| > I think this disagreement stems from the fact that, by instinct, you think socially. No, the disagreement stems from different beliefs over whether you've taken a rational position. Especially odd since at some level you understand it is an irrational conclusion since you're voting anyway. What you are calling "rational" probably would make sense in a world where people were unable to communicate and playing a one-off game. The issue that idea runs in to is people can communicate and elections are a repeated game. If voting is modelled as a game where people don't communicate then a lot of nonsense results turn up. The rational strategy for most people when communication is possible is to join up with a coalition that can win, then vote. There is a minority of people with unusual enough political opinions that they can't realistically join a coalition and they rationally wouldn't vote, but by definition they are fringe groups. In the main, most people would vote if they are rational. And indeed, in a move that makes one hopeful for humanity, most people do indeed make the rational decision on that one. Any study of coalition games like voting quickly discover that voting is entirely rational and a theoretical optimum in practice for most participants in a society. If you do a course on game theory there should be entire lectures on the subject. I suspect you might have done a course on game theory so I'm not sure why that wasn't drilled in. The mechanics of coalition building among rational actors is a fundamental topic. > In Prisoner's Dilemma, as originally formulated, I believe communication is expressly forbidden. You can look it up [0]; as originality formulated it was a 100-round game where cooperation is an entirely rational behaviour (for most rounds, anyway). It is a very powerful example of how cooperation followed by tit-for-tat is a near-optimal strategy under a lot of realistic assumptions and requires only the tiniest of communication channels to pull off and improve from an inefficient Nash equilibrium to a Pareto efficient one. In fact, I suspect the actual mistake you're making is thinking that a Nash equilibrium is equivalent to a rational one, when in fact it is not. When communication and coalitions are possible the Nash equilibrium is usually just a starting point for negotiations before the rational agents decide to get a better result for themselves. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma |
I don't see how this applies to voting at all in countries without compulsory voting.
Communication and iterations also don't seem that relevant to my argument about free-riding, since one's voting record is not usually visible.