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I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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Yes it is and it’s such a good example of logic that its archetype is now a formal part of game theory in the prisoner’s dilemma. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
Thank you for this. It's always nice to have valid reasoning backing up something you find so obvious lol
Not even close. Did you consent when voting for Biden that his administration could do a genocide? I hope not. This logic implies that we have a moral obligation to vote, which eliminates the free-will of individual choice.
To put it another way. If I am morally obligated to choose the lesser-evil, then that eliminates the freedom of choice. Let’s say you are in a coma during election season. Are you now complicit with everything Trump is doing because you couldn’t vote? Of course not.
By conflating voting with moral obligation, this sophist argument is an example of plausible reasoning.
A vote is a preference, a choice. It carries no burden of complicity. This is separate from ideological support. If one voted for Trump, but then regrets that support, they are no longer responsible for Trump’s actions.
Wrong. A vote is an action. And one that has the ability to negatively (or positively) affect others in your sphere.
If you voted for Trump, me and other LGBTQ people are now at immense risk, as are many other populations. Even if you regret your vote you are complicit and have responsibility for the action you took (or didn't take).
It's also false to claim that because something is a moral obligation that eliminates freedom of choice. Even if you have a moral obligation you can always choose to do the immoral thing.
So, the 80 million nonvoters in 2020 voted for Biden? I voted for Biden and Harris. That does not imply my consent for genocide. Complicity is only maintained through inaction. When I denounce the genocidal action, my complicity ends.
Since we’re erroneously referencing logic thought experiments, the trolley problem refutes the prisoner’s dilemma.
The thing about the dilemma is that you need to realize that the prisoners are rational, feeling people. They have good reasons to do what they do, often enough. Often their goals are good ones, compassionate ones.
They aren’t trying to scheme or sabotage one another. But they wind up doing that, because the only success condition is mutual cooperation.
That didn’t happen for us, and the outcome is boolean, pass or fail. Any move except sticking to the coalition and acting to cooperate would have doomed the effort completely, and we didn’t do that. So, here we are.
Where in the Wikipedia article does it mention “voting for the lesser evil “ is an archetype for the prisoner’s dilemma? I’m willing to change my mind, but I need actual reasons to do so.
A better understanding about the logic of voting:
It’s a varying application. It usually models opposing groups during diplomatic tensions, but it can also apply to groups within coalitions who face the same problem together but disagree how the coalition should proceed.
In the process of applying things, you have to consider the outcomes and think of the prisoners as “trapped” by the circumstances of the decision they face. Trapped here means that inaction triggers consequences, so it explicitly models inaction as a choice facing the circumstance.
Usually during negotiation that follows this kind of pattern, the prisoner’s dilemma is applied to figure out the best way to articulate the circumstances at hand and the choices everyone has. It’s a way to connect the cause and effect of everything to everyone in the negotiation, and to illustrate how their actions flow into those consequences, in a way that frames everything as less a “you vs me”, and more of an “us vs the problem”.
And that’s where the logic part comes into play: here it works as a mechanic to introduce cause and effect group logic to humans, and connect the notion of it all to their emotional needs. It helps demonstrate that negotiation and compromise are hard but valuable, logically and emotionally.
If you haven’t read it, “Getting to Yes” is fantastic. I highly recommend it, and although it doesn’t speak about the dilemma directly, the entire thing is about navigating compromise tactically in situations where everyone may be very correct, yet still have a hard time with each other.