The TDT-style reasoning is not “would this be bad if everyone did it?” but “would this be bad if everyone sufficiently similar to me did it?” and I think there it’s much less clear. If everyone similar to me spent less time on politics and more time on more useful things I don’t think that’s obviously a net loss at all.
Also, again, I think influencing the majority to influence politicians is a reason to have political beliefs but that most people don’t have political beliefs for this reason. A strategy for having political beliefs optimized for actually changing the opinions of large numbers of people would look very different from the way most people approach politics.
The TDT-style reasoning is not “would this be bad if everyone did it?” but “would this be bad if everyone sufficiently similar to me did it?” and I think there it’s much less clear. If everyone similar to me spent less time on politics and more time on more useful things I don’t think that’s obviously a net loss at all.
To be slightly more precise, the TDT-style reasoning is, “Would this be bad if everyone who decided using a decision procedure logically correlated with mine did it?”.
Now, it might be that your decision procedure is so “logically isolated” that the cohort of people whose decisions are correlated with yours is too small to be politically significant.
But it seems to me that most people arrive at their political opinions using one of a small set of correlated classes of decision procedures. It follows from the pigeon-hole principle that at least one of these correlated classes contains a lot of people. (The fact that you can write above about how “most people approach politics” also points towards this conclusion.) There is a real chance that this class is large enough to be politically significant.
The upshot is that your reasoning, while it might apply to you, would not apply to people who decide these issues in more typical ways, because these people are numerous enough that their political opinions have real influence.
Which is not to say that these people need to be spending more time on politics. But it does suggest that their getting their politics right matters.
I do think you might be underestimating the utility of being involved in politics.
It’s common to think, say, “There are 300 million people in this country, so if I only have an amount of democratic influence equal to 1⁄300,000,000 of the country, then it’s not worth being involved.” (Speaking in terms of the US). However, the total amount of utility at stake here is huge; the government spends about 3 trillion dollars a year. If you think that, hypothetically speaking, that party A would spend that money in a way that’s about 10% more efficient at creating positive utility then party B, then that’s about 300 billion dollars worth of positive utility at stake here. If you have a 1⁄300 million influence over a decision worth 300 billion dollars of utility, then when you multiply that out your influence is worth about 1000 dollars of utility. So one would think that it would be worth a fair amount of time to try to do something useful with it.
In practice, it may be lower if you don’t think that there is that much difference between the two parties, while on the other hand a person willing to spend a little time talking about politics and sending letters to their congressmen and otherwise getting involved probably has a higher degree of influence then that (especially since almost half the country doesn’t vote at all). And there are also other things the government does that aren’t directly related to money that can also have a significant impact.
If you’re trying to compute an expected utility, I don’t think this is the right way to compute the probability. The probability to compute is the probability that your vote will decide the election, which I expect to be very small where I live (California) but might be large enough in swing states to make it worthwhile to vote there. Someone posted a nice paper computing this probability for several states based on Nate Silver’s election data that I can’t find. (A very important point here is that the amount of political leverage you have is not linear in the number of people whose votes you affect: the change in the probability of deciding the election is highly nonlinear as you get closer to the boundary where the outcome changes.)
Nevertheless, I still think that a strategy optimized for actually making a difference in politics looks very different from the strategy most people adopt.
The probability to compute is the probability that your vote will decide the election
I think this should be the probability of your decision procedure deciding the election. If many people are using similar decision procedures, the decision they follow commands their combined votes, and correspondingly the probability that the decision matters goes up when there are more similarly-deciding people. From this point of view, the voters in an election are not individuals, but decision procedures, each of which has a certain number of votes, and each decision procedure can decide whether it’s useful to cast its many votes. A decision procedure that is followed by many people, but thinks that it only commands one vote is mistaken on this point of fact, and so will make suboptimal decisions.
A good example of this is how certain very simplistic decision procedures, like “single issue voters”, can have influence far above and beyond their numbers. If 5% of the population will always vote based on one specific issue, and that is both known and understood by politicians, then even if they are in the minority, they have a major amount of influence over that one issue, because that decision procedure is so significant. Examples: gun lobbies, labor groups, abortion, ect.
I don’t think your political influence is primarily dependent on the probability that your one, single vote will decide the election. It’s a much more nebulous thing that that in reality; it’s how you show up in polls, how politicians think their positions may affect your vote, how likely your demographic is to vote in the first place and how that affects politician’s priorities, how well you are able to articulate your position, how many resources a political party feels they need to devote to your district instead of some other district, ect. For example, even if it didn’t change any elections at all, I think that we would be funding college in a very different way if a higher percentage of college students voted.
Nevertheless, I still think that a strategy optimized for actually making a difference in politics looks very different from the strategy most people adopt.
