Selfish reasons. When viewed purely as entertainment and ritual, voting is a stupendous use of my time. It makes me feel like part of something bigger than myself, similar to Raemon’s solstice celebration.
(I also think that voting is plausibly justifiable on altruistic grounds, but if I’m honest with myself, that’s not the real reason I do it.)
The behavior of political candidates has direct, measurable, and large effects on the welfare of a lot of people I care about.
Political candidates are often very different from each other.
Even small differences between political candidates can have large effects if their constituency is large.
I want people who are like me to vote (because I have fantastic political views). You can motivate this acausally using TDT, but that’s not really necessary, because if I signal that I’m a voter to members of my social circles (who, by a remarkable coincidence, have nearly-as-fantastic political views) I can causally impact their tendency to vote. Signaling authentically is less taxing than pretending to be a voter, because it eliminates the risk of being found out, and doesn’t feel damaging to my image of myself as a good person.
Voting makes me more willing to speak up regarding important political issues, to maintain a consistent self-image; not voting would make me feel (at least a tiny bit) like a hypocrite or outsider when I think getting involved will have important benefits. More generally, it gives me practice cultivating habits I find otherwise useful.
I enjoy voting as a ritual. It improves my self-image, and the people in line at polls are fun to talk to.
In elections that are small and/or close, my individual vote often has a nontrivial probability of swinging the election. You can think of it as, in effect, an altruistic lottery with amazingly good odds. See Voting for Charity’s Sake.
Are those the kinds of reasons you were looking for?
Yes, I think that’s a nice selection of reasons. But I also think that when most people discuss political questions they aren’t doing it to become better-informed voters. A strategy optimized for better voting wouldn’t look like constantly discussing political questions, it would look like maybe setting aside a few weeks before election day to do a lot of research. A strategy optimized for influencing the votes of others would look like a grassroots campaign or something.
A grassroots campaign sounds like a significant expenditure of effort compared to voting and casual conversation about the issues. Perhaps maximizing our influence on the votes of others is not the only consideration, and voting hits a sweet spot which returns acceptable values for “(potentially) having an effect”, “not too time consuming”, and “improves my self-image”.
You’re right about setting aside some time for research, though; it’d be nice if we maximized potential effect in the correct direction :P
That sounds like a nearly fully general counterargument—I could be asking the same question about watching a movie, playing darts, studying geology, or whatever else the hell the person I’m speaking to is doing (short of working on efficient charity and the like).
Why do you think voting is valuable relative to the other things you could be doing? (Not a rhetorical question.)
That sounds like a nearly fully general counterargument
This interpretation requires directly contradicting the explicit and intentional claim in the grandparent.
(It is not always inappropriate to call ‘bullshit’ on a claim that a question is not a rhetorical question when it actually is but it seems more appropriate to do so directly rather than just casually ignoring the claim and assuming it is an argument anyway. As such I assume hasty reading is involved.)
A question can have presuppositions even if it’s not rhetorical. If I ask you whether you have stopped beating your wife, I’m implicitly claiming you have a wife and were beating her at some point, even if I’m genuinely curious as to whether or not you’re still doing so.
QY is implicitly saying that brainoil must think voting is valuable relative to the other things ey could be doing, with which I either agree or ADBOC depending on what exactly is meant by “valuable”.
Am I justified in asking why you bought an iPhone when you could have saved a starving child with that money, and whether you think getting an iPhone for yourself is more valuable than saving a dying kid? If not, you’re a hypocrite. If yes, that too tells something about you.
I accept utilitarianism. But I also think we’re not born with a utility function. When I vote, I value it being an informed decision. If you ask me whether I couldn’t think of anything more valuable than that, I’d ask whether you couldn’t think of anything more valuable to do with your money than buying a smartphone.
To be honest, I don’t vote. But many do and value their right to vote.
Am I justified in asking why you bought an iPhone when you could have saved a starving child with that money, and whether you think getting an iPhone for yourself is more valuable than saving a dying kid? If not, you’re a hypocrite. If yes, that too tells something about you.
Yes. This is a question I thought about before buying an iPhone and I think it deserves a serious answer, which in short is that iPhones can be used as incredible productivity tools, that I intended to use my iPhone that way (and have, by and large), and that I would pass on those productivity gains eventually (e.g. in increased earning potential which eventually finds its way to effective charities, or in being more effectively able to do work for MIRI or some other organization). Remember that consequentialism need not be nearsighted.
