= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Will_Newsome comments on Politics as Charity - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (161)
But of course these outside view considerations don't matter if you know that, causally, no one's going to be affected by your decision to vote or not. And I haven't done a rigorous analysis but the acausal consequences seem rather minimal.
I'm not sure I follow you. Research indicates that your decision to vote does affect the decision of others (unless you're a complete hermit, I suppose). Note that I'm not talking about acausal effects here.
The research is great for calculations based on the outside view. It holds for people in general. But if I know that none of my friends care or could verify whether or not I voted, that screens off the outside view considerations. Take me, for instance. Unless I go post about it on Facebook, I'm not going to cause any of my friends to vote or not. I don't talk about such things. Maybe if my nature was sufficiently transparent they could infer my tendency to vote or not vote, but I'm not that transparent. So what causal process is stemming from my vote decision to theirs? In general, people yammer on about their voting decisions, but those trends don't apply to people like me. I wouldn't be surprised if my decision was correlated with the decisions of others, but I don't see causation, and so my action is only consequential via acausal means.
Right. So assuming you do care about the outcome of the vote, you should modify your behavior so that you do e.g. post about it on Facebook.
Or just post about it on Facebook without doing it, and thus get all but 1 vote of the benefit with almost none of the cost.