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Comment by tboyd47 | Hacker News Reader

"People would probably be better off if they knew more than they do about a lot of things (or at least, I am assuming so, though there is research on this sort of thing). Politics might, however, be the last thing on that list... and yet, politics is the one area in which we get irritated when other people are apathetic or ignorant."

In America, anyway -- I don't know about other democratic countries -- this is so true. And as an apathetic person, let me say that it's so satisfying to hear a voice in political science say it.

People seem to have this superstitious obsession with the democratic ritual. The act of filling in a circle in a ballot box is so important to them that they just cannot accept the fact that someone would choose not to participate.

This way of thinking makes less sense to me than someone who's fanatic about a sports team. If you tell a fan of a football team that you don't watch football, at least he'll respect this about you. Try telling some party activist that you don't vote and see if they ever let it go.

Edit: my post is being downvoted to oblivion anyway, but removed some hyperbolic language that wasn't helping my case.

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Are you apathetic to: - whether your fellow countrymen go to war? - who gets to marry? - abortion rights?

If you are, then that's your right, but please don't act surprised when people who care about these things get irritated.

What I am apathetic to is which liar gets elected into office, the red liar or the blue liar? What surprises me is that people seem to have an irrational trust in these political figures.

Who trusts political figures? Repeated polling shows that most people don't, even if they vote.

Maybe you're down on voting because you think it's supposed to solve all the problems. So since it doesn't, it must be broken. The truth is that voting is just a very small part of trying to make the world look more like you think it should.

It's like developing a software application. No one would expect that buying a computer would take care of everything. But you can't start until you have a computer. And while the computer isn't everything, some are still going to be better for what you want than others.

If you vote for a certain candidate, that's a sign that you believe he's going to act a certain way in office. And unless you know him personally, that can only be based on what he said on the campaign trail. So the fact that you voted for him shows that you at least trusted him to do what he said he would do.

Remember that you can often vote for or against officials running for re-election, in which case you can vote based on their actual record of work. Many challengers have records of work by which to judge them as well.

I'm not the OP but what do those issues have to do with voting as voting currently works?

And why do you think it's warranted to be deciding how other people live their lives? What is "to get married" and why is it that a decision between two people needs to be chosen by you through "voting"?

Regarding war, why do you think anyone has the right to force young men to engage in a war they didn't start? Don't those young men own their own lives?

And so on and so forth. I'm not apathetic to any of those things but they're not solved (as can be seen in reality: they haven't been solved) by "voting".

I can't tell if you honestly are asking for answers, because all of those have fairly direct answers from people who saying voting matters.

Also, the one about war is a strawman, because it conflates war and the draft, which are related but not identical.

Ed: Typo.

here's what bothers me about this

as a voter I such a microscopically small degree of contol of any of those questions (functionally 0), that they don't seem productive to even care about

if I care about them, then I have to get upset when things don't go my way, I have to either get into arguments with people I know or actively try to avoid arguments

where is the net positive?

I mean, if you care more about not arguing with your relatives than you do that the CIA abducted and tortured people, then you have little incentive to engage with the wider political process.

Of course, most people think that the US government abducting foreign nationals and torturing them at black sites is a considerably bigger problem than their mother-in-law being grumpy at them for a couple days, and want to do something about it.

how do my in-laws being grumpy help foreign nationals tortured by the CIA?

how has that made the world a better place? other than now I feel vaguely superior to my in-laws "who just don't get it"

If one person in every family made their in-laws grumpy about the CIA torture scandal, then the entire nation would (at least once, over the course of months/a year) have an actual discussion about the situation. That discussion then goes on to inform their views on various topics, including who they should vote for in the next election.

Government officials, at the end of the day, are chosen because the circles get filled in on ballots, and the circles get filled in from a choice made on the aggregate of our experiences, including discussions with friends and family.

The difference is that if we talk about it, even if it makes people uncomfortable, then the nation discusses these issues and takes them in to account when voting. If we don't, then the nation doesn't.

