If voting is serious business, we need to treat it as such.
Right before the US 2020 election, Gelman argues that PA voters have a 1 in 8.8 million chance of breaking a tie. TX was 1 in 100 million. DC 1 in 240 trillion.
Showing some votes have high expected utility means showing those same votes can have high expected disutility.
It’s weird that Wilbin and MacAskill will be like, “Hey, careful! Before you donate $50, make sure you are doing good rather than wasting the money or worse, harming people. We are beset by biases that make us donate badly and we need to be careful.” But then when it comes to voting, they often advise people to just vote, or to guesstimate effects, when in fact the empirical work shows that are much more biased and terrible at judging politics than almost anything else.
Most people do not know enough to vote well, and voting well is hard. Believing it is easy is itself evidence of bias—that’s what the political psych shows. (Partisans downplay difficulty and think they are obviously right.) So if some people’s votes matter, rather than advising them to vote, period, we should advise them to be good EAs and be very careful about their votes.
If voting is serious business, we need to treat it as such.
Right before the US 2020 election, Gelman argues that PA voters have a 1 in 8.8 million chance of breaking a tie. TX was 1 in 100 million. DC 1 in 240 trillion.
Showing some votes have high expected utility means showing those same votes can have high expected disutility.
It’s weird that Wilbin and MacAskill will be like, “Hey, careful! Before you donate $50, make sure you are doing good rather than wasting the money or worse, harming people. We are beset by biases that make us donate badly and we need to be careful.” But then when it comes to voting, they often advise people to just vote, or to guesstimate effects, when in fact the empirical work shows that are much more biased and terrible at judging politics than almost anything else.
Most people do not know enough to vote well, and voting well is hard. Believing it is easy is itself evidence of bias—that’s what the political psych shows. (Partisans downplay difficulty and think they are obviously right.) So if some people’s votes matter, rather than advising them to vote, period, we should advise them to be good EAs and be very careful about their votes.