Is this really how you think it works? Do you honestly watch Game of Thrones because it helps to better other people's lives? I'd be surprised. More likely, you start with "I like Game of Thrones" and end up with "it helps me to save the world." I can't read your mind. But that'd be my guess.
That's a reasonable guess, and it's certainly something I have to watch out for. (I don't watch Game of Thrones, but I'm mentally substituting with a show I do watch.) If I genuinely didn't think that watching Game of Thrones was better as measured by my utility function than the alternative upon reflection, I hope I would be able to stop. I've stopped doing various other things this way recently (most recently browsing Tumblr).
You already justified your iPhone when you could have bought a cheap android phone that has pretty much the same features.
This wasn't clear to me at the time of my purchase. My impression from several people I talked to (that I trusted to be reasonably knowledgeable) was that Android is ultimately more powerful but requires more effort and tinkering to be put to use whereas an iPhone can be used out of the box. I'm not much of a power user and I wanted something that just worked. I also had the sense that there were more apps available for the latter than the former.
And, again, the perfect is the enemy of the good. It takes too much time to make optimal decisions, but I can at least try to make better decisions.
P.S. Is there any research done that suggests smartphones make people more productive?
Who needs research? It's pretty clear to me that my smartphone has made me more productive, and that's the question that actually needed answering. (I expect most people get distracted by games, but I adopted a general policy of not downloading games which I have only rarely broken, and the games I do download I don't play very much.)
I'm still not sure I understand what you're getting at with this line of questioning. You seem to think there's something wrong with the way I try to make decisions, which is to attempt to maximize expected utility while recognizing that I have limited time to search the space of possible things to do. What would you suggest as a superior alternative? (The alternative you've presented so far is justifying that you should think about political questions because of voting even though you don't vote.)
The intent was to show that asking whether I don't have anything more valuable to do than voting was an unfair question because even those who profess utilitarianism don't always do the things that are most valuable in utilitarian terms. But it seems this strategy won't work with you.
Related to: Privileging the Hypothesis
-- Paul Graham
-- Doug Henwood
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Here are some political questions that seem to commonly get discussed in US media: should gay marriage be legal? Should Congress pass stricter gun control laws? Should immigration policy be tightened or relaxed?
These are all examples of what I'll call privileged questions (if there's an existing term for this, let me know): questions that someone has unjustifiably brought to your attention in the same way that a privileged hypothesis unjustifiably gets brought to your attention. The questions above are probably not the most important questions we could be answering right now, even in politics (I'd guess that the economy is more important). Outside of politics, many LWers probably think "what can we do about existential risks?" is one of the most important questions to answer, or possibly "how do we optimize charity?"
Why has the media privileged these questions? I'd guess that the media is incentivized to ask whatever questions will get them the most views. That's a very different goal from asking the most important questions, and is one reason to stop paying attention to the media.
The problem with privileged questions is that you only have so much attention to spare. Attention paid to a question that has been privileged funges against attention you could be paying to better questions. Even worse, it may not feel from the inside like anything is wrong: you can apply all of the epistemic rationality in the world to answering a question like "should Congress pass stricter gun control laws?" and never once ask yourself where that question came from and whether there are better questions you could be answering instead.
I suspect this is a problem in academia too. Richard Hamming once gave a talk in which he related the following story:
Academics answer questions that have been privileged in various ways: perhaps the questions their advisor was interested in, or the questions they'll most easily be able to publish papers on. Neither of these are necessarily well-correlated with the most important questions.
So far I've found one tool that helps combat the worst privileged questions, which is to ask the following counter-question:
What do I plan on doing with an answer to this question?
With the worst privileged questions I frequently find that the answer is "nothing," sometimes with the follow-up answer "signaling?" That's a bad sign. (Edit: but "nothing" is different from "I'm just curious," say in the context of an interesting mathematical or scientific question that isn't motivated by a practical concern. Intellectual curiosity can be a useful heuristic.)
(I've also found the above counter-question generally useful for dealing with questions. For example, it's one way to notice when a question should be dissolved, and asked of someone else it's one way to help both of you clarify what they actually want to know.)