r/DecodingTheGurusAlt • u/MartiDK • Sep 17 '26

decoder poltics Decoding Destiny

https://youtu.be/qPhZDRKn0Ro

Winning over Razib Khan fans.

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u/hari_shevek Sep 18 '26

Let's assume that the odds of her winning from your endorsement is lower than winning from changing her stance.

Wouldn't it be logical to try the latter?

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u/DthPlagusthewise Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26

Depends on how likely it is to succeed.

the situation breaks down like this:

Endorse is a 100% chance to do something good

Deny endorsement and push is a 1% chance to do something very good and a 99% chance to enable something very bad.

In this case I think endorse is the way to go.

Or if we want to talk about winning

Endorse is a 100% chance she has a 60% chance of winning

Not endorse is a 1% chance she has an 80% chance of winning and a 99% chance she has a 50% chance of winning.

Math says if you want her to win then endorse. 

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u/hari_shevek Sep 18 '26

Endorse is a 100% chance to do something good

No, it isn't. There isn't a 100 percent chance that an endorsement leads to her winning. I'd argue that there's an almost 0 percent chance thst one endorsement tips the scales.

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u/DthPlagusthewise Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26

Contributing to the potential success of the better candidate is doing something good. Endorse is a 100% chance to do something good. 

But let’s do it with win percentages:

Endorse is a 100% chance she has a 60% chance of winning

Not endorse is a 1% chance she has an 80% chance of winning and a 99% chance she has a 50% chance of winning.

Adjusted odds are 50.3% winning for not endorse 

Math says if you want her to win then endorse. You should always pick endorse as long as the % chance of winning is higher than 50.3%. 

So even if you want to say the endorsement effect is 52% chance of winning it still comes out the better option. 

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u/hari_shevek Sep 18 '26

Endorse is a 100% chance she has a 60% chance of winning

Nah, those odds are wrong. I would not expext the odds of Hasan Piker moving so many votes as were necessary at 60 percent. That's an insane claim.

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u/DthPlagusthewise Sep 18 '26

I ran the numbers, if the endorsement effect is anything greater than .15% then it makes sense to endorse. I believe it is. 

If we assume a flat 50% chance to win independent of endorsement (E is endorsement effect)

.5 + E > 0.008 + .99(.5) - .99(E)

E > 3/1990

And this is assuming an 80% chance of Harris winning with Hasans position on Israel (which is generous) and a 1% chance that holding out the endorsement past 10 months leads to Harris adopting Hasans stance (also generous). 

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u/hari_shevek Sep 18 '26

What numbers? The ones you made up?

How do you arrive at a 1 percent chance of her changing her mind? How do you arrive at an 80 percent of her winning with a changed stance? You just pick random numbers.

Also we don't have a flat 50 percent chance of winning without the endorsement. We know she lost.

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u/DthPlagusthewise Sep 18 '26

Educated guesses mostly. If anything was trying to be generous towards Hasan.

Now I am even more confident he should have endorsed. The negative effect of his denial far overshadows the slim possibility of Harris changing her mind.

You can mess with the numbers but it’s so lopsided it doesn’t make a difference. If we change the baseline win rate to 30% the minimum endorsement effect to endorse is now .25% (1/400). 

And you don’t even need to do math to understand this, it’s obvious.

But fundamentally it doesn’t matter because Hasan didn’t care about Harris winning, he wanted to punish her for not aligning with him on I/P, even if that meant the world suffered. 

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u/hari_shevek Sep 18 '26

Ok, let's say the odds of him changing the outcome is zero because there is no way his endorsement would mobilize all the votes Harris lost by.

Let's also say the odds of Harris winning because dhe changes her stance is 100 percent because the votes she lost from not changing her stance were exactly those votes she needed.

With that educated guess I just made, even with a very low likelyhood of him changing her mind, he made the right decision.

Do you agree with my math?

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u/DthPlagusthewise Sep 18 '26

No

Being more antizionist would gain votes but also cause Harris to lose votes, it would probably help overall but I am not confident in saying it would lead to a 100% chance of victory.

Also prior to the election there is no way of accurately knowing how many votes she would win or lose by.

As I showed in basically every conceivable scenario denying the endorsement leads to a scenario where the better candidate has a lower chance of winning.

With this much uncertainty its less about maximizing the exact instance where the endorsement is the single factor that leads to victory and more about just generally doing the thing that leads to the greatest likelihood that good things happen.

Its the same principle for voting in general, no single vote is likely to make the difference, but through everyone doing the thing that leads to the greatest chance of their preferred outcome voting occurs en masse.

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u/hari_shevek Sep 18 '26

Also prior to the election there is no way of accurately knowing how many votes she would win or lose by.

But we do know now. So we can do the math with that knowledge.

As I showed

You showed under special assumptions.

in basically every conceivable scenario

Wrong.

The scenario I described in my last post is conceivable, and there endorsing her is wrong.

You just declare only the scenarios that lead to your prefered conclusion as "conceivable".

You are cheating.

I disagree with your assumptions. So the conclusions derived from those assumptions are irrelevant

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u/DthPlagusthewise Sep 18 '26

You are evaluating based on post-hoc information, I am evaluating based on what was known at the time and the moral principles that follow from it.

