538 Comments

I think having two parties equidistant from the center is a stable equilibrium, for some distances, so it can arise without the two colluding. For a toy model, say that your chance of winning the primary is proportional to your distance from the party's center and your chance of winning the general is proportional to your distance from the electorate's center, as a ratio to your distance and your opponent's distance. So, with 0 being extremist and 1 being perfectly moderate, a position of 0.5+d means your chance of winning an election is (1-d) * d/(d + opponent's d). Which is stable with d=1/3 on both sides, I think.

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And this isn't restricted to just the party elites and politicians themselves. Many voters will vote for whoever they like the most in primaries, but many will question their general electability (see Clinton vs Sanders). So I think this fits and makes a lot of sense.

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It's also important that the voters aren't actually evenly distributed, they're something more like bimodal. Or arguably trimodal on a two-dimensional model, along the lines of DW-NOMINATE, where there's an economic dimension, and a second dimension that roughly maps to being socially progressive and egalitarian, or protective of traditional hierarchies.

Historically, Southern Dems were lefty on the economic dimension (they liked the New Deal programs, and stuff like the Tennessee Valley Authority), but right-wing on the social dimension. There are still a lot of voters like that, and they like Trump, who offers right-wing red meat on culture war stuff, while also saying he won't cut Social Security and Medicare.

Modern Democrats are mostly lefty on both the social and economic dimensions.

There's also a tranche of hardcore traditionalist voters (like the Christian Dominionist types) who are right-wing on both. Trump won in 2016 by holding together the hard-right faction, and the econ-left social-right faction. Biden beat him in 2020 by peeling off some of that econ-left social-right faction, and perhaps somewhat by goosing turnout from the left-left faction, some of whom stayed home had been mad that Hillary wasn't Bernie and hence stayed home (or even defected to Trump, because they thought burning down the system sounded good).

Unfortunately, there are only the tiniest sliver of voters who are socially left, but economically right -- neoliberals, libertarians, etc. In favor of lower taxes, and thinking about social insurance from the perspective of avoiding large distortions (so, like, we should get rid of a lot of disparate programs that create weird income cliffs, and just do a UBI and a negative income tax). This is why the distribution is trimodal instead of tetramodal. Sigh.

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There is, BTW, a nifty tool for modeling the electorate and candidates' positions relative to the electorate, that was created by Ka-Ping Yee (who is probably known to some of the folks who hung around Berkeley Rationalist circles in the aughts).

http://zesty.ca/voting/voteline/

http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

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One example: gay marriage. Obama could not even run on supporting gay marriage because it was believed it would make him unelectable. 8 years ago, you probably couldn't win most elections, even in fairly red areas, opposing gay marriage. As the tides seem to be shifting more right-wing lately, I see a definite undercurrent of opposition rising.

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Also: Abortion. Overturning Roe is a liability in many elections for Republicans so you see most of them distancing themselves from it or proposing more moderate positions, in contrast with their prior stated views.

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> Overturning Roe is a liability in many elections for Republicans

I'm not sure about that. Democrats love to make that claim, based on a small sample size of outcomes in low-turnout off-year elections that can be easily swayed by deep-pocketed interest groups mobilizing single-issue voters. But because of the low turnout, off-year elections very commonly produce results that are quite different from the preferences of the electorate in general.

Pro-life policies have historically been a winning position for the last 50 years or so, and every time some state-level policy restricting abortions that was duly passed by the people's representatives, after they got elected promising to restrict abortions, got overturned by judicial review on "this violates Roe" grounds, — in suits brought by activists of the party nominally claiming to be in favor of democracy! — it brought more and more people around to the realization that the root-cause problem that needed to be fixed was Roe itself.

A couple low-turnout elections are not going to hard-reverse half a century of ever-increasing momentum. If Democrats believe otherwise, they're in for a rude awakening.

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The median voter wants neither no abortion nor abortion on demand.

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Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!

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There is just no way democrats should have had any sort of midterm in 2022 that wasn't a catastrophe and even in deep red state pro-choice ballot measures are winning. It's crystal clear that many people who were "pro-life" only was long as Roe was enact.

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There's nothing "crystal-clear" at all about the result of low-turnout elections.

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I think the results of the 2002 midterm, in which Republicans gained seats the year after 9/11, are pretty clear.

