Forgive me if I’m posting in ignorance of some well-worn argument that is common knowledge on this board, but I think your cynicism is misplaced.
Surely you should be considering voting as a massive prisoner’s dilemma: when you decide whether or not to vote you aren’t just deciding for yourself, you’re also deciding for anyone who thinks similarly to you. I’m not saying that your individual vote is going to make any noticeable difference, but the votes of every jaded rationalist in America on the other hand...
Of course, that doesn’t constitute a conclusive argument, but consider what voting actually costs you. At worst, it’s an hour of your time, and since you’re probably spending half an hour on a forum on the internet telling people (amongst other things) how you’re not going to vote, you can’t reasonably say that sacrificing that hour of you life is too big a utility loss.
If I had my way, voting would be compulsory in every democracy on the planet. I’m not saying that democracy is the best way of doing things, but if some countries ARE democracies then we should at least try to do mitigate the negative effects of the system. The problem with non-compulsory voting is it means that only the people who care strongly enough about the elections to get off the internet and drive to a polling booth are the ones who have their voices heard. This means that you lose a lot of moderate, sane, rational voters but keep all of the rabid nutjobs. Argentina have the best system—voting is compulsory once you’re over 18, but you can refuse to vote if you formally express this intention to the authorities at least 48 hours before the election. That way, nobody is forced to vote if they don’t want to, but it takes the same amount of effort to abstain as it does to vote, so you don’t lose moderates to laziness.
Of course, I live in one of the ten countries in the world where compulsory voting is enforced (Australia), so I’m aware that I could be suffering familiarity bias. I came up with the above argument in favour of compulsory voting independently, though, and I’ve never actually heard anyone else say that compulsory voting was important (or even a good thing). If anyone has an argument against voting, I’d be interested to hear it.
I’m not saying that your individual vote is going to make any noticeable difference, but the votes of every jaded rationalist in America on the other hand...
By voting, you will not make (or probably even encourage) every jaded rationalist in America to vote, so from a decision theoretical standpoint that observation is irrelevant. The instrumental value of voting is zero. There may be other values (signaling, pleasure, moral), but there is no instrumental value. You will not influence the election, so the expected value of any policy changes arising from just your vote is zero. Once you think of it strictly in terms of decision theory, the relevant variables should present themselves.
For those of us who don’t care that much about signaling interest in government and don’t think there’s any particular moral duty to vote (I think there is frequently a moral duty to abstain), wasting an hour on an internet forum is a much better use of our time.
If I had my way, voting would be compulsory in every democracy on the planet.
I know it’s normal in some countries, but I think this is an AWFUL policy. Why? Consider it in economic terms of negative and positive externalities. Say I’m a good voter who knows a thing or two about policy. When I vote, it very (very very very) marginally affects policy outcomes. When a bunch of good voters vote, policy outcomes become better.
Now turn it around. When a bad voter votes, it very (very very very) marginally affects policy outcomes. When a bunch of bad voters vote, policy outcomes become worse.
This is wonderfully analogous to pollution. By leaving a fan on all day, you only very marginally contribute to global warming. So, even if you’re interested in stopping global warming for selfish reasons, there’s nothing you can personally do to hinder it, so why bother? But there’s no personal incentive for anybody to bother, so global warming happens. Meanwhile, global warming affects more people than just you, and bad voting does the same. When you indulge your idiotic ideas of good policy, it doesn’t have any effect on the election, so it doesn’t have any effect on you. But since everybody’s doing it, policy gets dumb.
So the question becomes, when comparing voluntary and mandatory voting, which types of voters are more likely to abstain in a voluntary system?
I don’t see the need to hunt for the stats right now, but if you don’t believe me, I’ll happily scan some relevant sections from Scott Althaus’ Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics and Carpini and Keeter’s What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matter. The basic story is this: In America, people who are educated are way more likely to vote than those who aren’t, and uneducated people have demonstrably and outrageously boneheaded beliefs about policy. Forcing them to vote is like mandating bad policy.
(Hence what I said earlier about a moral duty to abstain. Like there might be a moral duty to reduce your carbon consumption, even though it will have no effect on the environment, there might be a moral duty to abstain from voting if you’re an ignoramus.)
By voting, you will not make (or probably even encourage) every jaded rationalist in America to vote, so from a decision theoretical standpoint that observation is irrelevant.
That’s not quite what I meant. If people think similarly to you, then they will most likely make similar decisions as you. Now that I’ve suggested this to you, you think similarly to all the people out there who realised this themselves or had someone point it out to them. So when you decide whether or not to vote, you should do so in the knowledge that there are a bunch of people out there who will probably end up making the same decision as you purely because they think similarly to you. You’re not just deciding for yourself, you’re deciding for everyone who thinks like you.
EDIT: Also, I disagree with you about the negative effects of compulsory voting. There are definitely some, but I think the negative effects of NON-compulsory voting are potentially worse. See my comment to Drethelin below.
The vast majority of humans are wrong about many, MANY fundamental things. The fewer of them controlling outcomes the better. Compulsory voting only makes sense if you think the number of smart informed people who don’t vote out of laziness outnumbers the number of idiots who don’t vote out of laziness.
I think the majority of people who don’t vote out of laziness are neither extremely smart nor extremely stupid, neither extremely right-wing nor extremely leftist, neither extremely gay nor extremely straight, etc. That’s the point, they’re not extremists.
I know that the lazy moderates aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, but I also know that once they’re out of the picture there’s much less ballast to keep the radical lunatics in line. To use a specific example: I think that the Tea Party does a better job of convincing their lazy supporters to vote than either of the major parties do, and if we accept that logic then the inescapable conclusion is that the Tea Party’s influence is being inflated by America’s non-compulsory voting system.
It’s not just the dullards who aren’t voting, either. I think you would be shocked at how smart and well informed you have to be before you actually decide you care enough to vote. Just look at Konkvistador—surely LWians and their ilk are the people we want MOST to vote?
To use a specific example: I think that the Tea Party does a better job of convincing their lazy supporters to vote than either of the major parties do, and if we accept that logic then the inescapable conclusion is that the Tea Party’s influence is being inflated by America’s non-compulsory voting system.
You do know tea party activists are actually above average on nearly any stat you’d care to name? Education, political knowledge, …
Just look at Konkvistador—surely LWians and their ilk are the people we want MOST to vote?
Well sure! Any plan on a revolution to make sure only we vote? Because otherwise a very eloquent Church pastor or Harvard professor can single-handedly bring more voting power to bear than we.
You do know tea party activists are actually above average on nearly any stat you’d care to name? Education, political knowledge, …
It’s weird, I had considered using that same fact as an argument for MY side of this debate, but I cut it for the sake of brevity. To be clear, are you suggesting that the Tea Party is a good influence on American (or world) politics? Sure, they’re smarter than the average American, but clearly being slightly smarter doesn’t translate to a similar increase in sanity. Glenn Beck himself is definitely smarter than most Americans, but he’s never let that get in the way of being a frothing lunatic. I could mention a whole swathe of examples of how despite being smarter, the Tea Party is also far more radical and morally objectionable than Americans on average, but I’ll just link some articles because I have class in half an hour and want keep this quick. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm/2010/05/10_fictious_tea_party_beliefs.htmlhttp://pewresearch.org/pubs/1903/tea-party-movement-religion-social-issues-conservative-christian
The reason we want to raise average voter IQ is because we think this will make the voters saner on average, but in the case of the Tea Party this clearly hasn’t happened. This is exactly why I brought them up—these people haven’t been motivated to vote by an appeal to their intelligence, or there’d be a hell of a lot more of them and their policies would be different. Rather, they’ve been motivated by an appeal to their fear and anger and radicalism. You can’t get lazy moderates to the voting booths by whipping them up into misguided fury, but you CAN get lazy radicals like that, so by making voting non-compulsory you hand people like Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, etc, a much greater proportion of the votes than they deserve. You don’t have to be smart to realise the Tea Party is wrong, just sane. Conversely, you don’t have to be dumb to be insane.
It’s weird, I had considered using that same fact as an argument for MY side of this debate, but I cut it for the sake of brevity. To be clear, are you suggesting that the Tea Party is a good influence on American (or world) politics?
I can’t speak for Konkvistador but I certainly do.
Glenn Beck himself is definitely smarter than most Americans, but he’s never let that get in the way of being a frothing lunatic.
What you mean is that you disagree with him on a lot of issues, for each one consider the possibility that it is you who is being a lunatic.
Wow, 6 of the 10 “fictitious” beliefs appear to actually be true (Edit: I suspect you disagree but debating them here might run even for afoul of the taboo against politics, or not whatever). As for the other 4 I don’t have enough information to assign probabilities either way.
Which 6? I know very little about any of these issues, but my priors on how politics work in general (mostly successful-politicians-are-never-too-radical and they-always-maintain-status-quo) make it difficult to score any 6 of these as being probable.
2 through 7, although now that I read it again 10 is at least partially true, i.e., the Tea Party is in fact a genuine grass roots movement.
I know very little about any of these issues, but my priors on how politics work in general (mostly successful-politicians-are-never-too-radical and they-always-maintain-status-quo)
And yet the political status quo today is different from what it was 50 years ago and very different from what it was 100 years ago.
I would be interested to see your supporting evidence for 2, 4 and 6. Don’t feel that you have to argue them, I won’t argue against them, but if you could link me to some sources or something in the spirit of educating me I would be appreciative.
Really? Someone voted this down? I was expecting to take a pretty big karma hit for expressing explicit political opinions on here, but this post didn’t even offer anything that could be disagreed with, let alone fallacious reasoning. I was honestly and humbly asking for more information. I’ve lost 23 karma points today. 22 of those losses I wouldn’t have minded, but this one is just nonsense. Did somebody just go through and downvote everything I’ve ever said or something?
Did somebody just go through and downvote everything I’ve ever said or something?
