Yes, I agree that there could be a large bias towards Biden, and lot's of simple models can be made showing Biden likely will win.

But the problem with those simple models is that it's too easy to miss something in which case, it's "oh, yeah, well didn't think about that" or "well, didn't think these votes would lean Trump". — boethius

Although there's always the possibility for a late surprise, most election analysts are pretty good at forecasting votes from certain demographics based on the remaining vote. Alot of the remaining vote is from urban areas and are mail-in. Thus far in this election alone, they've been heavily democratic,

Nope, but I can do research on what elections were like back then.

All of the things you listed (with the exception of Civil Rights) are problems facing America as a nation, not problems with America as a nation. Alot of the problems, the divisiveness, the corruption of congress, the tainted judicial system, the distrust of the media, etc. are not ones that can easily be fixed. I don't think that the country was as divided as it is now, at least not politically. If you look at the electoral maps from back then then you can see that every state was a swing state. Nowadays, despite everything that happened, you're still talking about a close race decided on very narrow margins in a few states. Heck, we're still waiting on the final results now.

What about the sixties was so bad?

But tricking people into thinking you've won doesn't serve any purpose in itself, since the vote goes on and the actual result will get declared anyway. The obvious interpretation would be that the false claimant is a lying scumbug. — Kenosha Kid

Well Trump's gonna contest the results in with his 6-3 SCOTUS and hopes they're as eager to dismantle democracy as he is. If enough people think he actually won then he thinks he could get away with it.

What is the thinking behind falsely declaring election victories? Is it just to lay the groundwork for false accusations of voter fraud? — Kenosha Kid

Pretty much. As a guy who is all about optics, Trump wants to control the narrative and thinks that if he just proclaims victory enough, people would think he's won.

I would say that this is a scummy GOP tactic, but Democrats also do it too. Just look back at Iowa and Mayor Pete. Good times.

I guess one bright spot in all of this is that even if Biden wins the establishment Dems can no longer claim that Trump is some sort of anomaly and that centrist incrementalism is still popular. They nearly lost to a guy who killed 200K lives through sheer incompetence, twice, and underperformed with minorities and the working class this year. That should give them pause and perhaps lead them to considering actually going more populist for once. Of course leadership may blame Bernie again and claim that they need to pivot further right, but hopefully the democratic voters who picked Biden purely based on him being the "electable" candidate are gonna reevaluate next time. Hopefully Biden doesn't run for a second term if he wins (though given his age, I honestly don't think he will).

And... the protests to stop the vote counting in the rust belt has begun. Trump suing to stop the count in PA and declaring victory early.

I think NC is still in play and may be more likely than PA (which is looking good for Biden as well), but apparently some people are writing it off.

Seriously I just want one candidate to reach 270 so I can relax already...

Pretty sure all eyes are still on PA at this point, but if Biden wins AZ, GA, or NV then it would end early. WI is called for Biden and MI is looking like he's gonna eek it out as of the time of this post.

You're right that Biden or Trump winning would just maintain the broken status quo. Disagree with climate change though since that's a global problem and not just a problem for the US to fix (which given the judgement of their people is probably a good thing). COVID has exposed alot of America's problems and Biden is NOT gonna fix them. Big corporations are bailed out with trillions (again) and meanwhile Pelosi and McConnell couldn't care less about helping out everyone else.

It will survive. — ssu

Not too sure about that. Given the current economic situation and the fact that any sort of huge stimulus is pretty much dead, along with the likelihood of post election violence in a middle of a pandemic, it feels like something has to break.

I don't know if I care much anymore to be honest (despite constantly refreshing the results every few moments). I'm sort of prepared for either outcome since regardless the fact that it's even close anyways tells you everything you need to know about the American people and their current state of judgement.

Whoever wins is gonna deal with a Democrat House and a Republican Senate and given the fact that stimulus checks haven't been passed pre-election, it doesn't look likely like they will pass post election either meaning more than just a dark winter. For the people who've lost their jobs, their health insurance, and their homes, I don't know what's gonna happen to them.

So how it looks like now I have to admit I was wrong in my forecast that Biden will win. At least I got right that it would be a tight race. Have to learn not to believe that election polling is as accurate or trustworthy in the US as it is here. — ssu

Biden is likely gonna win NV, AZ, WI, and MI, which is enough to put him over the top with GA and PA as possible toss ups, though there will likely be a legal battle though I don't know how much of a case Trump can make there to throw out already counted mail ballots.

And yeah, I'll probably never trust a US poll again after this. Like mail in ballots and masks, Trump has politicized answering polls too. Honestly I can't really see how the US can survive like this. They're incredibly screwed as a nation.

