Vladimir_Nesov comments on Politics as Charity - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 23 September 2010 08:09:10PM 1 point [-]

Do you believe that my decision to vote is as like to acausally influence my opponents into voting as it is my supporters?

For example, if the reason you were considering not voting was bad weather on election day, and you managed to discard that reason as one you won't be moved by in a voting decision, this decision would be common to many people irrespective of their candidate. By deciding to vote anyway, you establish that people in similar situations do vote.

This additionally places into question one vote as a lower estimate of influence of your decision, making it an outright useless figure.

Comment author: Yvain 23 September 2010 08:49:56PM 5 points [-]

Right, I agree with that. But let's say I'm a Democrat. If I choose to go, maybe a thousand Democrats and a thousand Republicans all choose to go, for a net gain of zero. If I choose to stay home, a thousand Democrats and a thousand Republicans choose to stay home, for a net gain of zero.

Either way, the net gain is zero. So why bother voting?

Comment author: Wei_Dai 25 September 2010 07:02:21PM 4 points [-]

If it's common knowledge that every eligible voter is using UDT I think the outcome might be that everyone chooses a mixed strategy: vote with probability p (for some fairly small p like < 0.1) and stay home with probability 1-p. This way, the outcome of the election is almost certainly the same as if everyone votes, but its cost is much smaller.

Caveats: I don't know how to derive this mathematically from the stated assumption, and I have little idea how to apply this type of reasoning to humans. Actually it still seems plausible to me that E(total number of votes | I vote) - E(total number of votes | I don't vote) is near 1 and therefore CDT-type ("deciding vote") reasoning is a good approximation for my actual situation.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov comment score below threshold [+] (11 children)

Comment author: JGWeissman 24 September 2010 05:38:32PM 2 points [-]

I don't think privileging the hypothesis is the problem here. While it is unlikely that the acausal effects on Republicans and Democrats is exactly balanced (a hypothesis we should not be privileging), without assymetric information about them, we should assume that any probability of a given margin of more Republicans being influenced would be balanced by an equal probability of the same margin of more Democrats being influenced, so the expected influence on each group is still balanced.

The problem is that assymetric information is being ignored.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 24 September 2010 06:33:07PM * 0 points [-]

Yes, see my reply to Larks. The problem was that Yvain's comment doesn't admit the interpretation of referring to zero expected effect. And having exactly balanced influences is a very narrow hypothesis with no support, hence unduly privileged.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 24 September 2010 08:51:19PM 2 points [-]

The problem was that Yvain's comment doesn't admit the interpretation of referring to zero expected effect.

The fact that everyone else on the thread interpreted it that way shows that it does.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 24 September 2010 09:05:02PM * 1 point [-]

If that was the intended interpretation, mystery solved!

Comment author: Larks 24 September 2010 05:27:47PM 1 point [-]

Because the distribution of Democrats and Republicans you acausally influence is symetric around 1:1

Comment author: JGWeissman 24 September 2010 05:33:57PM 1 point [-]

If, as in this hypothetical, Yvain is a Democrat, then he is more representative of Democrats than Republicans, and therefor is likely to acausally influence more Democrats.

Comment author: Yvain 24 September 2010 09:21:32PM 1 point [-]

I could see that as being true if my reason for not voting was "Obama just doesn't inspire me that much," but what about in the originally mentioned case where my reason is bad weather? Do you think Democrats and Republicans are different enough that their algorithms for dealing with bad weather differ in a consistent way?

Comment author: JGWeissman 24 September 2010 09:36:36PM 1 point [-]

"Obama just doesn't inspire me that much" and "bad weather" are simpified stories someone might tell to explain their behavior. But "Does Obama inspire me enough to deal with the bad weather?" is closer to how the decision is made.

Do you think Democrats and Republicans are different enough that their algorithms for dealing with bad weather differ in a consistent way?

I would not rule out their being some correlation with willingness to go out in bad weather.

I could imagine a world where Democrats and Rupublicans really run the same algorithm with different parameters pointing to different political entities that are close analogues of each other, in which case a Democrat would acausally influence Republicans as much as Democrats. But this does seem to be a highly specific hypothesis, that I would not favor, and does not fully fit in with actual assymetries that can be observed.

Comment author: wedrifid 24 September 2010 05:46:00PM 0 points [-]

With a very big ceteris paribus in there somewhere. (The relevance Yvain being a Democrat is that we may expect other people with the same political affiliation to be more likely to also share voting technique. Apart from making that inference possible the similarity is not relevant.)

Comment author: Larks 24 September 2010 05:40:07PM * 0 points [-]

Yes, I realise this. But the difference between Republicans and Democrats is likely to be so small this is small consolation.

On the other hand, there is Democrats and Republicans arguable use different value systems.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 24 September 2010 06:30:56PM 0 points [-]

These hypotheses are different: that you will have zero effect, and that you will have some effect of unknown sign and magnitude, with expected value of zero. I object to the former, not necessarily to the latter (note that the expected absolute value of the effect is bound to be non-zero in the latter case). To give an estimate of the nature of the effect, we need to consider specific reasons that moved your decision.

Comment author: NihilCredo 27 September 2010 12:06:51AM * 0 points [-]

For example, if the reason you were considering not voting was bad weather on election day, and you managed to discard that reason as one you won't be moved by in a voting decision, this decision would be common to many people irrespective of their candidate. By deciding to vote anyway, you establish that people in similar situations do vote.

Could you please tell me what "to establish" means in the last sentence?

(Your comment made me spit out my tea. I know almost nothing about U/TDT.)

Vladimir_Nesov comments on Politics as Charity - Less Wrong

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