Related to: Shut up and multiply, Politics is the mind-killer, Pascal's Mugging, The two party swindle, The American system and misleading labels, Policy Tug-of-War 

Jane is a connoisseur of imported cheeses and Homo Economicus in good standing, using a causal decision theory that two-boxes on Newcomb's problem. Unfortunately for her, the politically well-organized dairy farmers in her country have managed to get an initiative for increased dairy tariffs on the ballot, which will cost her $20,000. Should she take an hour to vote against the initiative on election day? 

She estimates that she has a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of casting the deciding vote, for an expected value of $0.02 from improved policy. However, while Jane may be willing to give her two cents on the subject, the opportunity cost of her time far exceeds the policy benefit, and so it seems she has no reason to vote.

Jane's dilemma is just the standard Paradox of Voting in political science and public choice theory. Voters may still engage in expressive voting to affiliate with certain groups or to signal traits insofar as politics is not about policy, but the instrumental rationality of voting to bring about selfishly preferred policy outcomes starts to look dubious. Thus many of those who say that we rationally ought to vote in hopes of affecting policy focus on altruistic preferences: faced with a tiny probability of casting a decisive vote, but large impacts on enormous numbers of people in the event that we are decisive, we should shut up and multiply, voting if the expected value of benefit to others sufficiently exceeds the cost to ourselves.

Meanwhile, at the Experimental Philosophy blog, Eric Schwitzgebel reports that philosophers overwhelmingly rate voting as very morally good (on a scale of 1 to 9), with voting placing right around donating 10% of one's income to charity. He offers the following explanation:

Disclaimer: If you are prone to dismissing women's complaints of gender-related problems as the women being whiny, emotionally unstable girls who see sexism where there is none, this post is unlikely to interest you.

For your convenience, links to followup posts: Roko says; orthonormal says; Eliezer says; Yvain says; Wei_Dai says

As far as I can tell, I am the most active female poster on Less Wrong.  (AnnaSalamon has higher karma than I, but she hasn't commented on anything for two months now.)  There are not many of us.  This is usually immaterial.  Heck, sometimes people don't even notice in spite of my girly username, my self-introduction, and the fact that I'm now apparently the feminism police of Less Wrong.

My life is not about being a girl.  In fact, I'm less preoccupied with feminism and women's special interest issues than most of the women I know, and some of the men.  It's not my pet topic.  I do not focus on feminist philosophy in school.  I took an "Early Modern Women Philosophers" course because I needed the history credit, had room for a suitable class in a semester when one was offered, and heard the teacher was nice, and I was pretty bored.  I wound up doing my midterm paper on Malebranche in that class because we'd covered him to give context to Mary Astell, and he was more interesting than she was.  I didn't vote for Hilary Clinton in the primary.  Given the choice, I have lots of things I'd rather be doing than ferreting out hidden or less-than-hidden sexism on one of my favorite websites.

Unfortunately, nobody else seems to want to do it either, and I'm not content to leave it undone.  I suppose I could abandon the site and leave it even more masculine so the guys could all talk in their own language, unimpeded by stupid chicks being stupidly offended by completely unproblematic things like objectification and just plain jerkitude.  I would almost certainly have vacated the site already if feminism were my pet issue, or if I were more easily offended.  (In general, I'm very hard to offend.  The fact that people here have succeeded in doing so anyway without even, apparently, going out of their way to do it should be a great big red flag that something's up.)  If you're wondering why half of the potential audience of the site seems to be conspicuously not here, this may have something to do with it.

Reply to: A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy

Lionhearted writes:

[A] large majority of otherwise smart people spend time doing semi-productive things, when there are massively productive opportunities untapped.

A somewhat silly example: Let's say someone aspires to be a comedian, the best comedian ever, and to make a living doing comedy. He wants nothing else, it is his purpose. And he decides that in order to become a better comedian, he will watch re-runs of the old television cartoon 'Garfield and Friends' that was on TV from 1988 to 1995....

I’m curious as to why.

Why will a randomly chosen eight-year-old fail a calculus test?  Because most possible answers are wrong, and there is no force to guide him to the correct answers.  (There is no need to postulate a “fear of success”; most ways writing or not writing on a calculus test constitute failure, and so people, and rocks, fail calculus tests by default.)

Why do most of us, most of the time, choose to "pursue our goals" through routes that are far less effective than the routes we could find if we tried?[1]  My guess is that here, as with the calculus test, the main problem is that most courses of action are extremely ineffective, and that there has been no strong evolutionary or cultural force sufficient to focus us on the very narrow behavior patterns that would actually be effective. 

Note: The primary target of the post is not professional, academic evolutionary psychology. Rather, I am primarily cautioning amateurs (such as LW regulars) about some of the caveats involved in (armchair) evpsych and noting the rigor required for good theories. While the post does also serve as a warning to be cautious about sloppy research (or sloppy science journalism) that doesn't seem to be taking these issues into account, I do believe that most of the researchers doing serious evpsych research are quite aware of these issues.

Evolutionary theories get mentioned a lot on this site, and I frequently feel that they are given far more weight than would be warranted. In particular, evolutionary theories about sex differences seem to get mentioned and appealed to as if they had an iron-cast certainty. People also don't hesitate to make up their own evolutionary psychological explanations. To counterbalance this, I present a list of evolutionary psychology-related problems, divided into four rough categories.

Problems in hypothesis generation

Rationalization bias. We know that human minds are very prone to first deciding on a desired outcome, then coming up with a plausible-sounding story of why it must be so. In general, our minds have difficulty noticing faulty reasoning if it leads to the right conclusion. It's easy and tempting to come up with an ad-hoc evolutionary explanation for any behavior, regardless of whether or not it actually has any biological roots.

Over-attributing meaning. Humans also have a strong tendency to attribute meaning to random chance. We might easily come up with explanations that are unnecessarily complex, and try to make everything into an evolved adaptation. For instance, humans tend to avoid thinking about unpleasant thoughts about themselves. A contrived evpsych explanation might be that this is evolved self-deception: by not acknowledging our own faults, it makes it easier for us to deceive others about them. But mental unpleasantness tends to be correlated with harmful experiences: we avoid situations where we'd be afraid, and fear is correlated with danger. It could just as well be that the mechanism for avoiding mental unpleasantness evolved from the mechanism for avoiding physical unpleasantness, and we avoid thinking unpleasant thoughts of ourselves for the same reason why we avoid poking our fingers at hot stoves. (Example courtesy of Anna Salamon.)

Alternative ways of reaching the goal. Eliezer previously gave us the example of the scientists who thought insects would under the right circumstances limit their breeding, but the insects ended up eating their competitors' offspring instead. We can only cover a limited part of the space of all possible routes evolution could take. While ”but another hypothesis might explain it better” is admittedly a problem all scientific disciplines face, it is especially acute here, since we have very little knowledge of what life in the EEA was actually like.

Problems in background assumptions

Did a genetic path to the adaptation exist? Evolution works by the rule of immediate advantage: for mutation X to reach fixation, it has to provide an immediate advantage. It's well and good to propose that under specific circumstances, organisms that developed a specific behavior would have gained a fitness advantage. But that, by itself, tells us nothing about how many mutations reaching such a behavior would have required. Nor does it tell us anything about whether all of those intermediate stages actually conferred the organism a fitness benefit, making it possible for the final form of the adaptation to actually be reached.