At this point it looks like Biden is winning NV, WI, AZ, and MI which should be enough to put him over 270. These races are close though so we're in legal challenge territory and who knows how that will play out. I'm not even an American but my brain is just fried right now. Can't work, I can't sleep, just as I would expect coming from 2020.

I know I'm probably touching on some 2016 nerves here, but Bernie probably would've done better where Biden failed. The reason why the election is so close now is because Biden lost ground with Hispanics. He didn't reach out to them as much as he could've and focused on the white suburban vote.

Bernie's campaign was largely focused on getting out the Latino vote with the help of Chuck Rocha, which paid dividends in places like Nevada. Of course Bernie probably would've lost in Florida cause Florida is an extraterrestrial asteroid that crash landed on the US east coast 3000 years ago and happens to be full of the one Hispanic group that despises him, but he probably would've done better in places like the RGV in Texas. Whoever the next democratic nominee is in 2024, they need to hire people like Rocha so that they don't take the Latino vote for granted.

It's looking like a reverse 2016 right now with Biden narrowly winning the rust belt and possibly Georgia. Expect riots and a court challenge which may likely exacerbate said riots.

Can anyone explain to me why some states choose to count their ballots early and others not? It seems like the US system is specifically designed to make things as chaotic as possible.

And we will likely see increased public unrest no matter which way those votes fall. Also soon the SCOTUS will dismantle the ACA in the middle of an out of control pandemic in an economy that's collapsing without any of the much needed stimulus passing or having any hope of passing at this point. Like I said in the other election thread, the US is fucked and frankly the people deserve it.

Given everything that happened in these past 4 years, the last year in particular, then yeah, I think the results are telling even if Biden wins.

It shows how much they are willing to put up with to own the other side. Trump literally left his supporters out in the cold but they were still going to vote for him.

Biden is more likely than not to win since he's favored in the rust belt, but it's close which just shows how much the American people are willing to put up with.

Election night. I do not get it, and it is more than a little disheartening that so that people are voting for Trump. What am I missing? Or are that many Americans that stupid? (And if Streetlight finds in this a T-ball question, he is welcome to swing away.) At the moment it appears that Trump will receive at least forty percent of the vote nationwide, and in some communities a majority. — tim wood

Whether or not Biden or Trump wins, the result is gonna be alot closer than people expected and that's a bad sign for the US as a country going forward. As it turns out you can get away with just about anything, even killing hundreds of thousands of your own people through sheer negligence, and still win reelection just as long as you play divisive politics. Hopefully this means the end of the US as the leader of the free world because it is clear that it is not a country that deserves to have as much influence as it does.

Whether or not Biden or Trump wins it doesn't look like any party is gonna win a trifecta in congress, which means gridlock and no stimulus in the middle of numerous crises. The United States is fucked as a nation.

Perhaps people don't want to stand in line for hours during a pandemic. — ssu

About 30% of them clearly don't apparently. Though ironically enough with the early in person voting and Texas limiting mail ballot drop offs to one location per county, people inevitably have to anyways.

Speaking of, the fact that Governor Abbott had to take such a move along with Texas Republicans fighting to throw out 100K curbside votes in Harris county should indicate that they're worried about the state flipping. It may not but the fact that it's a toss-up seems to have alot of people excited.

My eye is more on Texas. The early turnout data has been insane there, surpassing the 2016 numbers already and nearly all being concentrated on the blue counties or trending blue counties.

It may be extended for a week or so depending on if Florida wants to screw over the country again on election night...

I'm not all that familiar with European politics so I'll take your word on that. Also I don't really disagree on the need to address the social media bubbles that people are living in. I do think that that's adding to the problem but I'm just pointing out that it only made the existing polarization worse. I don't think that adding more parties necessarily completely fixes the situation either but it does help as does your solution.

That said, I think the only solution for this polarisation and ridiculous hate-mongering going both ways is prohibiting targeted ads and content on social media. — Benkei

Social media exists in all countries (except North Korea), but we don't see the same kind of polarization in the US as in places like the UK or Canada. Also social media was only a recent invention. Polarization in the US has been around since the early 90s. Not coincidental I think, since that was when the Cold War ended and I suspect that alot of that anti-communist rhetoric that was so prevalent in the latter 20th century didn't exactly go away as one would've thought.

Honestly if I were to suggest a solution to the polarization in the US it would probably be to get rid of the two party system that currently exists today. The reason why alot of Americans see things as black or white is because it sort of is. Either the Democrats control the Senate or the Republicans do, and there's little room for any actual bipartisanship in such a system and little need too since if you're in control you essentially have a simple majority to work with.