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What's crystal clear is that those "low-turnout elections"(midterms) determine control of Congress half the time. But then, who cares about control of Congress, right?

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The marketing of the "return to Roe" faction has been very strong. When they polled this issue in the past, most voters landed at some compromise short of what Roe mandated. A 20 week ban like the one at issue in Dobbs doesn't seem that threatening, there aren't a ton of abortions after 20 weeks and nearly all of those would qualify under common exceptions, so nobody rational should be imagining "oh gee what if I need an abortion and can't get one", bc those circumstances are very unlikely. I don't think people are actually afraid they won't be able to have 3rd trimester abortions, I think instead that the Roe revivalists have managed to convince people that the prohibitions are broader than they actually are, and as a result gotten them to vote for maximalist initiatives that guarantee later access to abortion than anybody ever said they wanted.

Even though the "this is a private health decision between a woman and her doctor" framing has been around quite awhile, I'm noticing a lot of mostly non-political women picking it up and echoing it who wouldn't have said that 10 years ago.

Appealing to single women voters will be an interesting test of the median voter theorem, as the GOP obviously can't meet single women entirely on the social safety net, other safetyism like gun control, or abortion policy (not without just becoming the Tories and losing any reason to exist) -- but the GOP can sure ramp up "strangers are killing your children and dogs" and whatever anti-crime backlash is coming in the nest few years, if that's all that's left that's what we should see all the focus being.

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>I think instead that the Roe revivalists have managed to convince people that the prohibitions are broader than they actually are

I think the crux of it is that, while there's only a minority of the electorate that thinks an abortion of a healthy baby at the moment of birth should be permissible, if people think there's any real chance that an abortion restriction could apply to themselves or someone they care about -- including in situations that aren't actually an abortion, like causing doctors to make bad decisions in cases of a miscarriage -- they'd rather just have no restrictions on abortion at all.

Those cases don't even have to be true, because who has time to investigate? The people in the fuzzy middle just have to think there's a real chance they could be personally affected to decide whatever vague pro-life convictions they have aren't worth the risk. Which is a pretty easy sell for the pro-choice side, low burden of proof. In this way I think the trend towards continued atomization and cultural disintegration will favor that side politically.

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Oct 24
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My understanding is that this is in fact true? For example, https://www.bmj.com/content/386/bmj.q2073

ETA: my prior is that this is almost certain to be true - in the US specifically - because if you actually let doctors carry out abortions whenever they might be necessary to save the mother's life, pro-choice doctors will abuse that to carry out unnecessary abortions, and the pro-life factions writing the laws really really don't want that to happen. (As the saying goes, "the ability to make a decision is inseparable from the ability to make the wrong decision".)

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Abortion referenda are on the ballot this year, will you update if pro-life loses just like it has lost in the off-year elections?

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Yet another dude downplaying the importance of reproductive health/control in the lives of American women.

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Umm... you *do* know that the pro-life movement has always been driven predominantly by women, right?

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You do know that women aren't a hive mind, so some subset of them can work against the interests of other subsets, right?

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Yeah, like the ones who empower the worst of men among us by pushing, in the name of "autonomy," for policies that make it easy for bad men to indulge their worst impulses and pressure women into making the consequences disappear.

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Yes, some women, like some men, live and vote by moral principles, and some live and vote by pure selfishness. In a remotely humane and decent society we'd all agree to only give respect to the first group. What truly terrifies me is that people like you seem to actually want more respect for the second!

"Ethically screwed up" doesn't begin to cover it.

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Yet another person who's been born downplaying the importance of not being killed in the womb.

And euphemistically describing as "reproductive rights" acts of brutal violence that will never happen to you.

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Thanks for the mansplaining! Have a great day :)

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I really hope you're a troll. If not, how does it feel to be a literal sociopath?

The kind of "person" who could be confronted with an act of violence against a child and not only make no effort to justify it but actually respond with a cheerful "have a great day" is a person for whom I'm not going to begin to list what they dessrve to have happen to them. Just use your imagination.

One day, in a more humane time, people will look at monsters like you the way they look at the ones who cheered on slavery, and shake their heads in inexpressable disgust.

Hopefully, this will happen in your lifetime and you'll face some real justice.

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People who are killed in the womb don't care about having been killed in the womb, due to being dead. And their next of kin seem to care less than in other cases of manslaughter. As do their non-related acquaintances.

