What does "informed" even mean? There are lots of people filled with misinformation, or biased, one sided information, or those who are highly opinionated in ways that are inconsistent, hypocritical, or are against their own self interest. I agree that many or most people should probably not be voting and are just adding noise (possibl…
What does "informed" even mean? There are lots of people filled with misinformation, or biased, one sided information, or those who are highly opinionated in ways that are inconsistent, hypocritical, or are against their own self interest. I agree that many or most people should probably not be voting and are just adding noise (possibly biased noise at that). At the least, we should stop encouraging people to vote who don't even understand the issues or have a strong opinion.
Indeed. I think I am using a slightly different version of informed than Maxim. I would say "high value" informed votes are cast by people who know the issues at hand, know the politicians, and know the state of the world/relevant fields of expertise well enough to make educated decisions, decisions where their vote is instrumental in a "I am voting for X because he will vote for A, B and C, while voting against Y, Z, and I want those positions because I am really quite sure those are the best positions based on my learnings."
So in my case I know a lot about economics, but if I don't know the voting history of local politicians on economic matters, I probably shouldn't vote because I don't know enough to use that knowledge. Voting for a president who promises to defund the police to solve crime is a bad idea, partly because the president can't really do that, and partly because it probably wouldn't solve crime in the way people hope. Net neutrality was never going to be an issue government should make decisions on, because it isn't clear that anyone really understood what the hell the question even was, let alone what the answer should be.
Anyway, short version of "informed" is "has knowledge about all relevant issues, and candidates such that votes cast for a candidate that leads to the candidates election are likely to lead to the desired legal outcomes, which are likely to lead to the desired outcomes in reality." Informed voters must know "Do we have problem X? If so, should we do Y to solve X? If we should do Y, will candidate Z reliably vote for Y should he be elected?"
I think that is the strongest argument against the governmentalizing of all of our affairs: who the hell has time to learn all that such that they can be effective voters? Government by the people requires a lot of the people, and that increases exponentially with the number of decisions made by government.
That is the ideal, but I think the value drops away pretty quickly once you get away from it.
Even considering the median voter is terribly uninformed, effectively voting at random for representatives, you have to consider how many potential issues a representative could decide upon should you vote for them. How many things can you be knowledgeable about? Single issue voters are not good, but 2-3 issue voters are not obviously a lot better. Plus, how do you know that potential candidates will vote the way your knowledge of the issues suggests they should?
Plus, what if you are well informed and absolutely objectively correct on 2-3 issues, but dead wrong on a few others? Are you sure you are adding value? You had better hope the 3 issues you are right on come up and the others don't, or at least that the benefit of your representative making the correct vote on those issues outweigh the harm from the others.
It is really important to grasp the multidimensionality of the issue space when considering voting for representatives. The problem with much of political science theory is that it tries to simplify things really hard. Take, for example, the median voter theorem. It assumes everyone votes and just a single dimension of decision. Those make it much more tractable, but pretty much useless in predicting real life where "getting the vote out" is more important than finding that sweet spot of dividing the electorate.
I should say that I do generally vote when I know a bit about the politicians and the relevant issues, but I don't assign a high likelihood of anything valuable coming out of it, even a high expected value, and just try my best. The only way to fix the problem is to lower the range of things to know, and until that happens at best the outcome of anyone voting is "perhaps not net negative." If someone is interested in maximizing the good done by their time, they definitely should focus on something else.
I don't think being informed is as hard as you make it out to be, for the simple fact that your options are limited. If all the candidates running are 80% similar, you only need to focus on the (relatively) small number of differences.
For instance, take the conflict in Ukraine. You could try to become informed, and learn all about the state of the war, and foreign policy in general. Or you could realize that the vast majority of federal politicians will happily spend billions of dollars in military aid to any foreign country no matter what. Consequently, this issue is irrelevant to most people, because they don't have an option of voting for someone who won't do that.
If you look at things this way, it narrows down the issues that you have to worry about. It's not a good situation, but it does make it easier to know how to vote.
How do you know the candidates are actually 80% similar? You assume that, but it seems like a really tough thing to tell. Are you not voting in primaries with a bunch of people running?
And again, how do you know what range of issues might come up, and no knowing that, how do you know if the candidates are similar?
Who would have known about COVID in 2016? Would people have changed their votes if they did?
Who expected the election fraud controversy in 2020? We could have done something prior to keep that happening like it did, for instance passing laws/amending the Constitution to say "Uhm... what do we do here, exactly? You know, so we don't have to fight about it if it comes up," at say, any point in the history of the country. What was Eisenhower's view on that?
Again, you are REALLY underestimating the high dimensionality of the possible issues that can come up. We get by via estimating and guessing what politicians will do about odd ball issues that are not issue of the day type debate topics, but is just guessing.
How would Trump have responded to the housing crisis of 2008? Damned if I know, and it happened already!
