Daily Meh is an edited stream of consciousness, by Simen.

Why Not Eat an Eclair?

Why vote when the result would likely be the same if you did not? Because the threshold is there, even if no single vote will reach over it, just like no single eclair will make you fat, but that doesn’t mean it’s rational to eat one every day, thinking that this one won’t be the one that makes you fat, so why not? At least, that’s what David Runciman thinks, reviewing Free Riding by Richard Tuck.

I go bald by losing my hair one strand at a time, but the loss of no one strand is enough in itself to move me from the category of non-bald to bald. So if I consider the loss of my hair on a strand by strand basis, I can’t go bald, not even if I lose it all. The same kind of reasoning can also apply the other way, say to fatness. No single éclair is ever going to make me fat, so I might as well eat this one. But if no single éclair will ever make me fat then, having eaten one yesterday, I might as well eat another one today, and so on, until I become the thing that one éclair at a time isn’t supposed to make me: fat. These are known as ‘sorites’ paradoxes (the ‘sorites’ being a ‘heap’ of the kind that ought never to arise if you add to it one grain of wheat at a time). It is not easy to say how they should be resolved. But Tuck shows that the best way to think about these puzzles is to consider them as not that different from the problem of voting.