You may have a stalker. As far as I can tell, there are a small number of people using the voting system against persons they dislike rather than against low-quality comment content.
Notice that Eugine_Nier’s comments have also been voted down en masse. My guess is that at least one person thought that the whole discussion was too close to partisan politics for LessWrong and downvoted all the comments in the thread.
I think that a good policy would be to move this kind of discussions to the monthly Politics thread. (By which I mean not only that Stuart’s original post should have been on there, as someone else said, but also that when a discussion like this one about the Tea Party emerges organically in a non-politics post, a moderator should move the whole subthread to the Politics thread).
Haha, and now the evidence request comment has been voted back up to zero but the one asking why the original was downvoted has been downvoted. Prediction: this post will also be downvoted.
Ah well, whether or not someone out there dislikes my contributions to it, this thread has been worthwhile because it has provided me with important data-points. The most important data-points are always the ones that surprise you. Data-point: some members of Less Wrong are Glenn Beck fans.
Honestly I’m getting tired of people gasping in a horror at the idea that in a readership of hundreds, a single person downvoted them. I also get downvoted. I don’t always feel those downvotes are deserved. Sometimes those comments get upvoted back to zero or beyond, sometimes not. I don’t keep complaining about every single downvote that I feel is undeserved, wasting time and space.
I’ve not downvoted you, but speaking generally I’m very likely to downvote people complaining about downvotes.
Your annoyance has been noted. Keep in mind, though, that I had asked a question in an attempt to see things from Eugine_Nier’s point of view, and that at the time I made the complaining post I hadn’t gotten an answer yet, but had been down-voted for my trouble. It’s poor practice for the community to punish people who make an effort to examine the evidence against their strongly-held opinions, and it’s in my best interests to rail against community behaviour that gets in the way of my own learning. I certainly don’t make a habit of whingeing about every loss of karma that seems unjustified to me—if I thought the loss of karma was deserved then I wouldn’t have made the post in the first place—but I reserve the right to kick up a stink if I think people’s down-votes are obstructing rational process. And, of course, I’m willing to cop any further karma loss that I take as a result as having been sacrificed for a worthy cause. So, go ahead down-voting complainers if that’s what makes you happy, but I’d respectfully like to tender the suggestion that occasionally complaining is the right thing to do.
Well obviously this depends on what one means by “death panels”, this article for example provides a decent argument.
4) Obama is going to take away our guns.
This one is hard to score since I suspect he’d be pushing this much harder if the Tea Party didn’t exist.
6) Fascism is a left-wing phenomenon.
You can start with this article by Eric Raymond, also read the comments.
Edit: Note this statement will depend on what one means by “left-wing”. I interpret the statement to mean “the most natural cluster in thing-space that includes movements generally called ‘left-wing’ also includes fascism.”
Edit: Note this statement will depend on what one means by “left-wing”. I interpret the statement to mean “the most natural cluster in thing-space that includes movements generally called ‘left-wing’ also includes fascism.”
The thing is that AFAIK fascism never described itself as left-wing. It sometimes describes itself as a third position, a mixture/improvement of both left-wing and right-wing ideas, but whenever it actually chose between the two it preferred to describe itself as right-wing.
It tends to be treated as “left-wing” only by those people who define left/right only by the criterion of statism—a treatment which really isn’t the historical usage...
It tends to be treated as “left-wing” only by those people who define left/right only by the criterion of statism—a treatment which really isn’t the historical usage
That part in bold should be nominated for understatement of the year.
I’m actually reading Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society right now, playing the game ‘record all instances where he criticizes conservatives or libertarians’ - so far 0.
Last night, I thought I could at least chalk up his criticism of Naziism & Italian fascism as instances 1 & 2, except he immediately launched into the standard argument that ‘no, actually those are socialisms don’t you see’. Oy vey.
Sowell is one of the best intellectuals in American conservatism right now, but that’s also clearly where he makes his home, which is disappointing from a LW perspective. The two books by him that I like best are Knowledge and Decisions and A Conflict of Visions. The first is, if I remember correctly, an updated explanation of Hayek’s insights, although the second ~60% of the book is spent on ‘historical trends’ and is probably about as biased as you would expect. The second is explicitly about politics, but its first chapter is tremendously insightful. (The latter sections of that book are basically more detailed repetition, and again I would expect the examples to be solidly conservative-leaning.)
You’ve definitively solved the issue of the political orientation of Nazism by merely noting the word “Socialism” in its title, just like a stereotypical American conservative does, without even the need to know anything about Otto and Gregor Strasser or how the left wing faction of the Nazi party was defeated, expunged and purged.
I was responding to the claim I quoted. If you’re going to intentionally misinterpret anything I write, I don’t see what the point of continuing this discussion.
The claim you quoted said “left-wing”, it didn’t say “Socialist”.
And the parts that you didn’t quote mentioned that fascism did sometimes describe as a mixture of both left-wing and right-wing ideas, just like “National Socialism” included the word “National” to appeal to right-wing nationalists, and “Socialism” to appeal to left-wingers.
If you want to make a rebuttal to my actual claim, find a place where Nazism or Fascism describes itself as “left-wing”—just left-wing, not “a response to both left and right” or “a synthesis of both left and right”, or indeed “National Socialist”.
I guess I don’t see how to properly interpret 3. Is it that Obama is a muslim AND a socialist AND a facist (which is how I took it). The first is very unlikely to be true given Obama’s record of attending Jeremiah Wright’s service.
I can see three or four that are vaguely disputable:
Obama did lower taxes for 95% of working Americans, but perhaps he raised the total amount of tax revenue the the government takes in? Maybe the Tea Party were never claiming that he would raise taxes overall, but were instead claiming that the areas in which he would raise taxes would cause a lot of harm? I can see someone defending either of these theses.
Perhaps Eugine_Nier actually does believe that global warming is a hoax.
He almost certainly does think that the Tea Party is a grass-roots movement. I can mount an argument against this but at the end of the day it depends what your criterion for “grass-roots” is. I think this one was the weakest one on the list and I wouldn’t have put it there if I was the author.
I guess maybe you could add the one about the Washington march—although the number of people who attended is a matter of fact, not opinion, perhaps the argument could be mounted that the 70000 figure excludes people who should count towards the tally, or was taken during a lull in proceedings. The rest, though? If there are Birthers on Less Wrong then… Well, that would be a disappointing discovery. We’re supposed to be good at weighing up evidence.
If there are Birthers on Less Wrong then… Well, that would be a disappointing discovery.
Frankly, the whole Birther thing reminds of how, back in the day, debates about whether a prince was actually the king’s son served as proxies for debates about whether the prince would make a good king. I think this explains why both sides seem to be much more sure of their position than the evidence warrants. (Although most of the “birthers” whose blogs I read don’t claim to know for sure that Obama wasn’t born in the US)
As for the matter of fact, I don’t know where Obama was born However, it is interesting that until he went into politics, Obama himself claimed to be born in Kenya.
The link you gave doesn’t say “Obama himself claimed to be born in Kenya”, it says that Obama’s literary agent said Obama was born in Kenya. In fact the very link you gave even offers a further link from an earlier 1990 interview that says clearly “He was born in Hawaii”
So, I’m downvoting this, as even a cursory examination of the links you gave indicate your statement to be inaccurate and misleading.
Frankly, the whole Birther thing reminds of how, back in the day, debates about whether a prince was actually the king’s son served as proxies for debates about whether the prince would make a good king.
You are being unreasonably generous to Birthers. If they wanted to discuss Obama’s qualifications and abilities then they would be discussing them explicitly. A crown prince has the lawful right to take the throne when the reigning monarch died—one of the few ways to get rid of a bad prince was to have him declared illegitimate. If Obama is a bad president then he can be voted out, no need to invent spurious reasons for his disqualification. Birthers are manufacturing doubt about Obama’s birthplace and then demanding balanced coverage of both sides of the story. That’s also what you’re doing in the last paragraph of your post: “I don’t know the truth, but I find it interesting that...” You have all the evidence you need to come to an informed opinion. Balanced coverage would be reporting the fact that he was born in Hawaii and has the birth certificate to prove it.
This strikes me as an excuse to avoid looking at the evidence being presented.
No, the evidence is the birth certificate. I’ve looked at it. Saying “I don’t know, but I find it interesting...” is offering innuendo in the place of evidence, since you seem to believe the birth certificate is real, which means the “born in Kenya” claim has to be incorrect.
Glenn Beck himself is definitely smarter than most Americans, but he’s never let that get in the way of being a frothing lunatic.
What you mean is that you disagree with him on a lot of issues, for each one consider the possibility that it is you who is being a lunatic.
Let me be very clear, I’m not calling Beck a lunatic solely on grounds of his policy. His policy is radical and I disagree with it, but that isn’t my main piece of evidence, it’s the cherry on the top. This is my main evidence:
This president I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture....I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.
–on President Obama, July 28, 2009
I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. … No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus—band—Do, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore,’ and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realize, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn’t choke him to death.’ And you know, well, I’m not sure.
–responding to the question “What would people do for $50 million?”, “The Glenn Beck Program,” May 17, 2005
Al Gore’s not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization...And you must silence all dissenting voices. That’s what Hitler did. That’s what Al Gore, the U.N., and everybody on the global warming bandwagon [are doing].
–”The Glenn Beck Program,” May 1, 2007
So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research. … Eugenics. In case you don’t know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. … The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening.
–”The Glenn Beck Program,” March 9, 2009
I don’t think we came from monkeys. I think that’s ridiculous. I haven’t seen a half-monkey, half-person yet.
– May 18, 2010
They [Democrats in Congress] believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You’re going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.
– June 9, 2010
The most used phrase in my administration if I were to be President would be ’What the hell you mean we’re out of missiles?″
—Jan. 2009
I can’t be bothered writing up a summary of his conspiracy theories, but it’s worth googling his Caliphate theory. That is, google it if you don’t believe his other theory about how Google is part of a separate but equally evil conspiracy.
