Welcome back to Go Doubt Yourself - the series about Critical Thinking in Politics.
Case 002 opens on a close Democratic primary in New York City in 1998. Four candidates wanted the House seat Chuck Schumer was giving up, and the city rotates the order of candidates from district to district. Nobody set it up as an experiment, but that’s what it became: the same front-runners, on otherwise identical ballots, with only their position changing.
The result is uncomfortable for anyone who believes votes go to the better candidate. Being printed first was worth real votes, in a race whose final margin came in under 500. It wasn’t a one-off, either. The same tilt turned up all over the city that year, in Ohio, and in New Hampshire in 2016, for Trump and for Clinton alike.
Part Two brings Daniel Kahneman back to explain why voters never notice it happening, with a short arithmetic puzzle that trips up students at some of the country’s top universities. Watch for what the people who solved it wrote down before they got it right.In other news:The latest from The xAI Files, plus every records request I’ve filed and who still hasn’t answered.
I have nearly 13,000 pages of public records on xAI. Help me read the ones nobody has gotten to yet.
Everything I’ve written about AI in one place, from Memphis data centers to the Pentagon.
Catch up on The GriftMatrix: every episode of The Daily Grift, newest first.
Sources
Jonathan G. S. Koppell and Jennifer A. Steen, "The Effects of Ballot Position on Election Outcomes," Journal of Politics, 2004 Joanne M. Miller and Jon A. Krosnick, "The Impact of Candidate Name Order on Election Outcomes," Public Opinion Quarterly, 1998 Bo MacInnis, Joanne M. Miller, Jon A. Krosnick and others, "Candidate name order effects in New Hampshire," PLOS ONE, 2021: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0248049 Shane Frederick, "Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2005 Andrew Meyer and Shane Frederick, "The formation and revision of intuitions," Cognition, 2023 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 98 (the certified primary result) Archival film, public domain, from the Internet Archive: A Day at the Fair (1947, Encyclopedia Britannica Films, Prelinger Archives), Wreckless (1935, Prelinger Archives), Behind the Freedom Curtain (1957, Prelinger Archives), The Boat (1921, Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline)
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