wedrifid comments on A Rational Argument - Less Wrong

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (40)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Lumifer 04 September 2013 03:13:00PM 1 point [-]

the public service of attending a voting booth and scribbling something arbitrary that may or may not be a vote on a piece of paper should be compulsory.

Why? I fail to seem any gains from that. Neither do I see any major empirical differences between countries with compulsory voting and countries without.

Comment author: wedrifid 04 September 2013 10:43:09PM -1 points [-]

Why? I fail to seem any gains from that.

In general the correct response to most "I fail to see" or "I can't imagine" claims is to observe that this could be either a fact about the problem or a fact about the speaker's imagination.

Neither do I see any major empirical differences between countries with compulsory voting and countries without.

The current solution to the tragedy of the commons is brainwashing with patriotism and relying on poorly calibrated tribal-political instincts to get by. This works well enough and I honestly don't think this is a problem that particularly needs addressing, compared to all the other things that can be done. It is merely a minor systemic insanity.