Really. (This sounds acerbic, but your comment is incredibly hard to take at face value.)
Do you also only watch a TV show (or a movie, or a fantasy novel) just enough so that you maximize your future contributions to effective charity (or MIRI etc.)?
What about going out with a girl, or keeping up with old friends outside the field? All that diverted effort consciously calculated to maximize your effective charity contributions, or do you treat time invested differently from other resources such as money?
(In the last few years, I’ve deliberately excluded some goals/activities that would sink resources/time but won’t serve a long-term global purpose (i.e. goals that are not about myself) and whose avoidance doesn’t seem to damage my motivation/productivity (reading fiction, playing games, studying music and (natural) languages, buying things beyond necessities, creating a family, aggressively advancing career). It might be that this mode is (psychologically) enabled by the fact that so far I’m investing in my own time/training, not donations.)
When tired or low on motivation, I watch TV shows (US, UK series), recently for about 1.5 hours a day on average, in 10-20 minute sections throughout the day.
(This sounds acerbic, but your comment is incredibly hard to take at face value.)
Yeah, I noticed that after writing it. Look, I have limited time and a complicated utility function. I can try to optimize where I think it would be particularly valuable to optimize (the decision to buy an iPhone is not small in terms of the accumulated costs or in terms of time investment so it seemed particularly worth paying attention to), but if I tried to consciously optimize everything I’d quickly run out of time to actually do any of the things I’m trying to optimize.
I recognize I’m opening myself up to further accusations of hypocrisy here, but I’d rather be hypocritical in the sense that I optimize some part of my life and not the other parts (and ask others to do the same) than be consistent in the sense that I don’t optimize any of it. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all that.
that I intended to use my iPhone that way (and have, by and large),
That seems like an awfully contrived reason to buy an iPhone, especially when you could do all the work you do with an iPhone using a cheaper android phone too. But suppose there is a certain unique feature that the iPhone has that others don’t that makes you more productive (I’m not asking what that feature is). You are still deliberately dodging the spirit of the question. It wasn’t about an iPhone. I didn’t even know you had one.
So, am I justified in asking why you spend four hours per month watching Game of Thrones when you could have used that time to earn more money and use that to save a child in Africa? Do you think spending time on a couch, watching Game of Thrones, eating potatoes, is more valuable than saving a dying child in Africa?
You already have guessed what these questions would lead to. But my intention is not to accuse you of hypocrisy. What I say is that even if you watch Game of Thrones instead of saving a dying child in Africa, I wouldn’t think any less of you.
Your article was Privileging the Question, not Promoting Utilitarianism. You could make your point without trying to change what people value.
So, am I justified in asking why you spend four hours per month watching Game of Thrones when you could have used that time to earn more money and use that to save a child in Africa? Do you think spending time on a couch, watching Game of Thrones, eating potatoes, is more valuable than saving a dying child in Africa?
Yes, and it depends. Whatever your values are, you need to be in a position to satisfy those values. That means you need to take care of yourself so you won’t go crazy or otherwise become incapable of satisfying your values in the future, and one aspect of that is giving yourself leisure time. Game of Thrones may or may not be a good way to do this.
I think you perceive this huge chasm between selfishness and selflessness that doesn’t really exist. Making your life better makes other people’s lives better to the extent that you put time and effort into making other people’s lives better and can do that better if your life is better. Making other people’s lives better makes your life better to the extent that you care about other people.
Is this really how you think it works? Do you honestly watch Game of Thrones because it helps to better other people’s lives? I’d be surprised. More likely, you start with “I like Game of Thrones” and end up with “it helps me to save the world.” I can’t read your mind. But that’d be my guess.
The problem is, you can justify too many things with this excuse. You already justified your iPhone when you could have bought a cheap android phone that has pretty much the same features. Paying the Apple tax is perhaps not the most effective way to save the world.
P.S. Is there any research done that suggests smartphones make people more productive?
Is this really how you think it works? Do you honestly watch Game of Thrones because it helps to better other people’s lives? I’d be surprised. More likely, you start with “I like Game of Thrones” and end up with “it helps me to save the world.” I can’t read your mind. But that’d be my guess.
