/philosophy/ - Philosophy

>The most optimistic estimate in the literature claims that in a presidential election, an American voter could have as high as a 1 in 10 million chance of breaking a tie, but only if that voter lives in one of three or four “swing states,” and only if she votes for a major-party candidate (Edlin, Gelman, and Kaplan 2007). Thus, on both of these popular models, for most voters in most elections, voting for the purpose of trying to change the outcome is irrational. The expected costs exceed the expected benefits by many orders of magnitude.

This is why I've never bothered to vote and never will.

>>4334

Bad game theory.

Almost everyone is very similar to a whole load of other people. It's hard to have just one person decide not to vote - their whole voting bloc decides not to vote at once, because they all think alike.

That said I'd love to see fewer folk vote, to the point where my own voting bloc becomes decisive.

What voting proves epistemically speaking is not clear at all. Perhaps most votes are essentially cast at random and can be discarded, as they cancel out and don't reflect any deeper desire of the voter? In other words I can think of lots of ways their probability estimate is wrong. It's only right if every voter is basically random, meaning the vote carries no information at all, but this can't be right due to the law of large numbers. Some fractal error there.