But bet at what odds?

Obviously, we must set up a toy electoral prediction market. And then save ourselves the bother of actually running the election.

(I bet nobody bothers.)

The Condorcet Jury Theorem is also undermined by strategic behavior—which, in this context, refers to rational individual use of available information. For the CJT to work, individuals have to vote according to their own beliefs about the truth. The theorem is then just a result of the law of large numbers.

Voters do not share identical preferences over outcomes in most elections. “More likely to be right than wrong” is meaningless when voters have genuine disagreements about what is “right.”

Moreover, voters are aware of what large numbers of other voters think. If I think that x is true, but I know that a majority of other voters think y is true, and I know that people are more likely to be right than wrong, then I may vote for y. This is perfectly rational from my perspective, but the CDT doesn’t work when individuals aggregate information this way before voting. At least, that’s my understanding of the recent work by Fedderson and Pesendorfer.

But he didn’t issue any pronouncements. He asked questions and made one qualified statement.

Dsqared, of course, you’d get more than half the votes if it were a two person field. For one thing, I’d vote for you over me in a heartbeat. Of course, I wouldn’t think too much about it in that heartbeat, but I bet we’d all count the vote.

I read the blog regularly. Comment too. It’s not just Berube. If it were a three person race, he’d probably win, you’d come second, and we could bar anyone who voted for me from ever voting (for anything) again.

I’m not sure about the pompous thing, though. And just so you know, it stung.

The point I was trying to make is that there are all sorts of non-frivolous reasons for voting, and to me it sounds like you’re defining “non-frivolous” in a way that sounds suspiciously like, “accords with my notion of seriousness, which is, by the way, the right notion.” As a veteran of the canon wars in literature, where I heard an English professor in 1975 claim that there were no “serious” literary artists in the United States and never had been, that sort of thing gets my back up.

And my concern is exactly this: I tend to think that people who will vote for Ron Paul or Ralph Nader aren’t being “serious.” But I don’t think I’m the one who gets to decide.

[M]athematics … ensure that as long as the average voter has a slightly better than 50% chance of making the right decision and the electorate is large enough, the majority vote will be correct in a two horse race

For this to be true an additional crucial assumption must be made: the votes cannot be very highly correlated. If voters are prone to make mistakes, and make them in the same direction at the same time (because, for example, voters are swayed by clever TV ads and they all watch the same TV ads), then the errors do not cancel each other, and there is a good chance that the “wrong” candidate gets elected.

Thus, the difficult part is not getting to close to 100% chance of choosing the right candidate (50% + ε will do). The difficult part is making your mind in an independent way that is not manipulated in the same way that all the other voters are manipulated. Only then can you rely on the law of large numbers to do the job for you.

Anyway, that is a funny post!

Yeah, it’s right up there with Churchill’s “A modest man, who has much to be modest about.”

Like the original post, the putdown was overwritten.

Best. Putdown. Ever.

Not in the US, it isn’t. Just vote against the Republicans, no matter who the individual candidates are. A Republican congressional majority is the ultimate disaster.