If Trump looses 2020, he'll just run again in 2024, if he isn't dead or in jail. — Echarmion

He'll probably lose then because though the GOP are willing to put up with alot, they'll not tolerate a loser. Just look at Roy Moore for instance. Speaking of, if it wasn't for him losing in 2017, I'm willing to bet someone like Moore is exactly the kind of politician who will have a bright future in the GOP.

Just wait until 2024 when the GOP somehow nominates a candidate who's even worse than Trump. I mean we all thought that Bush was the worst they can offer, but as we've learned over the years there's no such thing as rock bottom for them.

At this point Joe ought to be thanking Hunter every day for providing an infinite energy sink into which Trump and sacks of manure like NOS can pound sand over. — StreetlightX

They honestly think that they can make this into the next Clinton email scandal. Unfortunately given the pandemic, the economic crash, and the social unrest, it's just not gonna resonate with people.

Given the many different ways one can define "experience", no. The question is whether the things our ideas are referring to can't be irreducible if they pre-exist humanity and I see no reason why that should be the case.

I'd like to think that most everyone here would agree that conscious experience existed in it's entirety prior to our ever having coined the terms. An idea of something that already existed in it's entirety prior to our awareness of it is not rightly called "basic" or "fundamental". — creativesoul

Why is that? Are you suggesting that everything in the distant past was reducible just because they predated conscious beings like us? I'm not sure I understand the connection here.

There is more than one idea of conscious experience, and some of them are mutually exclusive and/or negations of one another; they are incommensurate with one another. They cannot all be basic and fundamental. — creativesoul

Sure there can be multiple ideas of what the term "experience" is, but I take it that most people have a common understanding of what first-person subjectivity refers to. Same with the concept of "red".

Neither can a computer program. — Kenosha Kid

A computer program is a set of logical operations as far as our understanding goes. It's easy to see how those operations can be conducted by a medium operating based on more fundamental laws, whether it be artificial or biological.

Again as far as conscious experience goes, it's just experience as far as we are concerned. How we go from there to more basic elements is what philosophers have been banging their heads on for centuries.

But the reason why people like Strawson need consciousness to be something other than a bunch of more elementary things is precisely that human consciousness is fundamental to subjective experience. They are not in the tizz they are in because of guinea pigs or ravens. — Kenosha Kid

Human consciousness=regular consciousness=subjective experience. They're all synonyms referring to the same thing and they are all irreducible, according to people like Strawson.

Are you saying that if you didn't know how a car was put together, you might suspect that it was irreducible? Or, put it this way, if you knew vaguely but not exactly how a car worked, and someone told you that actually carness is irreducible, that it is not the sum of its parts but actually a manifestation of a ubiquitous, elementary carness, would you accept that this was valid on grounds of your own ignorance or would it still sound absolutely absurd? — Kenosha Kid

Not really cause even if I didn't know how a car works, I can conceive of it being broken down into elements that I don't know about right now. The thing about consciousness is I can't conceive of how that can be the case. It's not like consciousness is a thing that we can measure and cut with a knife or anything. Experience is, well, experience. There is a reason why it's called the Hard Problem after all.

That's saying the same thing. Strawson's view is that the only way to grasp it is to accept it en tout without question. If you try to look at its moving parts, you lose visibility of the thing itself. — Kenosha Kid

Strawson's point is that the only way to grasp experience as a concept is to have it. None of that has anything to do with whether you can question it's nature. The way you seem to represent him he sounds like a closed minded bigot which I don't see at all.

It has to yield human consciousness without being reducible to simpler parts, e.g. the response of an electric charge to an electric field. That makes the whole universe homocentric from the bottom up. After all, no one becomes a panpsychist after really looking hard at rocks. — Kenosha Kid

Not human consciousness. Just consciousness. Animals can be conscious, aliens can be conscious, and robots can be too. At least I don't think Strawson would disagree with that. And being "centric" means that the universe is somehow tailored around consciousness on some metaphysical pedestal which is another thing I think panpsychists would disagree with.

Irreducible consciousness is not something we "know with certainty". It is something we believe through faith, and protect with anti-scientific argumentation. — Kenosha Kid

Consciousness itself though is something we can know with certainty and you'll find few people who will say that it doesn't exist.

Whether or not consciousness is irreducible on the other hand is debatable so I agree with you there. Strawson believes that it is, but people like Dennett would disagree.

Can you give an example of something that is irreducible but can have a natural origin? — Kenosha Kid

Elementary particles, the fundamental forces of nature, space, time, etc. Anything that we take to be basic in our models is by definition irreducible. None of these things are "magical", it's just that they are what they are as far as we know.