Probably true. The strategy most people adopt looks more to me like “let me try to spend the minimal amount of time necessary in order to get enough information to let me feel confident in deciding who to vote for”. Much less payoff then a deliberate strategy to maximize making a difference, but much less cost involved as well. There’s also a general attitude among a lot of people that, at a rule, doing at least that is your responsibility as a citizen, and I think that is probably correct.
The TDT-style reasoning is not “would this be bad if everyone did it?” but “would this be bad if everyone sufficiently similar to me did it?” and I think there it’s much less clear. If everyone similar to me spent less time on politics and more time on more useful things I don’t think that’s obviously a net loss at all.
Also, again, I think influencing the majority to influence politicians is a reason to have political beliefs but that most people don’t have political beliefs for this reason. A strategy for having political beliefs optimized for actually changing the opinions of large numbers of people would look very different from the way most people approach politics.
To be slightly more precise, the TDT-style reasoning is, “Would this be bad if everyone who decided using a decision procedure logically correlated with mine did it?”.
Now, it might be that your decision procedure is so “logically isolated” that the cohort of people whose decisions are correlated with yours is too small to be politically significant.
But it seems to me that most people arrive at their political opinions using one of a small set of correlated classes of decision procedures. It follows from the pigeon-hole principle that at least one of these correlated classes contains a lot of people. (The fact that you can write above about how “most people approach politics” also points towards this conclusion.) There is a real chance that this class is large enough to be politically significant.
The upshot is that your reasoning, while it might apply to you, would not apply to people who decide these issues in more typical ways, because these people are numerous enough that their political opinions have real influence.
Which is not to say that these people need to be spending more time on politics. But it does suggest that their getting their politics right matters.
I do think you might be underestimating the utility of being involved in politics.
It’s common to think, say, “There are 300 million people in this country, so if I only have an amount of democratic influence equal to 1⁄300,000,000 of the country, then it’s not worth being involved.” (Speaking in terms of the US). However, the total amount of utility at stake here is huge; the government spends about 3 trillion dollars a year. If you think that, hypothetically speaking, that party A would spend that money in a way that’s about 10% more efficient at creating positive utility then party B, then that’s about 300 billion dollars worth of positive utility at stake here. If you have a 1⁄300 million influence over a decision worth 300 billion dollars of utility, then when you multiply that out your influence is worth about 1000 dollars of utility. So one would think that it would be worth a fair amount of time to try to do something useful with it.
In practice, it may be lower if you don’t think that there is that much difference between the two parties, while on the other hand a person willing to spend a little time talking about politics and sending letters to their congressmen and otherwise getting involved probably has a higher degree of influence then that (especially since almost half the country doesn’t vote at all). And there are also other things the government does that aren’t directly related to money that can also have a significant impact.
If you’re trying to compute an expected utility, I don’t think this is the right way to compute the probability. The probability to compute is the probability that your vote will decide the election, which I expect to be very small where I live (California) but might be large enough in swing states to make it worthwhile to vote there. Someone posted a nice paper computing this probability for several states based on Nate Silver’s election data that I can’t find. (A very important point here is that the amount of political leverage you have is not linear in the number of people whose votes you affect: the change in the probability of deciding the election is highly nonlinear as you get closer to the boundary where the outcome changes.)
Nevertheless, I still think that a strategy optimized for actually making a difference in politics looks very different from the strategy most people adopt.
I think this should be the probability of your decision procedure deciding the election. If many people are using similar decision procedures, the decision they follow commands their combined votes, and correspondingly the probability that the decision matters goes up when there are more similarly-deciding people. From this point of view, the voters in an election are not individuals, but decision procedures, each of which has a certain number of votes, and each decision procedure can decide whether it’s useful to cast its many votes. A decision procedure that is followed by many people, but thinks that it only commands one vote is mistaken on this point of fact, and so will make suboptimal decisions.
Good point.
A good example of this is how certain very simplistic decision procedures, like “single issue voters”, can have influence far above and beyond their numbers. If 5% of the population will always vote based on one specific issue, and that is both known and understood by politicians, then even if they are in the minority, they have a major amount of influence over that one issue, because that decision procedure is so significant. Examples: gun lobbies, labor groups, abortion, ect.
I don’t think your political influence is primarily dependent on the probability that your one, single vote will decide the election. It’s a much more nebulous thing that that in reality; it’s how you show up in polls, how politicians think their positions may affect your vote, how likely your demographic is to vote in the first place and how that affects politician’s priorities, how well you are able to articulate your position, how many resources a political party feels they need to devote to your district instead of some other district, ect. For example, even if it didn’t change any elections at all, I think that we would be funding college in a very different way if a higher percentage of college students voted.
Probably true. The strategy most people adopt looks more to me like “let me try to spend the minimal amount of time necessary in order to get enough information to let me feel confident in deciding who to vote for”. Much less payoff then a deliberate strategy to maximize making a difference, but much less cost involved as well. There’s also a general attitude among a lot of people that, at a rule, doing at least that is your responsibility as a citizen, and I think that is probably correct.