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seanwelsh77 comments on Privileging the Question - Less Wrong
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Seriously, how much effort goes into voting? Perhaps an hour at the most?
Compared to how much tax gets taken off you every day it seems that having some minor influence in guiding the assembly that sets the budget for the spending of said tax is worth your while. If only to sack a representative assembly that displeases you.
What virtues are displayed by not voting? Sloth? Indifference?
If no one voted how would democratic government work?
Does voting increase utility? In a single case not by much but in the aggregate the people can remove a government that displeases them. This is surely better than the alternative (shoot them out as in Syria today).
The fact that Super PACs pay money to persuade people to vote speaks to the value of your vote not its worthlessness.
I think there are reasonable grounds for making the modest effort required to vote.
If you only spend an hour on gathering information for voting, you probably shouldn't be voting: given that you probably don't have magical powers of common sense pointing inerrantly to the optimal choices, voting without research or some kind of insider information is pretty much equivalent to expressing a vote in favor of whatever random environmental biases you've been exposed to. That's a set that normally includes a lot of PAC influence, if you care about such things.
On the other hand, I'll admit that in some situations proposals do make their way to the ballot without being cleared of flaws or biases that're obvious to the average LW reader but not to the average voter. When I do choose to vote, my usual way of dealing with California ballot propositions (a form of referendum) that I've never heard of is to read the voter information pamphlet while I'm waiting in line and then vote against whatever option sounds frothy, knee-jerky, or economically insane. There are surprisingly few that don't have such an option.
A lot of effort can go into informed voting. I experimented with voting for the first time last fall and I spent several hours looking up relevant information, and I could've spent a lot more if I wanted to get a strong grasp of the issues, which I didn't feel like I had.
Depends on how much influence.
Why do I care about displaying virtue?
You're confusing the average value of voting with the marginal value of voting. Would you apply the same argument to homosexuality ("if no one was heterosexual how would making babies work")?
If I believed that a social norm encouraging homosexuality stood a significant chance of reducing the rate of heterosexual relationships to the point where the birthrate became low enough to cause collective harm, I would be concerned about public acceptance of homosexuality.
If I believed that a social norm encouraging non-voting stood a significant chance of reducing the voting rate to the point where it became low enough to cause harm, I would be concerned about public acceptance of non-voting.
I find the second claim significantly more plausible than the first, though given how implausible I find the first claim that isn't saying much.
Okay, but me saying "I don't think voting is valuable" on LW seems pretty unlikely to actually encourage such a social norm.
I would agree that it doesn't apply very much pressure, but what pressure it applies does seem pretty clearly to push in the direction of non-voting.
Yes, which frees up people's time to do and think about other things, and I think for LW people in particular that the benefits of this outweigh the costs of not voting (although I am amenable to a Fermi estimate suggesting otherwise).
I'm assuming your reasoning is that LW people are, or at least are capable of, spending their time/effort doing more valuable things, so time spent voting (including time spent becoming an informed voter) is a net loss.
If that assumption gets widely implemeted, the end result seems to be that only people who don't do anything particularly valuable with their time vote.
Am I following your reasoning correctly? Or is there some other aspect of LW people (like being more likely to work on x-risk, or being more likely to be mathematicians, or something else) driving your reasoning?
Yes.
This is nearly identical to the current situation as far as I can tell anyway.