That’s a reasonable guess, and it’s certainly something I have to watch out for. (I don’t watch Game of Thrones, but I’m mentally substituting with a show I do watch.) If I genuinely didn’t think that watching Game of Thrones was better as measured by my utility function than the alternative upon reflection, I hope I would be able to stop. I’ve stopped doing various other things this way recently (most recently browsing Tumblr).
You already justified your iPhone when you could have bought a cheap android phone that has pretty much the same features.
This wasn’t clear to me at the time of my purchase. My impression from several people I talked to (that I trusted to be reasonably knowledgeable) was that Android is ultimately more powerful but requires more effort and tinkering to be put to use whereas an iPhone can be used out of the box. I’m not much of a power user and I wanted something that just worked. I also had the sense that there were more apps available for the latter than the former.
And, again, the perfect is the enemy of the good. It takes too much time to make optimal decisions, but I can at least try to make better decisions.
P.S. Is there any research done that suggests smartphones make people more productive?
Who needs research? It’s pretty clear to me that my smartphone has made me more productive, and that’s the question that actually needed answering. (I expect most people get distracted by games, but I adopted a general policy of not downloading games which I have only rarely broken, and the games I do download I don’t play very much.)
I’m still not sure I understand what you’re getting at with this line of questioning. You seem to think there’s something wrong with the way I try to make decisions, which is to attempt to maximize expected utility while recognizing that I have limited time to search the space of possible things to do. What would you suggest as a superior alternative? (The alternative you’ve presented so far is justifying that you should think about political questions because of voting even though you don’t vote.)
The intent was to show that asking whether I don’t have anything more valuable to do than voting was an unfair question because even those who profess utilitarianism don’t always do the things that are most valuable in utilitarian terms. But it seems this strategy won’t work with you.
While you are required to judge others using all of the information available to you, you are not required to inform them of that fact prior to gathering some information.
For example, one can privilege themselves without being evil, even when that means that one or more babies starve that didn’t strictly need to, or a section of space that could contain an asteroid that will destroy humanity remains unchecked.
I think maybe an easier way to think about this is to avoid comparing selfish and altruistic things you do (because that comparison is hard) but at least try to be effective in each category separately. Then it’s fair to ask why one would buy an iPhone over an Android or why one would vote as opposed to donate a malaria net (assuming time is roughly equivalent to money).
It’s not that comparing across the two categories is invalid; it’s just that the honest answer may be “I don’t care enough about other people to go without my iPhone” and that’s not an honest answer anyone wants to give. More generally, this comparison runs up against utility functions much more than the other.
Why do you think voting is valuable relative to the other things you could be doing? (Not a rhetorical question.)
Selfish reasons. When viewed purely as entertainment and ritual, voting is a stupendous use of my time. It makes me feel like part of something bigger than myself, similar to Raemon’s solstice celebration.
(I also think that voting is plausibly justifiable on altruistic grounds, but if I’m honest with myself, that’s not the real reason I do it.)
Upvoted for honesty. I don’t get such feelings from voting myself.
The behavior of political candidates has direct, measurable, and large effects on the welfare of a lot of people I care about.
Political candidates are often very different from each other.
Even small differences between political candidates can have large effects if their constituency is large.
I want people who are like me to vote (because I have fantastic political views). You can motivate this acausally using TDT, but that’s not really necessary, because if I signal that I’m a voter to members of my social circles (who, by a remarkable coincidence, have nearly-as-fantastic political views) I can causally impact their tendency to vote. Signaling authentically is less taxing than pretending to be a voter, because it eliminates the risk of being found out, and doesn’t feel damaging to my image of myself as a good person.
Voting makes me more willing to speak up regarding important political issues, to maintain a consistent self-image; not voting would make me feel (at least a tiny bit) like a hypocrite or outsider when I think getting involved will have important benefits. More generally, it gives me practice cultivating habits I find otherwise useful.
I enjoy voting as a ritual. It improves my self-image, and the people in line at polls are fun to talk to.
In elections that are small and/or close, my individual vote often has a nontrivial probability of swinging the election. You can think of it as, in effect, an altruistic lottery with amazingly good odds. See Voting for Charity’s Sake.
Are those the kinds of reasons you were looking for?
