My view is the complete opposite: voting reform is the biggest bang-for-the-buck human welfare increaser, by a huge margin. But don’t equate electoral reform with proportional representation.
Two different math PhD’s have run computer simulations to estimate the benefit of alternative voting methods:
A Princeton math PhD named Warren Smith, who advocates score voting (formerly known as range voting) produced these Bayesian regret calculations. https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig
A Harvard stats PhD named Jameson Quinn used some slightly different modeling assumptions and gave the results in an inverted normalized form called voter satisfaction efficiency or VSE, where 100% VSE is the same as a Bayesian regret of zero. https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse.html
Warren Smith found that an increase from plurality voting to score voting increased human welfare about as much as democracy vs. non-democratic random selection. He summarizes thusly:
there are very few causes out there with this much “bang for the buck.” Examine the numbers yourself. I do not believe religious causes can compete. Disaster relief cannot compete (in the long term; for large disasters in the short term, it can). Curing diseases also cannot compete except for the biggest killers. E.g, ending malaria or halving illiteracy each would cause an amount of good comparable to range voting, but would probably be more difficult to accomplish.
There is a great deal of empirical evidence that bolsters such claims. In a 2014 exit poll for the Maine gubernatorial race, switching from plurality voting to approval voting led to a complete reversal in finish order. A bombastic climate change denier won the real election due to vote splitting between the Democrat and a Democrat-ish independent.
My view is that if the impact of alternative voting methods was properly understood, it would comprise the vast majority of the EA community’s efforts. You just can’t get this kind of impact (per dollar) from cash transfers, malaria nets, deworming, etc.
I think using Bayesian regret misses a number of important things.
It’s somewhat unclear if it means utility in the sense of a function that maps preference relations to real numbers, or utility in axiological sense. If it’s in the former sense then I think it misses a number of very important things. The first is that preferences are changed by the political process. The second is that people have stable preferences for terrible things like capital punishment.
If it means it in the axiological sense then I don’t think we have strong reason to believe that how people vote will be closely related and I think we have reason to believe it will be different systematically. This also makes it vulnerable to some people having terrible outcomes.
Lots of what I’m worried about with elected leaders are negative externalities. For instance, quite plausibly the main reasons Trump was bad was his opposition to climate change and rejecting democratic norms. The former harms mostly people in other countries and future generations, and the latter mostly future generations (and probably people in other countries too more than Americans although it’s not obviously true.)
It also doesn’t account for dynamic affects of parties changing their platforms. My claim is that the overton window is real and important.
I think that having strong political parties which the electoral system protects is good for stopping these things in rich democracies because I think the gatekeepers will systematically support the system that put them in power. I also think the set of polices the elite support is better in the axiological sense than those supported by the voting population. The catch here is that the US has weak political parties that are supported by electoral system.
> It’s somewhat unclear if it means utility in the sense of a function that maps preference relations to real numbers, or utility in axiological sense.
there’s only one notion of utility. if your utilities for x,y, and z are 0,3,5 respectively, then you’d find a 60% chance of the 5 option equally preferable to the guarantee of y, and so on.
> preferences are changed by the political process.
well, no. your estimate of how much a given policy will benefit you, that is changed by the political process. the actual utilities aren’t.
> The second is that people have stable preferences for terrible things like capital punishment.
no. people have utilities that relate to things like “being murdered walking down a dark alley”. the preferences they form for policies like capital punishment are estimates of how well off they’ll be under a given legal policy regime. in reality, most people would prefer a world where capital punishment is illegal. but they erroneously think capital punishment is good becaus ethey don’t understand how ineffective it is, and how they themselves could end up being unjustly killed via capital punishment.
you need to update your mental model with the disparity between actual utility from policy, versus the assume utilities that form your espoused political preferences.
that disparity between actual and assumed preferences was already accounted for by “ignorance factors” in the bayesian regret calculations, fyi.
There isn’t only one notion of utility—utility in decision theory is different to utility in ethics. Utility in decision theory can indeed be derived from choices over lotteries and is incomparable between individuals (without further assumptions) and is equivalent under positive affine transformation because it’s just representing choices.
Utility in moral philosophy refers to value and typically refers to the value of experiences (as opposed to other conceptions of the good like satisfaction of preferences), is comparable between individuals without further assumptions and isn’t equivalent under positive affine transformation.
An individual’s utility (on either of the definitions) may or may not be changed by the political process.
Consider a new far-right party entering the political sphere. They successfully changed political conversations to be more anti-immigration and have lots of focus on immigrant men committing sexual violence.
A voter exposed to these new political conversations has their choice behaviour changed because they now feel more angry towards immigrants and want to hurt them, rather than because they think that more restrictive immigration policies would make them personally safer, for instance.
This same voter also has utility—in the moral philosophy sense—changed by the new political conversation. Now they feel sadistic pleasure when they hear about immigrants being deported on the news, leading to better subjective experiences when they see immigrants being deported.
I strongly reject the claim that we should imagine voters as exclusively deciding how to vote in terms of the personal benefits they derive in expectation from policies. I think people support capital punishment mostly because it fits with their inbuilt sense of justice rather than because they think it benefits them.
We could (probably) represent this voter as being an expected utility maximiser where they have positive utility from capital punishment, in the decision theory sense. This is a different claim from the claim that a voter expects their subjective experiences to be more positively valenced when there’s capital punishment.