Wait, did I just get punk’d? Was this a serious reply that I responded to? I’m genuinely wondering, I’m not trying to make fun of you. Poe’s Law and all that.
Forgive me, I should have been more careful with the wording of my thesis.
Either Glenn Beck is actually unbalanced, or he is doing a fairly good job of pretending to be mad for ratings, in which case the character he plays is a crazy person. Either way, the “Glenn Beck” persona is still a beacon of the Tea Party and I think that is good evidence that the Tea Party is irrational.
I agree that Beck has a tendency to use let’s say “evocative rhetoric” that would certainly not pass muster on LW.
This president I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture....I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.
What exactly is so “lunatic” about this quote? Yes, the reasoning isn’t up to LW standards, but that’s true of nearly all reasoning outside LW.
I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. … No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus—band—Do, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore,’ and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realize, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn’t choke him to death.’ And you know, well, I’m not sure.
He is by no means the only public personality to fantasize about killing a prominent member of the opposing political faction.
I don’t think we came from monkeys. I think that’s ridiculous. I haven’t seen a half-monkey, half-person yet.
I disagree with him, but you may want to read this before deciding that this is obviously “lunatic”.
I can’t be bothered writing up a summary of his conspiracy theories, but it’s worth googling his Caliphate theory.
Near as I can tell, this theory stripped of the flowery language boils down to the prediction that the Muslim spring uprising will result in theocratic Islamic governments that will attempt to impose Islamic theocracy on the rest of the world to the best of their abilities. Well, in light of recent events this prediction is looking increasingly probable.
Wait, did I just get punk’d? Was this a serious reply that I responded to? I’m genuinely wondering, I’m not trying to make fun of you. Poe’s Law and all that.
Let me guess, this is the first time you’ve been in a discussion with someone whose political views are vastly different from your own.
Nothing’s wrong with being radical. I’m radical myself on many issues. But his policy is radical and I do disagree with it, so it appears to me to be radically wrong. I am making the case that readers should agree with me on this point.
What exactly is so “lunatic” about this quote? Yes, the reasoning isn’t up to LW standards, but that’s true of nearly all reasoning outside LW.
I think the suggestion that the President has a deep-seated hatred for white people is ludicrous. If you have any serious evidence that Obama is concealing a burning emnity towards people of European descent then I am willing to weigh it against the evidence I have already seen to the contrary, but at the moment it seems so unlikely to be true that I struggle to imagine how a person could seriously believe it without suffering from some severe cognitive handicap. Thus: it seems like the sort of thing only a lunatic could believe.
He is by no means the only public personality to fantasize about killing a prominent member of the opposing political faction.
Sure, I’m certain plenty of people fantasize about killing their political opponents, but how many of them actually suggest on television that they would like to do so? I’ve seen Chuck Norris do it, I’ve seen Glenn Beck do it. I’m sure there are others, but again, I think that telling the nation about how you would enjoy staring into a man’s eyes as you choked the life out of him is not the sort of thing a sane, rational person would do with sincerely.
I disagree with him, but you may want to read this before deciding that this is obviously “lunatic”.
I agree that not believing in evolution doesn’t make him insane, just radically incorrect. Perhaps that particular quote was poor evidence for the “lunatic” thesis.
His Caliphate theory predicts that hardcore socialists and communists will work together with Muslims to overthrow Israel, capitalism, The West, and any other stable countries. He posits a conspiracy.
Let me guess, this is the first time you’ve been in a discussion with someone whose political views are vastly different from your own.
No, I often engage in political debate. I enjoy it! I am an active member of a minority political party, I attend a University full of intelligent people with varied opinions, I have a wide circle of friends from a range of backgrounds, many of whom disagree with me quite strongly. I have had this exact conversation dozens of times. The fact that you consider it a possibility that I have never encountered someone who disagreed with me is bizarre to me. My assumption was that you are in the same position. I asked if you were joking because I was surprised to find a Glenn Beck apologist in one of the most rational forums on the internet, and I didn’t want to look silly if it turned out you were being sarcastic.
I’ve seen Chuck Norris do it, I’ve seen Glenn Beck do it. I’m sure there are others
All the celebrities fantasizing about killing Bush.
His Caliphate theory predicts that hardcore socialists and communists will work together with Muslims to overthrow Israel, capitalism, The West, and any other stable countries.
Well, to a large extent hardcore socialists and communists are working together with Islamists.
I asked if you were joking because I was surprised to find a Glenn Beck apologist in one of the most rational forums on the internet
The fact that you were surprised to find a Tea Party supporter here is precisely why I wondered whether you’ve had any previous experience with people who aren’t on the left.
My assumption was that you are in the same position.
Given how dominant the left is at universities this a much less likely statement.
All the celebrities fantasizing about killing Bush.
I count a professed desire to assassinate Bush as a mark against the sanity of whoever professed it, too. More people doing it doesn’t make it saner.
The fact that you were surprised to find a Tea Party supporter here is precisely why I wondered whether you’ve had any previous experience with people who aren’t on the left.
It is my experience with people who aren’t on the left that made me surprised. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you will struggle to find people outside the US (from either side of politics) who don’t think that the Tea Party are wingnuts. That said, by the wonders of the internet I have spoken to a number of Tea Party supporters, as well as reading the work of Tea Party leaders. My experiences did not dispose me to expect to find a Tea Party supporter here.
My assumption was that you are in the same position.
Given how dominant the left is at universities this a much less likely statement.
What I meant was “I assumed you had had plenty of discussions with people who disagreed with you politically, too.” I’m not implying that I’ve changed that assumption, either, just that I was surprised you didn’t reciprocate it.
I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you will struggle to find people outside the US (from either side of politics) who don’t think that the Tea Party are wingnuts.
I’m perfectly aware of this, that’s why I considered you never having encountered a Tea Party supporter before a reasonable possibility.
I don’t understand why you think dumb people with no interest in politics will keep things more moderate rather than voting for whichever extremist aligns with their poorly thought out notions. Again, it doesn’t matter if smart people are the people we want most to vote if increased voting causes them to be more outnumbered by the people we want LEAST to vote. It’s also not just smart people I care about, it’s smart people who share my views. If the base rate for people to be similar to me is 1 in a thousand, and 200 out of a thousand are people I hate, and the rest are neutral, then increased percentage of people voting causes WAY more people to vote for things I hate than it does people to vote for things I like. Even if out of that 200 you claim 150 of them already vote so that doesn’t matter, I still think the remainder of lazy people with opinions I hate still hugely outnumber those of people whose opinions I like.
It’s also not just smart people I care about, it’s smart people who share my views.
What’s wrong with stupid people who share your views? In a binary election, they could easily form more than half the electorate.
I’m honestly undecided this time around. My gut tells me the increased entertainment value of candidate A over candidate B outweighs their minor policy differences...
Surely you should be considering voting as a massive prisoner’s dilemma: when you decide whether or not to vote you aren’t just deciding for yourself, you’re also deciding for anyone who thinks similarly to you. I’m not saying that your individual vote is going to make any noticeable difference, but the votes of every jaded rationalist in America on the other hand...
Remember you are likely to overestimate how much other people’s decision process is similar to yours. I must have missed the software update when we implemented TDT on voter brains.
Of course, that doesn’t constitute a conclusive argument, but consider what voting actually costs you. At worst, it’s an hour of your time, and since you’re probably spending half an hour on a forum on the internet telling people (amongst other things) how you’re not going to vote, you can’t reasonably say that sacrificing that hour of you life is too big a utility loss.
I try not to be hypocrite as much as possible. If I say voting is a bad idea, I hope most people who know me will agree this is a good indication that I don’t vote either. Also unlike with voting, I actually think I could perhaps change peoples minds, I view it as sanity training. More sane people is a good thing since they have positive externalities.
If I had my way, voting would be compulsory in every democracy on the planet.
Please no!
I’m not saying that democracy is the best way of doing things, but if some countries ARE democracies then we should at least try to do mitigate the negative effects of the system.
Democracies in say Western Europe actually only work as well as they do because of the competent civil service and respect people have for experts, which de facto radically limits how much politicians can do, especially since the process needed for them to fire any of these people is usually not worth the effort if it is possible at all. How would your relationship with your boss change if he couldn’t fire you?
Argentina have the best system—voting is compulsory once you’re over 18, but you can refuse to vote if you formally express this intention to the authorities at least 48 hours before the election. That way, nobody is forced to vote if they don’t want to, but it takes the same amount of effort to abstain as it does to vote, so you don’t lose moderates to laziness.
That sounds ok.
If anyone has an argument against voting, I’d be interested to hear it.
It is a ritual that contributes to belief. Why do you think Islam has obligatory praying several times a day?
It is a waste of time. A small but obvious one. Like buying lottery tickets is a small but obvious waste of money.
Large voter participation legitimize government action that in fact has very little to do with the political process.
Voting is associated with democracy, democracy is a bad idea ask Aristotle.
I don’t need to argue with friends and family because I wouldn’t vote for their candidate.
I must have missed the software update when we implemented TDT on voter brains.
I think you’re having it the other way around—TDT is partially based on the idea that “when you decide, you aren’t deciding just for yourself”, it’s not the idea which requires TDT...
In this case, you’re not voting just for yourself, you’re voting for all the people who’d vote the same party as you for roughly the same reasons. And if you don’t vote, you’re not voting for all the people who likewise don’t bother to vote for roughly the same reasons as you...
Yes, you can say that you are voting for a block or deciding to vote for a block, even if those people haven’t heard of TDT, as long as TDT doesn’t change your decision. But if you use TDT to actually make the decision to vote, you are now very different from the people who have not heard of it and you are not controlling their decision.
For example, say that economists don’t vote, but have political consensus ;-) A lone economist cannot use TDT to vote the block, because the others haven’t heard of it and aren’t going to vote.
