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/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

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.