4 does work. In Australia they have a near-perfect voter turn out. It makes voting rational, in order to avoid the fine.
In response to
Voting is not rational (usually.)
Wow, guys. I would have expected more of the less wrong crowd.
You emotionally dislike the fact that voting is irrational, so you've downvoted this post, but you haven't even attempted to reason with me.
If I'm wrong, tell me why. Don't just have an emotional reaction.
Voting is not rational (usually.)
Today is the midterm elections in the United States, and I am not voting.
For the vast majority of elections, voting is irrational, because the individual's vote is proportionately very small. This means it cannot have an effect on the outcome.
There are, however, conditions which can lead to voting becoming rational, and these are:
- The number of voters approaches zero.
- The ratio of votes for candidates (in a majority wins, 2 person race) approaches .5
- The difficulty of voting becomes vanishingly small.
- Incentives are created to make the costs of not voting greater than the cost of voting (for instance, not voting is illegal in Australia, and incurs a fine.)
For me, as for nearly everyone, voting this year is irrational. 1 and 2 are nowhere close to true, and 3 is especially bad for me this year. I forgot to change my address on my voter's registration until yesterday and my polling location is both a) usually overpopulated and filled with long lines and b) farther than I care to go.
Only 3 and 4 are something that we can certainly do something about. The web-based absentee voter system that was tested this fall is a step in that directions, but its subsequent hacking was unsurprising. Is opening our system up to fraud a reasonable trade-off to get more people to vote? Should there be an option to use paper absentee-like ballots even if you are not absent? Should the U.S. go the Australia route?
In response to
What is the group selection debate?
The case you described, where the cancer cell resulted in the death of the individual human, could equally well be described as kin selection. An individual that hurt its close genetic relatives- and actually actively kills them- also hurts its individual reproductive success.
The argument against group selection is an argument against its usefulness as a concept. Where group selection works, it is mathematically indistinguishable from kin selection, so you might as well use kin selection as your conceptual model. Additionally, it can be confusing for people who don't understand the circumstances where it definitely cannot work, which is any case where the individuals are not closely related.
Boobies and the lottery
So, in the past I have "donated" boobie pictures to boobiethon, a online fundraising event for breast cancer research. This year I entered into a drawing for a free custom WordPress theme. And I won it!
You might think that I'm lucky, but actually when I enter lotteries I'm very calculating. Once when I was 10, there was a Beanie Baby lottery at the local library. You could see the jars with the tickets in them for each Beanie Baby. There was one Beanie Baby that had very few tickets in the jar, so I bought exactly one ticket for it. And I won the Beanie Baby.
I saw that for this contest, there were 5 WordPress prizes to be awarded total. For other contests there were only one. And I correctly surmised that others would try to win the more desirable prizes. I also submitted 5 pictures of my boobies, and you got one ticket per boobie picture with a maximum of 5 pictures. That's 5 entries. Donating $10 only got you one ticket. And it cost me nothing :).
It's human nature to go for the lottery item of the thing you actually want. I don't do that. I enter the lotteries for things I think no one else wants and that have multiple awards and that have a low-to-no cost. You're never going to win the monetary prize, because the odds are against you. You CAN win things if the odds are in your favor.
It's a fact: male and female brains are different
In Which I Present The Opposing Side's Hypothesis and Falsify It
This post is in part in response to a New Scientist article/book review "Fighting back against neurosexism." And the tagline is "Are differences between men and women hard-wired in the brain? Two new books argue that there's no solid scientific evidence for this popular notion."
Full disclosure here: I haven't read the books, although I do have a B.S. in neurobiology. But you don't even need to understand anything about neurobiology to falslify their most basic hypothesis: that male and female brains have no hardwired behavioral differences.
And it's easy to falsify: if male and female brains were the same, all humans would be completely bisexual. If it's true that female brains, on average, prefer to fuck, date, and marry men, and male brains, on average, prefer to fuck, date, and marry women, then male and female brains are in fact different.
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I suppose I should have said, "where group selection works in nature."
From the paper you cited: "Unlike these closed laboratory populations, populations in nature would often be open to emigration." Evidence of group selection occurring or having occurred in real populations has never been observed.