But if you use TDT to actually make the decision to vote, you are now very different from the people who have not heard of it and you are not controlling their decision.
Fortunately thanks to evolution most people (at least the ones who haven’t reasoned themselves out of it) have an intuitive understanding of TDT even if they haven’t heard the term.
Yes, it is reasonable to analyze normal people’s voting in terms of TDT, at least to some extent. If you were going to vote anyways, you can use TDT to justify it.
But if you explicitly use TDT to decide to vote or to decide to put more effort into choosing your vote, you are not normal and your vote becomes less correlated with the large block of normal people. I was very serious about the economist example. Many economists don’t vote for CDT reasons. If an economist uses TDT to reject that line of argument, that doesn’t cause other economists to vote. Similarly, most people can’t use TDT to decide to invest in more informed vote.
If you were swayed against voting only by arguments found in the same place you found TDT, it is reasonable to let them cancel out and consider your vote entangled with the votes of people who have heard of neither.
you are now very different from the people who have not heard of it and you are not controlling their decision.
That’s a false binary view of the issue (that you either control something or not control it). Even the word “controlling” is highly misleading. I’m talking about moral responsibility. We are morally responsible for the decision we make, which is indicative of our values and our level of intelligence. We’re morally responsible for this decision no matter how many times it’s made (for similar reasons) throughout the population.
A thief is therefore in a sense partially morally responsible for all thefts. A murderer is therefore in a sense partially morally responsible for all murders. And a non-voter is therefore in a sense partially morally responsible for all non-votings.
I’m inclined to think that everyone affects the Overton window, but some people affect it more than others. People who commit new crimes expand the range of what’s thinkable more than people who commit the usual crimes.
except none of these things generalize. You’re only morally responsible for people in the same situation as yourself. Shooting someone who is about to kill you is not morally equivalent to shooting someone for fun, and someone who shoots in self defense is not morally responsible for all shootings, just for all shootings in self defense.
You’re only morally responsible for people in the same situation as yourself. Shooting someone who is about to kill you is not morally equivalent to shooting someone for fun
Agreed. That’s why I indicated “made for similar reasons”.
This assumes non-voters who use the same decision process as me are common. Also assumes that for those who do use the same decision process our interests and opinions about politics are aligned.
My individual vote is unlikely to make a difference. But it’s pretty easy to define relatively small voting blocs (i.e. farmers in Kansas) that would alter the results of elections if their voting behavior radically changed. If I really do have preferences in the achievable sections of policyspace, there are things I should do, right? Even if my mechanical hardware imposes limits on how ideal my decisionmaking is.
Of course, none of that applies if one does not have preferences in the achievable sections of policyspace.
This is why I was super fascinated by the idea of a bunch of libertarians moving to New Hampshire to become a powerful voting block and institute libertarian policies, but it seems to have died out.
FWIW, so far about 1,000 of the Free Staters have moved to New Hampshire, and 12 of the Free Staters have been elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives.
There are a lot of people. If we divide even vaguely evenly, all I get is a nanoslice.
I don’t recall mentioning pursuing that goal. I don’t think it is a good in itself. For starters I bet you agree children don’t need that nanoslice of power. But ok I’ll accept this temporarily for the sake of argument.
The thing is if you do this and are a orthodox LessWrong consquentalist you get some strange results.
Should one oppose those greedy activists grabbing more nanoslices of power for themselves? Or those internet addicts who keep creating new political propaganda? Or the NYT editor board which decides thousands of votes with the stroke of a pen? Or that NGO employed advisor who has so much power over which policy ends up adopted in Democratic Backwaterstan?
Non-exclusive ways to become influential in how society is organized.
Get rich
Become a “pillar of the community” (Active member in some quasi-charity)
Special Interest Litigation
Become a political activist
These acts can be mutually supporting. But some of them are more available than others to particular people. And the last choice I listed is heavily committed to trying to influence voting behaviors. Groups like the Sierra Club or the National Rifle Association are very powerful—and that power would vanish or massively decrease if all their members committed to not voting.
Voting suffers from substantial tragedy-of-the-commons issues. That doesn’t mean it is pointless.
Konkvistador, you are on record as being skeptical of the idea of consent of the governed because you think the concept is too ambiguous to implement. I readily acknowledge that arguments for voting rely on consent of the governed / government responsive to the people being coherent/implementable concepts.
I just wonder whether this discussion is more than disguised disagreement about the underlying concepts. In short, if counterfactual-Konkvistador accepted the idea of consent of the governed, would counter-K still be as hostile as you to the idea of voting?
If not, I respectfully suggest we discuss our actual disagreement rather than talking past each other on this proxy issue.
I’m trying to see how you get from this to “Voting is never rational in our current system.”
Because there are so many things that regular people who vote aren’t doing that could give them more influence over the outcome of the political process.
There’s no Omega, so why not take the nanoslice of power that’s readily available, in addition to whatever you can get by trying for more? It appears to me that doing both maximizes the expected payoff in all probable contexts.
Opportunity costs, in short. If you’re giving up more resource-equivalent time on that nanoslice of power than you expect it to return in dividends, it’s not worth your effort—and depending on how you do the counting, a lot of prominent examples return so little that it doesn’t take much time outlay for this to be the case.
In the specific case of voting, though, there are signaling effects to consider that might overwhelm its conventional dividends. Jurisdictions like Australia where voting is mandatory also change the incentive landscape.
My individual vote is unlikely to make a difference. But it’s pretty easy to define relatively small voting blocs (i.e. farmers in Kansas) that would alter the results of elections if their voting behavior radically changed.
Perhaps a given Kansas voter is obstructing a policy or candidate you favor, and you would be pleased if he changed his vote. Wouldn’t you be fully half as pleased if he merely abstained from voting? My intuition is that it is far more than twice as difficult to change a vote than to discourage a vote.
Oh hey, I drafted a reply to this comment and then accidentally ctrl+w’d the tab before I hit the button. Whoops! Damn, it was a long one too and not I have to retype it...
I try not to be hypocrite as much as possible. If I say voting is a bad idea, I hope most people who know me will agree this is a good indication that I don’t vote either. Also unlike with voting, I actually think I could perhaps change peoples minds, I view it as sanity training. More sane people is a good thing since they have positive externalities.
I wasn’t trying to convince you to keep arguing against voting but vote in secret, I was presenting an argument that voting was actually a good idea and that you should advocate it. I also wasn’t trying to antagonise you or anything like that, just trying to inject a little humour into the debate. Which is not to say that I think I DID antagonise you, but until someone invents a keyboard that can convey the emotional content of a sentence I’m going to err on the side of caution.
I’m not saying that democracy is the best way of doing things, but if some countries ARE democracies then we should at least try to do mitigate the negative effects of the system.
Democracies in say Western Europe actually only work as well as they do because of the competent civil service and respect people have for experts, which de facto radically limits how much politicians can do, especially since the process needed for them to fire any of these people is usually not worth the effort if it is possible at all. How would your relationship with your boss change if he couldn’t fire you?
I’m not sure if this was a rebuttal? I mean, no matter why democracies in Western Europe are working well, surely this doesn’t change the fact that we should mitigate the negative qualities of a democracy? I actually thought I’d be on firm ground with you here, since you’re advocating a change away from democracy and I’m arguing that while we still have democracy we should try to make sure it doesn’t cause too much havoc. AFAIK most Western European democracies don’t have compulsory voting, if that’s what you were getting at. Forgive me if I am missing the point here.
It is a ritual that contributes to belief. Why do you think Islam has obligatory praying several times a day?
I would agree with this point if I thought the effect was significant, but I think that having to vote once a year reduces this effect to complete negligibility.
It is a waste of time. A small but obvious one. Like buying lottery tickets is a small but obvious waste of money.
Sure, but that only matters if you weren’t going to waste the time anyway. I mean, if you were going to lose that money down the back of the couch anyway you might as well blow it on lottery tickets. I’m not saying it’s a good idea to waste resources, definitely not, but even the most organised, motivated person has one hour free a year in which they could vote without sacrificing some other important activity. If you genuinely do not have an hour free then you’re the sort of person I want voting, and I respectfully request that you delegate an hour’s worth of work to me so that you can go vote. EDIT: And of course I don’t actually agree that it’s a complete waste of time—I think it produces marginal benefit or I’d be agreeing with you.
Large voter participation legitimize government action that in fact has very little to do with the political process.
I’m not sure which government action you’re talking about here, but government action doesn’t need legitimising, it’s legitimised in almost everyone’s eyes. Conversely, not voting in a system where it isn’t compulsory to vote doesn’t delegitimise the government. If anything, you should want voting to be compulsory so you can flout the rules to draw attention to the fact that democracy is a bad way of doing things. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but non-compulsory voting isn’t actually a step away from democracy, it’s just a step into a different type of democracy. Swapping to non-compulsory voting doesn’t make it any more likely that a country will abandon democracy altogether.
I don’t need to argue with friends and family because I wouldn’t vote for their candidate.
I think this was probably a bit facetious, since it’s relatively small-scale compared to your other arguments, but on the chance it wasn’t… Arguing with your friends and family about political allegiances is actually a big point in favour of compulsory voting if you ask me—it forces people to think about politics. If my brother has always voted to support Americans Against Contraception (or whatever), then of his friends who vote, most of them probably share his political views. But if everyone has to vote, he’ll start meeting people who vote the other way. The more arguments he starts with sane people, the more likely they are to convert him.
The problem with democracy is rational ignorance and the problem of collective action—the famous example is the sugar subsidy in the United States. Using toy numbers, one might suggest that the average American pays $1 more per year for sugar because of those policies. By simple multiplication, that means the policy is worth ~ $300M to the sugar industry.
Why do situations like this persist?