Fair point, but it seems that you're describing an ideal that is literally not possible. I mean, I could tell you how I personally would deal with some hypothetical issue today, and maybe in the future when the hypothetical became real I would change my mind for a good reason! (I can imagine that being the case regarding the issues you mention.) If "being informed" requires the voter to have an understanding that the candidates themselves might not have, I don't think it's possible even in theory.
(Side note: being sort of a crazy libertarian, my default answer to the question "How will the government respond?" is usually "Hopefully by doing nothing".)
(Side note 2: To me it seems like primary candidates are more like 95% similar, but maybe I am taking too narrow of a view.)
But that is just it, having a high estimation of your vote resulting in good outcomes has a ridiculously high cost of knowledge (assuming your vote changed the election in the first place.) Yes, it is fantastically high when there is a wide range of issues representatives can and will make decisions on. Yes, you can't really know because it is hard to even know yourself that well. Yes, to the point of being absurdly impossible. That is the entire argument. You can have voters a little more informed on the margins, but that doesn't mean you have sufficiently informed voters to actually make good decisions, just like my kid's piggy bank can't pay off the national debt. I mean, sure, she is good at saving, better than any other kid, and just added three more quarters today in fact. Unfortunately she will never be up to the task, because it is pretty much impossible.
Put another way, if you want to have government by the people voting for representatives, you have to have a very narrow range of things the government can do, because the knowledge costs escalate very quickly. Otherwise you end up with nearly zero information voters voting expressively for crazy, irrational things, all while a vast amount of decisions are made involving huge sums of money and power with the electorate being almost entirely unaware. Which is pretty much exactly what we have today.
You can assert that … but other smart people (as measured by any objective standard) disagree with you, and we actually get a say in which leader is less bad
Voting is meaningless when there are only two choices and there's little difference between them. If that's your system, voting is harmful because it endorses a bad system. In the case of Trump, Biden, Hillary, and Obama, all of them believe that the secret of prosperity is to print money rather than set spending priorities to balance the federal budget; so it makes no difference who is elected.
Maybe that's the point. Cut out the public service ads guilting people into voting. Give them "permission" to admit that they aren't engaged and should stay out of it.
What does "informed" even mean? There are lots of people filled with misinformation, or biased, one sided information, or those who are highly opinionated in ways that are inconsistent, hypocritical, or are against their own self interest. I agree that many or most people should probably not be voting and are just adding noise (possibly biased noise at that). At the least, we should stop encouraging people to vote who don't even understand the issues or have a strong opinion.
Indeed. I think I am using a slightly different version of informed than Maxim. I would say "high value" informed votes are cast by people who know the issues at hand, know the politicians, and know the state of the world/relevant fields of expertise well enough to make educated decisions, decisions where their vote is instrumental in a "I am voting for X because he will vote for A, B and C, while voting against Y, Z, and I want those positions because I am really quite sure those are the best positions based on my learnings."
So in my case I know a lot about economics, but if I don't know the voting history of local politicians on economic matters, I probably shouldn't vote because I don't know enough to use that knowledge. Voting for a president who promises to defund the police to solve crime is a bad idea, partly because the president can't really do that, and partly because it probably wouldn't solve crime in the way people hope. Net neutrality was never going to be an issue government should make decisions on, because it isn't clear that anyone really understood what the hell the question even was, let alone what the answer should be.
Anyway, short version of "informed" is "has knowledge about all relevant issues, and candidates such that votes cast for a candidate that leads to the candidates election are likely to lead to the desired legal outcomes, which are likely to lead to the desired outcomes in reality." Informed voters must know "Do we have problem X? If so, should we do Y to solve X? If we should do Y, will candidate Z reliably vote for Y should he be elected?"
I think that is the strongest argument against the governmentalizing of all of our affairs: who the hell has time to learn all that such that they can be effective voters? Government by the people requires a lot of the people, and that increases exponentially with the number of decisions made by government.
what you describe seems to me more a platonic ideal than a realistic bar.
If you are closer to the ideal you lay out than the median voter is, then your vote adds value, so that should be the bar IMO.
That is the ideal, but I think the value drops away pretty quickly once you get away from it.
Even considering the median voter is terribly uninformed, effectively voting at random for representatives, you have to consider how many potential issues a representative could decide upon should you vote for them. How many things can you be knowledgeable about? Single issue voters are not good, but 2-3 issue voters are not obviously a lot better. Plus, how do you know that potential candidates will vote the way your knowledge of the issues suggests they should?
Plus, what if you are well informed and absolutely objectively correct on 2-3 issues, but dead wrong on a few others? Are you sure you are adding value? You had better hope the 3 issues you are right on come up and the others don't, or at least that the benefit of your representative making the correct vote on those issues outweigh the harm from the others.
