Is voting reasonable?

I think that the correct answer is: it depends.

If the reason you’re voting is to affect the outcome of the current election, then it seems pretty unreasonable to me. As the number of voters grows, the probability of your individual vote swaying the election approaches zero. As the article I refer to later says:

Since the chance of one’s own vote proving decisive is less by several orders of magnitude than the likelihood of being maimed in an auto accident while on the way to the polls, it would seem that a truly rational person will instead devote the half hour in question to reading a good book, drinking whiskey sours, or pursuing some other end that yields a perceptible positive return.

But is there another, rational, reason to vote?

Yes, I think so. In 1992, I read an article by Loren Lomasky in Reason Magazine that still affects my thinking on this issue.

In it, Lomasky argues that rational people vote for expressive reasons rather than the instrumental reason of deciding the outcome of the election. He gives the analogies of cheering at a football game or giving a “Get Well Quick!” card to a sick friend. We don’t do these things because we expect to change the outcome (or, more precisely, that the probability of changing the outcome multiplied by the value to us of that change exceeds the cost of the action). We do them because we want to express our support. We want other people to know what we support, and to just feel good about doing something that expresses that support. If you value the returns from this expression more than the expected costs to you, then it makes sense for you to do it.

So, suppose that you favor libertarian policies, but would prefer that a Republican candidate win vs. the Democrat candidate. This election has a Libertarian candidate as well. What should you do? It seems to me that the reasonable thing to do depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

If you’re trying to sway the election, you should forget about it and go read a good book or something.

But, if you’re voting for expressive reasons, then I think you should vote for the candidate who best represents your preferences. And that candidate is the Libertarian. I think you should do this even if you don’t really want this particular candidate to win (let’s say his approach to how to transition to libertarianism is different from yours). You should want people who analyze the results of the election to get the right message from your vote. You should want them to know that there was one more voter who favors libertarian policies, and hopefully they’ll modify their behavior to try to accomodate libertarians a bit more. But if you vote for the Republican, you’ll be sending the wrong message (or at least an ambiguous one).

So, if you want to send a libertarian message you should vote Libertarian. If you want to send a Republican message, you should vote Republican.

If you want to send a Democrat or Green message, you shouldn’t bother voting. Your vote won’t affect the outcome.

What makes things funny?

It seems like such a simple question that it must have a simple answer. But, I don’t think that there is one simple answer. I’ve always been considered funny. I’ve been good at coming up with a funny quip, telling jokes, predicting the punch lines of new jokes. I have a good internal sense of what I find funny, and what others will find funny; but I’ve never been satisfied with any explicit theory about what makes things funny.

Here are some tentative thoughts.

First of all, I’d like to distinguish between things that are funny and reasons we laugh. I think we laugh for other reasons in addition to finding things funny. We often laugh to communicate things to people; that we share values, that we’re not threatening (or that we are), etc. I’m sure there are lots of evolutionary sociological reasons that explain laughter. I’m not very interested in these.

But, what makes something funny?

The only thing that I can say that all funny things have in common is that they “tickle” our minds in an interesting way that pleases us.

I’ve heard it said that all humor is happiness at the misfortune of others. That’s not quite true, but it does seem to be the case that a lot of humor removes the dignity of somebody. Sometimes we’re being cruel to some group that’s out of favor in our local culture; but this might be more about the social aspect, like laughing, than about the pure humor. Also, we seem to like bursting the bubble of people who have a level of undeserved dignity, or superiority. That’s why bosses, teachers, politicians, priests, prudes, etc. are often the target of jokes. We are amused when they are shown to have human frailty and there’s nothing they can do to us about it. Also, slapstick seems to involve a quick transition from a noble, thinking, human to a lump of matter subjected to uncaring natural forces. We’re also amused by things that violate taboos because it’s fun to bring down those who think that some things should be off-limits to jokes. We don’t feel really threatened because humor keeps us safe from serious social attack; we were only joking, we’re not serious, etc. But being able to play with forbidden ideas is serious, and we like it.

But not all humor is like that. Some humor is just a clever turn of phrase, or double meaning, or surprise, or outrageous idea. While you might be able to find some imagined person whose dignity was diminished by the joke, I don’t think that’s what makes it funny.

I think we like to have our minds stimulated in interesting ways. We like to have to make or recognize a clever association. We like to be surprised; to have to switch contexts to see things in a new way. I think this is partially because this “cleverness” triggers a positive response. We like cleverness. We solved problems as children by changing our perspective, making new associations, etc. And we drew squeals of joy and other indications of approval from our mothers and other adults when we performed these feats. It makes sense that they would stay pleasing to us.

By the way, I realize that most funny things comprise both elements: context switch AND dignity reduction. I just wanted to make it clear that the dignity reduction wasn’t an essential part of all humor.

Anyway, these are my tentative thoughts. Criticisms are welcome.

