Is it wrong not to vote?

• The cost of voting is non-zero. Say it takes thirty minutes of your day to go and vote. You could instead spend that time making money in order to donate to charities that save lives, or simply doing something pleasurable with your time.
• The chance that your vote will be the deciding vote is infinitesimal. (In the case of U.S. presidential elections, this is compounded by the electoral college because it must be both that your state has the deciding electoral votes and your vote is the deciding vote in your state.) If the margin was more than one vote, you could have stayed home and nothing would be different.
• The difference in outcome between your preferred candidate and the alternatives is not at all a life-and-death matter. If you vote in your economic interest, the personal economic cost to you of an unpreferred outcome is probably at most only a few thousand dollars in extra taxes. Even if you are a compassionate person who votes based on social issues without regard for your economic interests, it’s not as if the worse candidate is going to kill a bunch of people (well, maybe they will, but it’s hard to predict, and this possibility also only occurs when the electorate is very large, and thus the chance of your vote being the deciding vote correspondingly more infinitesimal). The difference in outcome, to your life, or the life of anyone you care about, is very much finite (except in exceptional cases, like when only one candidate supports the legality of a life-saving treatment that you need).

It is plain to see that voting is usually irrational. In only the rarest intersections of small voter pools and high stakes outcomes is it rational, and most of the elections that people vote in today are not such cases. You could even make a case that voting is wrong, because you could use the time you spend voting to make money to donate to charities that save lives, but this is not a case I want to argue, because the demandingness objection to such attempts to take utilitarianism to its logical conclusions is something that is central to most people’s belief systems because it makes it possible to accept the cognitive dissonance of living in comfort without donating all of your excess wealth to humanitarian organizations when hundreds of millions of people are starving. So, I don’t want to talk about that; all I wish to establish is that not voting is not wrong.

Is it wrong not to reduce your personal carbon footprint?

I believe that global warming is one of the two most important challenges that humanity will ever face. The failure of humanity to act in the past two decades as it has become increasingly certain that we are creating a hellish future for ourselves is emblematic of everything that is wrong with humanity, and it is an existential imperative that we as a species figure out how to stop emitting greenhouse gases.

And yet, I can’t rationally justify personally limiting my carbon footprint. I do it anyway by not eating meat and not driving a car, somewhat incidentally but also because of self-image and conscience. But I couldn’t say to a person who lives a lifestyle of carbon excess that what they are doing is wrong.

• If I gave up carbon-expensive luxuries, my life would be less comfortable. Large warm houses, private cars, plentiful meat and electric appliances are all nice things that people won’t usually willingly give up.
• If I reduced my carbon footprint, it would have barely any effect on the future suffering of anyone. I comprise perhaps one billionth of the current anthropogenic carbon emissions. If I personally prevent a few more tons of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere, what does it really accomplish? It means that the temperature will end up, say, .0000001 degrees lower than it would have been. Any affect that this will have on anyone is so small that it doesn’t even outweigh the decrease to my comfort.

Is it wrong to eat meat?

Just to contrast the collective action problems of voting and global warming with a problem where individual action is a moral imperative, consider vegetarianism. I am a vegetarian myself, not because of some idea of animal rights or human virtue, but because it follows from a simple utilitarian argument.

• The production of any meat that I am likely to have access to involves a life of endless suffering for the animal. If you don’t believe this, just read or watch any of the media that has come out on the subject of factory farms since Peter Singer published Animal Liberation in 1975.
• Needless animal suffering is bad. No one has seriously claimed since the 1600s that animals aren’t sentient beings with rich inner lives, the ability to feel pain and pleasure, happiness and fear. There is a gradient of sentience, and I won’t take issue if you argue that a fish is equivalent to a rock as far as ethics is concerned, but for a cow, I certainly will.
• The pleasure I derive from the taste of meat is less than the suffering involved in its production. (That doesn’t even consider the fact that it’s a pretty crummy ethical philosophy to consider the interchangeability of your happiness and another’s suffering on anything approaching a 1-to-1 ratio.)
• Economic reality is such that, by my not buying meat, a substantially corresponding reduction in the production of meat will occur. This is not at all an obvious, and I am not an economist, but I believe it is true. If a million or a thousand people dropping out of the meat market would affect production, then it can be shown by induction that one person doing so must also affect it, otherwise there would be no way for a million people to do so. The precise amount of suffering that I prevent may depend on the elasticity of meat and how consistently I abstain, but I am confident that it is roughly equal to the suffering of one factory farm animal’s life.