It is really important to grasp the multidimensionality of the issue space when considering voting for representatives. The problem with much of political science theory is that it tries to simplify things really hard. Take, for example, the median voter theorem. It assumes everyone votes and just a single dimension of decision. Those make it much more tractable, but pretty much useless in predicting real life where "getting the vote out" is more important than finding that sweet spot of dividing the electorate.
I should say that I do generally vote when I know a bit about the politicians and the relevant issues, but I don't assign a high likelihood of anything valuable coming out of it, even a high expected value, and just try my best. The only way to fix the problem is to lower the range of things to know, and until that happens at best the outcome of anyone voting is "perhaps not net negative." If someone is interested in maximizing the good done by their time, they definitely should focus on something else.
I don't think being informed is as hard as you make it out to be, for the simple fact that your options are limited. If all the candidates running are 80% similar, you only need to focus on the (relatively) small number of differences.
For instance, take the conflict in Ukraine. You could try to become informed, and learn all about the state of the war, and foreign policy in general. Or you could realize that the vast majority of federal politicians will happily spend billions of dollars in military aid to any foreign country no matter what. Consequently, this issue is irrelevant to most people, because they don't have an option of voting for someone who won't do that.
If you look at things this way, it narrows down the issues that you have to worry about. It's not a good situation, but it does make it easier to know how to vote.
How do you know the candidates are actually 80% similar? You assume that, but it seems like a really tough thing to tell. Are you not voting in primaries with a bunch of people running?
And again, how do you know what range of issues might come up, and no knowing that, how do you know if the candidates are similar?
Who would have known about COVID in 2016? Would people have changed their votes if they did?
Who expected the election fraud controversy in 2020? We could have done something prior to keep that happening like it did, for instance passing laws/amending the Constitution to say "Uhm... what do we do here, exactly? You know, so we don't have to fight about it if it comes up," at say, any point in the history of the country. What was Eisenhower's view on that?
Again, you are REALLY underestimating the high dimensionality of the possible issues that can come up. We get by via estimating and guessing what politicians will do about odd ball issues that are not issue of the day type debate topics, but is just guessing.
How would Trump have responded to the housing crisis of 2008? Damned if I know, and it happened already!
Fair point, but it seems that you're describing an ideal that is literally not possible. I mean, I could tell you how I personally would deal with some hypothetical issue today, and maybe in the future when the hypothetical became real I would change my mind for a good reason! (I can imagine that being the case regarding the issues you mention.) If "being informed" requires the voter to have an understanding that the candidates themselves might not have, I don't think it's possible even in theory.
(Side note: being sort of a crazy libertarian, my default answer to the question "How will the government respond?" is usually "Hopefully by doing nothing".)
(Side note 2: To me it seems like primary candidates are more like 95% similar, but maybe I am taking too narrow of a view.)
But that is just it, having a high estimation of your vote resulting in good outcomes has a ridiculously high cost of knowledge (assuming your vote changed the election in the first place.) Yes, it is fantastically high when there is a wide range of issues representatives can and will make decisions on. Yes, you can't really know because it is hard to even know yourself that well. Yes, to the point of being absurdly impossible. That is the entire argument. You can have voters a little more informed on the margins, but that doesn't mean you have sufficiently informed voters to actually make good decisions, just like my kid's piggy bank can't pay off the national debt. I mean, sure, she is good at saving, better than any other kid, and just added three more quarters today in fact. Unfortunately she will never be up to the task, because it is pretty much impossible.
Put another way, if you want to have government by the people voting for representatives, you have to have a very narrow range of things the government can do, because the knowledge costs escalate very quickly. Otherwise you end up with nearly zero information voters voting expressively for crazy, irrational things, all while a vast amount of decisions are made involving huge sums of money and power with the electorate being almost entirely unaware. Which is pretty much exactly what we have today.
Thanks for clarifying. I get your point now, and I think this is a quite succinct description of the problem.
Anyone who votes for Trump or Biden is uninformed, or about 98% of voters in the last election.
You can assert that … but other smart people (as measured by any objective standard) disagree with you, and we actually get a say in which leader is less bad
Voting is meaningless when there are only two choices and there's little difference between them. If that's your system, voting is harmful because it endorses a bad system. In the case of Trump, Biden, Hillary, and Obama, all of them believe that the secret of prosperity is to print money rather than set spending priorities to balance the federal budget; so it makes no difference who is elected.
I disagree — I think there are major differences between them in policy, sanity, and competence.
But yes, if they are equivalent to you, then it doesn’t make much sense for you to vote.
Everyone must judge for themselves whether their opinion is really better than the median voter. Ideally subtract a bit for overconfidence bias.
Maybe that's the point. Cut out the public service ads guilting people into voting. Give them "permission" to admit that they aren't engaged and should stay out of it.
I’m all in favor of that. I also believe the point in this post was quite different.