CarlShulman comments on Politics as Charity - Less Wrong
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Why is this not a confusion? It seems on the face of it that since voters' decisions are correlated, your decision accounts for behavior of other people as well, and so you are not only casting one vote with your decision, but many votes simultaneously.
I'm saving the decision theory apparatus (which actually multiplies the expected payoff of both political and non-political altruistic expenditures) for a later post. I couldn't fit everything into the first one.
Then you should've made clear that "deciding vote" is actually a lower estimate, and shouldn't be interpreted as classical "deciding vote".
I added some clarifications.
Ah, didn't see this earlier.
I don't think it multiplies the expected payoff for both in the same way. Some Bostromian division-of-responsibility principle should apply in both cases. The apparent gains are from the probability of making an important shift via group action where individual action would be unlikely to go over a tipping point, not because you're multiplying by the number of people involved.