1) I’d spend more organizing the group to end these policies than I’d ever save on sugar (the problem of collective action)
2) Even taking the time to learn about the problem is a waste for the average individual (rational ignorance).
Forcing people to vote doesn’t solve these problems, it just forces people to make a decision when they would admit they don’t have enough information to make the decision that truly reflects their preferences.
Never voting is probably the wrong answer because being predictably irrelevant to a decision is not the way to influence the decision in one’s favor. But decision-making when decision-makers lack the resources to effectively consider the issues is not a very tractable problem. Consider the example of the local politicians who change their names (a) to famous names, or (b) to appear earlier on the list of names on the ballot.
Forcing people to vote doesn’t solve these problems, it just forces people to make a decision when they would admit they don’t have enough information to make the decision that truly reflects their preferences.
Placing constitutional limitations on the power of government might be a better solution. “No subsidies for anyone” seems more stable than arguing over each specific subsidy.
“No subsidies for anyone” seems more stable than arguing over each specific subsidy.
It’s more stable, but hard to define, let alone implement. All government spending benefits somebody—and usually there are un-obvious beneficiaries. For example, road construction helps the construction business and also those who use the roads and those who own property near the road. So you can’t really put “no subsidies” in the Constitution in a way that’s judicially or politically enforceable, at least if you want to maintain any of the sort of government services that society assumes will be there.
The problem with non-compulsory voting is it means that only the people who care strongly enough about the elections to get off the internet and drive to a polling booth are the ones who have their voices heard. This means that you lose a lot of moderate, sane, rational voters but keep all of the rabid nutjobs.
OTOH, you lose a lot of ignorant, clueless, or just lazy voters who have no basis for forming an opinion, and the ones who have the voices heard are the ones who cared enough to study the issues, even if their study was one-sided.
Push the problem a step back, and my thought here is compulsory political study rather than compulsory voting.
See my comment re: the Tea Party to Drethelin below—I think extremism is a far stronger motivator to vote than intelligence. Note that Konkvistador doesn’t appear to be voting, and for him to be on this board in the first place is a strong endorsement of his intelligence. I definitely agree about compulsory political study though. Also compulsory epistemology, ethics and statistics, etc.
The problem is that essentially nobody thinks similar to you. In particular, there are only a few hundred LWers, who are geographically scattered, not politically unified, and who don’t all even think similarly enough to agree that one should vote for the reasons you’ve given.
I agree that that is a downside of compulsory voting, but at the moment my strong suspicion is that it’s offset by the dilution of the crazies—see my reply to Drethelin above re: the Tea Party.
Note also that LWers are not necessarily the demographic that I associate most strongly with, and in fact that I don’t associate with any rigidly defined demographic at all. There are definitely people out there who think like me, though, and if we vote as a bloc then we have more power than just me alone. This is why people underestimate their own voting power, and this is why people who care at all about not being lead by lunatics should vote.
One doesn’t have to oppose democracy to advise folks not to vote. Jason Brennan makes a lot of pro-democracy, pro-civic engagement arguments along these lines. Here’s the abstract to his paper “Polluting the polls”
Just because one has the right to vote does not mean just any vote is right. Citizens should not vote badly. This duty to avoid voting badly is grounded in a general duty not to engage in collectively harmful activities when the personal cost of restraint is low. Good governance is a public good. Bad governance is a public bad. We should not be contributing to public bads when the benefit to ourselves is low. Many democratic theorists agree that we shouldn’t vote badly, but that’s because they think we should vote well. This demands too much of citizens.
Forgive me if I’m posting in ignorance of some well-worn argument that is common knowledge on this board, but I think your cynicism is misplaced.
Surely you should be considering voting as a massive prisoner’s dilemma: when you decide whether or not to vote you aren’t just deciding for yourself, you’re also deciding for anyone who thinks similarly to you. I’m not saying that your individual vote is going to make any noticeable difference, but the votes of every jaded rationalist in America on the other hand...
Of course, that doesn’t constitute a conclusive argument, but consider what voting actually costs you. At worst, it’s an hour of your time, and since you’re probably spending half an hour on a forum on the internet telling people (amongst other things) how you’re not going to vote, you can’t reasonably say that sacrificing that hour of you life is too big a utility loss.
If I had my way, voting would be compulsory in every democracy on the planet. I’m not saying that democracy is the best way of doing things, but if some countries ARE democracies then we should at least try to do mitigate the negative effects of the system. The problem with non-compulsory voting is it means that only the people who care strongly enough about the elections to get off the internet and drive to a polling booth are the ones who have their voices heard. This means that you lose a lot of moderate, sane, rational voters but keep all of the rabid nutjobs. Argentina have the best system—voting is compulsory once you’re over 18, but you can refuse to vote if you formally express this intention to the authorities at least 48 hours before the election. That way, nobody is forced to vote if they don’t want to, but it takes the same amount of effort to abstain as it does to vote, so you don’t lose moderates to laziness.
Of course, I live in one of the ten countries in the world where compulsory voting is enforced (Australia), so I’m aware that I could be suffering familiarity bias. I came up with the above argument in favour of compulsory voting independently, though, and I’ve never actually heard anyone else say that compulsory voting was important (or even a good thing). If anyone has an argument against voting, I’d be interested to hear it.
By voting, you will not make (or probably even encourage) every jaded rationalist in America to vote, so from a decision theoretical standpoint that observation is irrelevant. The instrumental value of voting is zero. There may be other values (signaling, pleasure, moral), but there is no instrumental value. You will not influence the election, so the expected value of any policy changes arising from just your vote is zero. Once you think of it strictly in terms of decision theory, the relevant variables should present themselves.
For those of us who don’t care that much about signaling interest in government and don’t think there’s any particular moral duty to vote (I think there is frequently a moral duty to abstain), wasting an hour on an internet forum is a much better use of our time.
I know it’s normal in some countries, but I think this is an AWFUL policy. Why? Consider it in economic terms of negative and positive externalities. Say I’m a good voter who knows a thing or two about policy. When I vote, it very (very very very) marginally affects policy outcomes. When a bunch of good voters vote, policy outcomes become better.
Now turn it around. When a bad voter votes, it very (very very very) marginally affects policy outcomes. When a bunch of bad voters vote, policy outcomes become worse.
This is wonderfully analogous to pollution. By leaving a fan on all day, you only very marginally contribute to global warming. So, even if you’re interested in stopping global warming for selfish reasons, there’s nothing you can personally do to hinder it, so why bother? But there’s no personal incentive for anybody to bother, so global warming happens. Meanwhile, global warming affects more people than just you, and bad voting does the same. When you indulge your idiotic ideas of good policy, it doesn’t have any effect on the election, so it doesn’t have any effect on you. But since everybody’s doing it, policy gets dumb.
So the question becomes, when comparing voluntary and mandatory voting, which types of voters are more likely to abstain in a voluntary system?
I don’t see the need to hunt for the stats right now, but if you don’t believe me, I’ll happily scan some relevant sections from Scott Althaus’ Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics and Carpini and Keeter’s What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matter. The basic story is this: In America, people who are educated are way more likely to vote than those who aren’t, and uneducated people have demonstrably and outrageously boneheaded beliefs about policy. Forcing them to vote is like mandating bad policy.
(Hence what I said earlier about a moral duty to abstain. Like there might be a moral duty to reduce your carbon consumption, even though it will have no effect on the environment, there might be a moral duty to abstain from voting if you’re an ignoramus.)
That’s not quite what I meant. If people think similarly to you, then they will most likely make similar decisions as you. Now that I’ve suggested this to you, you think similarly to all the people out there who realised this themselves or had someone point it out to them. So when you decide whether or not to vote, you should do so in the knowledge that there are a bunch of people out there who will probably end up making the same decision as you purely because they think similarly to you. You’re not just deciding for yourself, you’re deciding for everyone who thinks like you.
EDIT: Also, I disagree with you about the negative effects of compulsory voting. There are definitely some, but I think the negative effects of NON-compulsory voting are potentially worse. See my comment to Drethelin below.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57347634/poll-nearly-8-in-10-americans-believe-in-angels/
The vast majority of humans are wrong about many, MANY fundamental things. The fewer of them controlling outcomes the better. Compulsory voting only makes sense if you think the number of smart informed people who don’t vote out of laziness outnumbers the number of idiots who don’t vote out of laziness.
I think the majority of people who don’t vote out of laziness are neither extremely smart nor extremely stupid, neither extremely right-wing nor extremely leftist, neither extremely gay nor extremely straight, etc. That’s the point, they’re not extremists.
I know that the lazy moderates aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, but I also know that once they’re out of the picture there’s much less ballast to keep the radical lunatics in line. To use a specific example: I think that the Tea Party does a better job of convincing their lazy supporters to vote than either of the major parties do, and if we accept that logic then the inescapable conclusion is that the Tea Party’s influence is being inflated by America’s non-compulsory voting system.
It’s not just the dullards who aren’t voting, either. I think you would be shocked at how smart and well informed you have to be before you actually decide you care enough to vote. Just look at Konkvistador—surely LWians and their ilk are the people we want MOST to vote?
You do know tea party activists are actually above average on nearly any stat you’d care to name? Education, political knowledge, …
Well sure! Any plan on a revolution to make sure only we vote? Because otherwise a very eloquent Church pastor or Harvard professor can single-handedly bring more voting power to bear than we.
