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Emile comments on Open Thread, September 15-30, 2012 - Less Wrong
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Reposting a comment I made on Yvain's livejournal:
There's a standard argument about "efficient charity" that says you should concentrate all your donations on one charity, because presumably you have preferences over the total amounts of money donated to each charity (not just your own donations), so choosing something like a 50/50 split would be too sensitive to other people's donations.
I just realized that the argument applies in equal force to politics. If you're not using "beliefs as attire" but actually care about politics, your participation in politics should be 100% extremist. That's troubling.
It probably depends of the decision process you're trying to influence:
If you're voting for a candidate, you don't have any incentive to vote in a way more extreme than your preferences - with more than two candidates, you can have strategic voting which is often the opposite incentive, i.e. voting for a candidate you like less that has more chances of making it.
If a bureaucrat is trying to maximize utility by examining people's stated preferences, then you can have an incentive to claim extreme preferences for the reasons Yvain gives.
Informal discussions of what social norms should be look more like the second case.
Elected politicians have to deal with the two systems, on one side they want to take a moderate position to get the maximum number of voters (median voter etc.), on the other hand once elected they have an incentive to claim to be more extreme when negotiating in their constituents' interest.