I recently wrote about why voting is a terrible idea and fell into the same error as Gelman (I assumed 49.9-50.1 a priori is conservative). Wes and gwern, thanks for correcting me! In fact, due to the Median Voter Theorem and with better and better polling and analysis we may assume that the distribution of voter distributions should have a peak at 50-50.
Of course, there are other great reasons not to vote (mainly to avoid “enlisting in the army” and letting your mind be killed. My suggestion is always to find a friend who is a credible threat to vote for the candidate you despise most and invite him to a beer on election day under the condition that neither of you will vote and you will not talk about politics. Thus, you maintain your friendship while cancelling out the votes. I call it the VAVA (voter anti-voter annihilation) principle.
“Politics is the mindkiller” is an argument for why people should avoid getting into political discussion on Lesswrong; it is not an argument against political involvement in general. Rationalists completely retreating from Politics would likely lower the sanity waterline as far as politics is concerned. Rationalists should get more involved in politics (but outside Lesswrong) of course.
I recently wrote about why voting is a terrible idea and fell into the same error as Gelman (I assumed 49.9-50.1 a priori is conservative). Wes and gwern, thanks for correcting me! In fact, due to the Median Voter Theorem and with better and better polling and analysis we may assume that the distribution of voter distributions should have a peak at 50-50.
Of course, there are other great reasons not to vote (mainly to avoid “enlisting in the army” and letting your mind be killed. My suggestion is always to find a friend who is a credible threat to vote for the candidate you despise most and invite him to a beer on election day under the condition that neither of you will vote and you will not talk about politics. Thus, you maintain your friendship while cancelling out the votes. I call it the VAVA (voter anti-voter annihilation) principle.
“Politics is the mindkiller” is an argument for why people should avoid getting into political discussion on Lesswrong; it is not an argument against political involvement in general. Rationalists completely retreating from Politics would likely lower the sanity waterline as far as politics is concerned. Rationalists should get more involved in politics (but outside Lesswrong) of course.