• Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 hours ago

    Portraying this as a trolley problem is misleading and manipulative.

    This is not a trolley problem because:

    • It’s not a single decision after which there is no walking back on it, rather it’s a cyclical choice which happens every 4 years and a lot of what was done by the candidate elected in once cycle can be undone in the next (as the Republicans frequently demonstrate when one of theirs gets elected after a Democrat).
    • It’s not a single person making a decision, it’s millions of people all at the same time and it’s not even the average of their choices that gets executed (that would require Proportional Vote) but it’s done using a weird mathematical formula, so there are tons of situations were no matter what one’s choice is (or even not choosing at all) it makes no difference whatsoever.
    • Voters don’t actually know upfront what either choice will deliver. Politicians often promise one thing and do something else.

    The closest philosophical or game theory example to an election is a cyclical “Ultimatum Game” between voters and politicians only it’s in the best interest of politicians that people don’t see it that way (because they would be aware that they can punishing politicians in one cycle to get them to do a different split the next one, or specifically in American politics they can Punish the DNC in one cycle for fielding a too rightwing candidate to get them to field a less rightwing candidate the next cycle) so instead their propaganda has pushed for decades this falacy that it’s an “trolley problem” and it’s companion: the idea that people must “chose the lesser evil”.