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William_Quixote comments on Any existential risk angles to the US presidential election? - Less Wrong
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Voting is kind of like buying lottery tickets in this regard, a waste of perfectly good hope. It really is a silly ritual which I'm dismayed some rationalists still take seriously.
My advice is finding higher quality entertainment.
Voting as One-boxing
If Omega thinks you are the kind of person who one-boxes, you will find $1,000,000 in the one box. At this point, you could take two boxes and pick up a small additional reward, but if you are really the kind of person who one-boxes, you won’t do that. If you went for the minor utility pickup at the end, you would be a two-boxer and the million dollars wouldn’t’ have been there in the first place.
If parties think you are the kind of person who votes, they will care about your policy preferences. At this point, you could stay home and pick up a small additional reward, but if you are really the kind of person who votes, you won’t do that. If you went for the minor utility pickup at the end, you would be a non-voter and the parties wouldn’t care about your policy preferences in the first place.
I think that if you really buy into the one box arguments presented elsewhere on this site, you should be voting. (conditional on the assumption that you have significant policy preferences; if you don’t care either way, then there is nothing analogous to the million dollars)
This meme just will not seem to die.
No, not all the assumptions made in the thought experiments designed to show TDT cooperating and CDT defecting (and TDT benefiting from the difference) are present in the specific case of a human deciding whether to vote in a national election. The other agents are not behaving remotely like TDT or UDT agents and a TDT agent would defect and benefit from doing so. And then the next election would come around and they would do the same thing.
TDT doesn't mean act like a care bear!
(Expanding on this out of interest, and assuming a case where there are enough TDTish agents in your population for it to actually be sane to consider cooperating.)
The assumption required is not quite whether you have strong preferences but what the preferences of all the TDTish agents are (or are estimated to be). If there is a group of agents implementing decision theories like TDT who are all willing to cooperate if that's what it takes to make the other people in that group cooperate and it happens that half of them are Greens and half are Blues then they do cooperate by staying home!
Not at all, if Omega is offering me 1$ for one-boxing I see no need to play its game since I can get more utility doing other things. Voting probably doesn't get any particular voter more than a few dollars of expected utility in government action. The delusions associated with voting probably give them far more but again like with the lottery I find that a waste since they can be gained in other ways (some of which do the world some good).
To be fair on Billy_Q this particular exception seems to be accounted for in the parenthetical you included in the quote, at least in the way that he would translate "significant policy preferences" into dollar values.