It’s weird, I had considered using that same fact as an argument for MY side of this debate, but I cut it for the sake of brevity. To be clear, are you suggesting that the Tea Party is a good influence on American (or world) politics? Sure, they’re smarter than the average American, but clearly being slightly smarter doesn’t translate to a similar increase in sanity. Glenn Beck himself is definitely smarter than most Americans, but he’s never let that get in the way of being a frothing lunatic. I could mention a whole swathe of examples of how despite being smarter, the Tea Party is also far more radical and morally objectionable than Americans on average, but I’ll just link some articles because I have class in half an hour and want keep this quick.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm/2010/05/10_fictious_tea_party_beliefs.html http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1903/tea-party-movement-religion-social-issues-conservative-christian
The reason we want to raise average voter IQ is because we think this will make the voters saner on average, but in the case of the Tea Party this clearly hasn’t happened. This is exactly why I brought them up—these people haven’t been motivated to vote by an appeal to their intelligence, or there’d be a hell of a lot more of them and their policies would be different. Rather, they’ve been motivated by an appeal to their fear and anger and radicalism. You can’t get lazy moderates to the voting booths by whipping them up into misguided fury, but you CAN get lazy radicals like that, so by making voting non-compulsory you hand people like Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, etc, a much greater proportion of the votes than they deserve. You don’t have to be smart to realise the Tea Party is wrong, just sane. Conversely, you don’t have to be dumb to be insane.
I can’t speak for Konkvistador but I certainly do.
What you mean is that you disagree with him on a lot of issues, for each one consider the possibility that it is you who is being a lunatic.
Wow, 6 of the 10 “fictitious” beliefs appear to actually be true (Edit: I suspect you disagree but debating them here might run even for afoul of the taboo against politics, or not whatever). As for the other 4 I don’t have enough information to assign probabilities either way.
Which 6? I know very little about any of these issues, but my priors on how politics work in general (mostly successful-politicians-are-never-too-radical and they-always-maintain-status-quo) make it difficult to score any 6 of these as being probable.
2 through 7, although now that I read it again 10 is at least partially true, i.e., the Tea Party is in fact a genuine grass roots movement.
And yet the political status quo today is different from what it was 50 years ago and very different from what it was 100 years ago.
I would be interested to see your supporting evidence for 2, 4 and 6. Don’t feel that you have to argue them, I won’t argue against them, but if you could link me to some sources or something in the spirit of educating me I would be appreciative.
Really? Someone voted this down? I was expecting to take a pretty big karma hit for expressing explicit political opinions on here, but this post didn’t even offer anything that could be disagreed with, let alone fallacious reasoning. I was honestly and humbly asking for more information. I’ve lost 23 karma points today. 22 of those losses I wouldn’t have minded, but this one is just nonsense. Did somebody just go through and downvote everything I’ve ever said or something?
You may have a stalker. As far as I can tell, there are a small number of people using the voting system against persons they dislike rather than against low-quality comment content.
These are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they can go together, the latter forming the basis for one possible sense of the former.
Notice that Eugine_Nier’s comments have also been voted down en masse. My guess is that at least one person thought that the whole discussion was too close to partisan politics for LessWrong and downvoted all the comments in the thread.
I think that a good policy would be to move this kind of discussions to the monthly Politics thread. (By which I mean not only that Stuart’s original post should have been on there, as someone else said, but also that when a discussion like this one about the Tea Party emerges organically in a non-politics post, a moderator should move the whole subthread to the Politics thread).
Haha, and now the evidence request comment has been voted back up to zero but the one asking why the original was downvoted has been downvoted. Prediction: this post will also be downvoted.
Ah well, whether or not someone out there dislikes my contributions to it, this thread has been worthwhile because it has provided me with important data-points. The most important data-points are always the ones that surprise you. Data-point: some members of Less Wrong are Glenn Beck fans.
Honestly I’m getting tired of people gasping in a horror at the idea that in a readership of hundreds, a single person downvoted them. I also get downvoted. I don’t always feel those downvotes are deserved. Sometimes those comments get upvoted back to zero or beyond, sometimes not. I don’t keep complaining about every single downvote that I feel is undeserved, wasting time and space.
I’ve not downvoted you, but speaking generally I’m very likely to downvote people complaining about downvotes.
Your annoyance has been noted. Keep in mind, though, that I had asked a question in an attempt to see things from Eugine_Nier’s point of view, and that at the time I made the complaining post I hadn’t gotten an answer yet, but had been down-voted for my trouble. It’s poor practice for the community to punish people who make an effort to examine the evidence against their strongly-held opinions, and it’s in my best interests to rail against community behaviour that gets in the way of my own learning. I certainly don’t make a habit of whingeing about every loss of karma that seems unjustified to me—if I thought the loss of karma was deserved then I wouldn’t have made the post in the first place—but I reserve the right to kick up a stink if I think people’s down-votes are obstructing rational process. And, of course, I’m willing to cop any further karma loss that I take as a result as having been sacrificed for a worthy cause. So, go ahead down-voting complainers if that’s what makes you happy, but I’d respectfully like to tender the suggestion that occasionally complaining is the right thing to do.
Well obviously this depends on what one means by “death panels”, this article for example provides a decent argument.
This one is hard to score since I suspect he’d be pushing this much harder if the Tea Party didn’t exist.
You can start with this article by Eric Raymond, also read the comments.
Edit: Note this statement will depend on what one means by “left-wing”. I interpret the statement to mean “the most natural cluster in thing-space that includes movements generally called ‘left-wing’ also includes fascism.”
The thing is that AFAIK fascism never described itself as left-wing. It sometimes describes itself as a third position, a mixture/improvement of both left-wing and right-wing ideas, but whenever it actually chose between the two it preferred to describe itself as right-wing.
It tends to be treated as “left-wing” only by those people who define left/right only by the criterion of statism—a treatment which really isn’t the historical usage...
That part in bold should be nominated for understatement of the year.
I’m actually reading Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society right now, playing the game ‘record all instances where he criticizes conservatives or libertarians’ - so far 0.
Last night, I thought I could at least chalk up his criticism of Naziism & Italian fascism as instances 1 & 2, except he immediately launched into the standard argument that ‘no, actually those are socialisms don’t you see’. Oy vey.
(It’s really not a good book so far.)
Sowell is one of the best intellectuals in American conservatism right now, but that’s also clearly where he makes his home, which is disappointing from a LW perspective. The two books by him that I like best are Knowledge and Decisions and A Conflict of Visions. The first is, if I remember correctly, an updated explanation of Hayek’s insights, although the second ~60% of the book is spent on ‘historical trends’ and is probably about as biased as you would expect. The second is explicitly about politics, but its first chapter is tremendously insightful. (The latter sections of that book are basically more detailed repetition, and again I would expect the examples to be solidly conservative-leaning.)
I wrote a short review explaining what I disliked enough that I didn’t bother finishing: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/417975794
National Socialism.
You’ve definitively solved the issue of the political orientation of Nazism by merely noting the word “Socialism” in its title, just like a stereotypical American conservative does, without even the need to know anything about Otto and Gregor Strasser or how the left wing faction of the Nazi party was defeated, expunged and purged.
I was responding to the claim I quoted. If you’re going to intentionally misinterpret anything I write, I don’t see what the point of continuing this discussion.
The claim you quoted said “left-wing”, it didn’t say “Socialist”.
And the parts that you didn’t quote mentioned that fascism did sometimes describe as a mixture of both left-wing and right-wing ideas, just like “National Socialism” included the word “National” to appeal to right-wing nationalists, and “Socialism” to appeal to left-wingers.
If you want to make a rebuttal to my actual claim, find a place where Nazism or Fascism describes itself as “left-wing”—just left-wing, not “a response to both left and right” or “a synthesis of both left and right”, or indeed “National Socialist”.
Nationalism is not limited to the right. Depending the time and place nationalism can be either right or left wing.
Thanks! :)
I guess I don’t see how to properly interpret 3. Is it that Obama is a muslim AND a socialist AND a facist (which is how I took it). The first is very unlikely to be true given Obama’s record of attending Jeremiah Wright’s service.
Unless Wright is also a muslim, I suppose.
I was interpreting the slashes as ORs.
I can see three or four that are vaguely disputable:
Obama did lower taxes for 95% of working Americans, but perhaps he raised the total amount of tax revenue the the government takes in? Maybe the Tea Party were never claiming that he would raise taxes overall, but were instead claiming that the areas in which he would raise taxes would cause a lot of harm? I can see someone defending either of these theses.
Perhaps Eugine_Nier actually does believe that global warming is a hoax.
He almost certainly does think that the Tea Party is a grass-roots movement. I can mount an argument against this but at the end of the day it depends what your criterion for “grass-roots” is. I think this one was the weakest one on the list and I wouldn’t have put it there if I was the author.
I guess maybe you could add the one about the Washington march—although the number of people who attended is a matter of fact, not opinion, perhaps the argument could be mounted that the 70000 figure excludes people who should count towards the tally, or was taken during a lull in proceedings. The rest, though? If there are Birthers on Less Wrong then… Well, that would be a disappointing discovery. We’re supposed to be good at weighing up evidence.
Frankly, the whole Birther thing reminds of how, back in the day, debates about whether a prince was actually the king’s son served as proxies for debates about whether the prince would make a good king. I think this explains why both sides seem to be much more sure of their position than the evidence warrants. (Although most of the “birthers” whose blogs I read don’t claim to know for sure that Obama wasn’t born in the US)
As for the matter of fact, I don’t know where Obama was born However, it is interesting that until he went into politics, Obama himself claimed to be born in Kenya.
You may have just disqualified yourself for a Bayesian...
The link you gave doesn’t say “Obama himself claimed to be born in Kenya”, it says that Obama’s literary agent said Obama was born in Kenya. In fact the very link you gave even offers a further link from an earlier 1990 interview that says clearly “He was born in Hawaii”
So, I’m downvoting this, as even a cursory examination of the links you gave indicate your statement to be inaccurate and misleading.
You are being unreasonably generous to Birthers. If they wanted to discuss Obama’s qualifications and abilities then they would be discussing them explicitly. A crown prince has the lawful right to take the throne when the reigning monarch died—one of the few ways to get rid of a bad prince was to have him declared illegitimate. If Obama is a bad president then he can be voted out, no need to invent spurious reasons for his disqualification. Birthers are manufacturing doubt about Obama’s birthplace and then demanding balanced coverage of both sides of the story. That’s also what you’re doing in the last paragraph of your post: “I don’t know the truth, but I find it interesting that...” You have all the evidence you need to come to an informed opinion. Balanced coverage would be reporting the fact that he was born in Hawaii and has the birth certificate to prove it.
