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Shufflepants t1_ivpfa1p wrote

Reply to comment by TheRoadsMustRoll in The ethics of voting for the 'lesser of two evils' by ADefiniteDescription

No. You're speaking in absolutes when the person you replied to said "no chance", which means near zero probability. Because you don't know the outcome ahead of time, but you can still reasonably predict no third party candidate will win. Hillary did have a chance. Indeed, she won the popular vote.

You're trying to weirdly pretend like we both:

A) don't have any predictive power about the likelihood of a third party candidate winning.

B) Have complete predictive power about who will win between the two main candidates.

But we have neither of those. We do know that no third party candidate has any chance of winning. And we do know that both of the candidates from the main two parties have a reasonable shot at winning, but that it will be close, and therefore voting for one of the main two does stand a shot at affecting the outcome.

Voting third party only makes sense in a different voting system like ranked choice. The Nash Equillibrium for a first past the post, single vote system where we have access to limited information about voting patterns of others and engage in repeated elections is for two dominant groups/parties/candidates to emerge that vie for control. Go learn some game theory.

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TheRoadsMustRoll t1_ivpi738 wrote

a black man won in 2008. never happened before. it was unlikely at best.

but he won twice.

you'll live in a world where the unlikely never happens. i'll live in the real world where it does.

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Shufflepants t1_ivpjdxv wrote

>you'll live in a world where the unlikely never happens

No, I'm living in a world where there is a wide range of probabilities and where I'm taking into account all available data instead of just basing the probabilities on a single factor. We had mountains of polling data both before and after the democratic primaries on people's willingness to vote for Obama, and it was far from impossible. But after he won the democratic primary, the conditional probability for him winning shoots way up.

You're living in some weird world where there's only one degree of "unlikely". If something has less than a 50% chance of happening, it's "unlikely". Sure, maybe Obama had a less than 50% chance of winning. But any third party candidate has less than a 0.000000005% chance of winning. It's not just "unlikely" it's "implausible", it's "nearly impossible", or in colloquial terms it is impossible.

If you wanna bank of nearly impossible outcomes because they might happen, go buy lottery tickets.

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