I haven’t worked it out rigorously (else you would’ve seen a post on it by now!), but it seems to me in close elections (Florida 2000, say) that thought process could be valid. Considering how small the margins sometimes are, and how much of the electorate doesn’t vote, it doesn’t strike me as implausible that there are enough people thinking like me to make a difference.
And of course we could just specify as a condition that you and yours are a bloc powerful enough to affect the election. (Maybe you’re numerous, maybe there’re only a few electors, whatever.)
But it’s amusing how far democracy proponents will go to convince themselves that their vote matters.
The problem with irrelevant ad hominems is that they’re very often based on flimsy evidence and so often wrong. I didn’t even vote last year because I figured my vote didn’t matter. I was not surprised.
In Newcomb’s problem you’re the boss, e.g. you can assign yourself a suitable utility function beforehand to keep the million and screw the thousand. Not so in voting—no matter what you think, other people won’t change. They don’t have anything conditioned on the outcome of your thought process, as in Newcomb’s. No, not even if “people thinking like you” are a bloc. You still can’t influence them. It’s a coordination game, not Newcomb’s.
Your reasoning resembles the “twins fallacy” in the Prisoner’s Dilemma: the idea that just by choosing to cooperate you can magically force your identical partner to do the same. Come to think of it, PD sounds like a better model for voting to me.
Update: Eliezer seems to think PD and Newcomb’s are related. Not sure why.
I haven’t worked it out rigorously (else you would’ve seen a post on it by now!), but it seems to me in close elections (Florida 2000, say) that thought process could be valid. Considering how small the margins sometimes are, and how much of the electorate doesn’t vote, it doesn’t strike me as implausible that there are enough people thinking like me to make a difference.
And of course we could just specify as a condition that you and yours are a bloc powerful enough to affect the election. (Maybe you’re numerous, maybe there’re only a few electors, whatever.)
The problem with irrelevant ad hominems is that they’re very often based on flimsy evidence and so often wrong. I didn’t even vote last year because I figured my vote didn’t matter. I was not surprised.
In Newcomb’s problem you’re the boss, e.g. you can assign yourself a suitable utility function beforehand to keep the million and screw the thousand. Not so in voting—no matter what you think, other people won’t change. They don’t have anything conditioned on the outcome of your thought process, as in Newcomb’s. No, not even if “people thinking like you” are a bloc. You still can’t influence them. It’s a coordination game, not Newcomb’s.
Your reasoning resembles the “twins fallacy” in the Prisoner’s Dilemma: the idea that just by choosing to cooperate you can magically force your identical partner to do the same. Come to think of it, PD sounds like a better model for voting to me.
Update: Eliezer seems to think PD and Newcomb’s are related. Not sure why.