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Peterdjones comments on We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think - Less Wrong
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Presumably if you can predict that Candidate A will ruin the economy, then you vote for Candidate B instead.
Unless you can think of a way of winning by having advance knowledge that the economy will be ruined, which will net you greater gain than having an un-ruined economy would be. Then you may selfishly vote for Candidate A.
I'm ignoring here the question of how much your opinion influences the outcome of the election, of course. Also if you end up predicting that all the candidates will ruin the economy equally, you don't have much of a decision to make.
I can only predict what will happen on the basis that a) their policies will have a certain effect and b) they will actually implement their policies. Which gets back to the original point: if they are not going to do what they say, what is the point of voting?
I think I agree. I also think wedrifid wanted to talk about predictions of what the candidates do, even if they are not guaranteed not to change their mind.
This doesn't seem impossible, just harder. You'd have to make a guess as to how likely the candidates are to implement a different policy from the one they promised, as well as the effect the possible policies will have.
The candidates do have an incentive to signal that they are unlikely to "waffle". If you are relatively certain to implement your policies, then at least those who agree with you will predict that you'll have a good effect. If you look like you might change your mind, even your supporters might decide to take a different option, because who knows what you will do?
In theory, you might gain a bigger advantage by somehow signaling that you will change your mind for good reasons. Then if new information comes up in the future, you're a better choice than anyone who promises not to change their mind at all. But this is trickier and less convincing.
That seems to be a significant limitation.
Fortunately, not everybody has said limitation.