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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Mike makes a good point in bringing up correlation. If you assume that voters are uncorrelated, most models will probably conclude that everyone should vote. The main problem with uninformed voters is when their votes are correlated (because of eg. advertisements, cultural biases, or systematic errors in reasoning).

Since your model doesn't mention correlations, and yet comes up with small numbers of voters being optimal, I have to continue to suspect that you aren't taking variance into account correctly.

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Jeff Cliff's avatar

> Let N voters simultaneously choose to abstain or vote for one of two apriori-equal candidates, based only on which action is more likely to elect the “best” candidate.

This seems like a weird thing to do, and seems to be a completely backwards way of looking at what elections actually do in democracies. If you have two groups of people who are in conflict with eachother, one way you can resolve said conflict is through a vote -- a cynical way of looking at this is 'who can outbreed the other and get the more votes' but in practice this really is part of what democracies actually do - they serve as a non-violent means of resolving inter-group conflict.

In that case there is no 'best candidate' - there is your candidate, and my candidate. The question of which 'tribe' you and i are in becomes more salient -- the more you define your tribe as 50%+1 you can have power . Whether it's rich vs poor, white vs black, men vs women, people who work in the entertainment industry vs people who work in the tech industry...these issues hash themselves out at the ballot. It's messy but it is less messy than say a gang or civil war.

Where does this kind of analysis of 'best candidate' lead us in such a case? It's the story of what happens if voters cooperate. But clearly, they are *competing* with eachother.

Perhaps what is needed is a model that, within this conflict between groups, then has to come up with a marginally optimal number of voters. But wouldn't that be "as much as possible" to offset the competing groups? Seems like it would unless there's some kind of social more keeping only small numbers of a majority voting it'll always be 100% (for example -- religious people not voting until they were politically polarized to do by previous false majorities of more secular types 'going too far')

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