vote, and that only has a good outcome when everybody on all sides are doing so. If one side defects then they win because their vote isn’t split between several different parties, it’s concentrated in one party. So if conservatives choose between Reform, Constitution, Libertarian, and Republican, each gets 1/4 of the total conservative votes available. If democrats all vote for the Democratic Party, they get all available democratic votes. If you assume that the parties are roughly equal in support, the democrats will win even though the6 don’t have more votes.
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Has this ever happened anywhere? FPTP always collapses into a two-party system (at least in individual races/regions, if not always country-wide as in the US). It's better that way though, and that's why I said it's better for the fiction to continue for democracy at large - if we all selected our favourite candidate among, say, twenty options all spread around various mixtures of ideology and policy the winner would have a) no legitimacy, as they'd have won a pathetic plurality of votes, and b) would on average be no closer than the median winner of two-party elections to the median American. After all, in such a scenario the winner would be pretty much randomly decided based on which candidate had the fewest spoilers in and around their ideological position. Multi-party countries only work with multi-party electoral systems, otherwise you get Belfast South. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belfast_South_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s
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The comment by @monoamine is filtered, can you approve it?
Done!
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This might be true under causal decision theory, but it’s not necessarily true under evidential, functional, or timeless decision theory. Specifically, whether or not I choose to vote (and who I vote for) can provide very strong evidence about the voting behaviour of others like me, even in different states. If you’re a “bellwether voter”, it could be the case that by deciding to vote, you resolve reality so that others like you have also voted and your preferred candidate gets in.
Obviously if you’re a two-boxer this is superstitious nonsense!
On the other hand,being a non-voter should also provide strong evidence about the behavior of you and those like you in ways that influence those in power to adjust behavior.
If, say, only 10% of the eligible population voted in a major election, sure the voters 'decided' the actual outcome, but you think that those in power might take note of the fact that a lot of people purposefully abstained? That might be the strongest message of all!
In the absence of a 'none of the above' option... it could be the case that by deciding NOT to vote, you resolve reality in a way that aligns with your incentives.
I don't think anywhere in the US puts an actual bubble labeled "none of the above" on the ballot, but you can leave it blank or write in Mickey Mouse.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_o_pELPihIM?si=o1PT5F1SxZZCFRur
No one-line meme-posts, please.
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Sure, but if anything this would appear to strengthen my case. If you don't vote for Jill Stein because you don't think she can win, then you're collapsing the waveforms where everyone who wanted to cast a protest vote actually did so; in so doing, you could very well be collapsing the waveforms where Jill Stein actually wins.
It's definitely superstitious nonsense, but isn't that noumena in a nutshell?
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