Overcoming Bias

Voting Kills

According to a recent study, on the day of a US presidential election there are, on average, an extra 24 auto-accident fatalities.  The study covered the past 32 years, not including this year.

The number of times that a single vote has affected the outcome of a US presidential election is, so far, zero.

In order for voting to be rational, the expected benefit to you from your vote having an effect on the outcome, must be greater than the expected cost of you dying in an auto accident on your way to vote.

The traffic accident study covers only 32 years; but we have over 200 years of data on individual votes not swinging an election.  Over time, it has become much less likely for one person's vote to swing an election due to population increase.  I will approximate this effect by saying that 210 years of one vote not swinging an election is similar to 1000 years of one vote not swinging an election at current population levels.  That's a sloppy off-the-cuff guess at how the population changes affect the probabilities.

So, the odds of your dying in a traffic accident on your way to vote would at first seem to be 24 * (1000/4) = 6000 times the odds of your vote changing the outcome of the election.  (Probably much higher. Those are the odds they would be if one person's vote had swung the election once.)  The odds of your being disabled in a traffic accident on your way to vote would, similarly, seem to be 800*(1000/4) = 200,000 times higher than the odds of your vote swinging the election.

Positive vs. Optimal

I've been thinking a little lately about the difference between doing something useful, and doing the most useful thing. The latter is a lot harder, yet a lot more productive. I wonder if this is a basic area of human irrationality. I think you can classify a lot of the bad arguments that get made for things like the bailout of banks, or of car companies, as people saying "Here is why this money would help these companies", and missing out on "But it would help the rest of the world (like, companies that are profitable) even more".

Normally I rail against zero-sum thinking, the belief that we're just dividing up a fixed pie. But in the short-term, the inputs to producing happiness are constrained. I only have 24 hours in the day. The GDP of the US is only so much. We're investing those resources to produce even more resources - but the inputs at this stage are fixed. We can't invest in every positive-sum project. When you are figuring out what to do with these constrained inputs, you need to balance your use against *every other possible use* (or more specifically, the best alternative use). (This is nerve-wracking and tortuous, but you don't actually have to do it that well - if you just do a decent job, you'll be doing way better than someone who just does whatever positive projects happen to catch their attention.)

I think this connects to important topics at the micro and the macro level. Personal productivity techniques like Eat That Frog or Big Rocks are based on fighting our inclination to do what seems urgent, and instead doing what is optimal. I know I have a lot of trouble getting distracted by small urgent things, rather than doing the core, important work, and it seems to be a general problem. Our intuition is a terrible task prioritizer. And much of the erroneous analysis about the benefits of regulation has to do with ignoring the invisible (the best alternative use of the resources), as Henry Hazlitt so eloquently writes. Our intuition seizes on the visible consequences, and has trouble seeing the subtle, distributed, unrealized, un-proposed alternatives.

Which suggests a technique for overcoming this, at both the personal and professional levels. Try to always present alternatives. Reify the other options - or your mind will focus on whether your proposal does net good, rather than the most good with its limited resources.

Today's Inspirational Tale

At a Foresight Gathering some years ago, a Congressman was in attendance, and he spoke to us and said the following:

"Everyone in this room who's signed up for cryonics, raise your hand."

Many hands went up.

"Now everyone who knows the name of your representative in the House, raise your hand."

Fewer hands went up.

"And you wonder why you don't have any political influence."

Rationalists would likewise do well to keep this lesson in mind.

Obama Donors As News

What motivates campaign donations?  Discussions of campaign finance reform are dominated by a private interest theory, that donations are in trade for favors.  Here donations in support of interests besides yours are bad news; they says the candidate has implicitly promised to help those interests at your expense.

The main alternative is a public interest theory, which says we donate to signal private info about candidate quality.  Under this theory people who get private info suggesting a candidate would be good at promoting the general public interest donate money to signal confidence.  Here campaign donations are good news.  Now consider that Big Donors Drive Obama's Money Edge:

The record-shattering $150 million in donations that Sen. Barack Obama raised in September represents only part of [his] financial advantage. ... [It] is compounded by Obama's ability to continue to raise money through the election because he decided not to participate in the federal financing program. McCain opted in, meaning he received $84.1 million in federal funds to spend between the Republican National Convention and Nov. 4, and he must rely solely on the Republican National Committee for additional financial support. ...

The Democratic Party created a separate committee to capture millions of additional dollars from individuals who had already given Obama the most the law allows and who had also anted up $28,500 to the Democratic National Committee. ... The Committee ... has become a vehicle for ultra-rich Democratic donors to distinguish themselves from the 3.1 million others who have put $600 million behind Obama's presidential candidacy. ... Only a quarter of [this] has come from donors who made contributions of $200 or less. ... That is actually slightly less, as a percentage, than President Bush raised in small donations during his 2004 race. 

Obama supporters seem to have these alternatives:

1. Reject the private interest theory, and thus reject campaign finance reform, or
2. Accept the private interest theory, and
   • A. See Obama's donors as an unusual aberration, or
   • B. Agree this is bad news, but see enough other good news about Obama, or
   • C. See this as good news as they share private interests with Obama's rich donors.

Howard Stern on Voter Rationalization

I don't think Howard Stern has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but this piece was pretty well done.  He had one of his guys interview Harlem voters  asking first who they were voting for.  They would say Obama.  Then, the interviewer mentioned McCain's policies, pretended they were Obama's, and the interviewees thought these were great ideas.  That is, they would ask questions like this:  "Are you more for Obama's policy because he's pro-life, or because he thinks he our troops should stay in Iraq and finish this war?"  And they would say something like, 'because he's keeping the troops in Iraq'.

