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Mark_Eichenlaub comments on Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity - Less Wrong
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I rarely make decisions involving such low probabilities, so I don't really know how to handle risk-aversion in these cases. If I'm making a choice based on a one-in-ten-million chance, I expect that even if I make many such choices in my life, I'll never get the payoff. This is quite different than handling one-in-a-hundred chances, which are small but large enough that I can expect the law of large numbers to average things out in the long term. So even if I usually subscribe to a policy of maximizing expected utility, it could still make sense to depart from that policy on issues like voting.
BTW, in my state, Maryland, Obama has a 18-point margin in the polls. That could easily be six standard deviations away from the realm where I even have a chance of making a difference.
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...
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.