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Konkvistador comments on Any existential risk angles to the US presidential election? - Less Wrong
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Remember you are likely to overestimate how much other people's decision process is similar to yours. I must have missed the software update when we implemented TDT on voter brains.
I try not to be hypocrite as much as possible. If I say voting is a bad idea, I hope most people who know me will agree this is a good indication that I don't vote either. Also unlike with voting, I actually think I could perhaps change peoples minds, I view it as sanity training. More sane people is a good thing since they have positive externalities.
Please no!
Democracies in say Western Europe actually only work as well as they do because of the competent civil service and respect people have for experts, which de facto radically limits how much politicians can do, especially since the process needed for them to fire any of these people is usually not worth the effort if it is possible at all. How would your relationship with your boss change if he couldn't fire you?
That sounds ok.
My individual vote is unlikely to make a difference. But it's pretty easy to define relatively small voting blocs (i.e. farmers in Kansas) that would alter the results of elections if their voting behavior radically changed. If I really do have preferences in the achievable sections of policyspace, there are things I should do, right? Even if my mechanical hardware imposes limits on how ideal my decisionmaking is.
Of course, none of that applies if one does not have preferences in the achievable sections of policyspace.
This is why I was super fascinated by the idea of a bunch of libertarians moving to New Hampshire to become a powerful voting block and institute libertarian policies, but it seems to have died out.
See the Free State Project.
FWIW, so far about 1,000 of the Free Staters have moved to New Hampshire, and 12 of the Free Staters have been elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives.
Of course you should! But you should be rational about it. Try to do things that give you more than a nanoslice of power.
There are a lot of people. If we divide even vaguely evenly, all I get is a nanoslice.
That's a vast improvement over most of recorded history, when official policy was to avoid giving out any power to the majority of the populace.
I don't recall mentioning pursuing that goal. I don't think it is a good in itself. For starters I bet you agree children don't need that nanoslice of power. But ok I'll accept this temporarily for the sake of argument.
The thing is if you do this and are a orthodox LessWrong consquentalist you get some strange results.
Should one oppose those greedy activists grabbing more nanoslices of power for themselves? Or those internet addicts who keep creating new political propaganda? Or the NYT editor board which decides thousands of votes with the stroke of a pen? Or that NGO employed advisor who has so much power over which policy ends up adopted in Democratic Backwaterstan?
Putting words in my mouth isn't nice. :)
This is not an argument about how political power should be divided. It's an argument about whether voting can ever be a good idea.
I'm trying to see how you get from this to "Voting is never rational in our current system."
Because voting is so very low on the list of low investment activities that give you more power.
Non-exclusive ways to become influential in how society is organized.
These acts can be mutually supporting. But some of them are more available than others to particular people. And the last choice I listed is heavily committed to trying to influence voting behaviors. Groups like the Sierra Club or the National Rifle Association are very powerful - and that power would vanish or massively decrease if all their members committed to not voting.
Voting suffers from substantial tragedy-of-the-commons issues. That doesn't mean it is pointless.
Konkvistador, you are on record as being skeptical of the idea of consent of the governed because you think the concept is too ambiguous to implement. I readily acknowledge that arguments for voting rely on consent of the governed / government responsive to the people being coherent/implementable concepts.
I just wonder whether this discussion is more than disguised disagreement about the underlying concepts. In short, if counterfactual-Konkvistador accepted the idea of consent of the governed, would counter-K still be as hostile as you to the idea of voting?
If not, I respectfully suggest we discuss our actual disagreement rather than talking past each other on this proxy issue.
There's no Omega, so why not take the nanoslice of power that's readily available, in addition to whatever you can get by trying for more? It appears to me that doing both maximizes the expected payoff in all probable contexts.
Opportunity costs, in short. If you're giving up more resource-equivalent time on that nanoslice of power than you expect it to return in dividends, it's not worth your effort -- and depending on how you do the counting, a lot of prominent examples return so little that it doesn't take much time outlay for this to be the case.
In the specific case of voting, though, there are signaling effects to consider that might overwhelm its conventional dividends. Jurisdictions like Australia where voting is mandatory also change the incentive landscape.
Perhaps a given Kansas voter is obstructing a policy or candidate you favor, and you would be pleased if he changed his vote. Wouldn't you be fully half as pleased if he merely abstained from voting? My intuition is that it is far more than twice as difficult to change a vote than to discourage a vote.
I think you're having it the other way around -- TDT is partially based on the idea that "when you decide, you aren't deciding just for yourself", it's not the idea which requires TDT...
In this case, you're not voting just for yourself, you're voting for all the people who'd vote the same party as you for roughly the same reasons. And if you don't vote, you're not voting for all the people who likewise don't bother to vote for roughly the same reasons as you...
Yes, you can say that you are voting for a block or deciding to vote for a block, even if those people haven't heard of TDT, as long as TDT doesn't change your decision. But if you use TDT to actually make the decision to vote, you are now very different from the people who have not heard of it and you are not controlling their decision.
For example, say that economists don't vote, but have political consensus ;-)
A lone economist cannot use TDT to vote the block, because the others haven't heard of it and aren't going to vote.
Fortunately thanks to evolution most people (at least the ones who haven't reasoned themselves out of it) have an intuitive understanding of TDT even if they haven't heard the term.
Yes, it is reasonable to analyze normal people's voting in terms of TDT, at least to some extent. If you were going to vote anyways, you can use TDT to justify it.
But if you explicitly use TDT to decide to vote or to decide to put more effort into choosing your vote, you are not normal and your vote becomes less correlated with the large block of normal people. I was very serious about the economist example. Many economists don't vote for CDT reasons. If an economist uses TDT to reject that line of argument, that doesn't cause other economists to vote. Similarly, most people can't use TDT to decide to invest in more informed vote.
If you were swayed against voting only by arguments found in the same place you found TDT, it is reasonable to let them cancel out and consider your vote entangled with the votes of people who have heard of neither.
That's a false binary view of the issue (that you either control something or not control it). Even the word "controlling" is highly misleading. I'm talking about moral responsibility. We are morally responsible for the decision we make, which is indicative of our values and our level of intelligence. We're morally responsible for this decision no matter how many times it's made (for similar reasons) throughout the population.
A thief is therefore in a sense partially morally responsible for all thefts.
A murderer is therefore in a sense partially morally responsible for all murders.
And a non-voter is therefore in a sense partially morally responsible for all non-votings.
I'm inclined to think that everyone affects the Overton window, but some people affect it more than others. People who commit new crimes expand the range of what's thinkable more than people who commit the usual crimes.
except none of these things generalize. You're only morally responsible for people in the same situation as yourself. Shooting someone who is about to kill you is not morally equivalent to shooting someone for fun, and someone who shoots in self defense is not morally responsible for all shootings, just for all shootings in self defense.
Agreed. That's why I indicated "made for similar reasons".
This assumes non-voters who use the same decision process as me are common. Also assumes that for those who do use the same decision process our interests and opinions about politics are aligned.