A 2D voting sim

I made a Monte Carlo voting simulation. No particular reason, I just think it’s neat.

Okay, so I was thinking about the Median Voter Theorem, which says that the winning position in an election is the position of the median voter. Of course, this conclusion only holds under certain assumptions, and none of those assumptions are actually true. And yet the conclusion is approximately correct in many situations. That’s why we care disproportionately about the median congress members (like Susan Collins), the median Supreme Court Justices (like Roberts), and the median “swing” states (like Pennsylvania).

But it should be obvious that the median voter fails in a lot of ways. In particular, it doesn’t predict the political polarization that occurs in US politics. And there are plenty of possible explanations: voter turnout, third parties, primary elections, politician’s charisma factors, multidimensional political spectra, and so on. But I’m not sure which among those explanations are most important.

The voting simulation won’t answer any of these questions, I’m just setting the context. One of the assumptions of the Median Voter Theorem is that political preferences exist along only one dimension. I thought I’d try running simulations with two dimensions to see what would happen, and to make some pretty graphs.

Plot showing all the voters and candidates along a two dimensional spectrum.

Voters and candidates in a 2D space

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Link Roundup: November 2020

As usual, I bring you a collection of articles from the past month that I found particularly interesting.

Effective Altruism is logical, but too unnatural to catch on | Psyche – Alan Jern discusses why Effective Altruism is psychologically and morally counterintuitive.  This is very different from my own discussion of Effective Altruism, where I am most critical of the realities of the community and its priorities.  While Effective Altruism makes counterintuitive decisions in trolley problems, I don’t really consider that a problem with Effective Altruism, rather our flawed moral intuition is the problem, and Effective Altruism addresses that problem by offering community support and discussion.  In any case, I feel like it’s rarely a choice between altruism and family; the majority of one’s resources are usually spent on oneself, so altruism tends to come at one’s own expense first.

Inside Foxconn’s empty buildings, empty factories, and empty promises | The Verge – A bit late for this story, but this was just engrossing.  In 2017, republicans gave huge subsidies to bring a Taiwanese manufacturer into Wisconsin, and it was a huge scam and corporate nightmare.  As recently as last month, Trump was still claiming that Foxconn would keep its promises.

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Creators and their brands

Back in 2018, I invented the idea of content granularity, which is a measure of how large each chunk of content is when a creator produces a stream of content. I observed that creators usually try to be consistent in their granularity, and discussed the “coarse-graining death spiral” where creators feel the need to put more and more effort into each chunk until it is unsustainable.

Today I’d like to talk about other ways that creators enforce consistency in their content streams. For example, a creator may produce content focusing on a particular topic. Or perhaps they have a gimmick, which may be applied to one or multiple topics. Or maybe the one thing that is most persistent about their content, is their personality (either genuine or performed). Whatever it is that provides consistency, I will refer to as the creator’s brand.

As I write about this, I am totally thinking about that satirical music video by Brian David Gilbert, advising creators on establishing a brand.

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Origami: Three axis woven design

three axis woven design

Three Axis Woven Design, designed by David Huffman

I haven’t been posting much origami lately, because I haven’t been making any.  But I still have quite a number of models in my back catalog.  This is the Three Axis Woven Design, designed by David Huffman, later reconstructed and named by Erik Demaine.

This piece was painstakingly constructed as a gift for my grand aunt, who recently died.  She was an actress who played Asian characters circa the 1950s, and was a great appreciator of the arts.  She lived a full life.

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Vote, but not just today

Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States yesterday. This makes the current Supreme court one of the most conservative in ages, with a 6 to 3 majority. Previously, some cases would be ruled in favor of the liberal judges, because one of the conservative judges would agree with the liberal judges (and often they would dictate the terms of the opinion). Now this is much more unlikely, as it requires two conservative judges to side with the liberals.

This will have wide-reaching consequences. One of the most immediate consequences is on the current case arguing against the constitutionality of Obamacare.

If you’re a US citizen, you’ve likely been told to vote a hundred times already. Even if you’re not a US citizen, you’ve seen it, and are probably sick of it. This is, of course, because Trump is an extraordinarily dangerous president. But I want to point out the obvious: this whole situation with the Supreme Court did not arise from Trump shenanigans, it arose from plain old Republican shenanigans. Amy Coney Barrett is a judge that any Republican president could have nominated, and any Republican senate could have confirmed.

So don’t just vote out Trump, vote them all out. Note, senators are only reelected every 6 years, so this requires sustained commitment–voting in every election, including midterms. This year, everyone is anxious about the election and feeling a bit powerless. Channel that anxiety into a commitment to exercise your voting power at every opportunity.

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In which I program music

In my life I’ve tried many different art forms, and recently I’ve added a new one to the list. I’ve started making music, using programming. No music worth sharing for now, I’m just going to talk about the experience.

To create music, I use a tool called Csound. Csound has its own computer language, which I’ve been intermittently teaching myself over the past year. It’s not an easy tool to use, but it suits me because I’m comfortable with the programming and math, and because I want to full control over the creation of instruments.

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2020 California election positions

As I have done in previous elections, I’m going through my ballot, doing a little research, and making endorsements. My primary goal is to normalize the practice of informed voting, not just on the well-known issues, but on the entire ballot.

President

Biden.

People complain about having to vote for the lesser of two evils, but abstention is just the middle of three evils. Trump may very well lead to the collapse of the US, or the collapse of US democracy, or my personal death.

Researching an entire ballot is frankly a slog, and I’m in favor of spending less energy on obvious decisions, even if those are the ones I feel most strongly about. To express the intensity of my preference, I’ve committed to voting against all Republicans in all elections throughout the ballot for the next 10 years, which incidentally frees up more time to research other parts of the ballot. The Republican party has become the fascist party, and their candidates do not even deserve my research. I have also made the maximum donation to the Biden campaign.

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