At the same time we don't treat the killing of other creatures of equivalent or greater intelligence as crimes. Instead we treat it as bacon. This makes it hard for me to take secular moralist arguments against abortion seriously from anyone other than vegetarians. Are you a pro-life vegetarian?

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National opinions have shifted since Roe was repealed. Sort of a thermostatic effect, combined with declining religiosity.

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I don't think opinions have changed, just the status quo has changed.

A few years ago, the median voter's preferences on abortion were somewhat to the right of the overall national status quo. Now the median voter's preferences on abortion are somewhat to the left of the overall (measured somehow) national status quo.

But it's one of those rare cases where the voters didn't change their minds, the status quo changed, and without any direct intervention from politicians.

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I think the issue is that the median person has inconsistent opinions about Abortion. They think having an abortion is bad but are very opposed to actual stories of people being denied care.

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Nobody's actually proposing a moderation of state-level abortion bans except Trump, who won't say specifically what he actually wants. (He only said Florida's ban was too harsh.) And now the GOP has decided to do this, being incapable of waiting three weeks until after the election:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/10/17/gop-states-are-still-trying-to-restrict-abortion-pill-mifepristone-in-court-heres-how/

They're really eager to make the GOP into a regional party for left-behind areas.

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"left-behind areas" -- awesome play on words ;)

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You make an interesting point. Yes, some years ago, no mainstream politician dared campaign with a pro-LGBT platform. However, a lot of society has shifted leftwards, and now LGBT issues are fine. You say that tides are shifting towards the right - but this is just a rather slight correction of the leftward shift over the past years. Yet people on the left somehow think it is some sort of earthquake.

I'll point to trans issues as an example. Totally off the table 10 or 20 years ago. Became widely accepted. Now the right wants some limits, such as prohibiting trans (MTF) participation in women's sports. Small correction to a large leftward shift.

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...It's not going to last. Once the right is in power, they will absolutely crack down on the presence of trans people. There's no reason for them to tolerate such mockeries of the sexes.

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One reason would be that the median voter wants them to tolerate the presence of trans people (if that's indeed the case). "Tolerating the presence" is a pretty low bar.

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A majority of Americans still think changing gender is morally wrong. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx Even the readership of left-leaning papers like the NYT barely try to hide their disdain. Sure, they claim the problem is "social contagion" and "compromising women's rights," but it's pretty clear that it goes deeper than that.

The only force that is forcing everyone to pretend to accept the presence of transgenderism is the left. The allure of Trump is that he has shown people that you don't need to pretend to be tolerant of loathsome things just for the sake of "civility". The left will be dealt with, and with it will go transgenderism.

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From your lips to God's ear.

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I hear you saying that; I don't hear anyone influential on the right saying that.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/07/cpac-anti-trans-rhetoric

> Last week, the Republican governor of Tennessee signed into law a bill prohibiting gender-affirming care for minors as well as one imposing new limits on drag performances, which have become a target for Republicans. Mississippi also enacted a ban on treatment for transgender youth while Republican state lawmakers in Kentucky advanced a similar measure, following a charged debate over a separate proposal allowing teachers to refuse to use students’ preferred pronouns.

Until recently, most legislation banning transgender healthcare was aimed at minors, but Republicans are increasingly pushing proposals that would limit treatment for adults...

...But the speech that LGBTQ advocates found the most chilling came from Michael Knowles, a rightwing political commentator for the Daily Wire, who declared that “for the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely”. A range of voices, including public officials, experts and observers of rightwing rhetoric, condemned the remarks as inflammatory and dangerous, with some calling them “genocidal”. (Knowles insisted on Twitter that he was not referring to trans people, but “transgenderism” which he has described as a “false” ideology.)

Yet the intense focus on transgender rights at CPAC this year – nearly every speaker raised it – suggests it is likely to be an animating issue in the coming presidential election.

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"crack down on the presence of trans people"

How so specifically?

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I will point out that during a part of the Trump presidency, the right was in power in presidency and both chambers of Congress. If they rounded up all the trans people then, I must have missed that.

I would argue what really broke the (almost) 1:1 mapping between gender roles and biological sexes was effective contraceptives. Before they were a thing, it was the fate of perhaps 45% of the post-pubescent population to get pregnant and then (because of various reasons) end up raising their children. Gendered behavioral archetypes (the pushy suitor, the chaste maiden, the tastefully-hot woman, the caring mother, the providing father) come from this time.

