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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

I'm more upset with the electorate for having under-informed or unexamined political opinions.

This is unavoidable. Your vote doesn't matter - the probability of it altering the outcome are infinitesimally (read: too small to represent with a double) small.

Unless you derive entertainment value from informing yourself, why would you waste any time on informing yourself or thinking carefully?

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In Kantian ethics, there is a concept known as universalizability: "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." If one subscribes to such a principle, and one believes that the world would be a worse place if everyone was willfully ignorant of important political issues, then one would hold that one has an ethical obligation to make an effort to become politically informed.

I guess I better not become a programmer, because if everyone became a programmer, there would be no one to farm the fields.

A much better rule is something like "act as if you are deciding for everyone who can be expected to make similar decisions for similar reasons". This avoids that particular pitfall, because everyone who might decide to be a programmer for similar reasons is still not too big a fraction of the total world population, while still giving the right answer re: voting

> Your vote doesn't matter - the probability of it altering the outcome are infinitesimally small.

That's nice sounding cynicism, but it's not obvious that the math actually comes out that way. Consider: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/01/yes-it-can-be-r.html

They derive the "1 in 1 million" chance of your vote altering the outcome by assuming the distribution of votes is given by a uniform distribution on the possible vote outcomes.

I have no idea where this assumption comes from. To me the more natural one is to assume a binomial distribution - everyone else has a certain chance P of voting for Obama. Then do the normal approximation, and you realize the odds of your vote mattering are vastly smaller (i.e., exp(- delta^2) rather than 1/delta).

I agree that the uniform distribution is fishy. I could object to the binomial assumption too; it seems kind of question-begging. My point was just that the thesis "your vote doesn't matter" is not at all self-evident.

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