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patrissimo comments on Politics as Charity - Less Wrong
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I'm astonished that this comment has been voted down. The comment speaks bluntly, saying that standard classical causal decision theory is "wrong". Is the problem with standard classical causal decision theory really that bad? Yes!
Consider an election in which the members of faction A have accept decision theory and each individual in A takes a cold-blooded decision that it is not worth his while to vote. Meanwhile faction B is made up of ordinary dumb schmucks. They believe that they have a moral duty to vote, except that half of them conveniently forget. Of those that remember, half get distracted by something good on TV. That still leaves a hard core, only half of whom are put off by the rain.
The outcome of the election is that faction B wins with a turnout of one eighth of its members versus faction A which failed to get the vote out at all.
Now comes the "tricky" bit; sticking labels on the factions. Which do we label "rational" and which do we label "irrational". If rationalists win, we had better stick the label "rational" on B and "irrational" on A. "There is a lot of rocking and rolling up here, this is not a telemetry problem."
So far I just stated the paradox of voting, but there is a problem for Less Wrong and not just for voting. Ordinary people know fine well that you have to get off your arse and go and vote. If we on Less Wrong will not admit that there is a problem and simply repeat "voting is irrational" ordinary people will correctly conclude that we have disappeared up into our ivory tower where we can believe in stupid theories that don't work in the real world.
And this argument has what to do with my personal decision to vote?
My choice does not determine the choices of others who believe like me, unless I'm a lot more popular than I think I am.
After saying voting is irrational, the next step for someone who truly cares about political change is to go figure out what the maximal political change they can get for their limited resources is - what's the most efficient way to translate time or dollars into change. I believe that various strategies have different returns that vary by many orders of magnitude.
So ordinary people doing the stupid obvious thing (voting, collecting signatures, etc.) might easily have 1/1000th the impact per unit time of someone who just works an extra 5 hours a week and donates the money it to a carefully chose advocacy organization. If these rationals are > 0.1% of the population, they have greater impact. And convincing someone to become one of these anti-voting rationals ups their personal impact by 1000 as much as convincing someone to vote.
There's an organization (sorry no cite, but maybe this story will dredge up the info from other people) which teaches people how to be politically effective.
There was a woman who wanted to get a local issue taken care of, but she couldn't get any traction. She went to the organization, and they found a mayor(?) who was running uncontested, and told her how to run against him.
If she'd actually run, he'd have needed to do a lot more campaigning, even though he certainly would have won. So he went to her and said, "What do you want?".
Her issue was taken care of, and she has continued to be politically active.