10/30/16

Donald Trump, The Prisoner’s Dilemma and Maine’s Instant Runoff Initiative

Sometimes, in politics, weird things happen. (No kidding, right?) Witness Maine’s controversial governor, Paul LePage, who won his first visit to the state house with less than 38% of the vote. The reason? It was a three-way race.

Or even more dramatically and historically, this past spring’s Republican primary eleven-person cavalry charge. With so many folks running, and running into each other, the winner only needed a fraction of the vote, as long as it was a bigger fraction than anyone else’s. And that’s what happened.

Journal Universel, Paris, 1863

Then, as the Republican establishment began to realize that they were about to nominate perhaps the only candidate who could possibly lose to Hillary Clinton, they tried to put together a strategy that would #DumpTrump.  It didn’t work.

Why not?

First, it was too little, too late.  Trump was already well on his way to amassing sufficient delegates.  But their strategy also required the remaining candidates to play the Prisoner’s Dilemma and win. 

Say what?

Here’s how the Prisoner’s Dilemma works:

CanStock Photos

Imagine that you and your friend, Mr. D, are cat burglars. You were caught breaking into the Snodgrass Mansion in search of the priceless Cat’s Eye Diamond. The local police take you off to the station house and put you in separate rooms.  Eventually, the district attorney comes to both of you and offers the same deal:

      

      1.  Admit your guilt. If Mr. D also admits his guilt, you will both get a 6-month sentence at a minimum security prison. If Mr. D says he’s innocent, you go to prison for 12 years while he goes free. 

      2.  Insist on your innocence. If Mr. D admits his guilt, you go free and he gets the 12-year sentence.  If Mr. D also insists on his innocence, you both go to trial and each of you will get a 6-year prison term based on their airtight case.

Obviously, the best deal for both of you is for you both to admit your guilt.  The best deal for a single person is to hold on to your innocence and hope the other guy confesses. You are not allowed to communicate with Mr. D. What do you do?

If you live in a collectivist society (like Japan or Mexico, or India), one that values the group over the individual, you pick the first option. The good of the group outweighs the good of the individual. You trade off your chance to go free for the lower sentences for both of you. And Mr. D will do the same.  You both get the shorter sentence at a better facility.

If you live in a society that values the individual, like the U.S. does, you pick option two and hope for the best, because the good of the individual outweighs the good of the group. Unfortunately for you, Mr. D makes the same choice and off you both go for a long term in a maximum security prison.  What sunk the Republicans was that none of the pack running against Trump were willing to trade off their individual presidential ambitions for the good of the party. Not until it was far too late. As a result, they lost the Prisoner’s Dilemma and came very close to losing the election.

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Now, what does this have to do with Maine’s “Instant Runoff” Initiative?  Everything, actually. 

LePage won because he was in a three person race. The candidate with the least chance of winning took votes from the other, and LePage won instead.  Happened twice, once in 2010 and again in 2014. So in the hopes of preventing a minority winner in the future, Maine voters now have the chance to change how they vote with this new Initiative. Instead of picking a single candidate, voters would be asked to rank the candidates: 1st choice, 2nd choice, 3rd choice, etc .  Then, if no one gets a simple majority from the 1st choice votes, they would drop the lowest person and count the votes again.  The votes from the dropped candidate would then be assigned based on their second choice. And so on, until someone gets a majority.  An "instant runoff". They hope to do this in races for the governorship, senate, house, state senate and state representatives, thus eliminating the Prisoner’s Dilemma in these races and allowing only majority vote candidates to win.  Elegant and simple. I wish them the best.

Gary Johnson take note: Are you playing the Prisoner's Dilemma? Your vice-president has figured it out. 

10/27/16

Conservatives serve a tastier meal!

I’m not a very good cook.  Fearless, but not so good. My family suffered for decades with grocery store rotisserie chicken and green bean/mushroom casserole.  And some of our Thanksgiving meals have been the stuff of legend.

There was the turkey we cooked in one of those supermarket aluminum pans. You know, the cheap, flexible ones?  And when we went to take the bird out of the oven, the pan collapsed, spilling hot fat into the oven where it immediately burst into flames.  Who knew that would happen, right? Made for crispy turkey skin along with the singed eyebrows.

Then there were the pumpkin crème brulees in individual cups.  I bought a blow torch at the restaurant supply place that turned out to be big enough to repair a major pipeline.  As our daughter’s sweetie said, “Open flame at a Gilbert Thanksgiving? What could possibly go wrong?”

And then there was the Thanksgiving where I decided to do a New England clam bake instead of the usual. Being squeamish, I wanted to be sure the lobsters were dead before putting them in the boiling water.  The lobsters took exception to my plan.  What a mess. Enough said.

So what does this have to do with liberals and conservatives?  It takes us back to those moral foundations that underlie most societies and how Liberals and Conservatives use these foundations to cook up tasty notions. 

