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eli_sennesh comments on Non-standard politics - Less Wrong Discussion
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Actually, hold on, jump out, meta-level question: why are you privileging the hypothesis that "voting with their feet" represents a reflectively-coherent all-else-equal preference anyway? It usually involves changing several variables quite a lot, all at once, some by the choice of the person moving and others for other reasons, with close correlations between many of these variables. In terms of extracting uncorrupted information about preferences, it's about as bad as any randomly-chosen Life Choice, and a lot worse than ushering a person into an isolated booth to have them anonymously fill out a questionnaire about their preferences over possible societies.
What evidence do you possess that locates "migration patterns reflect people's real preferences over societies" in the hypothesis space?
Well, for one thing "voting with one's feet" doesn't have the rational ignorance problem that voting does.
Which is not evidence regarding migration as a preference indicator. You're playing politics, not rationality.
What definition of "preference" are you using there? If I pick the vanilla rather than the chocolate ice cream, would you agree that this is evidence regarding my ice cream preference?
That depends: what system of incentives, ranging from monetary payment to a gun to your head, is acting to make you choose vanilla? People's real preferences are the ones they possess and exercise without external compulsion or incentive making some possibilities easier than others.
That's still evidence that the value of said incentives is larger than any preference I have for chocolate over vanilla.
Which is actually why those incentives are confounding factors when we're trying to measure your actual preferences.
Not if those same factors also show up it the decision you're planning to make based on those preferences.
They don't: collective, political decisions are simply not supposed to take individuals' incentives into account as inputs, but instead to change those incentives as output.
How did we go from "preferences" to "incentives" and what distinction are you trying to make here?