Your decision inflicts the micromorts not just on yourself, but on all the people in the reference class, for the proportionally greater total number of micromorts that given this consideration turn into actual morts very easily.
But your decision also causes the corresponding benefits to accrue to all the people in the reference class? So the decision you make should be the same, it just becomes more consequentially important.
The voting case is different because the benefits are superlinear in the number of people you affect (at least up to a point) -- a million people voting the same way as you probably have more than a million times more chance at swinging the election.
ETA: Never mind, misunderstood habryka’s reply, I’m basically saying the same thing. Though I still think that the case for applying the argument to voting is much stronger than the case for applying it in other decisions where benefits are linear.
The absolute size of a reference class only gives the problem statement for an individual decision some altruistic/paternalistic tilt, which can fail to change it. Greater relative size of a reference class increases the decision’s relative importance compared to other decisions, which on the margin should pull some effort away from the other decisions.
That the effective multiplier due to acausal coordination is smaller for non-voting decisions doesn’t inform the question of whether the argument applies to non-voting decisions. The argument may be ignored in the decision algorithm only if the reference class is always small or about the same size for different decisions.
Yeah, I agree with all of that. (I didn’t realize the point about the relative sizes of reference classes until I read your reply to habryka more carefully.)
Perhaps another way to make the point about the argument for voting being stronger is that it affects your decisionmaking even if you are not altruistic. Here by stronger I mean that the argument is “more robust” or “less suspicious”.
Sure, for voting the effect on decision making is greater. I’m just suspicious of this whole idea of acausal impact, and moderate observations about effect size don’t help with that confusion. I don’t think it can apply to voting without applying to other things, so the quantitative distinction doesn’t point in a particular direction on correctness of the overall idea.
But your decision also causes the corresponding benefits to accrue to all the people in the reference class? So the decision you make should be the same, it just becomes more consequentially important.
The voting case is different because the benefits are superlinear in the number of people you affect (at least up to a point) -- a million people voting the same way as you probably have more than a million times more chance at swinging the election.
ETA: Never mind, misunderstood habryka’s reply, I’m basically saying the same thing. Though I still think that the case for applying the argument to voting is much stronger than the case for applying it in other decisions where benefits are linear.
The absolute size of a reference class only gives the problem statement for an individual decision some altruistic/paternalistic tilt, which can fail to change it. Greater relative size of a reference class increases the decision’s relative importance compared to other decisions, which on the margin should pull some effort away from the other decisions.
That the effective multiplier due to acausal coordination is smaller for non-voting decisions doesn’t inform the question of whether the argument applies to non-voting decisions. The argument may be ignored in the decision algorithm only if the reference class is always small or about the same size for different decisions.
Yeah, I agree with all of that. (I didn’t realize the point about the relative sizes of reference classes until I read your reply to habryka more carefully.)
Perhaps another way to make the point about the argument for voting being stronger is that it affects your decisionmaking even if you are not altruistic. Here by stronger I mean that the argument is “more robust” or “less suspicious”.
Sure, for voting the effect on decision making is greater. I’m just suspicious of this whole idea of acausal impact, and moderate observations about effect size don’t help with that confusion. I don’t think it can apply to voting without applying to other things, so the quantitative distinction doesn’t point in a particular direction on correctness of the overall idea.