SilasBarta 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.
Darn, you beat me to it! Given that your decision and others' decisions stem from a common cause, and you are highly correlated with them (compared to chance), then your decision is informative about their decisions. (You can think of it as deciding which world you "wake up" in.) I had elaborated before about how to apply this reasoning to PD-like problems:
Also, if I go the opposite route, and use Schwitzgebel's model and decision theory, that's not a good argument to justify voting, for with a population of 100,000,000, you actually have far less than a 1e-8 chance of swinging the outcome, because the other votes are unlikely (under this causal model) to split exactly 50/50 other than your vote.