The rate at which pissed off people bother their family members about what they're pissed off about directly influences the course of national politics, even if the particular result of any particular discussion is some pissed off in-laws and a small percentage chance a bubble gets filled out differently in a few months.

but I can't make one person in every other family talk to their in laws about CIA torture

I can only affect my small corner of the universe

how would the world be different if 1 person in every family told their in laws that they appreciated them as human beings

maybe that would change the world more, maybe there would be less pent up fustration and anger for Fox News (or whatever political bogeyman you ascribe to) tap into and frame with a political lense

> If one person in every family made their in-laws grumpy about the CIA torture scandal, then the entire nation would (at least once, over the course of months/a year) have an actual discussion about the situation. That discussion then goes on to inform their views on various topics, including who they should vote for in the next election.

Only in fantasy land.

The problem?

Nobody ever actually has a rational discussion or becomes informed about anything. Just shouting matches and insults get thrown around, nothing ever gets accomplished. Everyone now hates each other. You aren't going to change someone's deeply held beliefs even if those beliefs are based on complete and total lies.

The backfire effect.

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/

The Misconception: When your beliefs are challenged with facts, you alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking.

The Truth: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.

http://www.skepdic.com/backfireeffect.html

No, no, no, no, no. Things don't work like that. Even ignoring the backfire effect another commenter mentioned, you have this huge campaigns, PR and media machine optimized for politicians to make people have discussions politicians want. Media are actually mind-controlling nations and the funny thing is, people will tell you that they know it, and yet they act as if they weren't aware.

One voter has little effect. Many voters together can have a big effect. But not if each one of them, individually, decides not to bother.

there are many many uses of my time that can affect changes to make the world a better place

if nothing else I can spend that time being a better parent and spouse

voting ranks extremely low on the active uses of my time to make the world a better place

Voting takes little time (about 15-30 minutes in my precinct) but has a lasting effect for years. Measured on a per-minute basis, there are few ways you can have as large an impact as voting.

little time, and even less impact

What "lasting effect" does it have, given that the vote changes nothing? Are you just referring to the effect it has on the voter, which is that it makes him or her a bit less rational?

I don't think it's very rational to say that a vote "changes nothing," but I also don't think there's anything I could post that would change your mind, so I guess we'll just agree to disagree on this one.

At a national level, the chance of your vote changing the outcome is less than your chance of being struck by lightning or killed by a plane falling on you. Most votes aren't even close at all - you knew what candidate your state would pick going in and it picked that by a margin of, say, a million votes.

But hey, let's suppose one of those few, rare, much less than once-in-a-lifetime cases comes up where the vote is so close that your one vote WOULD make a difference. In that case we can say two things:

(1) that outcome is closer than the margin of error on our vote-counting technology, so the outcome will actually get decided in the courts

(2) If the country is THAT divided between the two candidates, they're probably so similarly positioned on the {net good/net bad} scale that your vote didn't really matter then either - you got to pick which of two functionally-identical candidates we got. (or if they're not, they're close ENOUGH that you have no way of being sure you made the right choice between them - you'd do as well to flip a coin.

Rationally speaking, the effect of voting for a candidate is identical to the effect of rooting for a sports team. It does nothing to modify the outcome of the match, but it does make YOU have a bit more ego invested in whoever you picked.

These sort of comparisons are often trotted out in voting arguments, but they are a misapplication of probability because a vote is not something that happens to you, it is something you do. And because votes are fungible, there is no way to pick out one vote and say that it mattered more than any other.

The issue is not chance, it is apportionment: to what degree can you claim responsibility for the final outcome of an election? And what you're saying is that in elections where your portion is very small, you don't think it's worth participating.

To me this seems like a rather self-centered approach to civic engagement, essentially saying "I won't participate in any process that does not sufficiently validate my importance."

And is there a value at which you would think it is worth participating? That would imply that the smaller and less consequential the election, the more likely it is that you would participate. That seems like a weird way to set priorities.

And it's worth noting that no matter how small each portion may be, it will still be larger than the portion of those who did not vote at all.

The argument from small apportionment also assumes that everyone else still votes (that's why the portion is so small, after all). So it can't work as a general argument against the utility of voting. In fact if everyone tried to follow that strategy, any defector would wield enormous power, as one of few people bothering to vote.

