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I think literally your entire comment is specifically making that point.

by mlthoughts2018 8y ago

mikeash 8y ago
How? My entire point was that you need to cast a vote if you want elected officials to care about your opinions. I said nothing whatsoever about how to choose who to vote for, only that voting itself is key.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  > “Vote for Mickey Mouse if you can’t stand an actual human, but you need to get on the record as having shown up if you want any sort of voice.” You very clearly are saying that “having your voice heard” matters more than using your vote to correctly predict a candidate who will cause your desired change. Since you say it’s never reasonable to abstain from voting (i.e. not even if someone is ignorant of the facts), this directly means your comment explicitly endorses “having your voice heard” above “voting accurately.” It’s all right there in your comment. There’s no question of interpretation. It was just the single, direct statement you made.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    You seem to have completely misunderstood my comment. In a democracy, elected officials respond to the voting public. If you stay home, there’s no chance they’ll do what you want them to do, unless by coincidence. If you show up to vote, they will account for that and your desires will influence policy. I said nothing at all about who to vote for or how to choose that. You can’t infer the relative importance of that from what I said. I may have an opinion on that, but you can’t possibly know what it is from what I’ve said here.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      I specifically only talked about first-past-the-post votes, like the US presidential election. The decisions a president makes after gaining office are not the result of (nor even very influenced by) any type of popular poll about courses of action. I really can’t make sense out of your last comment. You don’t influence specific policy decisions by getting out and voting. You only influence them by predicting which candidate, after being elected, will then actually perform the policy actions you want. If you value an accurate mapping between votes and correctly predicting outcomes, then when your personal knowledge of candidates is weak, abstaining is a way to allow more expert voters to improve the signal-to-noise ratio relative to ignorant voters. But you specifically said, > “Abstaining from voting is never a reasonable choice unless you want elected officials who don’t give a damn about you” and this can only make sense if instead of valuing votes as accurate predictions (wherein you might best obtain a politician who cares about you by abstaining from injecting your noisy vote into the election) you choose to value votes as a means of unqualified personal expression.
      - mikeash 8y ago
        Politicians’ views aren’t immutable. They decide on policy by figuring out what will best help them, and their party, win elections. I’m not talking about a single race. I’m talking about the whole system. Over time, politicians’ views are shaped by the voters. If you show up to vote, you’ll be part of that process. If you don’t, you won’t, and you shouldn’t then be surprised when none of the people running for office share your views.
        mlthoughts2018 8y ago
        > “Over time, politicians’ views are shaped by the voters. If you show up to vote, you’ll be part of that process. If you don’t, you won’t, and you shouldn’t then be surprised when none of the people running for office share your views.” This just simply is not true. If you are ignorant about facts pertaining to issues, then to the extent that your vote influences future policy shifts, it would do so in the wrong direction, or at least add noise to the process that knowledgeable people have to overcome. An ignorant voter could for example directly and unwittingly vote against their own views if they aren’t informed about the relationship between their preferred outcomes, policies that could potentially achieve those outcomes, and politicians’ likelihood of adopting particular positions, being lobbied by corporate interests, etc. For most politicians and most issues, most everyday people absolutely have zero knowledge about these situations that would imply their preferences deserve to be factored into the decision (from a statistical optimization point of view). > “If you show up to vote, you’ll be part of that process.” Yes, but you could be playing a harmful part of that process. Showing up to vote is not unequivocally always helpful. If you vote based on ignorance, even totally separate from meta debates about how to choose the right morals or norms subjectively, you could cause harm. “Being part of the process” could mean you are effectively noise-jamming democracy because your uninformed opinion about the best course of action shouldn’t be listened to. > “If you don’t, you won’t,” This is just wrong. You can “play a part” by abstaining from voting. In fact it can be a critical part if you know you are personally uninformed about the technical specifics of an issue or don’t know a candidate’s history of being a corporate shill, or you base your vote on a single issue that turns out not to be very urgent for society, etc. Not voting when you don’t have special knowledge of the best policy or best candidate can be an incredibly important way to meaningfully participate in government, and may often be much more socially responsible than voting from a position of ignorance. Despite all this, I still concede that if a person doesn’t care about “using their vote to do good” and chooses instead to care about “having their voice heard” and arguing (however ignorantly) in favor of their preferences, then they could justifiably reach the conclusions you give in your comments. Just not if their goal is to optimize the chance of the best policy outcome according to their views weighted by their expertise in the topic. In that case, abstaining from the vote can often be the optimal choice, even in terms of trying to get policy reformed in the direction you prefer.