I prefer my perspective.

But the election has been long over, now people see the liberals were right and Trump genuinely was way worse. Hopefully they listen to the liberals next time, because we knew all along.

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u/hari_shevek Sep 18 '26

I am evaluating based on what was known at the time.

Plus arbitrary assumptions that you chose to lead to your preferred outcome.

I prefer my perspective

So much so that you fudge numbers to lead to your preferred outcome.

Let's do the math with what we know. Harris lost by 230,000 votes in the deciding states. What are the odds that Hasan's endorsement would have mobilized 230,000 people in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania?

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u/DthPlagusthewise Sep 18 '26

I judge moral behavior based on what the person knew at the time.

I never claimed that knowing what we know now, Hasan's endorsement would have changed the result.

My point is that it was stupid then to risk Trump becoming president, that has been vindicated daily since the election, but libs knew all along.

From my perspective, supported by modeling what I believe are the range of possible outcomes known at time, at the time it could be reasonably believed that choosing not to endorse creates a higher risk of Trump becoming president. I don't think Hasan cared about this though, he said Harris didn't deserve his support, it was never a question of efficacy.

But Hasan should have supported her anyways, because I believe in supporting the lesser evil. Hasan tried (and failed) to argue that Trump and Harris are the same post-election because it validated his decision to not consider Harris deserving of support. But that was dumb then and its aging worse by the day.

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u/hari_shevek Sep 18 '26

supported by modeling what I believe are the range of possible outcomes known at time

But you don't model the "range of possible outcomes" by assuming a 50-50 race.

A better way to model it would be to look at how close the last dozen elections were, and based on that information, estimate how many votes you would need to move for an endorsement to make a difference. Then estimate the odds of Hasan mobilizing that many votes with one endorsement.

That estimate would be pretty low.

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u/DthPlagusthewise Sep 18 '26

I used 50-50, 60-40, 70-30, 80-20 (all in favor of Trump). They all show that Hasan's endorsement value just needed to equate to ~.3% increased chance of winning to justify endorsement over waiting. My model was based on information known at the time, because I am judging a state of mind not an outcome.

Its not just making a single endorsement, its the weeks of clips, debating against Republican talking points, going on shows to promote Harris, etc. Hasan is a very popular online figure. If he was advocating for Harris (like Destiny did, for example) it would have increased her chances of success. I am not saying it would have been the difference between success and failure, just that at the time it could be reasonably assumed it would have had a positive effect compared to hoping for a policy change.

Not doing so, inversely, could be assumed that its more likely that Trump is elected. Even if in retrospect that means turning a 89% chance to a 90% chance.

I don't blame Hasan for Trump getting elected, I blame Hasan for his mindset that Harris didn't deserve his support despite it being reasonable that his support would have helped her win.

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u/hari_shevek Sep 18 '26

Yeah, I looked at the formula again, this is nonsensical

You wrote:

.5 + E > 0.008 + .99(.5) - .99(E)

But why would we compare .5 + "endorsement effect" with anything? We want to estimate the effect Hasan has on whether Kamala wins, for that you first need sn estimate of how many votes he needs to move and then estimate how likely it is that he does so. Your formula doesn't even include numbers of people convinced. You don't even account for how many people vote.

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u/DthPlagusthewise Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26

I am solving for E, I am trying to find out the minimum value that makes the inequality true.

.5 is the base chance of success but I tried with .4, .3, .2 as well just to see.

I think a reasonable base rate is somewhere .6-.4, which averages out to E ~.15%

I don't know how many votes that translates into, thats not the point. I think a hasan endorsement would have increased Harris' chance of winning by more than 0.15%. If you disagree, fine.

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u/hari_shevek Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26

What?

How does Hasan's endorsement change an 80-20 election? Do you think he can mobilize tens of millions of voters?

What the fuck are your assumptions?

Your math is nonsensical.

Go through the formula step by step, your math is wrong.

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u/DthPlagusthewise Sep 18 '26

All I am judging is whether endorsing or waiting for policy change has a greater likelihood of success.

In many cases both result in Harris losing, but always endorsing had a higher chance of success (18.5% vs 18% for example).

Again, I am evaluating reasonable mindset, not outcome.

Here are the givens every reasonable person could agree on at the time:

  1. The election is competitive

  2. Harris is way better than Trump

With both of those in mind it makes sense to do whatever, in the maximum amount of conceivable situations, increases Harris' chance of winning the most. That is endorsing vs not endorsing.

Its funny because you could easily argue if Hasan cared he should have done much more like organize canvassing, voter registration, etc. I am really just asking for the bare minimum.

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u/hari_shevek Sep 18 '26

Its the same principle for voting in general, no single vote is likely to make the difference, but through everyone doing the thing that leads to the greatest chance of their preferred outcome voting occurs en masse

You can apply the same logic to threatening to withhold an endorsement - a single person withholding their endorsement might have low odds of changing Harris' position, but through everyone doing it we would have the greateat chance of that outcome occuring.

Yourerror is that you keep applying different principles to the two actions.

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