This strikes me as an excuse to avoid looking at the evidence being presented.
Birthers were claiming that the certificate was fake. That was at about the point I stopped paying attention.
No, the evidence is the birth certificate. I’ve looked at it. Saying “I don’t know, but I find it interesting...” is offering innuendo in the place of evidence, since you seem to believe the birth certificate is real, which means the “born in Kenya” claim has to be incorrect.
Let me be very clear, I’m not calling Beck a lunatic solely on grounds of his policy. His policy is radical and I disagree with it, but that isn’t my main piece of evidence, it’s the cherry on the top. This is my main evidence:
–on President Obama, July 28, 2009
–responding to the question “What would people do for $50 million?”, “The Glenn Beck Program,” May 17, 2005
–”The Glenn Beck Program,” May 1, 2007
–”The Glenn Beck Program,” March 9, 2009
– May 18, 2010
– June 9, 2010
—Jan. 2009
I can’t be bothered writing up a summary of his conspiracy theories, but it’s worth googling his Caliphate theory. That is, google it if you don’t believe his other theory about how Google is part of a separate but equally evil conspiracy.
Wait, did I just get punk’d? Was this a serious reply that I responded to? I’m genuinely wondering, I’m not trying to make fun of you. Poe’s Law and all that.
Quotes on a tv show that achieves ratings based on sensationalism aren’t great evidence for the sanity of the main character.
Forgive me, I should have been more careful with the wording of my thesis.
Either Glenn Beck is actually unbalanced, or he is doing a fairly good job of pretending to be mad for ratings, in which case the character he plays is a crazy person. Either way, the “Glenn Beck” persona is still a beacon of the Tea Party and I think that is good evidence that the Tea Party is irrational.
What’s wrong with being “radical”?
I agree that Beck has a tendency to use let’s say “evocative rhetoric” that would certainly not pass muster on LW.
What exactly is so “lunatic” about this quote? Yes, the reasoning isn’t up to LW standards, but that’s true of nearly all reasoning outside LW.
He is by no means the only public personality to fantasize about killing a prominent member of the opposing political faction.
I disagree with him, but you may want to read this before deciding that this is obviously “lunatic”.
Near as I can tell, this theory stripped of the flowery language boils down to the prediction that the Muslim spring uprising will result in theocratic Islamic governments that will attempt to impose Islamic theocracy on the rest of the world to the best of their abilities. Well, in light of recent events this prediction is looking increasingly probable.
Let me guess, this is the first time you’ve been in a discussion with someone whose political views are vastly different from your own.
Nothing’s wrong with being radical. I’m radical myself on many issues. But his policy is radical and I do disagree with it, so it appears to me to be radically wrong. I am making the case that readers should agree with me on this point.
I think the suggestion that the President has a deep-seated hatred for white people is ludicrous. If you have any serious evidence that Obama is concealing a burning emnity towards people of European descent then I am willing to weigh it against the evidence I have already seen to the contrary, but at the moment it seems so unlikely to be true that I struggle to imagine how a person could seriously believe it without suffering from some severe cognitive handicap. Thus: it seems like the sort of thing only a lunatic could believe.
Sure, I’m certain plenty of people fantasize about killing their political opponents, but how many of them actually suggest on television that they would like to do so? I’ve seen Chuck Norris do it, I’ve seen Glenn Beck do it. I’m sure there are others, but again, I think that telling the nation about how you would enjoy staring into a man’s eyes as you choked the life out of him is not the sort of thing a sane, rational person would do with sincerely.
I agree that not believing in evolution doesn’t make him insane, just radically incorrect. Perhaps that particular quote was poor evidence for the “lunatic” thesis.
His Caliphate theory predicts that hardcore socialists and communists will work together with Muslims to overthrow Israel, capitalism, The West, and any other stable countries. He posits a conspiracy.
No, I often engage in political debate. I enjoy it! I am an active member of a minority political party, I attend a University full of intelligent people with varied opinions, I have a wide circle of friends from a range of backgrounds, many of whom disagree with me quite strongly. I have had this exact conversation dozens of times. The fact that you consider it a possibility that I have never encountered someone who disagreed with me is bizarre to me. My assumption was that you are in the same position. I asked if you were joking because I was surprised to find a Glenn Beck apologist in one of the most rational forums on the internet, and I didn’t want to look silly if it turned out you were being sarcastic.
All the celebrities fantasizing about killing Bush.
Well, to a large extent hardcore socialists and communists are working together with Islamists.
The fact that you were surprised to find a Tea Party supporter here is precisely why I wondered whether you’ve had any previous experience with people who aren’t on the left.
Given how dominant the left is at universities this a much less likely statement.
I count a professed desire to assassinate Bush as a mark against the sanity of whoever professed it, too. More people doing it doesn’t make it saner.
It is my experience with people who aren’t on the left that made me surprised. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you will struggle to find people outside the US (from either side of politics) who don’t think that the Tea Party are wingnuts. That said, by the wonders of the internet I have spoken to a number of Tea Party supporters, as well as reading the work of Tea Party leaders. My experiences did not dispose me to expect to find a Tea Party supporter here.
What I meant was “I assumed you had had plenty of discussions with people who disagreed with you politically, too.” I’m not implying that I’ve changed that assumption, either, just that I was surprised you didn’t reciprocate it.
I’m perfectly aware of this, that’s why I considered you never having encountered a Tea Party supporter before a reasonable possibility.
I don’t understand why you think dumb people with no interest in politics will keep things more moderate rather than voting for whichever extremist aligns with their poorly thought out notions. Again, it doesn’t matter if smart people are the people we want most to vote if increased voting causes them to be more outnumbered by the people we want LEAST to vote. It’s also not just smart people I care about, it’s smart people who share my views. If the base rate for people to be similar to me is 1 in a thousand, and 200 out of a thousand are people I hate, and the rest are neutral, then increased percentage of people voting causes WAY more people to vote for things I hate than it does people to vote for things I like. Even if out of that 200 you claim 150 of them already vote so that doesn’t matter, I still think the remainder of lazy people with opinions I hate still hugely outnumber those of people whose opinions I like.
What’s wrong with stupid people who share your views? In a binary election, they could easily form more than half the electorate.
I’m honestly undecided this time around. My gut tells me the increased entertainment value of candidate A over candidate B outweighs their minor policy differences...
Remember you are likely to overestimate how much other people’s decision process is similar to yours. I must have missed the software update when we implemented TDT on voter brains.
I try not to be hypocrite as much as possible. If I say voting is a bad idea, I hope most people who know me will agree this is a good indication that I don’t vote either. Also unlike with voting, I actually think I could perhaps change peoples minds, I view it as sanity training. More sane people is a good thing since they have positive externalities.
Please no!
Democracies in say Western Europe actually only work as well as they do because of the competent civil service and respect people have for experts, which de facto radically limits how much politicians can do, especially since the process needed for them to fire any of these people is usually not worth the effort if it is possible at all. How would your relationship with your boss change if he couldn’t fire you?
That sounds ok.
It is a ritual that contributes to belief. Why do you think Islam has obligatory praying several times a day?
It is a waste of time. A small but obvious one. Like buying lottery tickets is a small but obvious waste of money.
Large voter participation legitimize government action that in fact has very little to do with the political process.
Voting is associated with democracy, democracy is a bad idea ask Aristotle.
I don’t need to argue with friends and family because I wouldn’t vote for their candidate.
I think you’re having it the other way around—TDT is partially based on the idea that “when you decide, you aren’t deciding just for yourself”, it’s not the idea which requires TDT...
In this case, you’re not voting just for yourself, you’re voting for all the people who’d vote the same party as you for roughly the same reasons. And if you don’t vote, you’re not voting for all the people who likewise don’t bother to vote for roughly the same reasons as you...
Yes, you can say that you are voting for a block or deciding to vote for a block, even if those people haven’t heard of TDT, as long as TDT doesn’t change your decision. But if you use TDT to actually make the decision to vote, you are now very different from the people who have not heard of it and you are not controlling their decision.
For example, say that economists don’t vote, but have political consensus ;-)
A lone economist cannot use TDT to vote the block, because the others haven’t heard of it and aren’t going to vote.
Fortunately thanks to evolution most people (at least the ones who haven’t reasoned themselves out of it) have an intuitive understanding of TDT even if they haven’t heard the term.
Yes, it is reasonable to analyze normal people’s voting in terms of TDT, at least to some extent. If you were going to vote anyways, you can use TDT to justify it.
But if you explicitly use TDT to decide to vote or to decide to put more effort into choosing your vote, you are not normal and your vote becomes less correlated with the large block of normal people. I was very serious about the economist example. Many economists don’t vote for CDT reasons. If an economist uses TDT to reject that line of argument, that doesn’t cause other economists to vote. Similarly, most people can’t use TDT to decide to invest in more informed vote.
If you were swayed against voting only by arguments found in the same place you found TDT, it is reasonable to let them cancel out and consider your vote entangled with the votes of people who have heard of neither.
That’s a false binary view of the issue (that you either control something or not control it). Even the word “controlling” is highly misleading. I’m talking about moral responsibility. We are morally responsible for the decision we make, which is indicative of our values and our level of intelligence. We’re morally responsible for this decision no matter how many times it’s made (for similar reasons) throughout the population.
A thief is therefore in a sense partially morally responsible for all thefts.
A murderer is therefore in a sense partially morally responsible for all murders.
And a non-voter is therefore in a sense partially morally responsible for all non-votings.