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests that we think of this like an audio equalizer.  Here’s what Liberals look like: 

Liberals are most concerned that others suffer no harm.  Seeing someone in pain deeply distresses them.  They are also concerned, though to a lesser degree, with anything that restricts their Liberty.  Finally, Liberals are concerned with fairness, which to them means equality. (To conservatives, it means proportionality. The difference in definitions all by itself accounts for a lot of the demonization of The Other.)

So in putting together their platforms and policies, Liberals have three spices to choose from. There will be a lot about Caring for others, Liberty (pro-choice, for example) and Fairness (equal rights, equal access, gay marriage).  But that can limit the dishes they can offer.

Conservatives, on the other hand, hit about equally on all six foundations. Their equalizer looks like this:

They care a lot about others’ being hurt but not as much as Liberals do. They’re about the same in Liberty but with different issues (Don’t’ take away my guns) and Fairness, but are much more involved in moral foundations like Loyalty (Colin Kaepernick, for example) Authority and Sanctity/Purity (opposition to gay marriage and sex education). 

What this means politically is that Conservatives have more spices in their spice rack. They can craft messages that address any and all of these six values while still being true to their conservative philosophy.

Side Note:  Arch Conservative Ted Olson helped argue for gay marriage in the landmark Supreme Court case of several years ago.  He said that marriage equality WAS a conservative value, but I believe he was basing that on issues of Liberty and Fairness, not the usual Sanctity/Purity.  It was an interesting turn. Many Conservatives disagreed.

Wild flight of fantasy:  Emotions and behaviors are contagious. Seeing others yawn, we yawn ourselves. Seeing someone hurt can make us hurt. This caring for others, feeling their pain, can be tied to what are called “mirror neurons” in the brain.  If I’m in pain, parts of my brain light up in an fMRI scan.  If I see someone else in pain, some of those parts still light up.  It’s the neurological foundation of empathy. 

David G. Myers, Psychology, 9^th edition

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It makes me wonder if an overabundance of mirror neurons determines, in part, whether someone is a Liberal instead of a Conservative.  Now there’s a dissertation topic for someone!

10/13/16

Living in the bubble Part III

When prophecy fails

Back in the 1950s, a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin became convinced she was in contact with aliens from the planet Clarion. They told her that the world would be destroyed in a great flood on December 21^st, 1954.

Gograph

She gathered around her a number of true believers who got rid of their possessions, left their spouses, and quit their jobs in anticipation of the end of the world. On the night in question, they convened at her house to await their midnight transportation to a flying saucer, which would save them from the deluge later that day.

Unknown to the group, their numbers included social psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues, who had secretly infiltrated the cult and joined them for their late night vigil.  Here’s what Festinger said happened as the clock ticked down:

•   December 20. The group expects a visitor from outer space to call upon them at midnight and to escort them to a waiting spacecraft. As instructed, the group goes to great lengths to remove all metallic items from their persons. As midnight approaches, zippers, bra straps, and other objects are discarded. The group waits.

•   12:05 am, December 21. No visitor. Someone in the group notices that another clock in the room shows 11:55. The group agrees that it is not yet midnight.

•   12:10 am. The second clock strikes midnight. Still no visitor. The group sits in stunned silence. The cataclysm itself is no more than seven hours away.

•   4:00 am. The group has been sitting in stunned silence. A few attempts at finding explanations have failed. Martin begins to cry.

•   4:45 am. Another message by automatic writing is sent to Martin. It states, in effect, that the God of Earth has decided to spare the planet from destruction. The cataclysm has been called off: "The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction." (Wikipedia)

Because of their public commitment to the apocalypse, because they had taken irrevocable steps to prepare for it, and because it didn’t happen, they were forced into cognitive dissonance, the brutal collision between belief and reality. Which they resolved by deciding that their prayers had changed God’s plan.

I think that something similar will happen at Trump HQ on Election Night, 2016.

Consider Trump and his Breitbart alt.right conspiracy clan.  As of this date, mid-October, they are still saying that Trump is ahead in the polls. He’s not, not even in the charmingly weird LA Times/USC poll. If the trend continues, they will lose in November and possibly lose big.  But they will never own it. They can’t. Like Martin’s doomsday cult, they have been too sure, too public in their insistence that they are right. Plus, Trump never owns any of his failures. Finally, many of Trump’s supporters have confined themselves to fringe sites that are giving them bad data. They will not see this coming.  

Unlike Martin's group, though, sweetness and light and heavenly mercy are probably not on their agenda. Instead, Trump (and campaign CEO Steve Bannon) will undoubtedly blame it on some elitist global conspiracy or on Paul Ryan or, my bet, on massive voter fraud.  And it will get uglier from there.

That’s my own doomsday prediction.

ETA: My cousin Michael believes that Trump's ultimate plan is to set up his own TV network or cable channel and rake in more millions by milking the angst of his frustrated followers. Stay tuned.