I think literally your entire comment is specifically making that point.

How? My entire point was that you need to cast a vote if you want elected officials to care about your opinions. I said nothing whatsoever about how to choose who to vote for, only that voting itself is key.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
> “Vote for Mickey Mouse if you can’t stand an actual human, but you need to get on the record as having shown up if you want any sort of voice.” You very clearly are saying that “having your voice heard” matters more than using your vote to correctly predict a candidate who will cause your desired change. Since you say it’s never reasonable to abstain from voting (i.e. not even if someone is ignorant of the facts), this directly means your comment explicitly endorses “having your voice heard” above “voting accurately.” It’s all right there in your comment. There’s no question of interpretation. It was just the single, direct statement you made.
- mikeash 8y ago
  You seem to have completely misunderstood my comment. In a democracy, elected officials respond to the voting public. If you stay home, there’s no chance they’ll do what you want them to do, unless by coincidence. If you show up to vote, they will account for that and your desires will influence policy. I said nothing at all about who to vote for or how to choose that. You can’t infer the relative importance of that from what I said. I may have an opinion on that, but you can’t possibly know what it is from what I’ve said here.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    I specifically only talked about first-past-the-post votes, like the US presidential election. The decisions a president makes after gaining office are not the result of (nor even very influenced by) any type of popular poll about courses of action. I really can’t make sense out of your last comment. You don’t influence specific policy decisions by getting out and voting. You only influence them by predicting which candidate, after being elected, will then actually perform the policy actions you want. If you value an accurate mapping between votes and correctly predicting outcomes, then when your personal knowledge of candidates is weak, abstaining is a way to allow more expert voters to improve the signal-to-noise ratio relative to ignorant voters. But you specifically said, > “Abstaining from voting is never a reasonable choice unless you want elected officials who don’t give a damn about you” and this can only make sense if instead of valuing votes as accurate predictions (wherein you might best obtain a politician who cares about you by abstaining from injecting your noisy vote into the election) you choose to value votes as a means of unqualified personal expression.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      Politicians’ views aren’t immutable. They decide on policy by figuring out what will best help them, and their party, win elections. I’m not talking about a single race. I’m talking about the whole system. Over time, politicians’ views are shaped by the voters. If you show up to vote, you’ll be part of that process. If you don’t, you won’t, and you shouldn’t then be surprised when none of the people running for office share your views.
      - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
        > “Over time, politicians’ views are shaped by the voters. If you show up to vote, you’ll be part of that process. If you don’t, you won’t, and you shouldn’t then be surprised when none of the people running for office share your views.” This just simply is not true. If you are ignorant about facts pertaining to issues, then to the extent that your vote influences future policy shifts, it would do so in the wrong direction, or at least add noise to the process that knowledgeable people have to overcome. An ignorant voter could for example directly and unwittingly vote against their own views if they aren’t informed about the relationship between their preferred outcomes, policies that could potentially achieve those outcomes, and politicians’ likelihood of adopting particular positions, being lobbied by corporate interests, etc. For most politicians and most issues, most everyday people absolutely have zero knowledge about these situations that would imply their preferences deserve to be factored into the decision (from a statistical optimization point of view). > “If you show up to vote, you’ll be part of that process.” Yes, but you could be playing a harmful part of that process. Showing up to vote is not unequivocally always helpful. If you vote based on ignorance, even totally separate from meta debates about how to choose the right morals or norms subjectively, you could cause harm. “Being part of the process” could mean you are effectively noise-jamming democracy because your uninformed opinion about the best course of action shouldn’t be listened to. > “If you don’t, you won’t,” This is just wrong. You can “play a part” by abstaining from voting. In fact it can be a critical part if you know you are personally uninformed about the technical specifics of an issue or don’t know a candidate’s history of being a corporate shill, or you base your vote on a single issue that turns out not to be very urgent for society, etc. Not voting when you don’t have special knowledge of the best policy or best candidate can be an incredibly important way to meaningfully participate in government, and may often be much more socially responsible than voting from a position of ignorance. Despite all this, I still concede that if a person doesn’t care about “using their vote to do good” and chooses instead to care about “having their voice heard” and arguing (however ignorantly) in favor of their preferences, then they could justifiably reach the conclusions you give in your comments. Just not if their goal is to optimize the chance of the best policy outcome according to their views weighted by their expertise in the topic. In that case, abstaining from the vote can often be the optimal choice, even in terms of trying to get policy reformed in the direction you prefer.