I agree with the arguments of Henry David Thoreau and of Lysander Spooner to the effect that voting is fundamentally an immoral act. To vote, above all else, is to broadcast your own acceptance of the outcome and willingness to abide by it. So from a moral perspective, I should only vote if doing so has a sufficiently strong chance of averting some even greater evil.

But setting morality aside and just assessing the expected value, I should want to vote more when the expected value is large, which is to say when I have BOTH (a) a decent chance of affecting the outcome, AND (b) some good reason to think my vote is much better informed than that of the average voter.

If - case (a) - my vote is one of millions, I have no reason to expect it to CHANGE the result.

If - case (b) - my vote isn't above average in terms of how well-informed I am and how carefully I've thought it through, I have no reason to think adding mine to the mix will IMPROVE the result, even if it DID change the outcome.

For most people and most elections most of the time, neither (a) nor (b) applies; they should not vote.

Your last paragraph suggests the use of Kant's categorical imperative, which not a great guide to action. To illustrate why: suppose our question at hand is "should I walk on the grass?" If I do, I will enjoy the feeling of grass between my toes, but if EVERYBODY walked on the grass, the grass would die and we would lose not just its usefulness and that nice feeling but also its beauty. So applying Kant says I shouldn't walk on the grass, right? But wait! There are more likely options in the world than EVERYBODY or NOBODY should walk on the grass; there's also the option that SOME people walk on the grass. If we test the rule "people SUFFICIENTLY LIKE ME should walk on the grass", that works fine when you universalize it! Then we get the prettiness for all AND the nice feelings for some and the grass survives.

So to return to voting: not everybody should vote. SOME people should vote. Which ones? People who really ENJOY doing so, and people who have reason to think it will be a close race AND are especially well-informed or otherwise have reason to think their vote helps much more than average.

I'm in neither of those categories, so I shouldn't vote.

Both Thoreau and Spooner are out of date in numerous ways. When they wrote on the subject of voting:

- Slavery was legal.

- Votes were cast publicly (hence the concerns about what is broadcast). The secret ballot was introduced into federal elections at the end of the 19th century, in part to address this concern.

- Only a subset of Americans could actually vote. In addition to the disenfranchisement inherent in slavery, women were denied the vote, and many states had poll requirements like property ownership, taxes, literacy, etc.

In addition, neither argued that people should not vote at all, but rather that a vote, by itself, is not sufficient to enforce morality, justify any given government action, or achieve justice. I agree with them on all of that.

But the argument against complacency in voting is not the same thing as arguing in favor of never voting.

In the end, you clearly don't want to vote, and that is fine with me--I don't think that anyone should be forced to vote!

But that's not the argument you made to kick off this subthread. You didn't say "I don't think I should vote" or "I don't want to vote" or "I think voting would make me feel less rational."

What you said is that "the vote changes nothing" and makes "the voter" less rational. That's a general argument about voting for any given person. I don't think you've proved that point, and I think you've stopped trying to.

edit: copy edits

That an individual vote changes nothing in the real world almost goes without saying - you can trivially compare the hypothetical world in which that person does vote to the one in which she doesn't. If and only if the outcome changes, marginal votes can be said to have "made a difference".

The way it makes the voter less rational is that once you have voted for somebody you become emotionally invested in that candidate. If they lose, you now get to feel bad about their losing. if they win, you can either feel bad about their inevitable advocacy of bad policies and abandonment of election promises...or you can reconfigure your opinions so as to convince yourself that what they actually do is what ought to be done.

Being personally invested in candidates makes people dumber. The fact that somebody voted for Obama makes it harder for them to see what a empty suit Obama has been as President; ditto for people who voted for Bush when he was in office. And neither the Bush voters nor the Obama voters can see how SIMILAR the two are. If you want to be able to assess politicians impartially, it's easier to do that if you didn't vote for them.

When I cast a vote, I know for a fact that it won't change the outcome of the election but it will change ME. I should therefore only cast a vote if I want the change in myself that I expect that vote to cause.

I think people frame voting in the wrong way. It's true that your particular vote has functionally zero impact on anything. I see the problem with voting being perceived as an act of making a decision, of trying to control something. It's not. It's just an awkward implementation of government polling people's brains for their opinion. Since you can't just pull information out of people's head directly, you need them to respond with required information themselves. But if you vote, you're not choosing anything. You're just providing a data point.

