Please explain why voting doesn’t matter for us poker players. TIA.
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Individually your vote is statistically insignificant. It is not worth it to go through the effort from a selfish standpoint, especially if you have to do so in person.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.
Remove the “from a selfish standpoint” and then explain how approx. 107,000 votes got Trump the election despite losing by like 3-4 million. For us poker players. Seems like a few votes are very important.
Well it was 106,999 but I didn’t vote.
coolstorybro!
In most voting systems in most elections that are nationally run, individual inputs don’t make a difference either way. There’s debate among economists and political scientists about how to calculate the probability that your vote will be decisive. On one of the models that people use—it’s called the Brennan-Lomasky model—the chances that your vote would be decisive in a major national election in the US are vanishingly small. They’re on the order of the chances that your phone is going to spontaneously quantum tunnel through your desk. On another model, called the Gelman-Kaplan model, you have a higher chance depending on what state you’re in. Living in northern Virginia, I have something like a one-in-20-million chance of being decisive in the next presidential election. But you being in New York, you have no chance at all. So it’s certainly harmless to vote for a third party.
Your vote literally doesn’t matter. This whole conversation is an utter waste of time and it’s all purity testing.
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LOL. Guess it’s just time to move to Canada.
You can do one of 3 things with your vote:
- Biden +1
- Neutral (vote 3rd party or not vote)
- Trump +1
If you don’t take action 1 or action 3, how is that not in effect equalizing Biden and Trump?
I’ll take expected utility theory even with all its problems. It’s actually even more powerful this year than others because one of the required conditions is so much more obvious this year.
If these two things are true you should vote.
-
one candidate is much better than the other and stands to make the world much better,
-
there is some, even very small chance, your vote could decide an election.
While the chance your vote would matter is small the expected value if it did is SO HUGE it makes sense to vote.
Condition 1 is more true this year than any in history. If you live in a swing state condition 2 is more likely.
Therefore, voting matters.
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Of course my individual vote will not matter. But you know what the fucking boomers figured out, if they as a group show up to vote, they can keep electing whatever terrible fucking corpses they want. If everyone under 40 who thinks “well my one vote won’t matter” showed up to vote, our country would look vastly different.
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I enjoy that if the articles claiming that individual votes don’t matter were effective deterrents, than individual votes would matter
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Glad we got a Vice article interviewing a philosopher and professor to tell us what’s what.
I wonder if he thinks differently now since that was written before the election of 2016. If 2016 offered online voting would the results be the same?
Ignore the post office shenanigans. Your vote doesn’t matter anyway. If only these marchers had read philosophy dude’s article before getting clubbed to the face.
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What you said is not the same thing as thinking they are the same. The obvious fact is that lots of people will not vote for either without thinking they are the same.
1 in 20 million is more than a person’s share in the decision. Virginians should vote.
Our vote for POTUS doesn’t matter at all. (Californians)
Maybe 1 is so great that you should vote. It wouldn’t be that hard.
Happened recently—Silent Generation got passed over when the Greatest H.W. was replaced by Boomer Slick Willy.
Biden is a Silent. They might get one.
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Oh shit—does that make Trump one too? Off to the internets.
Nope Trump is 1946 first year of the Boomers.