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jmmcd comments on Probability and Politics - Less Wrong
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Comments (31)
Note that the analysis holds for a single rational voter.
If many people decide using similar considerations, then donations go up, electoral turnout falls, and extremists (who can't be swayed by advertising or campaigning) and non-rationalists (who do not apply the OP's analysis) will be over-represented. This is a distorting influence.
If donations go up then candidates suffer who attract relatively little funding (of the normal type, not the type of donations which rationalists use to replace voting). This is a second distorting influence.
A drop in electoral turnout can be seen as decreasing the winner's perceived legitimacy. This might be an unintended consequence.
Yes. Carl's post notes that he'll assume CDT for this post, for simplicity, and will consider decision theories later.
But even if we go ahead and allow non-CDT complications: we're considering elections here, and for elections, we have solid past data indicating how most people act. In such situations, even if one doesn't assume CDT, reasoning on the present margin seems to be the correct thing to do. You know how many people, roughly, behave one way vs the other. It's correct to ask about the benefits of moving the voters from [usual number] to [usual number + 1], or the campaign donations from [usual number] to [usual number + yours], and not to consider the rather different average changes that would be brought about in moving the current totals to a far-away and unlikely total.
For example, if I'm considering whether to be vegetarian or to donate to in vitro meat, I should ask about the benefits of one person doing so; the argument "but if everyone donated to in vitro meat, their ability to use money would be overwhelmed, and this would be less useful than everyone being vegetarian" is irrelevant.
The situation would be different if I was e.g. considering the action-shift in response to a national bestseller that advocated that action, or if I was otherwise being moved by considerations that might affect enough people to significantly change the margin, and, thus, the marginal impact.
Since we know that CDT is totally wrong in such situations, even if TDT/UDT doesn't help with quantitative analysis, "for simplicity" doesn't quite side-step the flaw.
We also know that frictionless planes are totally wrong in most situations. That doesn't mean that assuming a frictionless plane "for simplicity" is not a reasonable first step when attempting a difficult analysis. As Polya teaches: when considering a problem that is too difficult, start with a similar problem related to your target.
Most people despair of calculating optimal philanthropy payoffs at all because the situation is so complicated. The result is a huge inefficiency of most philanthropic efforts. If we're going to make headway, it will have to be by considering and expositing simple pieces and building up piece by piece, as Carl begins to do here.
If the problem is "continuous", you'll get sufficiently correct solution for sufficiently low-friction problems. In this sense the assumption of lack of friction is not "totally wrong" in the sense I used the term in my comment for CDT/TDT voting analysis differences.
I agree with this observation: you learn about the structure of methods of solving the target problem by studying similar methods of solving simpler problems, even if solutions (answers) are unrelated (not similar).
However, I don't see how CDT analysis with its deciding votes is at all similar to TDT analysis that involves no such concept, and so how this observation is relevant.
It's often a reasonable strategy, but not if the "pieces" have nothing to do with the desired whole.
Could you say more about how the TDT voting analysis would go, and what its pieces would be?
It seems to me that in the limit as the number of voters with "your algorithm" goes to zero, the TDT solution is the same as the CDT solution.
That's the more interesting topic, and it came up when I visited the NYC LW crew last week.
My take is that, if TDT really is superior to other decision theories, then a society of majority-TDTers should not lose out to "mindless drone decision theorists" (MDDTers) simply by all individually refusing to vote, while the MDDTers vote for stupid policies in unision.
The TDTers would, rather, recognize the correlation between their decisions, and reason that their own decision, in the relevant sense, sets the output of the other TDTers, so they have to count the benefit of voting as being more than just "my favored policies +1 vote". I conclude that a TDTer would decide to vote, reasoning something like "If I deem it optimal to vote, so do decision makers similar to me."
The others there disagreed that TDTers would vote in such an instance, claiming that other methods of influencing the outcome exceed the effectiveness of voting in all situations.
This seems to suggest that a society of TDTers would quickly abandon democracy. What form of government would they move to?
Elaborate on your reasoning there.
Were you not talking about a society of TDTers that didn't think it was worth voting? Or were you allowing for a sufficient number of irrational nuts in the system for the democratic process to be useful or necessary even though the majority (and all the rational people) do not use it?
This analysis of consequences of your decisions doesn't just say that other people who perform similar analysis are influenced by your decision. People who make their decisions differently can be (seen as) influenced as well.
I don't know. I know that CDT commits irrecoverable error, but not how to understand the problem. (I can guess that my decision probably makes a difference of 0.01 to 20% in a two-choice vote of the typical kind, but this is not based on explicit analysis, hence wide interval.)
That I don't know how to solve the problem doesn't license me to privilege a "solution" that is known to be incorrect (even though it's rigorous and popular).
Yes, but it's an unreasonable assumption in case of voting, and I don't see how to generalize in the direction of acausal-under-logical-uncertainty control from a solution performed under this assumption. From what I currently understand, the question is, what can you predict about all voters (how would you estimate the outcome), if you assume that you actually make a certain voting decision (estimate this for all possible decisions). Such assumption can even weakly inform you about probable decisions of other voters that are rather loosely related to you, with the estimated probability of voting by person X being controlled by your decision less if you are less similar to X, but with (your understanding of decisions of) all people controlled to some extent.