Sometimes people say that a single vote can’t ever affect the outcome of an election, because “there will be recounts.” I think stuff like that (and near variants) aren’t really things people can say if they fully understand IVT on an intuitive level.
Very similar: ‘Deciding to eat meat or not won’t affect how many animals are farmed, because decisions about how many animals to farm are very coarse-grained.’
Yep! Or donations below a certain amount won’t do anything since planning a shipment of antimalarial nets, or hiring a new AI Safety researcher, is lumpy.
I don’t get how the IVT applies here. Like, the things I would think about here would be there is a chance that my vote can be that one important vote that gives my candidate advantage. Or how we need to coordinate without communication, like if other people thought the same that their vote doesn’t matter, all in all my candidate looses many more votes than one. The number of votes my candidate has is the integral of voter’s preferences, but this is not a smooth function so it shouldn’t apply here as well?
I’m struggling to come up with an example of a real dispute involving the intermediate value theorem. Can you suggest one?
Sometimes people say that a single vote can’t ever affect the outcome of an election, because “there will be recounts.” I think stuff like that (and near variants) aren’t really things people can say if they fully understand IVT on an intuitive level.
Very similar: ‘Deciding to eat meat or not won’t affect how many animals are farmed, because decisions about how many animals to farm are very coarse-grained.’
Yep! Or donations below a certain amount won’t do anything since planning a shipment of antimalarial nets, or hiring a new AI Safety researcher, is lumpy.
I don’t get how the IVT applies here. Like, the things I would think about here would be there is a chance that my vote can be that one important vote that gives my candidate advantage. Or how we need to coordinate without communication, like if other people thought the same that their vote doesn’t matter, all in all my candidate looses many more votes than one. The number of votes my candidate has is the integral of voter’s preferences, but this is not a smooth function so it shouldn’t apply here as well?
Have you heard the argument before that single votes can’t ever matter because there’d be a recount anyway?
no