You realize that two out of three of those issues are archtype culture war distraction issues, right? Political types call them 'squirrels'. They're a great way to get people to watch your network, vote for your candidate, or kill an inconvenient web browser.

"Completely symbolic and pointless"? I call cynicism.

It's symbolic because you can only choose who to vote on out of the options presented to you.

It's pointless because (at least in the US) the government has too much power and it sells that power to lobbyists.

US Government is only a tiny fraction of whom I vote for. From State officials through City and County, School Board, even Township and Water Board. All of them affect me, including my tax rates and property rights.

Fair enough. "Completely symbolic and pointless" was a tad too far.

> All of them affect me

And none of them really care about you, which can be evidenced by the amount of corruption that goes on everywhere.

Also, "voting" is inherently dumb because it's just "majority wins". Shouldn't the best outcome win? Why can't we have a system where we argue things out and have some heuristics for finding out what the best decision is for a given group of people?

Are you sure voting for representatives, as we currently do, is the best possible way to run countries, states, cities? If not, where are we trying to find better ways?

Can you then see why some don't see the value in "voting"?

> Why can't we have a system where we argue things out and have some heuristics for finding out what the best decision is for a given group of people?

We do this.

We just haven't resolved two fundamental problems:

1. The heuristics are not faithfully stated nor evaluated. This actually has upsides and downsides, as it allows them to be unexpectedly flexible and comprehensive at the cost of some corruption and unpredictability. This may just be a fundamental trade-off of such metrics. The heuristics are just currently embodied in little sacks of meat with some extra processes happening, because of stand-alone computers being a relatively new thing. (I'm actually not sure how much better with regards to lack of corruption and transparency we could make the heuristics than "just pick a guy to choose", because of limits in decidability and other related computer science/math.)

2. We don't know any way to define 'best outcome' besides ask everyone what they think, and resolve conflicts with some kind of strategy like "go with what the most people think is the right answer".

So I really don't understand your position: it's essentially that you don't see value in participating in which heuristics are chosen, and think that people should pay more attention to your wants and desires, even if you don't advocate for them with the same strength as other people.

Honestly, your position mostly sounds poorly thought out and entitled.

> 2. We don't know any way to define 'best outcome' besides ask everyone what they think

I disagree. Here's a better way: empiricism (through federalism). Let different US states have different laws (that the Federal law cannot trump) and let's see through experimentation which set of laws is best for different sets of people. But we've long closed the federalist "democracy lab" dream.

I'm sorry if this comes across as poorly thought out and entitled. I have thought long and hard about these things and I'm a libertarian so there's very little I think I'm entitled to (especially by the government).

> Let different US states have different laws (that the Federal law cannot trump) and let's see through experimentation which set of laws is best for different sets of people.

This only makes the chunking smaller, not fundamentally removes the chunking that you objected to. ("Chunking" in this sense meaning that we have a region ("chunk") that has to all follow the same law picked by some fixed (possibly local) strategy, such as majority wins or other common voting strategy.)

I actually agree with the concept that the chunks should be smaller about many things than they currently are in the US, and that the US generally has too many federal laws.

The problem with your answer to the question posed, however, is that we still aren't sure what we mean by "best", except just to ask every body and take some kind of "most popular answer wins" or averaging strategy. Fixing a heuristic like "best" allows you to deduce (most of) the rest of the things you need to figure out.

One obvious potential problem with this strategy, which is the point of federalism to address, is that the equilibrium reached by allowing each chunk to vary its laws and people to move freely between them, is that we might settle on to a suboptimal equilibrium (or never converge) which is considerably worse than one we might have discovered via planning.

Obviously, the current state of affairs isn't what many people would think of as optimal either. So the question, at least as I see it, becomes "What mechanic do we focus our effort on to fix?"

As someone who thinks that voting is a useful mechanic, my answer would be that addressing the voting mechanics would allow the law to more accurately reflect the desires of people governed and allow for better selection of heuristics for decision making.

Your stance seems to favor just removing large segments of what exists, and seeing what gets invented to fill in the gaps.

> Let different US states have different laws (that the Federal law cannot trump) and let's see through experimentation which set of laws is best for different sets of people.

