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ChristianKl comments on The "best" mathematically-informed topics? - Less Wrong Discussion
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The problem with focusing on the math of elections is that it often makes the person ignore politics of elections. In this video there for example the claims that First Past the Post Voting always results in a two party system. In the UK you have a third party with the Liberal Party. Canada also has multiple parties in it's parliament despite First Past the Post Voting.
"If a field involves math, and you cannot do the math, you are not qualified to comment on that field."
The "politics of elections" are explicable mathematically using formal methods like game theory. That said, it's social science, which is naturally inexact, which makes it difficult. If you want to criticize it, how about learning the math yourself?
I trust people who are actually successful at politics over people sitting in academia when it comes to explaining me how politics works.
As far as the ability to do the math of the field goes, when I was a kid I did the d'hondt calculation to get the amount of seats particular election results would produce while being at a election party and most of the people with public offices at the party had never run d'hondt.
OK, props to you for working through a mathematical model of an election. But I find your criticism about the ability of elected officials to be wanting: Do you expect your plumber to well-versed in the mathematics of hydrodynamics?
The point is that elected officials are the experts at politics. If they have no use for knowing the math, then the math is not central.
The campaigns of candidates employ political consultants many of whom are statisticians of the Nate Silver kind. All high-level campaigns do a lot of data mining and analysis.
I don't deny that there's polling and trying to predict the effect of political messaging based on statistical models.
On the other hand running a campaign and doing public policy are two different things.
*I would also note that I don't live in the US but in Germany, and we don't have exactly the same political system.
So you're criticizing Capla's interest in models of electoral dynamics because politicians don't do it. That misses the point: electoral dynamics are mathematically explicable. They don't cause electoral outcomes, so an in-depth understanding of them is of limited value to candidates themselves. But trusting the explanations of the politicians as to why they won an election is a genuinely terrible approach to understanding anything but the politician's own beliefs.
Isn't that like saying psychology is useless since humans have "free will"? It may not be perfectly predictive, but it's still interesting and useful to know what the underlying math and incentives tend to.
In any case, if there are major exceptions that deviate form the mathematical political optima, I want to know why that is.
The problem isn't uselessness it's that people think they understand more than they do and make a lot of silly mistakes because they are overconfident that their models matter.
In particular people it makes people underrate the value of the public debate and complex coalition building and focus to much on elections as if they are the only way that public policy get's decided.
Whether or not humans have free will is also arguable.
Is your disagreement with Capla's interest in electoral dynamics, or with Political Science writ large?
I think plenty of people in political science departments misunderstand politics because they are in their ivory tower. On the other hand that doesn't mean that everybody in political science doesn't know what they are talking about.
"In particular people it makes people underrate the value of the public debate and complex coalition building and focus to[sic] much on elections as if they are the only way that public policy get's[sic] decided."
There's a lot more to political science than non-causal models predicting elections. Coalition-building, to borrow your example, is a particularly rich topic of study.
Here my core concern isn't so much political science but people from a STEM mindset trying to understand politics and then focusing their energies on easily modeled processes and thereby misunderstand the complexity of politics.
If you want to know more about my position see the discussion on http://lesswrong.com/lw/krp/three_methods_of_attaining_change/ .
Ah, the sweet smell of common ground! I definitely agree with this.
It's in quotes for a reason.