I’m not sure how relevant the vegetarian argument is to the point I’m about to make, but it’s useful to see that not all problems are collective action problems.

What is to be done?

People have a stunning inability to think rationally about these questions. People have told me that the above arguments justifying non-voting and personal inaction with regard to global warming scare them, because they seem excessively individualistic. In fact, I am considering the problem from the most collectivist perspective imaginable, the future of humanity itself, and it is the people who refuse to see that acts like voting are fundamentally unable to solve our problems who scare me.

The instinct to irrationally cooperate is the product of millions of years of evolution that rewarded groups whose members cooperated, but also tolerated a certain number of free-riders. People cooperate selectively, but competition is the dominant driver of human advancement. We now face existential risks that require complete cooperation across the entire human species to avoid. Collective action problems have been solved before by totalitarian goverments, but totalitarianism is bad and tends not to last. Humanity must figure out how to get everyone to cooperate without being forced to, how to replace competition with cooperation as the dominant mode of human affairs.

I used global warming as an example, but this is a more general problem that humanity must solve. If we instituted a global carbon tax, it would solve one manifestation of the problem, but not the problem itself. For instance, we would still be killing each other in unnecessary wars that benefit political and religious leaders and the owners of the military-industrial complex at the expense of everyone else. The rich would still be exploiting the poor while every poor person dreams of becoming rich.

How many people collectively have decision-making power over a large enough portion of the global economy (say 30%) that they could force the entire global economy to stop emitting greenhouse gases? I’d guess it’s a relatively small number, maybe 10,000. Global warming could be solved if these people got together in a room and agreed to a binding contract, or to tell political leaders to institute regulations. But until then, these people have a strong incentive to agitate for global warming inaction, and will only act once they see that the consequences will be full-blown within their and their children’s lifetimes, and even then, since any individual only controls a fraction of a percent of the global economy, they will be acting out of conscience, not self-interest. By then, it will be far too late.

We must develop a mechanism to make cooperation among the entire human species rational.

Edit: Some interesting discussion arose on Facebook, including Peter Singer weighing in via email.

1. Content.  Your Twitter page’s content and presentation should induce people to want to follow you.  It is important not to give the impression of being a spammer or unidirectional marketer who is not interested in their followers as anything other than an audience.
   • Have an icon – lack of an icon is a dead giveaway of a spammer.
   • Use your Twitter account details shown on the top right to link to your webpage, and include an interesting bio about your company or self that doesn’t sound spammy.
   • You should initially have at least half a dozen or so tweets, so they reach the bottom of the browser on most monitors, lessening the impression of being new to Twitter.
   • Your tweets should be engaging and interesting, not spammy, and it is especially good if they invite @ replies.  It is also good to have some @ replies in your tweets to indicate community participation.
2. Following the right people.  To maximize the effectiveness of your time, you need to find people who have a high probability of following you back and/or would be a valuable follower.
   • Follow high-profile Twitter users such as @guykawasaki and @chrisbrogan who follow nearly everyone who follows them.  There are various websites with lists of the top Twitter users.
   • Obviously, follow everyone who @ replies to you or otherwise mentions you in a tweet.
   • Search Google on site:twitter.com for as many keywords you can think of that people who would be interested in you or your company/product would be likely to have listed in their Twitter bios.  For example, I searched for at least a dozen occupations and hobbies related to the company I was doing the work for, and variants of those words.  Add anyone for whom you think there is a remote chance of them following you back, i.e. anyone with a followers/following ratio of less than 10.
   • If you or your company/product have a geographical focus, use the location toplists at Twitter Grader to find top Twitter users in your area to follow.
   • As a last resort, you can find people who are mentioning related keywords on search.twitter.com.  This is initially what I tried but I found the noise level to be far too high.  You will have to sift through a lot of unrelated and bot tweets to find people tweeting about what you want, and this method is not a very effective use of time.
3. Managing your following/followers ratio.
   • This ratio is probably the single most important aspect of your Twitter page.  If most Twitter users see you with a low ratio, they will assume you are a spammer and not return your follow.  Try to avoid letting this ratio get below 2/3 early on.  Once you have hundreds of followers you can probably afford to let it get a little lower, perhaps to 2, but avoid a difference in the number of digits of followers and following – I think it has a subtle pyschological effect, like the price of something being $99 instead of $100.
   • In order to avoid a low following/followers ratio, you need to be constantly unfollowing people who have not reciprocated. One to two days is probably a good amount of time to wait before unfollowing someone, depending on how impatient you are.  However, if you notice someone who has tweeted since you followed them (except if their tweet was from a mobile) and has not followed you back, unfollow them as long as it has been at least 15 minutes since you followed them (you can assume they checked their email and decided not to follow you back).
   • If someone follows you on their own, follow them back.  It still decreases your ratio, and if you did not reciprocate they would be more likely to unfollow you at some point in the future.  You are most likely not a celebrity or famous website (otherwise, you wouldn’t need to do much to get followers), so you can’t expect to have a ratio over 1.
   • If you are not on a deadline, a good way to do this is to follow a batch of people once a day, perhaps 50 or 20% of your follower count, whichever is higher, and then unfollow the ones who didn’t reciprocate before you do the same the next day.
   • Use SocialToo.com to automatically unfollow those who unfollow you.
   • Don’t unfollow any of your followers unless they are extremely offensive; doing so is considered bad Twitter etiquette.