Informed Voters Choose Worse

From Time:

Political scientists Richard Lau at Rutgers and David Redlawsk at the University of Iowa have developed four models of how people actually pick candidates.  No partisan or demographic group is predisposed to a particular model, and a voter might use different strategies for different contests. ...  More than 70% of the time, voters end up checking the box for the candidate who shares their views. ...
Passive Voter:  You don't look for facts about the candidates, other than their party affiliation. ...
Frugal Voter:  You learn the candidates' stands only on topics you really care about, ignoring all else. ...
Intuitive Voter: You seek only enough information to reach a decision. ... the process appears to be almost unconscious. ...
Rational Voter: You actively seek as much information as possible about all candidates, consider the positives and negatives and evaluate them against your personal interests.

• Because you learn so much about both sides, this strategy is highly likely to lead to a vote across party lines.
• This strategy is also the most likely to result in a incorrect choice - picking a candidate who does not reflect your views. Researchers think that many people can't process all they learn and simply become confused.

Source: How Voters Decide: Information Processing During Election Campaigns, by Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk 2007.

Got that? Voters who try to learn more than just a few things end up less able to pick candidates who share their views.  So either humans just aren't capable of supporting a more informed democracy, or our most "informed" voters aren't really trying to make a good choice.  Apparently for them, voter information isn't about voting policy. 

Traditional Capitalist Values

Followup to:  Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?, Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided

"The financial crisis is not the crisis of capitalism.  It is the crisis of a system that has distanced itself from the most fundamental values of capitalism, which betrayed the spirit of capitalism."
        -- Nicolas Sarkozy

During the current crisis, I've more than once heard someone remarking that financial-firm CEOs who take huge bonuses during the good years and then run away when their black-swan bets blow up, are only exercising the usual capitalist values of "grab all the money you can get".

I think that a fair amount of the enmity in the world, to say nothing of confusion on the Internet, stems from people refusing to contemplate the real values of the opposition as the opposition sees it.  This is something I've remarked upon before, with respect to "the terrorists hate our freedom" or "the suicide hijackers were cowards" (statements that are sheerly silly).

Real value systems - as opposed to pretend demoniacal value systems - are phrased to generate warm fuzzies in their users, not to be easily mocked.  They will sound noble at least to the people who believe them.

Whether anyone actually lives up to that value system, or should, and whether the results are what they are claimed to be; if there are hidden gotchas in the warm fuzzy parts - sure, you can have that debate.  But first you should be clear about how your opposition sees itself - a fact which has not carefully optimized to make your side feel good about its opposition - otherwise you're not engaging the real issues.

So here are the traditional values of capitalism as seen by those who regard it as noble - the sort of Way spoken of by Paul Graham, or P. T. Barnum (who did not say "There's a sucker born every minute"), or Warren Buffett:

Why Voter Drives

From a recent Economics & Politics:

This paper explores the link between compulsory voting and income distribution using a cross-section of countries around the world. Our empirical cross-country analysis for 91 countries during the period 1960-2000 shows that when compulsory voting can be strongly enforced the distribution of income improves as measured by the Gini coefficient and the bottom income quintiles of the population. ... Because poorer countries are the ones with relatively more unequal distribution of income it might make sense to promote such voting schemes in developing regions, such as Latin America. ... We also use an instrumental variables approach to further check the robustness of our results. ... Regardless of the control variables used, we obtain coefficients that are statistically significant in compulsory voting.

I suspect this is the main reason people push others to vote - because added voters tend to favor their side in wealth redistribution debates.  To such pushers, the good of this outweighs added voter ignorance making other policies worse. 

Election Gambling History

While it is sometimes claimed that political betting markets are a recent invention, they clearly are not.  Rather it is the absence of such markets during the mid- and late-20th century which is the exception.

Rhode and Strumpf illustrate their point:

Quotes of betting odds on papal succession appear as early as 1503 when such wagering was already considered "an old practice." ... Aversion to such activities eventually led Pope Gregory XIV, in March 1591 to ban on pain of excommunication all betting on the outcome of papal elections, the length of the papal reign, or the creation of cardinals. ...

The Wire

I recently finished watching the fifth and final season of The Wire, my favorite TV show ever.  It presents a vivid and believable world of Baltimore drugs, police, politics, etc.  Some suggest producer David Simon's "political passions ultimately trump his commitment to accuracy or evenhandedness."  But I find The Wire's world unusually consistent with everything I know.  It seems real overall, though Simon tells a less realistic good vs. evil tale about newsrooms, his old stomping ground.

The overall moral of the story seems to me largely libertarian.  A renegade cop effectively legalizing drugs in one area works out great, and the show's writers have a Time oped supporting drug law jury nullification.  Dire consequences follow from child labor and prostitution being illegal.  The police, courts, prisons, schools, and city hall are unrelentingly corrupt and dysfunctional, because voters don't much care.  In the background of the story, industries managed mainly by private enterprise, such as stores, hotels, shipping, and cars, seem to mostly function well.  Private newspapers look bad, but mainly because readers don't much care. 

Apparently, however, many see The Wired as calling for more government.  At a Harvard symposium on The Wired, many panelists said the answer was more funding.  Simon was there: 

The wire is about a world in which people are worth less. ... We depicted a world in which market forces always have their say and in which capitalism has triumphed, and marginalized labor - it makes labor cheap. ... What we have here is a market-based [world]; capitalism has been the God.  To even suggest that there should be some social compact along with the capitalistic forces, to mitigate any of that, over the last twenty-five years, has been political suicide. ... We are only getting the American that we've paid for, no more, and God damn it, we deserve it. 

When asked if government wasn't the problem rather than the solution: