A win for bad principles is no win at all. It's a lose/lose. See it as you may, we will never agree. That's ok.
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Voting Strategy 101
- Thread starter since9
- Start date
A win for bad principles is no win at all. It's a lose/lose. See it as you may, we will never agree. That's ok.
Primus
Regular Member
Yea.... Jagaloon....
since9
Campaign Veteran
Nonsense response.
It's never "equally," but you're right in that the votes they do pull are usually not enough to alter the outcome of the election.
However, the reason I specifically mentioned Louisiana's Senatorial race is because Maness wasn't an independent. He was a Republican, same as Cassidy. Both he and Cassidy garnered five to six times more votes from moderates than from liberals, double the conservative votes than votes from moderates, and roughly ten times as many votes from conservatives as liberals.
Put another way, Maness wasn't pulling any significant votes away from Landrieu. Because both he and Cassidy were Republicans, they were competing head-to-head. Maness was stealing the vast majority of his votes from Cassidy.
Then don't vote.
Again, then don't vote.
Your understanding of game theory of laughably shallow.
As it was, Landrieu wound up with 42% of the vote, Cassidy with 41% of the vote, and Maness with 14% of the vote. Since the votes between Landrieu and Cassidy were close enough to hold a runoff, and since 9 out of 10 of Maness' votes would then go to Cassidy, reasonable estimates of a runoff election would pit Cassidy with 55% of the vote to Landrieu's 42%. That's why Landrieu pulled out.
However, if this had been a state without a runoff, Landrieu would have won.
THAT's why you NEVER vote a candidate like Maness who has no reasonable chance of winning himself, but who is more than capable of yanking votes away from his politically similar (same party) opponent.
Come back to the table when you understand iterative deletion and the median-voter theorem, or can explain the difference between moral hazard and hungry lions, or why your approach falls under the category of "backward induction."
In cases where two of three candidates were conservatives, yes. In the case of Ross Perot, no. He came very close to being the cause for the republican loss, but when you look at the sources of his votes, and discover who they'd have been voting for had he not been in the picture, the simple truth is that while it would have been close, Clinton would still have won. Where Perot helped Bush, Sr. lose the election, however, was the negative association some had with Perot's over-the-top militaristic approach, the same attitude with which he ran Electronic Data Systems. It was a significant turn-off to moderates and more moderate liberals.
Lol, which is that? Ignorance, or stupidity?
Even I'm surprised a full 39% of Democrats want Obama to run a third term. As Spock would say, even at the destruction of the entire world, "Fascinating."
I have no such delusions, Superlite. I am most certainly fallible. My convictions rest upon the likes of Professor Pollack: Ben Polak is Professor of Economics and Management in the Department of Economics and the School of Management at Yale University. He received his B.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge University, his M.A. from Northwestern University, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. A specialist in microeconomic theory and economic history, he has published in Economic Letters, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Economic History, Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Theoretical and Institutional Economics, and Econometrica. His current projects include "Generalized Utilitarianism and Harsanyi's Impartial Observer Theorem" and "Mean-Dispersion Preferences."
Ignorance is the problem, as is stupidity. You can fix ignorance, but when people are wilfully ignorant, that can no longer be fixed as it's cross the line into the realm of stupidity. Well-educated, intelligent people are willing to banter ideas about with an open mind. Close-minded people retort with comments like, "YOU are the problem."
Given the fact that perhaps 1/100th of 1% of Louisiana voters ever read these forums, I highly doubt I've had any such effect as you claim.
However, if that's the case, it would be a good thing, as the polls in existence before I made this post strongly indicated Maness had a very real chance of pulling the election away from Cassidy and handing it to Landrieu on a silver platter, while never getting much closer to winning himself. Again, this was before I made this post, so if you would, please take your made-up "30%" and chuck it in the bayou.
I think the better question might be why the Republican party tends to put up crappy candidates? Here in Colorado, Bob Beauprez won the Republican Primary, but few people consider him to have been the best choice to run against Hickenlooper. In effect, the GOP coughed up a loser.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around that one, but I believe it has to do with groupthink, particularly as it's strongly influenced by a few key, powerful people here in Colorado who would rather risk losing the election than seeing someone else in the party win the election.
That's a good description of groupthink. To be sure.
Voting is, by definition, gambling. There are winners and there are losers. You make your best guess as to which way you should vote, but in the end you only have control over your own vote, and not the votes of others.
That is merely one strategy. As I mentioned in the OP, there are four main strategies. Two are viable, and two are not. Yours is a subset of one of the two viable strategies, but taken by itself, it's not viable, for it wastes your vote in those situations where your choice for "best candidate" has no reasonable chance of winning.
Absent ALL information with respect to how the candidates are doing leading up to election time, it would be a viable choice. In fact, it would be the only viable choice.
In the presence of additional information, such as the fact that less than one in six voters will vote for him (Maness), the mere act of voting for him anyway is foolish. It's a waste of your vote. You have to ask yourself what's more important: To vote for one candidate regardless of all information? Or to maximize the odds of getting a Republican into office? If it's the former, then I can teach you nothing. If it's the latter, then the only viable strategy is to vote for the Republican candidate most likely to beat Landrieu. Maness didn't have a chance. Cassidy did.
You're unable to distinguish the difference between strategies. Again, if your strategy is to elect Maness, period, you might as well have saved your time and gas, as there's no way he would have won. If your strategy was to either get a Republican into office or to defeat Landrieu, the only viable choice for both strategies is to vote for whichever opposing candidate stands the greatest probability of beating Landrieu.
You bring up an excellent point, the difference between single-election tactics and long-term strategy. In game theory, that's known as multiple trials. If the Democrats had not so badly damaged our economy through the insanely stupid and long-debunked strategy of tax and spend, I might be inclined to give things a long-term whirl. When you absolutely have to win in one trial, however, the strategy listed in the OP remains valid.
I honestly didn't read this last sentence before writing my preceding thought, but I see you reaffirmed my position. This time around, the focus was indeed winning the next term.
since9
Campaign Veteran
stealthyeliminator
Regular Member
Your reply appears to be more or less just a reiteration of your OP, to which I've already replied. I will leave with this...
"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost." - John Quincy Adams
"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost." - John Quincy Adams
marshaul
Campaign Veteran
LOL! You think you can half-assedly throw a bunch of irrelevant concepts you obviously poorly understand yourself and expect to frighten me off? :lol: Get real.
Where shall I start?
First of all, the application of "game theory" to elections is, as with basically everything of any actual use, automatically fallacious. Game theory depends on a number of premises which simply do not hold in the real world, such as rational actors (actually, usually "super rational"). Game theory is useful for solving logic riddles of the sort one sees posted to computer science professors' doors, oversimplifying economics, and little else.
- Iterative deletion – big eye roll here. It's a good example of what I said above; its applicability depends wholly on the presumption of strictly dominant strategies. Iteration is irrelevant because I reject on its face the premise that there is an initial dominant strategy. Voting Republican (it doesn't matter which one) or Democrat is value-equivalent, unless your goal is solely to console yourself with a meaningless "win" which is value-indistinguishable from the "loss".
- Moral hazard – there's no shared risk here. I'm not benefitting from your (in your mind) "responsible" vote. I'd still vote LP even if you stayed home (and we lived in the same state), and in your election I'd still not vote at all. (I'd vote LP no matter how many Republicans stayed home, because the Republican party is vile and corrupt.) Moreover, the GOP isn't sufficiently good on guns that your strategy is any more dominant than would be running to the skyward end of the sinking Titanic; you're gonna drown either way.
- Hungry lions – non sequitur. I can only assume this is a reference to something trite you heard in a youtube video. "Hungry lions" is a silly logic riddle, and the solution depends on whether the number of lions is even or odd. How you imagine this relates to voting is beyond me. Perhaps you have fantasies of odd numbers of super rational democrats eating me while I vote against your cretin?
- Backward induction – I would call it "forward planning", but no matter. Your reflexive reference to this without context or justification implies that you believe it to be automatically invalid, which suggests your familiarity with the concept is limited to the backward induction paradox. As it happens, backward induction can be used to "validly" solve some of your useless game theory puzzles, so I'm not sure what your point is.
Now, I get it: you don't agree with me. What you don't seem to understand is that all your desperate appeals to "game theory" are nothing more than appeals to what you imagine to be your superior authority, and do nothing to actually prove the sine qua non of your position: that the GOP is, in fact, a superior choice, and therefore one of its candidates absolutely must win.
Now, I realize that the particular election in question was between two (R)s and a (D). But your arguments are broadly the same as are paraded out every time there's a third party candidate on the ballot, and to the extent that they are unique to this election they depend on game theory, which has no actual utility outside providing academics a means to convince themselves they understand things. My rebuttals would be just as valid from an individual who had a preference as strong for the losing (R) as is mine for an (L), or from someone who didn't care to vote.
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Primus
Regular Member
You just made all that up didn't you?
I'm kidding. I'm actually quite interested in this. His initial theory did make sense on face value but youve offered quite the rebuttal.
georg jetson
Regular Member
How did I not see this thread until today!?!? Dangit.
Since9, you say the following:
"Do the math. I have zero respect for Maness, trying to run when he didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning. His greed/pride/ego (pick one) handed the race to Landrieu on a silver platter."
Do the math you say. Hmmmm… Well Since9, before you failed the math part of this thread did you do any reading or comprehending. Let’s see. Look at post #19. Uh Oh… failed again. I bet the poster of #19 spent seconds researching the fact that a runoff is yet to come. Maybe he decided to poke around in the Louisiana sub forum (for God knows how long) and ran across this thread:
http://forum.opencarry.org/forums/showthread.php?121969-Rob-Maness-for-Senator
It’s difficult to find being the first thread in the list and all. It does explain the math involved in Louisiana’s primary/run-off process and the opportunity the voters of this state have for a decent choice for senator. This explanation was availble before the election even.
So, having pointed out that you brought nothing useful to this forum with this thread I direct you to the first line of post #8. Well put Marshaul.
BTW – Since9, despite the fact that you have problem respecting others, and that you’ve made a complete fool of yourself here, I will still read your future posts. Some things you have to say are useful on occasion.
Since9, you say the following:
"Do the math. I have zero respect for Maness, trying to run when he didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning. His greed/pride/ego (pick one) handed the race to Landrieu on a silver platter."
Do the math you say. Hmmmm… Well Since9, before you failed the math part of this thread did you do any reading or comprehending. Let’s see. Look at post #19. Uh Oh… failed again. I bet the poster of #19 spent seconds researching the fact that a runoff is yet to come. Maybe he decided to poke around in the Louisiana sub forum (for God knows how long) and ran across this thread:
http://forum.opencarry.org/forums/showthread.php?121969-Rob-Maness-for-Senator
It’s difficult to find being the first thread in the list and all. It does explain the math involved in Louisiana’s primary/run-off process and the opportunity the voters of this state have for a decent choice for senator. This explanation was availble before the election even.
So, having pointed out that you brought nothing useful to this forum with this thread I direct you to the first line of post #8. Well put Marshaul.
BTW – Since9, despite the fact that you have problem respecting others, and that you’ve made a complete fool of yourself here, I will still read your future posts. Some things you have to say are useful on occasion.
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