Especially funny ones.

UPDATE 3: The book described in this post, now represents my best theory of humor.

UPDATE 2: This post is relevant.

UPDATE 1: I just heard that it’s Bob Hope’s 100th birthday today. Seems appropriate. Happy Birthday, Bob!

Are ethical hedonists right? Is happiness the only important thing about life; the thing we should be exclusively interested in maximizing?

Robert Nozick presented an interesting thought-experiment in The Examined Life (and also discussed this in Anarchy, State, and Utopia):

Imagine a machine that could give you any experience (or sequence of experiences) you might desire. When connected to this experience
machine, you can have the experience of writing a great poem or bringing about world peace or loving someone and being loved in return. You can experience the felt pleasures of these things, how they feel “from the inside.” You can program your experiences for tomorrow, or this week, or this year, or even for the rest of your life. If your imagination is impoverished, you can use the library of suggestions extracted from biographies and enhanced by novelists and psychologists. You can live your fondest dreams “from the inside.”

Would you choose to do this for the rest of your life? If not, why not? (Other people also have the same option of using these machines which, let us suppose, are provided by friendly and trustworthy beings from another galaxy, so you need not refuse connecting in order to help others.) The question is not whether to try the machine temporarily, but whether to enter it for the rest of your life. Upon entering, you will not remember having done this; so no pleasures will get ruined by realizing that they are machine-produced. Uncertainty too might be programmed by using the machine’s optional random device (upon which various preselected alternatives can depend).

Would you connect for the rest of your life?

Please ignore any issues you may have about whether such a machine is possible (assume that it is). The point is to test whether you really believe that all that matters, ultimately, is your internal feeling of happiness.

I think most people would not permanently connect to such a machine, and they’d be correct to make that choice. Happiness is good because it is a signal that things are going well; that our values are being furthered. But, what’s important are the things, not the signal. Focusing exclusively on happiness is like focusing on the symptom rather than the disease.

For most of us, our values involve real things in the real world. This connection with reality is very important to us; it gives our lives meaning. Responding to a simulation, while useful for providing fun and knowledge, is not what we most want.

I think Nozick sums up very well:

We want experiences, fitting ones, of profound connection with others, of deep understanding of natural phenomena, of love, of being profoundly moved by music or tragedy, or doing something new and innovative, experiences very different from the bounce and rosiness of happy moments. What we want, in short, is a life and a self that happiness is a fitting response to—and then to give it that response.

Ok, so I claim to strive to be reasonable. What do I mean by reasonable?

To me, being reasonable means having a commitment to using reason to determine what makes sense, what’s appropriate, what’s true, and what’s good; and then acting in accordance with those judgments. The uniquely human abilities to understand the world, to create knowledge, to teach and learn from others seem so precious to me that it strikes me as clear that these are things to value and pursue.

Being reasonable requires being rational. This entails accepting fallibility; that none of our knowledge is certain, and is all subject to criticism. We don’t know things because the beliefs are justified in the sense of being provably true, but we should hold those theories that are the best (meaning they conform with the facts as we can observe them, have great explanatory power without unhelpful complexity, have survived the severest criticism, etc.) that we know of. We should prefer the truth to comfortable fantasies. This doesn’t mean that fantasies can’t be valuable; they can. But we shouldn’t confuse them with reality.

Being reasonable requires perspective. We should consider which factors are more important, and which are less important before we take actions. Perspective is easy to lose after spending time focusing on some aspect of a situation, or when strong emotions are involved, so we should be careful to re-evaluate how important things are as we proceed. We often need to trade-off some things in order to get others and shouldn’t let the unattainable perfection prevent us from pursuing the attainable good.

Being reasonable requires a healthy skepticism. We shouldn’t accept things as true just because they are common knowledge. Memes don’t become successful by being true and good for people; they become successful by being effective at propagating themselves. This success can happen many ways, but some of them are by exploiting mental laziness and irrationality. So, we can improve the meme pool by trying to not be mentally passive hosts and transmitters of bad ideas, but subject theories to the tests of rationality discussed above, and accept and transmit only the best theories we know of.

Being reasonable requires a good attitude towards change. Many people are overly pessimistic with respect to change. Change carries risks, but also opportunities. All progress requires change. We can try to resist it at every turn and suffer the consequences; or we can embrace it and deal with it rationally. For an amusing treatment of how to deal with change personally, see this book. For an excellent treatment of the larger societal issues related to how we deal with change, see the book promoted here.

Relationships are very important in life. Being reasonable socially entails being flexible, kind, humorous, generous (but not self-sacrificial) because acting this way makes life more pleasant, helps people reap the synergistic benefits of cooperation, overcoming initial differences in plans and expectations. We often gain by being open to pursuing a common preference rather than by stubbornly standing on our rights.

There’s a lot more to being reasonable than I’ve sketched here, but it’s a start.