Yes, I think that’s a nice selection of reasons. But I also think that when most people discuss political questions they aren’t doing it to become better-informed voters. A strategy optimized for better voting wouldn’t look like constantly discussing political questions, it would look like maybe setting aside a few weeks before election day to do a lot of research. A strategy optimized for influencing the votes of others would look like a grassroots campaign or something.
Yes. They’re also trying to influence other people’s votes.
A grassroots campaign sounds like a significant expenditure of effort compared to voting and casual conversation about the issues. Perhaps maximizing our influence on the votes of others is not the only consideration, and voting hits a sweet spot which returns acceptable values for “(potentially) having an effect”, “not too time consuming”, and “improves my self-image”.
You’re right about setting aside some time for research, though; it’d be nice if we maximized potential effect in the correct direction :P
That sounds like a nearly fully general counterargument—I could be asking the same question about watching a movie, playing darts, studying geology, or whatever else the hell the person I’m speaking to is doing (short of working on efficient charity and the like).
It’s not a counterargument. It’s a request for an explanation.
This interpretation requires directly contradicting the explicit and intentional claim in the grandparent.
(It is not always inappropriate to call ‘bullshit’ on a claim that a question is not a rhetorical question when it actually is but it seems more appropriate to do so directly rather than just casually ignoring the claim and assuming it is an argument anyway. As such I assume hasty reading is involved.)
A question can have presuppositions even if it’s not rhetorical. If I ask you whether you have stopped beating your wife, I’m implicitly claiming you have a wife and were beating her at some point, even if I’m genuinely curious as to whether or not you’re still doing so.
QY is implicitly saying that brainoil must think voting is valuable relative to the other things ey could be doing, with which I either agree or ADBOC depending on what exactly is meant by “valuable”.
Am I justified in asking why you bought an iPhone when you could have saved a starving child with that money, and whether you think getting an iPhone for yourself is more valuable than saving a dying kid? If not, you’re a hypocrite. If yes, that too tells something about you.
I accept utilitarianism. But I also think we’re not born with a utility function. When I vote, I value it being an informed decision. If you ask me whether I couldn’t think of anything more valuable than that, I’d ask whether you couldn’t think of anything more valuable to do with your money than buying a smartphone.
To be honest, I don’t vote. But many do and value their right to vote.
http://xkcd.com/871/
Yes. This is a question I thought about before buying an iPhone and I think it deserves a serious answer, which in short is that iPhones can be used as incredible productivity tools, that I intended to use my iPhone that way (and have, by and large), and that I would pass on those productivity gains eventually (e.g. in increased earning potential which eventually finds its way to effective charities, or in being more effectively able to do work for MIRI or some other organization). Remember that consequentialism need not be nearsighted.
Really. (This sounds acerbic, but your comment is incredibly hard to take at face value.)
Do you also only watch a TV show (or a movie, or a fantasy novel) just enough so that you maximize your future contributions to effective charity (or MIRI etc.)?
What about going out with a girl, or keeping up with old friends outside the field? All that diverted effort consciously calculated to maximize your effective charity contributions, or do you treat time invested differently from other resources such as money?
(In the last few years, I’ve deliberately excluded some goals/activities that would sink resources/time but won’t serve a long-term global purpose (i.e. goals that are not about myself) and whose avoidance doesn’t seem to damage my motivation/productivity (reading fiction, playing games, studying music and (natural) languages, buying things beyond necessities, creating a family, aggressively advancing career). It might be that this mode is (psychologically) enabled by the fact that so far I’m investing in my own time/training, not donations.)
Just curious: What things, if any, do you do that sink resources but don’t serve a long-term global purpose?
When tired or low on motivation, I watch TV shows (US, UK series), recently for about 1.5 hours a day on average, in 10-20 minute sections throughout the day.
Yeah, I noticed that after writing it. Look, I have limited time and a complicated utility function. I can try to optimize where I think it would be particularly valuable to optimize (the decision to buy an iPhone is not small in terms of the accumulated costs or in terms of time investment so it seemed particularly worth paying attention to), but if I tried to consciously optimize everything I’d quickly run out of time to actually do any of the things I’m trying to optimize.
I recognize I’m opening myself up to further accusations of hypocrisy here, but I’d rather be hypocritical in the sense that I optimize some part of my life and not the other parts (and ask others to do the same) than be consistent in the sense that I don’t optimize any of it. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all that.
Qiaochu participated in the last MIRI math workshop. Calculation done.
