magfrump comments on Politics as Charity - Less Wrong

29 Post author: CarlShulman 23 September 2010 05:33AM

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Comment author: magfrump 23 September 2010 05:56:19PM 0 points [-]

Yeah when I wrote the first draft I was a little confused, and the "efficient" comment is left over from that.

I guess the range of value for votes was never determined but my underlying point was that it seems to be in a range where it is likely to barely not be worthwhile much of the time, but may jump in elections with huge candidate value differences to being extremely worthwhile for anyone at all.

Comment author: CarlShulman 23 September 2010 05:59:54PM 1 point [-]

Right. A neat feature of cash spending is that you can save it up (with some complications from contribution limits) for close or important elections, and send it to jurisdictions more important than your own.

Comment author: magfrump 23 September 2010 06:22:45PM 0 points [-]

Sure. I don't really mean to be saying anything meaningful about politics as charity except that the actual expected value of voting should be decided as a corollary, and at this stage we have at least some idea of order of magnitude and it seems to be in the confusing range of sometimes worthwhile sometimes not.