Olgratin_Magmatoe @ Olgratin_Magmatoe @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Good thing I'm not a liberal, and I have hard mathmatical evidence. Here it is!

        Total voters: 1214
    52% of voters approved of the results.

    cocina - 626 votes - WINNER
    owen - 588 votes


  

        Total voters: 1214
    48% of voters approved of the results.

    owen - 585 votes - WINNER
    room - 317 votes
    cocina - 312 votes


  

These two randomly generated elections are identical, with the exception that the second election has a newly introduced candidate, who is irrelevant.* Yet despite their irrelevance, their introduction has changed the outcome of the election. That means this is a failed electoral system, and this is what people are talking about when they talk about the spoiler effect, as per the definition:

In social choice theory and politics, the spoiler effect refers to a situation where a large group of like-minded voters split their votes among multiple candidates, which can affect the result of an election by allowing a candidate with a smaller base of support to win with a plurality. If a major candidate is perceived to have lost an election because a more minor candidate pulled votes away from them, the minor candidate is called a spoiler candidate and the major candidate is said to have been spoiled. This phenomenon is also called vote splitting.

Irrelevent meaning they had no chance of winning. In the second election, the voters colored lime green and light blue would never have voted for the new purple candidate, because the lime green and blue candidates were closer. So telling those voters to "quit voting for the establishment, vote with your heart" is meaningless, because that's already what they're doing, they're just voting for whoever is closest to them.

At work we get around this by not having docker or anything similar set up in the first place.

I'm getting tired of it lol

On it's own, that's bad. But what's worse is that this is all based off of a white supremacist conspiracy theory. And he is adding fuel to the fire.

Canceling out only a tiny bit puts you on an orbit similar to earth's. You need to kill basically all of your momentum.

Because the spoiler effect is the result of geometric proximity, not the strength of candidates.

But voters cling to their oligarch bread crumbs too tightly to do the right thing.

Yeah that's called the spoiler effect. The spoiler effect hurts 3rd party candidates too.

Trump said he wants Isreal to finish the job. You're fooling yourself if you think Trump won't intentionally make things worse.

You've read my mind.

It's worse, if you try to suggest that the problem is the system they'll instead blame anything else.

Because it is the best option. It's dead simple, it's easy to give updates mid count, it's easy to audit, it's no more expensive than any other form, etc.

This is not to say it's perfect, but it's easily the best.

I'd also like to point out something I've heard way too much lately:

maybe democrats should run on some of the policies that are overwhelmingly popular instead so there’s no room on the left for someone to run.

I've heard probably a dozen variations of this statement by now.

The spoiler effect is the result of geometric distance between candidates, not the strength of policy positions. If anybody tells you that the democrats should just do X, unless X is switching the country over to approval/star/rcv, or some other system that is more representative, they don't know what they're talking about.

Here is an example using a randomly generated set of voters and candidates. The first election is just two candidates, the second election is identical, but with an extra 3rd candidate

        Total voters: 765
    The winner was favorable to 56% of voters
    lachlan - 427
    emma - 338


  

        Total voters: 765
    The winner was favorable to 44% of voters
    emma - 338
    lachlan - 312
    omalley - 115


  

Any party, any candidate can fall victim to this, no matter how strong or inspirational they are. This is simply the result of everybody voting for the candidate closest to them.

A good electoral system will not have the results changed by an irrelevant candidate. But our current systems are vulnerable to this, and it is disastrous for the state of our country.

Instead of handwringing about spoilers, maybe democrats should run on some of the policies that are overwhelmingly popular instead so there’s no room on the left for someone to run.

The spoiler effect is the result of geometric distance between candidates, not the strength of policy positions. You don't know what you're talking about.

Sure, but retaliation like that shouldn't be possible. It's a mark of a terrible, failed democracy.

With a tip of the keyboard to a certain someone who has blocked me and won’t see this (a shame really):

I can take a pretty educated guess as to who that is. You're not wrong for posting this in the slightest.

These shenanigans are the exact type of bullshit that shows the U.S. is a failed democracy, and is in need of severe election reform. That goes for the form of financial reform, switching to more representative types of voting like approval voting, measures taken to make gerrymandering impossible, etc.

any man who genuinely tried to bring up circumcision as tantamount in the abortion conversation would be rightly laughed out of serious consideration.

The point has sailed over your head. At no point did I say they were tantamount. I said they are relevant to each other, because they're both problems dealing with bodily autonomy.

but frankly the scale and scope of the two are so wildly and enormously different as to instantly render any attempts at comparison moot.

I never said otherwise.

Fuck the polls, fuck the analysts

go fucking vote

I’d argue that men centering themselves in the discussion which largely centers around attempts to remove bodily autonomy from women only hurts, not helps the cause.

I think we'd have to take a poll from the general population and compare it with a poll from an anti-circumcision group and compare it to be sure.

Regardless, I said it was a pathway, not a guarantee.

I don’t buy the flying saucer stuff, it strikes me as at best creative speculation.

I'm glad we're in agreement there.

For example if you were viewing technological development on different planets, all other things being equal but one has a fractured global government with hundreds of different defense concerns and intra-class conflicts sapping resources and scientific ability, vs a planet that has progressed beyond that, and is able to direct all resources towards a single purpose. One of those is going to be more effective in material terms.

I also agree here, though I think the importance of the speed of progress isn't the important part here. Even if it takes a billion years, it potentially wouldn't matter because an extraterrestrial race could have evolved a billion years earlier than us. Though this gets into the problem of stability over long periods like you've mentioned.

I would actually point out that we have an extremely pressing example on our current planet where the endless-growth orientation of our economic system is de-terraforming our planet before we have demonstrated any ability to re-terraform it, when you’re looking at things on an interstellar timescale this starts to look like something self-defeating rather than a ticket to rapid development.

Absolutely, but another thing to consider is that it may not be a requirement to have a fully habitable planet. Earth has already, since before industrialization, had places that are effectively uninhabitable to humans. We're reducing the area that is habitable at a terrifying rate, but it could be the case that it becomes irrelevant. My mind goes to a world like that of Earth within the Warhammer 40k series. The Earth is just fucked, plastered and cemented over, with a poisonous atmosphere, etc. They just brute force the problem by ignoring it.

That, and living on a planet may not be necessary in the first place. Given the composition of our asteroid belt, it has basically everything we'd ever need for potentially thousands of years, easily available and minable, relatively speaking. Outside of food problems, it could potentially be possible to live nomadically in space.

any systems which are not at a stable equilibrium will simply not exist long enough to actually have an impact.

Maybe, maybe not. It could be the case that wormholes, alcubierre drives, and other forms of FTL shenanigans are impossible, and the only way to get somehwere else is to send a generational ship. If that's how things play out, intelligent life might hope from one system to the next in a manner similar to conway's game of life. It isn't at equilibrium, because each planet is drained of resources rapidly, but there is enough momentum to keep things going.

The rationale is essentially just that any system stable enough to actually sustain existence at those timescales across those distances would necessarily look different, and could not look like a system with constant boom and bust cycles, as eventually the technology gets the the point where the ‘bust’ is a self-annihilation.

That could be the case. It also could be the case that those timescales aren't needed, because FTL is somehow possible. We literally just don't know right now.

To add even more to this complete speculation, it may be the case that there are stable political systems, without boom and bust cycles, that aren't capitalist, socialist, or communist. It could be the case that technology inevitably advances such that the bust is self-annihilation, but it could also be the case that technology inevitably advances such that there isn't any possible way for their to be a bust, that it isn't possible to revolt against the bourgeoisie/monarch/dictator. AI systems are going to get a lot more crazy over these next few years, and a large chunk of it will be used to quell protest and dissidents. They can already track people based on the gait of their walk, what when (not if) that technology is expanded upon? The technology is very clearly here to use small scale drones to attack individual people, what happens when (again not if) that technology is expanded upon? We may find ourselves in a position with the bourgeoisie impossible to touch thanks to technology.

This question of economic/political stability is essentially just one possible answer to the fermi paradox and great filter.

I guess I’m just not that confident that we’re on a trajectory which would result in us becoming an interstellar civilization without the need for major overhauls to our political economy first,

Yeah, I agree.

and it makes it hard to envision aliens getting to that point while still also being tied up with internal ethnic strife and economic crises.

Maybe I've just focused on science fiction dystopias too much, but I can envision it. But that's not to say I think it likely.

It’s a dick topic of extremely minimal consequence in the grand scheme

I disagree. I think this country has a problem with respecting bodily autonomy, and a large part of that is men trying to legislate women's bodies. Showing these men that they have a horse in the bodily autonomy race so to speak is a good thing. Maybe it's only a minimal effect, but it's a potential pathway out of harmful beliefs.

this looks like a bunch of dick-obsessed weirdos complaining because their dicks are too small.

it’s just being so focused on the topic in the first place is fucking weird.

I've been on lemmy for about a year now. And this one off handed thread is the only place I've seen this topic discussed, in the entirety of this last year. I think you are vastly overstating the frequency to which this is discussed.