I understand that you feel annoyed, but this post comes off (to me) as snarky and makes me feel annoyed. In turn, I am less able to take your request seriously.
Given the little that I know about your political views, I imagine that there is a large inferential chasm between us. And I don't dismiss your views out of hand. But if you're interested in convincing me that I shouldn't vote, a much better tact would be to rigorously argue for your views rather than making a curt discussion post.
More productive would be exploiting tensions: if someone claims voting is a fantastic idea because of 1 to millions odds of affecting the outcome, why don't they accept this same reasoning in other cases like existential risks?
Hmm, how would that world look, assuming he had his way? Billions spent on FAI research and cryonics? Mandatory basic rationality training? Legalizing polyamory marriage? Erecting statues of Bayes?
To give a boring answer:
If we are assuming there wouldn't be any other major changes to the political structure (e.g. no bayesian party in congress) then the effect on policy outcomes would be fairly minor. For better or worse the president doesn't have that much direct power, and has to work with a lot of other interested groups.
Also I think people underestimate the domain specific knowledge in politics, there's no reason to believe that being rational would make Eleizer a particularly effective politician any more than a good doctor or lawyer.
The main specific power the president has is in publicity, so Eleizer could probably increase attention on existential risk and FAI issues, but how much concrete change that would make I don't know.
Does voting add legitimacy to a democracy? I've seen many people take it as a given (as Konkvistador does in this post), but I don't see why it is necessarily true.
In one sense competitive races with high turnout are legitimate in terms of "probably not stolen with corruption", and I agree that illegitimacy in the form of stolen elections can reduce turnout. But in another sense competitive races with high turnout are the least legitimate. They have the most controversy, the most regret, and the highest percentage of the public disliking the result and getting a turnover next race. In the US you get a spike of turnout in '92, then the Republican Revolution of '94, a spike of turnout in '04, then the democratic sweep of '06, Obama in '08 then the Tea Party takover in '10. These are not signs of a stable electorate that is happy with it's legitimate government. Just eyeballing a pair of 30 year graphs of "citizen satisfaction in the US government" and "voter turnout" seems pretty convincing to me that people go out to vote when they're most dissatisfied. Voter turnout thus seems to be a combination of dissatisfaction in government and a belief tha...
Non-voting as a political strategy
I would certainly vote for a candidate that could belivably promise to replace democracy with something I thought worked better. But since I know I'm biased against the strenght of the Humean small-c conserviative argument against change (because it doesn't make good insight porn ), I would require a very high standard of evidence. I don't think I'd vote for Moldbug's Neocamerialism as a replacement for my cozy Central European Parlimentary Social Democracy just yet for example.
But consider that the high voter turn out happened in the examples you gave in a later comment because there where parties that promised fundamental change in the political system which included abolishing voting or changing its role in society. Without such an option casting your ballot is just demonstrating the system is working as intended. The overton window was not moved in those cases by the Demublican party moving slowly away from democracy year after year because it kept giving them more votes, but because of external change convicing people the old parties and the old system was lame. New parties arose who promised to change the system by which they arose (oh irony)...
Downvoted because this post doesn't actually make an argument. Something this short belongs on Twitter, hashtag and all.
Try to jump to a global optimum instead! It certainly won't end in bloodbath, dictatorship and collapse like the last three hundred times!
And if we push out of democracy, what are the chances the new optimum will be better? History is not encouraging on this point.
I think it is dopey to be against a local optimum without even giving the hint of a proposal of a framework for getting something better.
Isn't there some theorem that random changes on complex systems at local optima have vanishingly small probability of being better? That the space of parameter space that represents improvements is tiny compared to the whole space? I know that random modifications of programs, circuits, and motors behave this way, I haven't done double blind studies but I've made lots more changes that degraded than that helped.
Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum
I don't accept the (implied, or at least necessary) assumption that not voting is an effective method of increasing the probability that a better-than-democracy outcome will result. It is far more likely to just result in the local pessimum "extinction".