That seems like an awfully contrived reason to buy an iPhone, especially when you could do all the work you do with an iPhone using a cheaper android phone too. But suppose there is a certain unique feature that the iPhone has that others don’t that makes you more productive (I’m not asking what that feature is). You are still deliberately dodging the spirit of the question. It wasn’t about an iPhone. I didn’t even know you had one.
So, am I justified in asking why you spend four hours per month watching Game of Thrones when you could have used that time to earn more money and use that to save a child in Africa? Do you think spending time on a couch, watching Game of Thrones, eating potatoes, is more valuable than saving a dying child in Africa?
You already have guessed what these questions would lead to. But my intention is not to accuse you of hypocrisy. What I say is that even if you watch Game of Thrones instead of saving a dying child in Africa, I wouldn’t think any less of you.
Your article was Privileging the Question, not Promoting Utilitarianism. You could make your point without trying to change what people value.
Yes, and it depends. Whatever your values are, you need to be in a position to satisfy those values. That means you need to take care of yourself so you won’t go crazy or otherwise become incapable of satisfying your values in the future, and one aspect of that is giving yourself leisure time. Game of Thrones may or may not be a good way to do this.
I think you perceive this huge chasm between selfishness and selflessness that doesn’t really exist. Making your life better makes other people’s lives better to the extent that you put time and effort into making other people’s lives better and can do that better if your life is better. Making other people’s lives better makes your life better to the extent that you care about other people.
Is this really how you think it works? Do you honestly watch Game of Thrones because it helps to better other people’s lives? I’d be surprised. More likely, you start with “I like Game of Thrones” and end up with “it helps me to save the world.” I can’t read your mind. But that’d be my guess.
The problem is, you can justify too many things with this excuse. You already justified your iPhone when you could have bought a cheap android phone that has pretty much the same features. Paying the Apple tax is perhaps not the most effective way to save the world.
P.S. Is there any research done that suggests smartphones make people more productive?
That’s a reasonable guess, and it’s certainly something I have to watch out for. (I don’t watch Game of Thrones, but I’m mentally substituting with a show I do watch.) If I genuinely didn’t think that watching Game of Thrones was better as measured by my utility function than the alternative upon reflection, I hope I would be able to stop. I’ve stopped doing various other things this way recently (most recently browsing Tumblr).
This wasn’t clear to me at the time of my purchase. My impression from several people I talked to (that I trusted to be reasonably knowledgeable) was that Android is ultimately more powerful but requires more effort and tinkering to be put to use whereas an iPhone can be used out of the box. I’m not much of a power user and I wanted something that just worked. I also had the sense that there were more apps available for the latter than the former.
And, again, the perfect is the enemy of the good. It takes too much time to make optimal decisions, but I can at least try to make better decisions.
Who needs research? It’s pretty clear to me that my smartphone has made me more productive, and that’s the question that actually needed answering. (I expect most people get distracted by games, but I adopted a general policy of not downloading games which I have only rarely broken, and the games I do download I don’t play very much.)
I’m still not sure I understand what you’re getting at with this line of questioning. You seem to think there’s something wrong with the way I try to make decisions, which is to attempt to maximize expected utility while recognizing that I have limited time to search the space of possible things to do. What would you suggest as a superior alternative? (The alternative you’ve presented so far is justifying that you should think about political questions because of voting even though you don’t vote.)
The intent was to show that asking whether I don’t have anything more valuable to do than voting was an unfair question because even those who profess utilitarianism don’t always do the things that are most valuable in utilitarian terms. But it seems this strategy won’t work with you.
While you are required to judge others using all of the information available to you, you are not required to inform them of that fact prior to gathering some information.
For example, one can privilege themselves without being evil, even when that means that one or more babies starve that didn’t strictly need to, or a section of space that could contain an asteroid that will destroy humanity remains unchecked.
I think maybe an easier way to think about this is to avoid comparing selfish and altruistic things you do (because that comparison is hard) but at least try to be effective in each category separately. Then it’s fair to ask why one would buy an iPhone over an Android or why one would vote as opposed to donate a malaria net (assuming time is roughly equivalent to money).
It’s not that comparing across the two categories is invalid; it’s just that the honest answer may be “I don’t care enough about other people to go without my iPhone” and that’s not an honest answer anyone wants to give. More generally, this comparison runs up against utility functions much more than the other.