I’m inclined to think that everyone affects the Overton window, but some people affect it more than others. People who commit new crimes expand the range of what’s thinkable more than people who commit the usual crimes.
except none of these things generalize. You’re only morally responsible for people in the same situation as yourself. Shooting someone who is about to kill you is not morally equivalent to shooting someone for fun, and someone who shoots in self defense is not morally responsible for all shootings, just for all shootings in self defense.
Agreed. That’s why I indicated “made for similar reasons”.
This assumes non-voters who use the same decision process as me are common. Also assumes that for those who do use the same decision process our interests and opinions about politics are aligned.
My individual vote is unlikely to make a difference. But it’s pretty easy to define relatively small voting blocs (i.e. farmers in Kansas) that would alter the results of elections if their voting behavior radically changed. If I really do have preferences in the achievable sections of policyspace, there are things I should do, right? Even if my mechanical hardware imposes limits on how ideal my decisionmaking is.
Of course, none of that applies if one does not have preferences in the achievable sections of policyspace.
This is why I was super fascinated by the idea of a bunch of libertarians moving to New Hampshire to become a powerful voting block and institute libertarian policies, but it seems to have died out.
See the Free State Project.
FWIW, so far about 1,000 of the Free Staters have moved to New Hampshire, and 12 of the Free Staters have been elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives.
Of course you should! But you should be rational about it. Try to do things that give you more than a nanoslice of power.
There are a lot of people. If we divide even vaguely evenly, all I get is a nanoslice.
That’s a vast improvement over most of recorded history, when official policy was to avoid giving out any power to the majority of the populace.
I don’t recall mentioning pursuing that goal. I don’t think it is a good in itself. For starters I bet you agree children don’t need that nanoslice of power. But ok I’ll accept this temporarily for the sake of argument.
The thing is if you do this and are a orthodox LessWrong consquentalist you get some strange results.
Should one oppose those greedy activists grabbing more nanoslices of power for themselves? Or those internet addicts who keep creating new political propaganda? Or the NYT editor board which decides thousands of votes with the stroke of a pen? Or that NGO employed advisor who has so much power over which policy ends up adopted in Democratic Backwaterstan?
Putting words in my mouth isn’t nice. :)
This is not an argument about how political power should be divided. It’s an argument about whether voting can ever be a good idea.
I’m trying to see how you get from this to “Voting is never rational in our current system.”
Because voting is so very low on the list of low investment activities that give you more power.
Non-exclusive ways to become influential in how society is organized.
Get rich
Become a “pillar of the community” (Active member in some quasi-charity)
Special Interest Litigation
Become a political activist
These acts can be mutually supporting. But some of them are more available than others to particular people. And the last choice I listed is heavily committed to trying to influence voting behaviors. Groups like the Sierra Club or the National Rifle Association are very powerful—and that power would vanish or massively decrease if all their members committed to not voting.
Voting suffers from substantial tragedy-of-the-commons issues. That doesn’t mean it is pointless.
Konkvistador, you are on record as being skeptical of the idea of consent of the governed because you think the concept is too ambiguous to implement. I readily acknowledge that arguments for voting rely on consent of the governed / government responsive to the people being coherent/implementable concepts.
I just wonder whether this discussion is more than disguised disagreement about the underlying concepts. In short, if counterfactual-Konkvistador accepted the idea of consent of the governed, would counter-K still be as hostile as you to the idea of voting?
If not, I respectfully suggest we discuss our actual disagreement rather than talking past each other on this proxy issue.
Because there are so many things that regular people who vote aren’t doing that could give them more influence over the outcome of the political process.
There’s no Omega, so why not take the nanoslice of power that’s readily available, in addition to whatever you can get by trying for more? It appears to me that doing both maximizes the expected payoff in all probable contexts.
Opportunity costs, in short. If you’re giving up more resource-equivalent time on that nanoslice of power than you expect it to return in dividends, it’s not worth your effort—and depending on how you do the counting, a lot of prominent examples return so little that it doesn’t take much time outlay for this to be the case.
In the specific case of voting, though, there are signaling effects to consider that might overwhelm its conventional dividends. Jurisdictions like Australia where voting is mandatory also change the incentive landscape.
Perhaps a given Kansas voter is obstructing a policy or candidate you favor, and you would be pleased if he changed his vote. Wouldn’t you be fully half as pleased if he merely abstained from voting? My intuition is that it is far more than twice as difficult to change a vote than to discourage a vote.
Oh hey, I drafted a reply to this comment and then accidentally ctrl+w’d the tab before I hit the button. Whoops! Damn, it was a long one too and not I have to retype it...
I wasn’t trying to convince you to keep arguing against voting but vote in secret, I was presenting an argument that voting was actually a good idea and that you should advocate it. I also wasn’t trying to antagonise you or anything like that, just trying to inject a little humour into the debate. Which is not to say that I think I DID antagonise you, but until someone invents a keyboard that can convey the emotional content of a sentence I’m going to err on the side of caution.
I’m not sure if this was a rebuttal? I mean, no matter why democracies in Western Europe are working well, surely this doesn’t change the fact that we should mitigate the negative qualities of a democracy? I actually thought I’d be on firm ground with you here, since you’re advocating a change away from democracy and I’m arguing that while we still have democracy we should try to make sure it doesn’t cause too much havoc. AFAIK most Western European democracies don’t have compulsory voting, if that’s what you were getting at. Forgive me if I am missing the point here.
I would agree with this point if I thought the effect was significant, but I think that having to vote once a year reduces this effect to complete negligibility.
Sure, but that only matters if you weren’t going to waste the time anyway. I mean, if you were going to lose that money down the back of the couch anyway you might as well blow it on lottery tickets. I’m not saying it’s a good idea to waste resources, definitely not, but even the most organised, motivated person has one hour free a year in which they could vote without sacrificing some other important activity. If you genuinely do not have an hour free then you’re the sort of person I want voting, and I respectfully request that you delegate an hour’s worth of work to me so that you can go vote. EDIT: And of course I don’t actually agree that it’s a complete waste of time—I think it produces marginal benefit or I’d be agreeing with you.
I’m not sure which government action you’re talking about here, but government action doesn’t need legitimising, it’s legitimised in almost everyone’s eyes. Conversely, not voting in a system where it isn’t compulsory to vote doesn’t delegitimise the government. If anything, you should want voting to be compulsory so you can flout the rules to draw attention to the fact that democracy is a bad way of doing things. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but non-compulsory voting isn’t actually a step away from democracy, it’s just a step into a different type of democracy. Swapping to non-compulsory voting doesn’t make it any more likely that a country will abandon democracy altogether.
I think this was probably a bit facetious, since it’s relatively small-scale compared to your other arguments, but on the chance it wasn’t… Arguing with your friends and family about political allegiances is actually a big point in favour of compulsory voting if you ask me—it forces people to think about politics. If my brother has always voted to support Americans Against Contraception (or whatever), then of his friends who vote, most of them probably share his political views. But if everyone has to vote, he’ll start meeting people who vote the other way. The more arguments he starts with sane people, the more likely they are to convert him.
The problem with democracy is rational ignorance and the problem of collective action—the famous example is the sugar subsidy in the United States. Using toy numbers, one might suggest that the average American pays $1 more per year for sugar because of those policies. By simple multiplication, that means the policy is worth ~ $300M to the sugar industry.
Why do situations like this persist?
1) I’d spend more organizing the group to end these policies than I’d ever save on sugar (the problem of collective action)
2) Even taking the time to learn about the problem is a waste for the average individual (rational ignorance).
Forcing people to vote doesn’t solve these problems, it just forces people to make a decision when they would admit they don’t have enough information to make the decision that truly reflects their preferences.
Never voting is probably the wrong answer because being predictably irrelevant to a decision is not the way to influence the decision in one’s favor. But decision-making when decision-makers lack the resources to effectively consider the issues is not a very tractable problem. Consider the example of the local politicians who change their names (a) to famous names, or (b) to appear earlier on the list of names on the ballot.
Placing constitutional limitations on the power of government might be a better solution. “No subsidies for anyone” seems more stable than arguing over each specific subsidy.
It’s more stable, but hard to define, let alone implement. All government spending benefits somebody—and usually there are un-obvious beneficiaries. For example, road construction helps the construction business and also those who use the roads and those who own property near the road. So you can’t really put “no subsidies” in the Constitution in a way that’s judicially or politically enforceable, at least if you want to maintain any of the sort of government services that society assumes will be there.
OTOH, you lose a lot of ignorant, clueless, or just lazy voters who have no basis for forming an opinion, and the ones who have the voices heard are the ones who cared enough to study the issues, even if their study was one-sided.
Push the problem a step back, and my thought here is compulsory political study rather than compulsory voting.
See my comment re: the Tea Party to Drethelin below—I think extremism is a far stronger motivator to vote than intelligence. Note that Konkvistador doesn’t appear to be voting, and for him to be on this board in the first place is a strong endorsement of his intelligence. I definitely agree about compulsory political study though. Also compulsory epistemology, ethics and statistics, etc.
The problem is that essentially nobody thinks similar to you. In particular, there are only a few hundred LWers, who are geographically scattered, not politically unified, and who don’t all even think similarly enough to agree that one should vote for the reasons you’ve given.
Compulsory voting has a downside, insofar as it requires poorly motivated voters, who will also know less, to vote.
I agree that that is a downside of compulsory voting, but at the moment my strong suspicion is that it’s offset by the dilution of the crazies—see my reply to Drethelin above re: the Tea Party.
Note also that LWers are not necessarily the demographic that I associate most strongly with, and in fact that I don’t associate with any rigidly defined demographic at all. There are definitely people out there who think like me, though, and if we vote as a bloc then we have more power than just me alone. This is why people underestimate their own voting power, and this is why people who care at all about not being lead by lunatics should vote.
One doesn’t have to oppose democracy to advise folks not to vote. Jason Brennan makes a lot of pro-democracy, pro-civic engagement arguments along these lines. Here’s the abstract to his paper “Polluting the polls”