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TimS 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.