This is just how to rapidly add followers.  Once you have them, you have to come up with a strategy to keep your tweets interesting and engaging, and you may have a few unfollows a day, so unless you are generating organic follows by then, you will occasionally need to follow some more people.

Unfortunately, tonight, I was writing a paper, and when I had finally got working for an extended period of time, and when I switched to my browser to look something up, I involuntarily was sucked into Facebook because I had the tab open.  This also happens a lot with Wikipedia; you can read chains of linked articles and end up reading about something entirely irrelevant.

To remedy this, I envision an application, possibly a browser addon, that, when you have a word processor open (and it could do some checks to see whether the document you are editing is likely a paper, such as by seeing whether you have a standard MLA header, for example), compares the text of your document to the text of the tab(s) you currently have open, and closes it/them if there is insufficient relevancy to indicate that what you are browsing is related to your paper.  I believe this is necessary because one can unconsciously procrastinate when web-browsing, so a strategy or tool such as this is a useful counteraction.

This post was a method of procrastination.

There are many decent notetaking programs for Linux, including NoteCase, KnowIt, BasKet, Wyneken and others; other solutions such as a wiki, text-file, Tomboy notes, or sticky notes can be used. However, none of them are built specifically for educational use, and it would greatly increase the productivity of students to have an information manager that was.

Most note-taking programs currently have a sidebar on the left which contains a hierarchical note tree. I believe that this outlining model is actually unnecessary for students, and I find that I tend to just have top-level notes for each of my classes and then a flat sequential collection of notes for each class one level below. It would be better to have the program store a flat series of notes for each class, get rid of or make temporarily viewable the sidebar, and have buttons for each class aligned horizontally at the top of the editor. For students, I think doing away with the tree structure of notebooks is a good tradeoff for the added simplicity and space in the UI. Notes could be scrolled through chronologically using back and forward buttons, and they could be renamed or re-ordered with a preferences dialog rather than in a tree view. Notes could automatically be named by date (this is similar to how Wyneken currently operates), or a name could be prompted for upon creation.

The ideal notetaking software for students needs to be WYSIWYG and, importantly, have a way of making bulleted lists that does not require any clicks (perhaps with a keyboard shortcut or by recognizing the “*” character as a bullet).

Task management programs such as Tasque and gtodo have the same problem of not being designed for student use and so being less than ideally useful. To enhance usability for a student, task programs should know what homework assignments and larger projects are. They should also get rid of almost all the manual preference setting required, and have the student only need to enter a title, optional description, and optional due-date, and select a class for each task.

The notebook and task list for each class could then be shown side-by-side in one application.

UPDATE: In September 2008, I discovered TakeNote, which is almost the ideal notetaking application – it does what you want it to do and nothing more.  However, I later switched to Zim Desktop Wiki, which is fairly popular in the Linux world, because it seems a little more polished and its linking ability could be useful.