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Decius comments on Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity - Less Wrong
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Comments (210)
How small does the chance have to be before it isn't a chance anymore?
Also, are you intending to research and vote only for the presidential election? Local offices have smaller budgets but also smaller margins...
"Less than one expected payoff per human lifetime" seems like a good threshold.
So... there is no chance that you will be married if/when you die. There is also no chance that you will be single if/when you die. (Assuming that you will only 'die' once). There are many things that happen one or fewer times per human lifetime; the expected chance of them happening is less than once per human lifetime.
Most people stop attempting to acquire additional spouses after they find a good one, so the actual rate of success isn't reflective of the number of successes someone could statistically expect if they worked at it continuously for 100 years.
Many people marry more than once in their lifetime; I'm not sure what the average is offhand- but I didn't reference marriages, I measured conditions at a specified point in lifespan.
Of course, this is LW; local notions of how long a human lifetime is differ by many orders of magnitude.
Zero?
Re: other stuff on ballot. Yes, that's right. I was just replying to the content of the post.
Sorry, I don't understand what was meant by your first sentence.
Is a .001% chance of making a difference still a chance of making a difference? Is a seven-sigma chance still a chance?
All of them are obviously still chances. I never said that a very small probability wasn't a chance. I said that it might rationally be treated in a different manner than larger chances due to risk-aversion.
Not to mention that, if he lives in Maryland, he has at least seven ballot questions to answer on the poll.