gwern comments on Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Academian 05 November 2012 01:02AM

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Comment author: gwern 05 November 2012 01:25:38AM 2 points [-]

Ah, I was hoping to see a pseudo-Pascal's Mugging* argument constructed for voting. Now I can ask people who bring it up in response to any topic, 'do you vote for consequentialist reasons?'

* I say pseudo because people go around claiming that any argument involving small probabilities of large benefits or harms is a "Pascal's mugging" even though this is not what either Bostrom or Yudkowsky meant when they wrote on it; yet no one ever seems to realize this, which mystifies me a little - the LW post and PDF are both online, just a Google away!