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TimS comments on Any existential risk angles to the US presidential election? - Less Wrong
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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.