Thankfully, with contraceptives, the mapping between gender roles and sexes broke down. Humanity hacked its reward function. Today, most sex in first world societies is non-reproductive, an evolutionary imperative we follow even though its original purpose has been lost. What remains of genders is likewise an vestigial echo of our evolutionary past. In accordance with that past, most will prefer to have sex with people presenting as one gender (perhaps in a specific life stage), or having one set of secondary or primary sex organs, or perhaps even having the corresponding genotype.

In 1700, being a woman (e.g. presenting as a chaste, yet hot maiden so that you would attract a high-quality husband) was a very different role from being a man (e.g. learning a trade or going to war to earn enough of a fortune to be an acceptable husband). Today, little of that difference remains. Our sex chromosomes no longer determine our lives to a comparable degree.

The way I see it, gendered titles and pronouns are almost as vestigial as noble name prefixes. Where in 1500, the difference between Mr von Grauen and Mr Grauen might be the difference between dying in a duel or getting beaten up when giving offense, and the difference between Miss Grauen and Mr Grauen was the difference between wooing (or raping) someone and slaughtering them on some battlefield, the days of nobility are just as gone as the days of strong gender roles, and good riddance to either.

I am a straight, cis-by-default guy. I don't really care what sex bits most of the people around me have in their pants, be it dicks, pussies, nothing or tentacles, pubes or shaved. If I foresee the possibility that I will be interacting with said sex bits of a person, I will make tasteful inquiries, but I actually tend to fuck just a small fraction of the people I encounter. If a few people feel really strong about belonging to some medieval class or gender role, let them acquire their von or Mr or Ms or whatever. Like gay marriage, it does not hurt me in the least and seems to make them happy, so I am a-ok with it.

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Personality differences are LARGER between the sexes in Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic societies. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/klyde-the-barbarianhtml

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While I think a long-term right win would bring issues, I'm skeptical that they'll crack down in a truly significant manner without some major disruption (Republicans win the next several elections, Trump somehow manages to perform a coup). I don't expect a major disruption like that.

I expect they'll most likely crack down on even more controversial topics, like puberty blockers, which earns them applause from their base which has far less resistance from our existing laws about people doing what they want with their body.

I heard much of the same during 2016 about a variety of topics and it simply didn't happen.

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There does seem to be a shifting tide on trans issues where the NYT is now publishing things that horrify activists. But gay marriage seems cemented in place.

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I think you're being entirely too charitable and bipartisan. Many voters and politicians make their decisions simply because they are evil.

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How does this contradict or affect the Median Voter Theorem?

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The median voter theorem is a statement about how rational political parties would act based on an assumed one dimensional political spectrum.

First of all, it's a model, and the onus is on a model to describe real life, not the other way around.

Second of all, "evil" (as well as "good") is a mechanism for explaining why some political parties did not play rationally - for example, why the house stayed democratic for many decades.

I believe many politicians were not able to move along the ideological spectrum to optimally play the median voter theorem, because their individual values prevented them from taking optimal positions.

However, it is worth noting that while the house did stay democratic for several decades, the Republicans eventually won in the long term, and have achieved many of their goals since taking the house under Gingrich. Barry Goldwater may have lost his election decisively in '64, but his ideas won in the long term. So perhaps we shouldn't be too critical of Republican strategy during that period - they won eventually.

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Part of why I want to bring in "evil" here is that part of politics is moral, and I don't believe you can completely reduce it to simple math.

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If we say for the sake of argument that the axis of politics goes from good to evil, this does not contradict the median voter theorem. It would just result in both parties being equidistant from the median moral voter, such that half the country was better than him and half worse.

Also, remember the orthogonality thesis, evil people need not (in the game theoretic sense) be irrational

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The game-theoretic sense is clearly not the one they're using, "irrational" here is being (ab)used to mean "not maximizing electoral success".

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Then you need to also bring in "good", and might as well call it "values" as you do in the comment above: that certain politicians or whole parties will not shift as much as they "should" from the point of view of optimal electability because they're *constrained* by those values, beyond the obvious "we can't give up on position X even tho it's a minority position, because it will lose is the most faithful and generous supporters".

