How would I in principle estimate how many more votes go to my favored presidential candidate in a presidential election (beyond the standard answer of “1”)?
I’m happy to see Abram Demski mention this as I’ve long seen this as a crucial case for trying to understand subjunctive linking.
My own answer would be the EDT answer: how much does your decision correlate with theirs?
This is my perspective as well. I can’t imagine that subjunctive linking exists ontologically. That is that there isn’t some objective fact in the universe, in and of itself linking someone’s decision to yours, but instead it is about how you model other actors (I don’t know if I still fully embrace this post, but it’s still illustrative of my position).
So unless we actually start getting into the details of how you’re modelling the situation, we can’t really answer it. In a way this means that the concept of subjunctive linking can be a misleading frame for this question. The way this question is answered is by updating the model given the new information (that a particular person voted a particular way) rather than trying to identify some mysterious free-floating effect that we have no reason to think exists.
One way to try to understand this would be to try constructing the simplest case we can understand. So let’s imagine a world where there are two candidates, Hilary and Obama. We’ll assume there are 10 voters and that you have no information about the other voters apart from the fact that:
There’s a 50% chance that every voter has a 40% chance of voting for Hilary and 60% for Obama
There’s a 50% chance that every voter has a 60% chance of voting for Hilary and 40% for Obama
Once you’ve decided on your vote it should cause you to update your probability about which world you are in and then you can calculate the chance of winning the election. Anyway, this is just a comment, but I’ll probably solve this probably and put it in its own separate post afterwards.
I imagine that by constucting a whole bunch of similar scenarios we might be able to make solid progress here.
For voting in particular, if these esoteric DT considerations would change my answer, then they usually wouldn’t, actually (because if the DT is important enough in my computation, then I’m part of a very small reference class of voters, and so, should mostly act like it’s just my one vote anyway).
Strongly agreed and something that people often miss.
I’m happy to see Abram Demski mention this as I’ve long seen this as a crucial case for trying to understand subjunctive linking.
This is my perspective as well. I can’t imagine that subjunctive linking exists ontologically. That is that there isn’t some objective fact in the universe, in and of itself linking someone’s decision to yours, but instead it is about how you model other actors (I don’t know if I still fully embrace this post, but it’s still illustrative of my position).
So unless we actually start getting into the details of how you’re modelling the situation, we can’t really answer it. In a way this means that the concept of subjunctive linking can be a misleading frame for this question. The way this question is answered is by updating the model given the new information (that a particular person voted a particular way) rather than trying to identify some mysterious free-floating effect that we have no reason to think exists.
One way to try to understand this would be to try constructing the simplest case we can understand. So let’s imagine a world where there are two candidates, Hilary and Obama. We’ll assume there are 10 voters and that you have no information about the other voters apart from the fact that:
There’s a 50% chance that every voter has a 40% chance of voting for Hilary and 60% for Obama
There’s a 50% chance that every voter has a 60% chance of voting for Hilary and 40% for Obama
Once you’ve decided on your vote it should cause you to update your probability about which world you are in and then you can calculate the chance of winning the election. Anyway, this is just a comment, but I’ll probably solve this probably and put it in its own separate post afterwards.
I imagine that by constucting a whole bunch of similar scenarios we might be able to make solid progress here.
Strongly agreed and something that people often miss.