This happened before but it ended up widely unpopular. It is called the National Minimum Drinking Age Act. Best outcome is extremely subjective as well.

What happened:

After prohibition most states elected a minimum legal drinking age of 21.

The 26th amendment comes around in 1971 which made the voting age 18. In response 29 states lowered the drinking age.

The lower drinking age states saw in increase in motor vehicle fatalities. Particularly in the 18-21 group.

The Feds decided if states want 100% of their highway construction funds they had to make the drinking age 21 to reduce highway fatalities.

You can argue that "less dead youths" is a best outcome even though pretty much everyone still wants the drinking age to be 18.

> Also, "voting" is inherently dumb because it's just "majority wins". Shouldn't the best outcome win? Why can't we have a system where we argue things out and have some heuristics for finding out what the best decision is for a given group of people?

Robin Hanson proposed[0] an interesting form of such system - named "Futarchy". The basic idea is that people vote on what things they care about, but to determine how to get them, they use prediction markets. Hence, "vote on values, bet on beliefs".

[0] - http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html

"The options" are in actuality other citizens who have done a lot of hard work to build coalitions and support, and get themselves on the ballot.

Voting is not a service that the government offers its citizens. It's a system that the citizens run to select leaders from amongst themselves. If you don't like the options, it's worth asking what you, as a citizen, have done to improve them.

> If you don't like the options, it's worth asking what you, as a citizen, have done to improve them.

I can revert that and ask you, what have you done, as a citizen, that you've made the choices so awful for everyone else?

See, that's easy to say, but I don't think we really do have an impact over who our candidates are.

> > If you don't like the options, it's worth asking what you, as a citizen, have done to improve them.

> I can revert that and ask you, what have you done, as a citizen, that you've made the choices so awful for everyone else?

I picked people who would act in my interest, and since you didn't participate, they only care about my interests, not yours. Why should I care about your interests, when you can't be bothered to represent them as part of the process?

Edit: Your comments seem to not really reflect the scale and complexity with which the system you're talking about operates.

did they act in your interest?

you threw out the CIA torture thing above

let make a not-necessarily-called-for leap, lets say you voted for Obama

did telling Obama that he did enough to earn your vote help or hurt those affected by CIA torture?

(if you're not an Obama voter you have my apologies)

> did they act in your interest?

To address this, we have to reintroduce the complexity that I had omitted in my comment: there are other people besides me and the (figurative) person I was addressing.

I think the honest answer here is that yes, the CIA staff did what people wanted, likely in violation of what the law actually was, because they saw it as their duty to undertake such tasks when the public clamored that they needed safety from a dangerous world, everything else be damned.

One of the hardest and most interesting questions about government is how do we stop ourselves from making collective bad decisions on effectively a whim in a moment of weakness/fear/etc?

You're dodging the question,

By saying you're going to vote, all a politician has to do to earn you vote is to be the lesser of two evils

By not making your participation automatic, you've raised the standard you hold politicians to

Then you're lucky that your interest is represented amongst the few candidates from which we can pick from.

Don't forget all the people that voted for the opposition that lost. What do you tell them? "Too bad you didn't get enough votes to represent your interests"? This is not a sustainable system if only a few win.

My comments don't reflect the scale and complexity of the status quo because I'm arguing from first principles. Also I believe in more localized governance a la cantons, charter cities, archologies, and so on.

It would be a great question to ask. But then you shy away from actually asking or doing anything about it.

People tend to think the things they really care about should be universal. You see it all the time here with the "everyone should learn how to program" camp.

politics is the primary mechanism by which society regulates its emotion. people get emotional when you say that you don't follow politics because that is how the 'politics' mechanism operates. people express anger outwards - at the out groups who are seen as 'not helping' - and upwards, where it is packaged and managed by people who are capable of handling intensely powerful emotions - many of them are sociopaths, who simply don't care.

try watching house of cards with the 'politics as emotional transfer mechanism' model running. see how many decisions are made on the basis of creating or moving jobs. having a job makes people calm. not having a job makes them worried.

you can start to view the capital building as the 'central emotional processor' of the nation, where emotions are packed up in intense chunks and moved around between people who believe they are just trying to get more power, but are effectively reducing emotional tension.

Nice analysis.

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