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Elections aren't simple games, they're iterated games. One reason for not playing an optimal median voter election, is that many individuals do not simply have inherent preferences somewhere in the left right spectrum, but are influenced by what positions political parties have taken in past elections.

Many voters are "leftists", "rightists", or "centrists", *relative to the positions of the two political parties*. This is "Overton window shifting". So, it may be worth not playing to the median voter in today's election, because that same voter may change his politics to be "more centrist" in future elections in a way which pushes policy in a particular direction.

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>I believe many politicians were not able to move along the ideological spectrum to optimally play the median voter theorem, because their individual values prevented them from taking optimal positions.

This can explain why an individual politician didn't move, but wouldn't that lead to them eventually losing to a candidate whose values/positions put them in a different place along the ideological spectrum?

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The candidate generation process is not necessarily efficient - people who run for office aren't uniformly sampled from the electorate. Most people aren't able to campaign for public office - those who do are therefore different from the norm, and these differences are not uncorrelated to political opinions

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Even evil people want to achieve their goals; losing elections doesn't help with that. Even if you're right that some politicians are too principled to moderate their positions for tactical reasons, I don't see why you'd describe that as evil.

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How are we defining evil here?

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What policy favored by Goldwater do we have now?

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Shouldn't "evilness" increase the sway this model holds? And wouldn't "evil" people be more likely to outcompete "good" people on all levels of politics, after controlling for intelligence?

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It just means you have to apply Conflict Theory more than you are currently doing. For example, you seemed surprised when Nancy Pelosi intervened to get Gavin Newsom to veto the AI bill. You shouldn’t have been.

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Please. One of the biggest problems facing the West today is the inability to discuss and understand each other's positions. Your opponents are not wrong, they are *evil*. This is not a productive way to conduct politics, and is something we need to work against.

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How can you so confidently rule out "evil" as a motivation?

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At the very least, "evil" is like "a wizard did it". It means you're not interested in any further explanation or exploration.

That may in fact be true; you may already have pierced their arguments and decided there is no merit to them. But most people haven't done that.

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Evil people aren't even trying to make arguments, they're trying to use power to hurt people.

That's not something that's about debate, that's a naked use of power. They either have the power to hurt, or they don't

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This sounds like something you would need to explore if you wanted to know whether it was true, no? And so I don't think that works as a rebuttal of what MM said.

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To what ends? Sadism? You think there is a significant political faction of abstract sadists who get off on looking at a spreadsheet where they can see how many lives they have made worse?

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Because "evil" isn't anyone's motivation, even very evil people. Even in cartoons, villians usually have a better motivation than "I want to be evil".

I think evil people usually fall into four categories:

1. Doing evil because they think it's good (classic Mao/Hitler/whatever)

2. Doing evil because they think it's justifiable because reasons (waah I had a broken home so it's fine if I steal these shoes), and

3. Doing evil because they're emotional and can't help themselves (classic domestic violence), or

4. Doing evil because it benefits them and they don't care (organised crime etc)

Nobody does evil because "hooray evil".

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Part of what's relevant to designating something as "evil" is whether it's beyond the range of potentially convinceable by argument.

If Hitler is going to do the Holocaust, I don't think I can have a rational debate with him and convince him not to. Hitler's just going to do the Holocaust because he's Hitler, i.e., evil

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But that would be true of any strongly held conviction whether good or evil. I don't know whether you're pro or anti abortion, but what are the odds of someone changing your mind about it with debate? And we don't know how hard it would be to persuade Hitler with debate either; I don't think he exactly had a lot of friends pitching, "hey Adolf, maybe Jews are actually great". You may be assuming that bad people and your ideological enemies are more rigid in their beliefs than your allies. People always think their own side is rational and the other side won't listen to reason.

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And I can't convince you that there might be a justfiable reason to commit a genocide, so does that make you evil as well?

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People can be rendered unpersuadable by delusion, mental illness, or manipulation by another agent. At the same time, a genuinely evil person often will be persuadable by appealing to self interest (e.g. a sadistic sociopath who gets finite utils from causing suffering can still be bargained with as long as they also like money). Unpersuadability is neither necessary nor sufficient for designation as evil of someone who does bad things.

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As a time traveller, I think I could show to him that his Malthusian belief about Germans starving without more lebensraum was simply incorrect.

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Over the last decade, my belief in "evil" as a motivation has steadily risen based on what I've observed in this country.

