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Re43: The Midterms -- Part 1

Retraice^1

On Tuesday, players will be chosen for a game.

Air date: Monday, 7th Nov. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

Current history

There's a good chance the history books will mention tomorrow's midterm elections, which would make it `current history', or `What's going on out there'.

Several hypotheses are relevant, but the most pressing is:

H5. Civil War: `The U.S. seems vulnerable to a civil war this decade.'

We must yet define `seems', `vulnerable', `civil war', `this decade'.

Tuesday's midterms

The turnout for midterms is not as big as for presidential election years. The argument for non-mandatory voting would be: You want your voters to be the people who really care about voting. There is a similar saying about taxes: The U.S. tax code is perfect because those who really don't want to pay taxes don't have to. There are contrary views to these.

Primary elections (wherein parties choose their candidates) have the lowest turnout; midterms are higher; presidential years are highest.

These midterm elections are the last stop on a train line that ends in 2024. Very bad things might very well happen in the United Stated over the next two years. And they might not!

Issues old, new, explicit, implicit

What are the issues this election cycle?

Explicit, old: o the economy (jobs, inflation), a mostly `is' (not `ought') question; o abortion, mostly an `ought' question; o environment, both an `is' and `ought' question; o guns, an `is' and `ought' question.

Those who have hard-to-predict views on the issues are hard to sway. It is similar to the logic of AI in social media: the easiest way to predict a user's behavior is to change the user to make him or her more predictable, usually by steering them toward one extreme or another.^2

Explicit, new: * Trump's character vs. consequences (mostly a question of `fit' goodness, not `moral' or `truth' goodness); "In any modern, complex democracy, the question is not whether elites shall rule, but which elites shall, so the perennial political problem is to get popular consent to worthy elites."^3 Trump is an elite; he is the Republican voters' elite. * culture: gender (How many are there?), race (How much should we think about it?); * the 2020 election. (Was it stolen? Should we bother voting if we believe it was? This is the nuclear bomb in a democracy.)

Implicit: * rich, poor (coasts vs. heartland, cities vs `country');^4 * suffering: men, women, based on changed environments, internal and external; * resentment: you can be a winner and not deserve it, and vise versa; * meanness disguised as comedy (Bill Maher, and many comedians on the left); * contempt disguised as sarcasm and caricature (anything after 7 PM on Fox News Channel).

The unlikely upshot:

Both sides think that fascism is coming from the other side.

Players will be chosen

U.S. Senators, House Reps; state same; governors. These are the people to whom we delegate the work of government.

Do we vote for their policies or them? Them.

And they're not the only players, of course.

A game

It's a game in the sense of von Neumann & Morgenstern (2004).

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online):

"Game theory is the study of the ways in which interacting choices of economic agents produce outcomes with respect to the preferences (or utilities) of those agents."^5

Prisoner's dilemma:

"[W]hat is optimal for each individual need not coincide with what is optimal for the group. Individual rationality sometimes comes into conflict with group rationality."^6

It's about agents, preferences, choices and outcomes. Most if not all of the issues above can be interpreted as prisoner's dilemmas.

But what about... * Beliefs, `What's GOOT', news; * Feelings, especially desire and disgust (Are these really under preferences?); * Care, `volitional necessity'^7 (Are these really under preferences?); * Interests (known or unknown), incentives.^8

The list: agents, [feelings, cares, beliefs, interests, incentives = preferences], choices, outcomes.

And then there's the (John F.) Banzhaf power index:

The "power index of [an entity] is ...the number of ways in which that [entity] can change a losing coalition into a winning coalition or vise versa."^9

From Wikipedia: "To calculate the power of a voter using the Banzhaf index, list all the winning coalitions, then count the critical voters. A critical voter is a voter who, if he changed his vote from yes to no, would cause the measure to fail. A voter's power is measured as the fraction of all swing votes that he could cast. There are some algorithms for calculating the power index, e.g., dynamic programming techniques, enumeration methods and Monte Carlo methods."^10

If you are not a `critical' voter, you're a dummy (that's the term they use, probably rightly).

Gerrymandering, `cracking and packing', and the like, are similarly mathematical ways of evaluating (and affecting) elections:

"Mayer and the plaintiffs base their argument [against Gerrymandering in their July 2015 suit in Wisconsin] on a new standard called the efficiency gap, developed by University of Chicago law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos and Eric McGhee, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. They posit that that [sic] between `cracking' and `packing' districts--dividing voters of one party across a number of districts, or cramming them into a small handful--you can measure the number of wasted votes. The efficiency gap is the difference between the parties' wasted votes divided by the total votes cast. Gerrymandering, then, becomes the art of wasting more votes for the other side. This measurement shows what they call the `undeserved' seat share--the proportion of seats that one party would not have received if lines were drawn in such a way that both sides had an equal number of wasted votes."^11

So it has become mathematical. And now that it's mathematical, it can become machine-controlled, which is H12.^12

Side note: Super Tuesday: "the United States presidential primary election day in February or March when the greatest number of U.S. states hold primary elections and caucuses."^13

Tomorrow is not a `Super Tuesday'.

References

Daley, D. (2016). Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count. Liveright, Kindle ed. ISBN: 978-1631491634. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781631491634 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781631491634 https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018111

Frankfurt, H. G. (1988). The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge. ISBN: 978-0521336116. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0521336116 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0521336116 https://lccn.loc.gov/87026941

Paulos, J. A. (1995). A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper. Basic Books. ISBN: 0465043623. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0465043623 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+0465043623 https://lccn.loc.gov/94048206

Peterson, M. (2017). An Introduction to Decision Theory. Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. ISBN: 9781316606209. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781316606209 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781316606209 https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057387

Retraice (2022/10/19). Re22: Computer Control. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re22 Retrieved 19th Oct. 2022.

Russell, S. (2019). Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. Viking. ISBN: 978-0525558613. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0525558613 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0525558613 https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029688

von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (2004). Theory of Games and Economic Behavior: 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition. Princeton University Press, 60th anniversary ed. ISBN: 978-0691119939. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780691119939 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780691119939 https://lccn.loc.gov/2004100346

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 "Like any rational entity, the algorithm learns how to modify the state of its environment--in this case, the user's mind--in order to maximize its own reward." Russell (2019) pp. 8-9.

^3 People are fine with elites as long as they aren't politicians, George F. Will, washingtonpost.com, Nov. 20th, 2019.

^4 On the parties' misperception of each other, see Democrats are gay, Republicans are rich: Our stereotypes of political parties are amazingly wrong, John Sides, washingtonpost.com, May 23rd, 2016, citing The Parties in our Heads: Misperceptions About Party Composition and Their Consequences, Ahler and Sood, Sep. 15th, 2016. From the Post: "On average, Americans thought that 32 percent of Democrats are gay, lesbian or bisexual. The correct answer is 6 percent. And they thought that 38 percent of Republicans made more than $250,000 a year. The correct answer is 2 percent."

^5 Game Theory, Don Ross, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2021 Edition.

^6 Peterson (2017) p. 237. Cf. 266 on the risk connection.

^7 Frankfurt (1988) p. 86.

^8 Paulos (1995) p. 10.

^9 Paulos (1995) p. 10.

^10 Banzhaf power index, wikipedia.org The idea was first published 20 years earlier by Lionel Penrose.

^11 Daley (2016) p. 140.

^12 Retraice (2022/10/19).

^13 Super Tuesday, wikipedia.org, retrieved Nov. 8th, 2022.