How Do Prayer, Horseshoes, Gravity, and Voting Relate?

Just believe, they said.

It is said that prayer works even if you don’t believe, and I believe this. At the very least it “works” in that it makes one feel heard.

Purportedly Niels Bohr had a horseshoe hanging in his office. When asked about it since he surely didn’t believe in that sort of thing, his reply was, “They tell me it works even if you don’t believe.”

I don’t believe in horseshoe-driven luck, and I’m not sure the story is true. This is different than prayer in that it is presupposing a good/favorable outcome. The faithful can always fall back on “Sometimes God answers by saying, ‘no’, ” and “God works in mysterious ways.”

Obviously a belief in gravity is irrelevant to the constant presence of that universal force. Here it works no matter what you believe—unless you are The Road Runner.

To one degree or another, people seem to reason like in the above examples when espousing their belief in voting… it works even if you aren’t good at it, or the outcome is better the more participation there is regardless of the quality of the participation. This is nonsense—an optical illusion in our mind’s eye.

Blindly and generically encouraging people to vote just for the sake of voting is either dereliction of duty or blind faith in demonstrable mysticism that somehow the act alone can create quality.

Why would one think that more ounces of pollution would reduce much less negate pollution? One cannot appeal to the wisdom of the crowds affect since there is little reason to expect one bad (weakly formulated) opinion would be offset by another opposing one. Bad thinking in this case is very likely serially correlated.

Or alternatively, what about human beings—lazy creatures that they are—makes one think that they would put effort toward being better voters simply because they were prodded and cajoled into voting?

Quit relying on magical powers to correct our political woes.