I’m afraid I can’t comment on what ignorance factors do or do not account for under Bayesian regret without rereading the paper, but it’s of course possible that they do account for that disparity between actual and assumed preferences.
My view is the complete opposite: voting reform is the biggest bang-for-the-buck human welfare increaser, by a huge margin. But don’t equate electoral reform with proportional representation.
Two different math PhD’s have run computer simulations to estimate the benefit of alternative voting methods:
A Princeton math PhD named Warren Smith, who advocates score voting (formerly known as range voting) produced these Bayesian regret calculations. https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig
A Harvard stats PhD named Jameson Quinn used some slightly different modeling assumptions and gave the results in an inverted normalized form called voter satisfaction efficiency or VSE, where 100% VSE is the same as a Bayesian regret of zero.
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse.html
Warren Smith found that an increase from plurality voting to score voting increased human welfare about as much as democracy vs. non-democratic random selection. He summarizes thusly:
There is a great deal of empirical evidence that bolsters such claims. In a 2014 exit poll for the Maine gubernatorial race, switching from plurality voting to approval voting led to a complete reversal in finish order. A bombastic climate change denier won the real election due to vote splitting between the Democrat and a Democrat-ish independent.
Warren Smith is actually fairly skeptical of proportional representation, mind you.
My view is that if the impact of alternative voting methods was properly understood, it would comprise the vast majority of the EA community’s efforts. You just can’t get this kind of impact (per dollar) from cash transfers, malaria nets, deworming, etc.
I think using Bayesian regret misses a number of important things.
It’s somewhat unclear if it means utility in the sense of a function that maps preference relations to real numbers, or utility in axiological sense. If it’s in the former sense then I think it misses a number of very important things. The first is that preferences are changed by the political process. The second is that people have stable preferences for terrible things like capital punishment.
If it means it in the axiological sense then I don’t think we have strong reason to believe that how people vote will be closely related and I think we have reason to believe it will be different systematically. This also makes it vulnerable to some people having terrible outcomes.
Lots of what I’m worried about with elected leaders are negative externalities. For instance, quite plausibly the main reasons Trump was bad was his opposition to climate change and rejecting democratic norms. The former harms mostly people in other countries and future generations, and the latter mostly future generations (and probably people in other countries too more than Americans although it’s not obviously true.)
It also doesn’t account for dynamic affects of parties changing their platforms. My claim is that the overton window is real and important.
I think that having strong political parties which the electoral system protects is good for stopping these things in rich democracies because I think the gatekeepers will systematically support the system that put them in power. I also think the set of polices the elite support is better in the axiological sense than those supported by the voting population. The catch here is that the US has weak political parties that are supported by electoral system.
> It’s somewhat unclear if it means utility in the sense of a function that maps preference relations to real numbers, or utility in axiological sense.
there’s only one notion of utility. if your utilities for x,y, and z are 0,3,5 respectively, then you’d find a 60% chance of the 5 option equally preferable to the guarantee of y, and so on.
> preferences are changed by the political process.
well, no. your estimate of how much a given policy will benefit you, that is changed by the political process. the actual utilities aren’t.
> The second is that people have stable preferences for terrible things like capital punishment.
no. people have utilities that relate to things like “being murdered walking down a dark alley”. the preferences they form for policies like capital punishment are estimates of how well off they’ll be under a given legal policy regime. in reality, most people would prefer a world where capital punishment is illegal. but they erroneously think capital punishment is good becaus ethey don’t understand how ineffective it is, and how they themselves could end up being unjustly killed via capital punishment.
you need to update your mental model with the disparity between actual utility from policy, versus the assume utilities that form your espoused political preferences.
that disparity between actual and assumed preferences was already accounted for by “ignorance factors” in the bayesian regret calculations, fyi.
There isn’t only one notion of utility—utility in decision theory is different to utility in ethics. Utility in decision theory can indeed be derived from choices over lotteries and is incomparable between individuals (without further assumptions) and is equivalent under positive affine transformation because it’s just representing choices.
Utility in moral philosophy refers to value and typically refers to the value of experiences (as opposed to other conceptions of the good like satisfaction of preferences), is comparable between individuals without further assumptions and isn’t equivalent under positive affine transformation.
An individual’s utility (on either of the definitions) may or may not be changed by the political process.
Consider a new far-right party entering the political sphere. They successfully changed political conversations to be more anti-immigration and have lots of focus on immigrant men committing sexual violence.
A voter exposed to these new political conversations has their choice behaviour changed because they now feel more angry towards immigrants and want to hurt them, rather than because they think that more restrictive immigration policies would make them personally safer, for instance.
This same voter also has utility—in the moral philosophy sense—changed by the new political conversation. Now they feel sadistic pleasure when they hear about immigrants being deported on the news, leading to better subjective experiences when they see immigrants being deported.
I strongly reject the claim that we should imagine voters as exclusively deciding how to vote in terms of the personal benefits they derive in expectation from policies. I think people support capital punishment mostly because it fits with their inbuilt sense of justice rather than because they think it benefits them.
We could (probably) represent this voter as being an expected utility maximiser where they have positive utility from capital punishment, in the decision theory sense. This is a different claim from the claim that a voter expects their subjective experiences to be more positively valenced when there’s capital punishment.
I’m afraid I can’t comment on what ignorance factors do or do not account for under Bayesian regret without rereading the paper, but it’s of course possible that they do account for that disparity between actual and assumed preferences.