Is there Any Reason We Should Vote- or Not?

Kartikey Sehgal at The Young India makes a case for not voting- here, and here. He does not actually say you should not vote, it is more like he says, there is no need for you to listen to people who say you HAVE to vote.

Now, we can argue back and forth about this, but it gets interesting if you see whether you can approach it from some other way. So I did some searching.

The first link I want you to check out is Less Wrong. It is a rationalist group, but not vicious rationalists, it is a great group of honest people discussing honest opinions- and the comments vouch for their intelligence.

In that particular post, I learnt of someone called Aumann. Now, Aumann is the guy who said, if two people know one another, and know what they each are thinking, it is impossible for them to agree to disagree. This is called Aumann's Agreement Theorem. It has nothing to do with the issue here, but I just found it interesting, so I put it in.

Speaking of that Less Wrong post, it makes these points:

People would often get better answers by taking other people's answers more into account.

So take the tug-of-war analogy:  "There's a knot tied in the middle of the rope, and you have some line in the sand where you believe the knot should end up.  But you don't stop pulling when the knot reaches that point; you keep pulling, because the other team is still pulling." What this means is you don't think whether your vote counts: you vote because the people on the other side will vote.

Phil Goetz, who made that post says, "Tug-of-war voting makes intuitive sense if you believe that an irrational extremist is usually more politically effective than a reasonable person is."

Sure, the reasonable person will think about the odds and sit out at home; the irrational extremist will go and vote ten times to make sure he gets the odds right.

Now, Goetz tell you how to apply Aumann's theorem to voting: you start by identifying which side has more idiots, and vote the other side. So he says a non-idiot population can eventually work out a good solution to any particular problem.  By voting, your enrol yourself to the non-idiot population and cancel out an idiot.

Now the other interesting article I read is by Presh Talwalkar, who studied Economics and Mathematics at Stanford, and now speaks about Personal Finance. 

He applies Game Theories to voting at Mind Your Decisions.

Now, his website carries an advertisement which says, "Vote for Advani," and I hope this is not Presh Talwar's considered opinion (Not that I say don't vote for Advani, it is just that in a page that discusses "Game Theory and Voting", that particular advertisement looks incongruous). The essential points are, I don't understand them entirely, but here is what I could grasp:

He starts with, "we can level the playing field by telling people about voting theory...In that spirit, I share some ideas from voting and game theory."

He asks whether there is a pivotal vote, and answers, no, voting doesn't pay ("It does pay," if you know what I mean, but you and I won't get the money. They know which way we will go). Your chances of individually making a difference is nearer to zero than one.

But collectively you can be a part of a voting bloc. You gain power through unity, and you can make a difference. Your group doesn't even have to be a major player. Even if you are part of a small group, you can make a decisive impact by acting as a bloc.

Talwalkar discusses this in a brilliant article, Voting Power in Israeli Judge Selection and the Shapley-Shubik Index. It is too long to discuss, but the conclusion he makes are these:

"Here is what you can take away when creating your own voting structures:

• Vote size does not equate to voting power
  
• Smaller voters can still hold great power
  
• Voters can increase power through voting blocs
  
• Raising a majority might not diminish the power of a voter or bloc."
  

It is well argued, though it uses maths, but in general, you can make sense of it.

I am not saying you should vote, or that you should not vote, only that you need not feel so hopeless. Just talk to people, and be a group, gather some momentum, pray to God, and hope you can get a snowball effect going.

You might be the group that votes this way or that, or a group that says no way we are going to vote- but don't think you can't make a difference either way, just by talking to people, and getting them to work cohesively, YOU make the difference.