People Are Ignorant. Big Deal, Right? Well, Yeah.

We've been on the theme of political ignorance for nearly a month now, and so far we've concluded that people are generally pretty ignorant, but we don't yet understand whether this is such a bad thing. Recall from last time there were three arguments about whether political ignorance matters.

Nathan Explains Science Just Voted, and You Can Too.

I just voted. You should too. Well, if you're 18 or older, anyway.

Errol Morris usually says it better.

Nathan Explains Science has spent a fair amount of resources to convince you that politics doesn't work quite the way that pundits would like you to believe. Among the topics: the many reasons — sometimes arguably legitimate — not to vote. Among them, your vote is unlikely to count, and even if it counted  toward deciding your state's electoral college votes in a presidential election, your state's choice might not ultimately matter. Who gets elected might not matter — though Nathan Explains Science emphatically denies that assertion as it applies to recent presidential elections.

On the other hand, if no one votes, then anybody who does makes the decision for everyone. Thus, in an incremental sort of way, the fact that you vote makes democracy just a little bit safer.

I'm bringing this up because Errol Morris, innovative director of the documentaries The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War, just shot a short film on the subject of why we don't vote. You can view it here:  11 Excellent Reasons Not to Vote. It's about seven and a half minutes, and Morris does not disappoint.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Jesus? He's On Your Side

A string of attacks on religious institutions including Muslim and Sikh houses of worship got me thinking about the sort of psychology that justifies these things. That led me indirectly to one of the more significant questions of our time: What would Jesus do?

People Are Ignorant. Big Deal...Right?

In my previous three posts, I wrote about the fact that people generally don't know much about politics, though there is variance, and I wrote about why people know what they know. Basically, learning about politics takes effort, so people only know the things that are the easiest to learn about, which isn't much.

Okay, so people don't know much about politics, and we have some idea why. Today and next time, I'll look at whether it actually matters. In particular, I'll look at whether individuals and societies can make good decisions in spite of their ignorance. Roughly, there are three arguments:

Why People Know What They Know About Politics

In my two previous posts, I looked at what people know about politics, and I looked a bit at who knows what about politics. The general theme is that people don't know very much overall, but there's variation—people know more about some things than others, and some people know more than others.

Today, I want to look at why people know what they know, and fortunately we've already seen some hints at the explanation. For example, we've seen that more people know about high-profile issues than about others. Putting that together with everything else we've seen so far suggests a fairly simple explanation for why people don't know that much about politics: it's actually kind of hard to follow, and most people have better things—or at least more pleasant things—to do than think about the awful state of the economy or whether gay people should be allowed to marry each other.

What "The People" "Want", Part Three: Voting Rules Gone Bad

Last time, I introduced Arrow's Theorem, which states, essentially, that we can't have our voting cake and eat it too. I also showed how plurality rule fails to give us one thing we’d like, transitivity.

Today I want look at the other classic problem: the Borda count and independence of irrelevant alternatives. First, let's review a little bit.

Fielding Reader Questions: The Strength of Voter Preference

Reader F. Tyler asks the following (slightly edited) question regarding the Borda count, a voting method in which people rank alternatives, higher-ranked alternatives get fewer points, and the option with the fewest points wins, just like golf (see this post and its follow-up on basic problems with voting):

What "The People" "Want", Part Two: It Gets Worse.

Last time I talked about what the people want, there were two main points.

First, there are always more than two options. The point of this is that if even in seemingly two-party systems such as that here in the US, there are so-called third parties, and the presence of third-party candidates is sometimes consequential. The big scary example is Allende in Chile in the 1970s; the less scary but more proximate example (for US readers) is Perot in the 1992 US presidential election.

Second, once there are more than two options, what the people "want" is hard to define. Using the Borda count and plurality rule voting methods, I showed how society's first choice depends on the manner in which people decide.

In the academic literature on "social choice," as it's called, the issue is one of preference aggregation and whether it's possible to aggregate preferences in a rational, fair way.

Today, I'll start with a statement of Arrow's Theorem, which answers that question with a resounding "No, it's not possible. Sorry." I'll follow with some intuition, and in future posts I'll flesh out the ideas.

What "The People" "Want", Part One: It Depends

Now that the election is fading from your memories—and I assure you it is—I thought I’d kick off what I hope will be a series of semi-regular posts on how elections really work.