by Here's the claim: engaging in developed world politics is a selfish waste of time.
First, for the sake of argument, let's divide our daily activities into self-gratifying and utilitarian. We obviously do both (and they probably overlap somewhat) - though even the best of us lean far more towards the former. But let's forget self-gratification - if people genuinely enjoy doing something, then so be it. But when people discuss the merits of political engagement it's usually from an ethical perspective.
So, politics as utilitarian activity has to compete with other uses of the time. The political act usually most esteemed is probably voting. Overcoming Bias has a fun screed against the act: Voting Kills. But two things they don't consider are the opportunity cost from a utilitarian perspective and the uncertainty factor. On the former, you could earn about $7.25 an hour on minimum wage, so a vote costs you about $5.45, or at least one ninth of a person’s lifelong eyesight (or about 5 person-years of vision, at a conservative estimate of African life expectancy).
If you take seriously the claim about George Bush having cost the country $10 trillion and the odds of swinging the vote being 1 in 60 million, then the expected value of voting against him (iff you vote for the Democrats) is about $16,700. Immediately divide that by two, considering you’re voting for only one of his terms at a time. Now consider that the government spends its money massively less efficiently than we could spend ours. I can’t make a serious guess at the ratio, but given that a lot of it is obviously wasted on enforcing archaic social regulation, overfunding the military, campaigning for elections, promoting the good of the country over the good of the world, and other zero sum or negative ventures, it doesn’t seem too pessimistic to assume the government spending averages to no more efficient than Seeing Eye. (this isn’t meant to be an argument for smaller government, incidentally - I imagine the average person spends their money at least as inefficiently)
In that case, we can divide the value of the money we expect to save them by another 2500 (the cost effectiveness of Fred Hollows vs Seeing Eye - if you treat ‘having a guide dog’ as the same as ‘being able to see’, but since the comparison’s already pretty spurious I probably should...).
Now we’re down to an expected value of $3.34 for your vote against the way you would have spent your own money. If that seems overly harsh, I’ve given a couple of concessions to the vote already:
a) the time it takes you to go to the polling station is only a fraction of the total time you invest in the vote, at least if you do so responsibly. Even in the most cut and dried of Western democratic elections such as Bush vs Kerry it should take you at least a couple of hours to raise your confidence in Kerry’s superiority to well over 50%, and several more so to raise it to any high credence in Overcoming Bias’s >$5 trillion (for half Bush’s presidency) figure.
b) Bush vs Kerry was an anomaly. Normally one party hasn’t openly chucked away multiples of the GNP on an ‘obviously’ ill-conceived war.
***
So the vote is a waste of time. The other political activities available to most of us are fundraising and trying to persuade people to change their views, on internet forums for eg.
Fundraising (including working to donate your own money to political groups) could conceivably be more efficient than voting, but the question as ever is whether it’s more so (or even just not much less so) than giving the funds to a group like Fred Hollows (see third link, above). I don’t think it’s something people tend to spend much of their free time doing anyway - and in any case would be more interesting as full topic comparing it to charity.
Finally, trying to persuade people to change their political views seems like one of the worst options. In general it seems to have a very low success rate - cognitive biases run rife in political disputes for some reason. Even when we claim to be treating them as matters of fact, we get emotionally invested in a way that we never would about something like maths.
What’s more, even if political persuasion is worthwhile, it’s a skill like any other, which some people are much better at than almost everyone else. Unless you write political speeches professionally, spending your own time doing something that others do better is unlikely have greater benefit than spending your time doing what you do best for money, and donating the income to hire or train someone to speak for your political cause, or to extend the visibility of the people already speaking for it.
But if that option appeals to you, then you again need to compare the effectiveness of putting your money into such a cause vs Fred Hollows.
***
The other problem with political discussion is its imprecision.
When I alluded to the views above recently, EmbraceUnity said he was satisfied with 90% precision on political views. If I actually had something recognisable as 90% confidence in any of them, I would adjust my expectation of the outcome to match (so, oversimplistically, the expected $3.34 gain from voting would become about $3.01).
But I don’t, because so little political discussion is really empirical. Some of the people on here make make sweeping claims that in situation x, y will happen. But if this were a physical science, we’d never get away with such vagueness. A few hundred years ago, I might have been extremely confident that objects fall to the ground, or that a child comprises 50% of each of her parents’ biological makeup, but these claims only progressed when people carefully defined their components' individual parameters and tested them separately.
Why should politics be different? In fact, when several highly intelligent people passionately advocate incompatible views, it should be a warning that there’s something more going on than identifiable factual error. But intelligent people should know better than to generalise so much as to ever talk about ‘politics’ rather than specific policies in specific circumstances anyway.
In short, you’re much more confident than you should be of your political views, and even if they’re correct you can do much better than pursue or promote them anyway.
***
None of this applies nearly as much to third world citizens, who will earn much less money per hour than a first-world worker with their skills, and who might have a reasonably clear choice between a democratic government and a tyrannical regime that will evidently cause a lot more harm than the loss of a few trillion dollars.
