Aumann voting; or, How to vote when you're ignorant

Much more common situation: the parties are A and B. A is slightly more idiotic. The right answer is C, which has no candidate and causes both A and B to recoil in horror.

Vote how?

I really liked Robin Hanson's essay about this, "Policy Tug-O-War":

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html

Moral: Pull policy ropes sideways!

If you're going to do this, you must research idiocy independently and gather statistics on its specific forms. Do not allow your impressions of where the idiots are and how numerous they are to be formed by the media.

Phil- clever heuristic, canceling idiots..though note that it actually applies directly from a bayesian expected value calculation in certain scenarios:

1. Assume you have no info about the voting issues except who the idiots are and how they vote. Now either your prior is that reversed stupidity is intelligence in this domain or it's not. If it is, then you have clear bayesian grounds to vote against the idiots. If it's not, then reversed stupidity either is definite stupidity or it has 0 correlation. In case 1, reason itself does not work (e.g., a situation in which god confounds the wisdom of the wise, I.e. You're screwed precisely for being rational). If 0 correlation, then the idiots are noise and provided you can count the idiots to be sure multiple of you don't cancel one idiot, you reduce noise, which is the best you can do.

The doubtful point in this assessment is how you identify "idiots" about a voting situation which Ostensibly you know nothing else about. In your examples, the info you used to identify the idiots seemed to require some domain knowledge which itself should figure into how you vote. Assuming idiots are "cross-domain incompetent" may be true for worlds like ours, but that needs to be fleshed a lot more for soundness, I think.

I think you need evidence about what effect non-tug of war voting has.

Suppose I support the free ownership of weapons, but think a seven day waiting period is better than none.

If I vote for that waiting period, am I demoralising my fellow gun supporters, and invigorating the gun control types, who will therefore struggle harder for more restrictions? Or invigorating my side, which will make sure it does not get defeated next time? Too little evidence to make a prediction.

Or what if I say, well, seven days is OK, but if they win this the gun control types will then demand gun licencing, involving gun holders needing annual psychiatrist's reports. So I have to tug against seven days, in case something worse comes along.

I would vote for the policy I supported. This has little enough effect on whether that policy gets made into law. I would think the effect on future changes is more negligible.

As a British citizen, I have never been eligible to vote in a referendum. It seems that American propositions are much more common.

Less Wrong SF quote: "The right to bear weapons is the right to be free"- The Weapon Shops of Isher.

"If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for, but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong. If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time on it that truly intelligent exercise of franchise requires."

--Heinlein

Voting to "cancel out an idiot" is possibly acceptable as a first-order approximation, but sorely lacking beyond that.

Even assuming single-issue voting on a question that is completely linear, if you believe that the correct point is at point X% of the way from A to B, where Y% of the idiots vote towards A and (100-Y)% towards B, a second-order approximation of rationality would mean randomly voting toward one side or the other in proportion to the difference between X and Y such that if X and Y are equal you flip a coin.

This assumes that the debate and possible solution set lies along a straight line, in which case reversed stupidity is very close to intelligence. In situations where this is strictly the case, this method might not be bad, and in markets if you can manage to buy when the idiots sell and sell when the idiots buy (again, along a straight line of possible values) in my experience you end up doing well, if you can figure out which end of the rope is which. JGWeissman, I wouldn't worry about overcancellation too much because the number of idiots is large and the number of people willing to employ heuristics like this is small.

In most situations of this type the best solutions lie far from the rope and even the smart people have long since given up doing anything but pulling. If that is not possible, and there is no cost to pull on the rope, trying to cancel out the idiots is on average likely to be better than doing nothing, but I certainly wouldn't think this is a good primary methodology to make decisions.

I don't think it's a good heuristic, and I don't think you do either. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and it's more efficient to tug "sideways".

For issues that are split around 95%-5%, I wouldn't be surprised if the proportion of idiots had very little correlation to the truth of the causes.

Is your advocacy to vote in order to cancel out mindless voters? Or does the heuristic promote voting to cancel out the mindless in general?

I ask because I don't think you can generally distinguish between voting idiots and non-voting idiots in a secret ballot system.

Imagine a less publicized election with low turnout. If the pro biotechnology group votes more rigorously, they might actually have more mindlessly pro-science voters because a large number of anti-science voters stayed home.

If the heuristic dictates voting against idiots in general, then it falls to the aforementioned "reversed stupidity is not intelligence". If the heuristic dictates voting against voting idiots, then you need to have good assumptions about which idiots vote and which idiots stay home. And that's virtually unattainable knowledge.

I'm agnostic to the heuristic you propose, but I disagree with applying it to the metric that you use (being pro- or anti-science). Scientific progress might be slowed by respecting genetic privacy rights, but we could say the same of any privacy rights (or, indeed, many other things). Imagine how much faster sociology and psychology could advance if we knew what everybody does in the privacy of their homes. Surely there are considerations more important than the advancement of science.

My job is to cancel out an idiot.

How do you coordinate so that many others with the same strategy don't cancel out the same idiot? If you also consider everyone who uses strategy as an idiot, it could work, but it seems difficult to achieve in practice. I think it would be more effective to actually make a judgment of what you would do if you were in charge, and then vote that way.

This is an excellent point!