I'm a bit confused here. Are you saying that people should not vote, because democracy is only a local optimum, and that's not good enough to lend legitimacy to?
But there's no quick and easy way to get to nonlocal optima. Democracy is a strong local attractor. If national voted participation dropped to 15%, it would be likely to spark debates on how to reach out to more voters, whether more people could be engaged if the process were made more convenient, etc. It almost certainly wouldn't lead to discussion of whether we needed to be trying out other systems of governance.
If there's some other thing you mean, I'm not getting it.
What do you mean by 'legitimacy'?
How does activist non-participation accomplish anything when it looks no different from apathy to an outsider? Any medium you might use to spread your message can be used regardless of if you vote or not. You might as well vote for a lesser evil while claiming non-participation, unless you think a possible greater evil will be somehow more likely to dissolve its own power.
Interestingly, Moldbug whom Konkvistador cites as an antidemocratic root, blogs about supporting Obama and attending an election night party.
You're convinced by that strange melange of moralistic sin reasoning and politics? (I have no idea what a purely secular version of that could be - what would be 'borrowed time' without his religious interpretation? A dollar of national debt is a dollar of national debt, be it run up by Romney or Obama, or run up early and left to compound versus a larger sum run up later.)
Beethoven is more appropriate here, not to describe Romney but Moldbug - "so he too is but an ordinary man!"
I just knew the Socialist Russian commenter was you. :)
The post came off as bitter, as someone in desperate denial of how much he started rooting for Romney ever more the more the election date approached. But I liked it because of the bolded sentences in my other comment. I liked it because of how well it shows the sheer terror of the huge check reality is going to hand back to us one day if my and his model of the government and politics is correct.
Perhaps I was biased towards it because while on the day of the election I was apathetic, since I could barely see the difference between Romney and Obama both pro-wall street moderate theist stateist democracy advocates who like to bomb other countries. My apolitical stance crumbled when I saw everyone celebrating the win. The Facebook comments. The smiles on my friend's faces. The utterly creepy unity of thought. That I couldn't share. That I could never share. And I couldn't explain to them why, there is too little time, the singaling is so wrong, it would only cost me friends. I also knew I was far away from anyone else that even empathy towards me was not possible. So alienating. So alienating to see this in what I was as a chil...
One thing, however: why have you said "right-wing traditionalist" instead of "right-wing authoritarian"?
A right wing traditionalist is authoritarian, but not all right wing authoritarians are traditionalist. I was hoping you would have noticed by now that I while I think he is right about progressivism and power in American society I have my own disagreements with Moldbug. BTW Moldbug hasn't argued for chattel slavery as much as pointed out that the modern educated person has only ever heard the straw man argument for chattel slavery.
So you want me to talk about traditionalism? I don't know if I can do so with justice as my brain is thoroughly modern due to upbringing. But I will try with my broken mind to point to some traces left behind by the poorly understood institutions we have lost.
Patriarchy as existed in 1900 Britain was probably an incredibly good arrangement for most people involved. On utilitarian grounds I'm pretty sure moderate patriarchy wins out over the sexual marketplace of today. Before you dismiss this out of hand pause to consider that we have data showing men today are about as happy with their marriages as they where 50 years ago, but...
I guess the problem is that yes, I do have trouble seeing the "loss of status of the archetype of 'honorable working man'" leading to an overall economic decline that means both parents have to work–why wouldn't it be balanced out by the new archetype of the "independent working woman"?
I think I'm probably running into some belief bias here–I'm having trouble evaluating your arguments because, as a woman with a fierce need for independence, who is really enjoying life in this day and age, I deeply disagree with your premise that less patriarchy is a Bad Thing.
You're probably right that it's a bad idea for some men, though. Hell, I know some of those men–friends and friends' boyfriends who are in their 20s and still live with their moms. I'm also not all that familiar, personally, with the "American inner city" that you talk about. And I have no idea how to evaluate the fact that women are apparently less happy with their marriages–but if someone did a study on it and showed a correlation, then something is going on there.
However, there's no going back at this point (or, at least, I really think there shouldn't be). Why not wait until society settles i...
Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.
I wouldn't know. I don't really read romance novels–I much prefer sci-fi and thrillers, of which there is more than enough to read. I've occasionally watched romantic comedy films–being dragged there by family members, usually–but a) I've never seen one that had a similar plot arch to what you describe, and b) I wouldn't go voluntarily anyway.
So you may be right that the 'intended audience' of that novel likes patriarchy, but I am obviously not the intended audience and I have no idea who they are.
I think anybody who thinks not voting will sway anything in any way to go out and not vote! While they are out, they can have a small number of children to bring the world's population down, and they can donate to their public radio station on the first day of the pledge drive so as to end the pledge drive early.
If voting is only a local optimum, I'll accept that we shouldn't reinforce its legitimacy. If.
More broadly, you're on record as opposing any government system that tries to implement the expressed (or implied) desires of the ruled population. There are pros and cons to that position. But it is not really insightful to notice that rejecting "will of the people" as a source of policy goals implies voting is a terrible idea.
No problem I'll explain it to you. High IQ is useful for climbing out of poverty, this is a robust finding of social science. Poor children are on average dimmer than rich children. In the First world this is probably mostly due to genetics. IQ is mostly heritable. This doesn't necessarily the causes are genetic differences. But since we also know that above some very low plateau (nearer to mild abuse than mild neglect) education, better nutrition and nearly anything else tried doesn't show any sustained gains in IQ it is the explanation that best fits the evidence.
I think these are great examples of where "wisdom" and "preference" smear across each other's boundaries. The truths you cite above are matters of degree, we probably both agree on that. Where we don't agree probably is that the low hanging fruit of more better people and fewer expensive criminals and morons are the fairly large minority of poor children who are brought down by lousy home environments. You assert that here this is probably mostly due to genetics, implying we've got the environment "good enough" for either everybody or mostly everybody. I constantly hear of studies like Preschool Education and Its Lasting Effects showing significant and persistent gains from early intervention with the right population. In the United States, that self-proclaimed paradigm of the first world.
Now as far as I am concerned, the more interesting point is NOT whether the US being a benign enough environment so that poor people with good IQ genes have already climbed out of poverty, or whether there is still plenty of raw human material unexploited. The more interesting point is that we have different preferences in those regards, and we can't easily separate our judgements on the preponderance of the evidence from our preferences. And in a democracy, I don't have to convince you necessarily that I am closer to right than you are, I just have to convince some complex mix of people and interests corresponding to what, with other factors, will tend to get me 51% of the vote. My aesthetic preference would be to actually convince you, that would be winning and make me more confident that I was right and not just deluded by my preferences. But by deciding the democracy is beautiful, by having a meta-esthetic, I can enjoy the process whether I am winning or not.
By the way, as far as the conclusion that above a certain fairly low threshold, grooming children for success is wasted, it seems rather telling to me that 1) you never see a rational rich person sending their children to inner city public schools and making them pay for their own community college and 2) you see an overrepresentation of the well off children who were groomed by their parents in the professions and what you might call the rank and file of elite jobs. Its funny that as many rich people who may believe the children will be fine, they hardly ever apply that reasoning to their own children. If there were some reason to believe that they might be biased against reaching their conclusion that they should pay more taxes to educate poor children, then one might question their objectivity in reaching this "children are robust" conclusion.
But of course, what is this? Just me diving deeper into the wisdom I see that supports the preference I have. If you are half the nerd I think you are, you will have clever and nearly compelling counterarguments to everything I have said.
Have you read Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids? He makes a pretty strong argument that middle and upper middle class parents wildly over estimate the effects of more time and money spent on their children.
1) you never see a rational rich person sending their children to inner city public schools and making them pay for their own community college
Socialization of your children does matter, keeping them in desirable company is a good goal since on most measurable matters they have more impact than you as a parent do. Inner city schools ...
Related to: Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity, Does My Vote Matter?
And voting adds legitimacy to it.
Thank you.
#annoyedbymotivatedcognition