First, for the sake of argument, let's divide our daily activities into self-gratifying and utilitarian. We obviously do both (and they probably overlap somewhat) - though even the best of us lean far more towards the former. But let's forget self-gratification - if people genuinely enjoy doing something, then so be it. But when people discuss the merits of political engagement it's usually from an ethical perspective.
So, politics as utilitarian activity has to compete with other uses of the time. The political act usually most esteemed is probably voting. Overcoming Bias has a fun screed against the act: Voting Kills. But two things they don't consider are the opportunity cost from a utilitarian perspective and the uncertainty factor. On the former, you could earn about $7.25 an hour on minimum wage, so a vote costs you about $5.45, or at least one ninth of a person’s lifelong eyesight (or about 5 person-years of vision, at a conservative estimate of African life expectancy).
If you take seriously the claim about George Bush having cost the country $10 trillion and the odds of swinging the vote being 1 in 60 million, then the expected value of voting against him (iff you vote for the Democrats) is about $16,700. Immediately divide that by two, considering you’re voting for only one of his terms at a time. Now consider that the government spends its money massively less efficiently than we could spend ours. I can’t make a serious guess at the ratio, but given that a lot of it is obviously wasted on enforcing archaic social regulation, overfunding the military, campaigning for elections, promoting the good of the country over the good of the world, and other zero sum or negative ventures, it doesn’t seem too pessimistic to assume the government spending averages to no more efficient than Seeing Eye. (this isn’t meant to be an argument for smaller government, incidentally - I imagine the average person spends their money at least as inefficiently)
In that case, we can divide the value of the money we expect to save them by another 2500 (the cost effectiveness of Fred Hollows vs Seeing Eye - if you treat ‘having a guide dog’ as the same as ‘being able to see’, but since the comparison’s already pretty spurious I probably should...).
Now we’re down to an expected value of $3.34 for your vote against the way you would have spent your own money. If that seems overly harsh, I’ve given a couple of concessions to the vote already:
a) the time it takes you to go to the polling station is only a fraction of the total time you invest in the vote, at least if you do so responsibly. Even in the most cut and dried of Western democratic elections such as Bush vs Kerry it should take you at least a couple of hours to raise your confidence in Kerry’s superiority to well over 50%, and several more so to raise it to any high credence in Overcoming Bias’s >$5 trillion (for half Bush’s presidency) figure.
b) Bush vs Kerry was an anomaly. Normally one party hasn’t openly chucked away multiples of the GNP on an ‘obviously’ ill-conceived war.
***
So the vote is a waste of time. The other political activities available to most of us are fundraising and trying to persuade people to change their views, on internet forums for eg.
Fundraising (including working to donate your own money to political groups) could conceivably be more efficient than voting, but the question as ever is whether it’s more so (or even just not much less so) than giving the funds to a group like Fred Hollows (see third link, above). I don’t think it’s something people tend to spend much of their free time doing anyway - and in any case would be more interesting as full topic comparing it to charity.
Finally, trying to persuade people to change their political views seems like one of the worst options. In general it seems to have a very low success rate - cognitive biases run rife in political disputes for some reason. Even when we claim to be treating them as matters of fact, we get emotionally invested in a way that we never would about something like maths.
What’s more, even if political persuasion is worthwhile, it’s a skill like any other, which some people are much better at than almost everyone else. Unless you write political speeches professionally, spending your own time doing something that others do better is unlikely have greater benefit than spending your time doing what you do best for money, and donating the income to hire or train someone to speak for your political cause, or to extend the visibility of the people already speaking for it.
But if that option appeals to you, then you again need to compare the effectiveness of putting your money into such a cause vs Fred Hollows.
***
The other problem with political discussion is its imprecision.
When I alluded to the views above recently, EmbraceUnity said he was satisfied with 90% precision on political views. If I actually had something recognisable as 90% confidence in any of them, I would adjust my expectation of the outcome to match (so, oversimplistically, the expected $3.34 gain from voting would become about $3.01).
But I don’t, because so little political discussion is really empirical. Some of the people on here make make sweeping claims that in situation x, y will happen. But if this were a physical science, we’d never get away with such vagueness. A few hundred years ago, I might have been extremely confident that objects fall to the ground, or that a child comprises 50% of each of her parents’ biological makeup, but these claims only progressed when people carefully defined their components' individual parameters and tested them separately.
Why should politics be different? In fact, when several highly intelligent people passionately advocate incompatible views, it should be a warning that there’s something more going on than identifiable factual error. But intelligent people should know better than to generalise so much as to ever talk about ‘politics’ rather than specific policies in specific circumstances anyway.
In short, you’re much more confident than you should be of your political views, and even if they’re correct you can do much better than pursue or promote them anyway.
***
None of this applies nearly as much to third world citizens, who will earn much less money per hour than a first-world worker with their skills, and who might have a reasonably clear choice between a democratic government and a tyrannical regime that will evidently cause a lot more harm than the loss of a few trillion dollars.
