Who should I vote for ?

In Sri Lanka, every full moon day is a public holiday. This particular full moon was on a Friday which bestows upon the citizens the oft sought after three day weekend. On this fine Thursday night, I found myself on a secluded rooftop at a going away party. The party aside, I found myself talking to a friendly, rather drunken, fellow. The sort of I prefer any day to to the overly cautious, non-drunk variety you often find at these parties. He was from Chicago and , as someone who had the good fortune of spending a very trivial amount of time in the great city, I of course consider myself an honorary Chicagoan. Being my recent lack of in person exposure to Americans as a result of island seclusion, I couldn’t help myself but ask him about the upcoming American presidential election.

As our conversation went on and we debated the pros and cons of both candidates, I realised something that happens when ever this subject is discussed. Whenever I talk about this with anybody, each side ends up having a rather difficult time defending our candidates. In my head, I have absolutely no problem defending my choice in candidate but when I am put to the task of defending said candidate in conversation, I find it really difficult. It’s been the case in every election. More often than not, its the case with the person I’m talking about it to as well. Oddly enough even debates between “political analysts” on the TV and internet end up with people just arguing with each other. Why is that? How is someone supposed to make an informed, rational and most importantly, correct decision when it comes to D-day and they have to cast that vote? I think I may have an idea.

The task the average person in America is charged with is actually a monumental, unreasonable ask. Really, think about for a moment the magnitude of the task you’re asking the hair dresser down the road or the college senior to undertake.

You’re saying “Alright champ, I want you to go in there, and pick the person you want to run this country of 319 million people. Oh and don’t forget to take into consideration about economic policy, foreign policy, immigration policy and the colour of the suit your candidate wore during dinner 3 weeks ago on Sunday”. Consider all the people that dedicate their entire lives to studying Economics, for example, that still somehow manage to screw up on the ideas of the economy and that still don’t quite understand who they should vote for. To understand who’s environmental policy is the best, you need to really understand environmental policy.The so called “experts” in economy can’t agree on what works and what doesn’t but we expect Johnny down the street to make an informed decision based on a set of variables as vast as the ocean. I hope you see the levels of complexity adding up.

The media only conflates the issue. You usually know less than you started if you spend any time on the news.

So lets start there. Let’s start with the understanding that it is not possible to make a fully informed decision about who you’re going to vote for. So how the hell do you vote? Why is it so complicated?

Complexities : It’s all too big

“I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false” — Friedrich von Hayek

Most often when I talk to someone about who they want to vote for, they’re actual initial reaction is something along the lines of “I like the way he carries himself” or “I like her attitude and the way she talks” and “I think it would be great for me if..” but soon its replaced by a very puzzled look on their faces as they try to come up with some sort of statistic or policy position in preparation for what they assume is coming. Which is “Really? that’s what you’re going to base your vote on? Her voice and what’s good for you? wow, think about the rest of the country man”. Yes, actually why not, I’m going to vote because I like the colour of his hair. What other real information do you have?

50 states with different climates, industries, histories and cultures. 319 million individuals with unique lives, tastes, loves and hates. How is anyone feasibly supposed to make a decision with facts and figures and policies? There are way too many variables. Just way too many. It’s just way too big and way too complicated.

Our minds are just not built for this scale of understanding. We are hardwired to react what we see in a person. I don’t think we are equipped to handle the never ending information and the ever remembering archive that is the internet. We just didn’t evolve in a way to handle considerations of this scale. We evolved to think about ourselves and our immediate neighbours, our tribe. We took care of the small world around us and so long as everyone did that, we did just fine. How have we come to forget this and expect a rural farmer in the midwest to care about “black lives matter” thousands of miles away? It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s just all too big.

It doesn’t really matter

In my opinion, magnitude and gravity of the job and the number of variables involved is ridiculous. With every variable you add, complexity does not increase linearly. It’s exponential and there are enough variables here to make this whole thing seem ridiculous. The fact that you have to vote for one person to handle all these variables is just mind boggling even with congress and the supreme court.

How is such a tiny fraction of the population or one person supposed to make decisions for so many people and variables? It just doesn’t make sense. Is it any surprise that the NSA has been collecting information on everyone? Is it any surprise that Facebook and Google so insanely profitable by selling everyone’s information and habits? Do people really expect the federal government to stand by and not use any means necessary to get as much information as possible? Is it any wonder that billions of dollars is going into big data research?

To make any system function, you need to know as much as you can about the variables that affect the system and in this giant system, there are way too many variables. All systems fail when they loose control of their variables, as do empires. Technology may hold this giant system together for now with the information it needs, but entropy always wins in the end.