“1. You should vote for the less evil of the top mainstream candidates, because your vote is unlikely to make a critical difference if you vote for a candidate that most people don’t vote for.
2.You should stay home, because your vote is unlikely to make a critical difference.”
Altruists should vote on the basis of expected utility. Depending on the state and the election (primary or general), as well as information from polls and political prediction markets, you may be able to determine that you have much more than a one in a million chance of swinging an election to one candidate or another. Differences in the U.S. on conventional policies like NIH budgets and foreign aid for global public health can avert many millions of premature deaths, so a voter might invest effort in studying the candidates and going to a polling place in lieu of making a $1000 donation to an organization providing antimalaria bed nets.
Even better, a few dozen altruists (neglecting existential risks, astronomical waste and radical technological change perhaps because of discount rates and person-affecting ethics) could share the fixed costs of research and benefit from economies of scale by putting $1000 each into a fund divided between candidate and research and promotion of the candidate selected if the cost of voter persuasion were low enough (and it does seem that $1,000 may be enough to buy more than one vote in a primary process).
Doing the same calculation for candidates with very low probabilities of success (based on polls, etc) the expected direct benefits from their improbable election are much less, and the benefits in disciplining the system as a whole would need to be very large. People who are not convinced that those benefits are so massive can easily break apart the two views Eliezer mentioned.
How could we distinguish between:
“1. You should vote for the less evil of the top mainstream candidates, because your vote is unlikely to make a critical difference if you vote for a candidate that most people don’t vote for. 2.You should stay home, because your vote is unlikely to make a critical difference.”
Altruists should vote on the basis of expected utility. Depending on the state and the election (primary or general), as well as information from polls and political prediction markets, you may be able to determine that you have much more than a one in a million chance of swinging an election to one candidate or another. Differences in the U.S. on conventional policies like NIH budgets and foreign aid for global public health can avert many millions of premature deaths, so a voter might invest effort in studying the candidates and going to a polling place in lieu of making a $1000 donation to an organization providing antimalaria bed nets.
Even better, a few dozen altruists (neglecting existential risks, astronomical waste and radical technological change perhaps because of discount rates and person-affecting ethics) could share the fixed costs of research and benefit from economies of scale by putting $1000 each into a fund divided between candidate and research and promotion of the candidate selected if the cost of voter persuasion were low enough (and it does seem that $1,000 may be enough to buy more than one vote in a primary process).
Doing the same calculation for candidates with very low probabilities of success (based on polls, etc) the expected direct benefits from their improbable election are much less, and the benefits in disciplining the system as a whole would need to be very large. People who are not convinced that those benefits are so massive can easily break apart the two views Eliezer mentioned.