A red sun dawns over San Francisco. Juxtaposed against clouds and sea, it forms a patriotic tableau: blood red, deathly white, and the blue of the voi

Mantic Monday: Judgment Day - by Scott Alexander

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2024-11-05 12:30:37

A red sun dawns over San Francisco. Juxtaposed against clouds and sea, it forms a patriotic tableau: blood red, deathly white, and the blue of the void. As its first rays touch the city, the frantic traffic slows to a crawl; even the birds cease to sing. It is Election Day in the United States.

Future generations will number American elections among history's greatest and most terrible spectacles. As we remember the Games in the Colosseum, or the bloody knives of Tenochtitlan, so they will remember us. That which other ages would relegate to a tasteful coronation or mercifully quick coup, we extend into an eighteen-month festival of madness.

The mathematicians say there are simple voting systems that could practically ensure the selection of a universally-popular moderate. We reject these, and - in a country with a hundred living Nobel laureates - near-invariably pick a pair of mediocrities, extremists, or lunatics. Once their inherent badness has been magnified by a froth of propaganda, millions end out convinced that one candidate or the other wants to hunt them for sport, put them in camps, or institute a communist/fascist/theocratic dictatorship. Some people threaten to flee the country if the wrong person wins; others prepare to commit suicide. Loving grandmothers disown their family members for being too tepid in their loathing. Psychologists warn of an upcoming wave of mass trauma.

The nation’s smartest forecasters and statisticians labor full-time to mark microdeviations in the odds. Bettors sink $2.2 billion dollars - enough money to buy every homeless person in America a used car - into prediction markets. I reload Nate Silver’s blog dozens of times a day, half-anxious-for, half-dreading the next update. Any pollster capable of giving us a novel word of reassurance briefly becomes an ultra-megacelebrity before collapsing back into obscurity.

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