Salemicus comments on A Rational Argument - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 October 2007 06:35PM

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Comment author: Salemicus 04 September 2013 03:53:37PM *  1 point [-]

I agree that voting is a Tragedy of the Commons - but in the exact opposite way to how you frame it. Because people don't fully internalise the costs and benefits of their votes, but value self-expression, (1) it is very cheap for the ill-informed to use their votes to signal expressively, and (2) there is little incentive to become a well-informed voter. For a given level of political ignorance, we get far too much voting.

To my mind, voting is analagous to pollution and should be taxed as such.