TheRoadsMustRoll t1_ivln71t wrote on November 8, 2022 at 9:32 PM

Reply to comment by AzLibDem in The ethics of voting for the 'lesser of two evils' by ADefiniteDescription

>If your candidate has no chance of winning, it's the same as not voting.

that means one would have been a fool to have voted for Hillary in 2016 or Trump in 2020 since they had no chance of winning.

all of those votes for the losers throughout history were the same as not voting?

how are people supposed to know in advance of the election that they are voting for losers?

Shufflepants t1_ivpfa1p wrote on November 9, 2022 at 5:25 PM

No. You're speaking in absolutes when the person you replied to said "no chance", which means near zero probability. Because you don't know the outcome ahead of time, but you can still reasonably predict no third party candidate will win. Hillary did have a chance. Indeed, she won the popular vote.

You're trying to weirdly pretend like we both:

A) don't have any predictive power about the likelihood of a third party candidate winning.

B) Have complete predictive power about who will win between the two main candidates.

But we have neither of those. We do know that no third party candidate has any chance of winning. And we do know that both of the candidates from the main two parties have a reasonable shot at winning, but that it will be close, and therefore voting for one of the main two does stand a shot at affecting the outcome.

Voting third party only makes sense in a different voting system like ranked choice. The Nash Equillibrium for a first past the post, single vote system where we have access to limited information about voting patterns of others and engage in repeated elections is for two dominant groups/parties/candidates to emerge that vie for control. Go learn some game theory.

TheRoadsMustRoll t1_ivpi738 wrote on November 9, 2022 at 5:44 PM

a black man won in 2008. never happened before. it was unlikely at best.

but he won twice.

you'll live in a world where the unlikely never happens. i'll live in the real world where it does.

Shufflepants t1_ivpjdxv wrote on November 9, 2022 at 5:51 PM

>you'll live in a world where the unlikely never happens

No, I'm living in a world where there is a wide range of probabilities and where I'm taking into account all available data instead of just basing the probabilities on a single factor. We had mountains of polling data both before and after the democratic primaries on people's willingness to vote for Obama, and it was far from impossible. But after he won the democratic primary, the conditional probability for him winning shoots way up.

You're living in some weird world where there's only one degree of "unlikely". If something has less than a 50% chance of happening, it's "unlikely". Sure, maybe Obama had a less than 50% chance of winning. But any third party candidate has less than a 0.000000005% chance of winning. It's not just "unlikely" it's "implausible", it's "nearly impossible", or in colloquial terms it is impossible.

If you wanna bank of nearly impossible outcomes because they might happen, go buy lottery tickets.

Shufflepants t1_ivpfzng wrote on November 9, 2022 at 5:30 PM

>how are people supposed to know in advance of the election that they are voting for losers?

Because we have past data on voting patterns. We have countless examples of third party candidates failing to get even a single electoral vote. We also have plenty of survey data and mountains of other evidence that points to the fact that many voters just vote for whoever has the R next their name every time or whoever has the D next to their name every time. We do have evidence that there are voters who aren't fixed in their voting patterns, and who sometimes vote R, sometimes vote D, and sometimes vote third party; but these non-fixed voters do not represent a large enough proportion of voters to be able to elect a third party on their own. So, we KNOW with very high certainty that in order to win, you MUST win either the voters that only vote D or the voters that only vote R, while also capturing some of the voters that aren't fixed. Therefore, we can rightly conclude that any non-R or non-D candidate has virtually zero chance of winning; more surely than one's chances of winning the powerball.

TheRoadsMustRoll t1_ivphszp wrote on November 9, 2022 at 5:41 PM

>Because we have past data on voting patterns.

that helped us figure out who would win in 2016?

based on past voting data no black person should ever be voted for because they've only won once in the history of the country.

that's ridiculous. things change. if you discard changes in favor of past mediocrity then you'll always have the same results you always had.

Shufflepants t1_ivpi5dv wrote on November 9, 2022 at 5:43 PM

>that helped us figure out who would win in 2016?

Yes, it helped us know that no third party candidate had any chance of winning. And it helped us know that both the R and D candidate had a reasonable chance of winning.