Would you caution this more strongly than you might caution against caching, or identifying with, any other comparably-specific belief?
Depends on what you mean by "comparably-specific". The belief I spoke of was a generalization: that because a certain set of elections were not worth worrying about, that all future elections will not be. A notable feature of elections is their variability; it is clearly the case that results vary.
Is voting actually a meaningful, or effective, or necessary way to go about [participating in politics]? If so, why and how?
A single vote is massively unlikely to affect anything important. Political campaigns, however, can have a reasonable probability of doing so. Campaigns are about convincing large numbers of people to vote in a certain way. The messages you put out about whether or not you intend to vote affect your friends. A 2012 study using a facebook button showed that by voting themselves, individuals could bring 4.5 other voters to the polls. Obviously the specific circumstances of that study are not likely to repeat, but the overall message that it's about more than just your one vote are likely to be applicable more generally. If you intend to canvass or phonebank, of course, this is even more relevant; it is likely that voting yourself is a better investment than trying to lie effectively about whether you believe individual votes matter.
Are there many instances when one choice is clearly more flawed, such that you can see this in advance, and you also have a nontrivial chance of affecting the outcome with your participation?
Again, we'd have to define the terms, but if you have a significant altruistic term in your utility function I think it's a good bet.
Your choices are to be a habitual voter, a habitual nonvoter, or an occasional voter based on individual calculations of the expected value of each election. Whichever choice you make is leaky; if you have friends, they will be influenced by your decision. In this circumstance, being an occasional voter seems unlikely to be rational; your outlay on calculating the expected value, and the reduced contagion of your voting decision even when you do find that a specific election is worth it, probably overwhelm the trivial effort you save by not voting.
So the question is, is it worth a few hours a year to be a habitual voter? It would be easy to overestimate the cost, but remember, this should be compared not against the most effective possible use of those hours, but against the average effectiveness of your non-work hours. In dollar terms, this is probably a lifetime cost in the high four or low five figures. There is at least 10 times that money at stake in even the most trivial local election. You have to discount that by the weight of the altruism term in your utility function and by the average difference in quality between frontrunners, but for me those terms together shrink it by less than half an order of magnitude, so I'll ignore them.
So if there's better than a 10-30% chance that you will participate in an election with a margin of under around 5 votes (your vote plus the net margin of your social penumbra divided by two) in your lifetime, then voting is worth it. At 4 small local elections a year for 50 years, that means that if average margins are less than about 600-2000 votes on those elections, then it's likely to be worth it, without accounting for any intrinsic values (such as the feeling of having participated). That's in the right ballpark.
What would you say, roughly, is the chance that with my vote, Romney takes NY, but without my vote, Obama takes NY?
Roughly zero. And you'd multiply that by the chances that the national election swung on NY, which are also small. So great, you've found an example where voting wasn't worth it. Do you think it's safe to generalize from that example?
As I argued above, the main value of being a habitual voter is in convincing your friends to vote in small local elections; and yet you will probably spend more time talking with them about Obama and Romney than about your local sheriff or school board or judge or public transit administrator. That's not logical, but that's how people are.
The messages you put out about whether or not you intend to vote affect your friends. A 2012 study using a facebook button showed that by voting themselves, individuals could bring 4.5 other voters to the polls.
I barely have 4.5 people that I ever discuss politics with, and all of their political views are at least as established as mine. I would be surprised if my voting brought so much as one other voter to the polls.
If you intend to canvass or phonebank, of course, this is even more relevant;
Good god, no!
...Whichever choice you make is leaky; if y
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A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
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