Voting is like donating hundreds of thousands to charity

The article gives an upper limit of the expected value of a vote. Even if the lower limit is 2 orders of magnitude lower, it still is quite significant. And makes it worth the time to vote, or to try to convince other people to vote your way.

Scott Alexander estimates the value of a vote more conservatively to be about $300 to $5,000 (the higher number for if you live in a swing state.) He backs this up by pointing to specific policies and actions taken by presidents that cost trillions of dollars.

I don't think it's hard to believe that the president can be worth trillions of dollars. Presidents can start and prevent wars, and have very significant influence on domestic policy. In the worst case, a president has some risk of starting a nuclear war that costs [world GDP], or starting a world wide economic depression. In the best case they could stop said war or depression. Supreme court appointments just by itself is worth a huge amount.

Yeah, 75% is pure nonsense. 50% of the budget is social security and medicare/medicaid/CHIP/marketplace subsidies, which are almost entirely locked in. Maybe at the margin policy can adjust this somewhat, especially the marketplace subsidies portion. 16% is defense spending, which are decisions made by the military bureaucracy with a little bit of pork barrel politics. Maybe they could adjust the growth rate of that up or down 5%. 10% is safety net and welfare, 6% is interest on the national debt, and 8% is pensions that have already been agreed to. 11% of the budget is for the rest of the government's services, and most of those budgets are requested by the bureaucracies and individually fulfilled plus or minus some percent. Then, the president has to share the responsibilities for setting those budgets with the senate and congress. I would be surprised if 15% of the budget went to different people under Obama than under Jon McCain, and, I think in terms of realistic impact, where very similar entities have relatively the same impact on my political views, the number is probably in the single-digit percentages.

Also, I would like to point out for Gleb's benefit that "tenure-track professor" sounds worse than simply "professor" for the same reason that "junior carpenter" sounds worse than "carpenter." Most people's availability heuristic is not that the typical professor is not on the tenure track. The idea wouldn't even be salient except that "tenure-track" was mentioned.

Budget source

Ha.

Great article Gleb! You are the best writer of a rationalism and I will buy all your best selling book to be better at life! I will tell my friends of you on all the social medias! Many of thnaks to you and InIn for the saving of my life!

There's a lot of cringe-y stuff in the link. But Gleb seems like a nice guy to me. Probably overly ambitious about trying to complete whatever mission he sees himself as trying to complete (and probably a bit too anxious to grow his status), and therefore willing to stoop to do some exaggerating and weird quasi-unethical stuff online to get it done... but he seems pretty harmless for the amount of ire he always draws on here.

Writing is hard and he writes some nice entry-level rationality stuff that would be novel to some huge chunk of the population that will never give a damn about lesswrong or any other rationality blog.

Maybe I'm overestimating how mean people around here have been to Gleb. I know there have been some positive things said about him as well. If his treatment's been fair and I'm way off, cool. My bad. But I imagine a universe where he'd been embraced by LW and, for instance, asked to help work a project creating an ELI5 version of the sequences for mass consumption...and I think that is a better universe than this one.

Oh, boy, Gleb seems to have really pissed off some very polite people X-)

I don't see anything in that link that is relevant to this post.

I don't think it makes sense to call writing an article about a topic when another person wrote an article about the same subject a ripoff.

Trying to calculate the expected value of voting goes back at least to public choice economists in the 1960s.

Which was in turn a ripoff of early attempts to calculate E.V. of voting.

I don't see why you do that division. The point of being the decisive vote, is that if you didn't show up to vote, the election would have gone the other way (lets ignore ties for the moment.) You can disregard other people entirely in this model. All that matters is the expected value of your action. Which is enormous.

Yeah, you are counting the fact that so many other people are also voting twice if you divide as described above.