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I'll bite. How are you defining "evil" (either with or without the scare quotes) here?

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Enjoyment of the suffering of others

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I don’t think people who disagree with me are evil, but I think the politicians they vote for are. I’m just here in the comments section trying to get them to realise it

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Agree

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Are you saying that members of one or both parties wake up in the morning thinking 'how can we decrease the global human utility sum and turn our world into the torment nexus?'

If you think that, then you have a very shallow model of your political opponents. Sure, there are sadistic psychopaths who enjoy spreading suffering where they go. But these are relatively rare, and they do not cooperate well enough to dominate. (No, not even the NSDAP was majority psychopaths.)

Take abortion, a typical hot topic where people on either side portrait the other side as evil.

If a fetus has the same moral value as a teenage human, then forcing women to carry their fetus to term (until we get artificial wombs, at least) seems perfectly acceptable. We don't allow parents to murder their teenagers either, even if murdering them was really convenient because they make a great an organ donor for you.

If a fetus is just some tissue without intrinsic moral value, then forcing a woman to carry it to term and thereby creating a kid which has a worse starting hand genetically and socially than average is monstrous towards both the woman and the kid.

So the other side is evil only if your own assumptions are true. Granted, you will likely find the odd psychopath on either side, like a pro-lifer who does not care about unborn children at all, but really wants to punish women who had sex, or a pro-choicer who does not care about women, but just rejoices at any life ending, but these are minorities.

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Counterpoint: Donald Trump specifically is pretty clearly a sadistic psychopath

The Republicans are so personalist at this point it's not really meaningful to talk about a republican party distinct from Trump

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>Donald Trump specifically is pretty clearly a sadistic psychopath

It's not really clear at all. Boorish, boastful, philandering, greedy, lying, even foolish I could see arguments for. But what cause do we have to believe he is a psychopath, or a sadist? He certainly seems to experience the normal range of human emotion, and what I've heard of his sexual exploits did not seem to prominently feature infliction of pain.

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I do not think it is productive to have further discussions if you cannot agree on the above comment. Have a nice day.

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If that is your response, then I would have to agree: it would not be productive.

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There are forms of sadism other than "inflicting physical pain in an obviously sexual context." The man's catchphrase is "you're fired," contextually meaning "with a momentary whim, in two syllables, I have destroyed what took you years to build, and most of your hope for prosperity in years yet to come."

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Words have meaning, and if firing people on a game show makes you a sadist then the word has little meaning left. Trump is certainly no saint who humbly loves his enemies, but I don't see him as particularly taking pleasure in the pain and suffering of others.

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> 'how can we decrease the global human utility sum'

Isn't classical evil more like 'how can I increase my own utility & happiness by any means including decreasing that of everyone else?" Whether it's loud or quiet, hidden as a usually unconscious motive or 100% embraced, I do think there's plenty of *that* out there. (And not just in politicians.)

I fully agree with the rest of your comment though.

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I think that most people put a higher weight on their own utility than on the utility of a random person. In a way, this is okay -- a person who is just likely to buy any stranger some food as he is to buy his own dinner will starve in short order, which will seriously hamper his efforts to increase the utility of mankind.

I would define evilness as the quotient of utility weights between oneself and a stranger being above a certain threshold. For example, the evilness of someone who gets paid 10M$ to kill an innocent is much lower than the evilness of someone who kills innocents just to pass the time, like that gunner in Apocalypse Now ("How can you kill women and children" - "It's easy, you just don't lead them so much").

--

Unrelated, I think that 'my opponent is evil' acts as a curiosity stopper, just like murderism [1]. Sometimes this is appropriate: there are likely few insights to be gained from digging deeply into the prioritization the Nazis had for their genocides (unless they are still at large and you are wondering when your turn will be). On the other hand, while Jan 6 was imho clearly an evil act of Trump, there are myriad other ways in which he could have acted. "Evildoers do evil, and how they pick their acts is forever beyond the understanding of decent folks" seems to be a bad frame to understand politics.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/

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That type of evil wouldn't stand in the way of the theorem presented in the article though. Maximizing electability as an avenue towards personal power and safety still makes sense.

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Obviously, "Many voters and politicians make their decisions simply because they are evil" is not self-explanatory, so you'll hsve to expand on that concept.