Like I said, you're not supposed to ask about it, you just have to accept it. — Kenosha Kid

Um, I don't think that that was how the quote was meant to be understood. I think the point of what Strawson was saying there was that the very idea of conscious experience itself is, like I said elsewhere, basic and fundamental.

The thing about basic concepts is that it is impossible to explain them without merely pointing to examples of them that people already understand (that's why they're basic). If you ask me "what is red?" for instance, there's no way of explaining it without being circular. I can try to say that it's what you see when you look at an apple, but that's just referring to examples of red things. If you happen to be blind from birth, and have no idea what it even is like to look at one, there's absolutely nothing I can do to explain it to you. As stated in your quote: “If you got to ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know.”

Yes, but it doesn't follow that, because there are elementary things, and because there are cars, there can be elementary cars. Our actual studies on elements of reality show they are basic, simple, dumb, and not in the least homocentric. — Kenosha Kid

Well cars are reducible to smaller elements since we can break them down to their subatomic composition. As for conscious experience, that is a whole other question.

Also if you're implying that panpsychism is homocentric, I'd say it's quite the opposite. Panpsychist views aren't claiming that humanity is somehow special, or even that consciousness is. It's a pretty naturalistic view, which is why some have found it appealing.

Essentially the above, that it's something irreducible that has to be taken at face value and accepted on faith. — Kenosha Kid

What is to be taken at face value here? Experience itself? If that is the case, I don't think that that's really a controversial view. There's very little that we can be certain of in the world, but one thing that most of us can know without a doubt is the fact of our existence, our thoughts, and more generally our experience (you can ask Descartes that).

In addition, I would take issue with calling that "faith" as well since it seems like one of the few things we can know with certainty, which is the opposite of faith. To believe in an external world that isn't an illusion fabricated by some demon manipulating my experiences requires more faith than believing in the experiences themselves.

I didn't say Strawson was a dualist, just that he has a dualist's idea of consciousness. That said, any physicalist panpsychist is also a dualist, since panpsychism is not a description of physical nature, i.e. it is unfussed about observation. Or sense, for that matter. — Kenosha Kid

Of course Strawson would take issue with you about that, but I'll leave that for you two to work out.

Strong emergence is magic, agreed. But so is irreducible consciousness. It is something one cannot question, derive the origins of, or study: one simply has to take it on faith that exists, like God or UFOs. — Kenosha Kid

I don't think that Strawson is saying that consciousness is not something that can be questioned, or explained. That's the New Mysterianist view. He's merely saying that it is not a thing that can be reduced into anything more fundamental but that doesn't prevent one from looking into it's origins or anything like that. For instance, a strong Emergentist would say that consciousness is an irreducible byproduct of certain configurations of matter, emphasis on the word "byproduct".

Personally I don't see anything "magical" about irreducibility in itself because inevitably one has to arrive at something basic in their ontology. When Strawson says that consciousness is irreducible he's suggesting that it's like the concepts of mass, space, or time, which we take to be basic for the most part unless proven otherwise.

Rather I said that Strawson's argument is that if you don't believe in his magical consciousness, you don't believe in consciousness full stop. Dennett's counter is that this is wrong. One can believe consciousness exists without having to adopt Strawson's idea of it. — Kenosha Kid

What is Strawson's idea of consciousness, in your mind? I'm not sure I'm clear on what that is.

Of course, even this straw man is obvious. Dennett himself does not reject the notion of qualia. — Kenosha Kid

I'm not sure about that, but I've never really been sure about what Dennett says to be honest. Depending on who you ask, either his views are extremist or sensible, but he is widely seen as a critic of qualia.

Dennett is saying that the dualist conception of consciousness is an illusion. Basically Strawson holds that consciousness is this magical thing that directly reveals reality to us, contrary to all knowledge about how we become conscious of things (e.g. how the human eye works). Dennett says that this direct awareness is an illusion, and he is right. We are unconscious of the mediators between reality and perception, therefore we perceive that we perceive things directly. — Kenosha Kid

I think you're misrepresenting Strawson's position a number of ways here. For one, Strawson is a self-described monist and a physicalist, just of a panpsychist bent. He also doesn't hold that consciousness is a magical thing, though he may consider it to be fundamental and irreducible. So much as Strawson does use the term "magic" it's used to describe strong emergence, which is something he explicitly rejects (and also part of the reason why he believes in panpsychism in the first place).

You also seem to be suggesting that the dispute between Dennett and Strawson is over naive realism vs. something like indirect realism, but I don't think that was what Dennett was referring to. Instead, his disagreements come over the existence of qualia or the subjective aspects of what we call experience.

Your party hasn't.

Yeah, COVID is 55500 times worse.