Personally, I would argue diametrically that noone thinks that they are evil, although from an outside perspective, their argument may look very thin. So I have problems to understand your position.

But if you want to convince others that politicians really do act out of a pure will to just hurt people, I'd have to see some examples. Please provide cases where you think this is the underlying reason.

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If primary voters myopically pick their favorite primary candidate without considering general electability, then you'll always get a median-democrat and median-republican nomination regardless of what positions individual candidates adopt.

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Ok, but those two would be equidistant from the actual median only when the electorate is very close to 50/50. That seems to have been true for a while, but I’m not sure I can explain why.

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If the two parties' candidates are typically equidistant from the median voter, that also explains why a similar number of voters belong to each party and vote in its primaries, which in turn explains why their candidates are typically equidistant from the median voter.

In theory this is an unstable equilibrium though (under our assumptions that primary voters mostly don't vote tactically, and people vote in the primaries of the party they prefer). If a bigger fraction of the electorate belongs to one of parties, that should make its primary voters more moderate on average, which should result in its candidates being closer to the median voter, which should make even more people switching to that party. Though this is mitigated if, say, center-right voters keep voting in the Republican primaries even if they vote Democratic in the general election because they perceive Democrats as more moderate, or vice versa.

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Yeah, the problem is the apparent stability of the 50/50 split. I always fear that the reason for it is that there *are* no median voters -- it's a bimodal distribution of groups that see no validity in the other group's positions, and never the twain shall meet.

I'd like to blame the primary system for this. Smoke-filled rooms have a bad rep, but at least the party leaders have a terminal goal of winning the election, which we gather primary voters often do not. But we have not had the knife-edge 50/50 split for as long as we've had the primary system, so if primaries are the problem the effect has been gradual and cumulative.

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This assumes that the primary voters represent the general election voters more or less 1:1, which is generally not the case. Primaries, and especially caucuses, attract people who are politically engaged, and they tend to activist-y and have stronger, more choate opinions on politics.

Michael Podhorzer has a great write-up on his Substack wrt 2022: https://www.weekendreading.net/p/red-wave-blue-undertow

We can look at 2024 for some evidence against that idea. Trump currently leads in AZ polls by nearly 2 points. AZ Republican primary voters selected Kari Lake (~409k votes) for the 2024 Senate seat over Mark Lamb (~293k) and Elizabeth Reye (~38k). That works out to Lake winning 55.3%, all numbers per NBC News.

Per 538, Gallegos, the Democratic Senate nominee, is leading Lake by nearly 7 points. With races having tightened across the country, Trump has nearly 10 full points on Lake even after she won her primary comfortably.

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The AZ primary is an excellent example of primary voters not considering general electability. Lake's weakness in the general was very well known in the few weeks leading up to the primary. GOP strategists trying to win the Senate were screaming about it.

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The process for parties staying equidistant from the median voter doesn't have to be fully organized top-down. It can be partially an emergent phenomenon, in which candidates who do so the best are successfully elected, and candidates who don't, aren't. This applies to candidates for all positions - state, local, and federal. Some of these positions aren't term limited, so successful politicians can stick around (even when they can't stick around in a given position, they can leverage their success to move to different political offices). The collective of elected candidates from a given political party will therefore approximate median voter preferences. This collective then creates norms that other members of the party can default to. These norms will shift over time as the collective of elected officials shifts per shifting voter preferences.

This model could create an inertia that keeps electoral results relatively close, even in instances when a given candidate doesn't do as good a job of matching the collective party line. Since per this model, party norms develop based on the collective tendencies of successfully elected members of that party, the public can develop party loyalty and vote for the party candidate even if they veer somewhat from the norm. Of course, party loyalty isn't absolute, so we'd expect such candidates to lose some support. They'd then be less likely to get elected and join the collective of elected officials from their party, which then shifts the makeup of the collective slightly, to maintain equilibrium.

Party loyalty in the partisan era could probably explain the relatively even electoral results even if one doesn't adopt the aforementioned model.

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1. If three reliably blue states are admitted to the union you still only need 54 senators (or 53+VP) to control the Senate.

2. Tony Blair became the person that said "We Labour politicians whould veer right" after 17 years of conservative dominance and it worked. He even successfully removed achieving socialism from the party goals.

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Bill Clinton did the same in 1992. 90s Democrats were extremely conservative by most metrics we would use to measure that before or after his presidency.

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Trump veered to the left, economically. Republicans used to be the party of the rich. They are not anymore.

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He also veered left on a bunch of social issues, like the whole Christian agenda.

The only thing he's veered right on is immigration, and even that is mostly just a return to the classical consensus of "hey why don't we actually enforce the law?"

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He’s used a lot of rhetoric that scans as right-wing, particularly about immigration - but some of his related rhetoric on international trade would have scanned as left wing a few decades ago. He’s just systematically anti-foreigner in the way he talks, which isn’t really right or left.

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I guess that depends where you put nationalism on the spectrum. The far-left often present themselves as anti-nationalist, yet in historic examples they were willing to drop that stance and opportunistically veer nationalist. And nationalism usually becomes more and more pronounced the further right you go in modern terms, yet the original right, i.e. royalty, nobility and clergy with temporal power, were very much not nationalist and only occasionally played towards nationalist sentiments for gain or to boost general morale.

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Republicans prior to Trump didn’t say, “I’m running exclusively to represent the interests of the rich.” It’s not a winning electoral tactic because even if you get the vote of every single voter in the top 1%, that won’t get you to 50%, which is what you need to win.

Once in office, however, Republicans tend to favor the rich. Trump’s major legislative achievement was a tax cut which primarily benefits the wealthy. During the campaign, promised to eliminate the carried interest loophole (which lets hedge fund managers play lower taxes), but he didn’t try to add a provision to the tax bill to do that.

Trump was more willing to impose tariffs than previous Republican presidents, but because of the marginal utility of money decreases with wealth, higher prices due to tariffs affect the wealthy less than they do people lower down on the income scale. So I don’t think Trump’s tariffs mean that the Republican Party is no longer the party of the rich.

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"republicans aren't the party of the rich" is based on rich people shifting to net-support for the democrats, see eg https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/polarization-of-the-rich-the-new-democratic-allegiance-of-affluent-americans-and-the-politics-of-redistribution/E18D7DAE3A1EF35BA5BC54DE799F291B. It's obviously sensitive to exactly how you define rich.

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RE tariffs - typically, at least part of the rationale behind them is to protect domestic manufacturing (existing or emerging), and more manufacturing jobs should be beneficial to the working class.

So won't count it as policy benefiting the rich...

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Who funds the tariffs? Rich CEOs? Foreign countries?

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Domestic end consumers, mostly.

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A minor quibble; electoral college advantage isn't static, but relates to the composition of the two parties' electoral coalitions (it tilted towards the dems as recently as 2012), so the proper electoral-advantage-adjusted measure isn't national popular vote minus a static adjustment, it's margin of victory in the marginal state.

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Yes this is correct. And it will show an even closer margin in the last 20 years than 2% I believe. At least 2016 and 2020 tipping point state differences are less than 1%.

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Oct 23Edited

Yes, I made the same point elsewhere in the discussion, I think we all agree that the margin in the tipping point state is the appropriate view. To save others the effort, here’s a link to the table on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping-point_state#List_of_tipping-point_states_by_election

If I calculated correctly the average in the years 2000 to 2020 was 3%, mostly because of Obama’s decisive victories with tipping state margins of 9.0% and 5.4%.

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Yeah I was kinda surprised Scott applied that lazy 2% hack rather than just showing the margin in the tipping point state, especially since the table already includes which state that is.

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Yup, the electoral college favoring Republicans has much more to do with 'Winner Takes All' and much less that small states get extra electoral votes that is usually the go to explanation. The effect of that changes as the parties coalitions change (big driver of it getting more favorable for Republicans lately is the increasing education polarization). Small states are surprisingly relatively evenly split (RI,VT,HI, DE etc. are all tiny and D dominated for example). Nate Silver has talked about this a couple of times.

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Right, the big problem with the electoral college is the winner takes all nature of it. If states allocated electoral votes roughly proportional to the vote shares, the electoral college would be more or less fine.

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The ME/NE system might be a good nearer-term change target, if for no other reason than that it has already been tested by real-world implementation.

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I agree!

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The big worry about that method is just that it supercharges the value of congressional gerrymandering.

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It could, or it might reduce it (if the partisan-optimal gerrymander for Congress differs from that for the Electoral College).

Even if it did, it'd still be better than either the current system or a national popular vote.

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