One of the mistakes people make in approaching a site like Facebook is to tell someone: "You're posting more about X than Y, so you obviously care more about X than Y."
A good response would be: "No, I care about making Facebook feeds better, and I see that Y is getting 10 times as much attention as X, so I'm posting more about X to improve the overall balance."
That could be rational even if I care twice as much about Y as I do about X. That's thinking more about the site as a whole than how to signal what I care about.
You can also apply this idea to voting.
For instance, let's say reducing cruelty to animals ranks #20 on my list of political goals. But maybe I think almost no other voters are going to consider that issue at all when they cast their votes. In order to correct the overall neglect of that issue, I could rationally make the question of which candidate will be best for animals the #1 factor in how I cast my vote. That makes it sound like I think animal issues are more important than any other issues, but what it really means is that I'm thinking about the whole democratic process instead of, again, how to signal what I care about.
(Photo by Paul Sableman.)
Wednesday, June 3, 2020
Why your focus in online posting or voting doesn't need to reflect your priorities
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1 comments:
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but I don’t think voting and your FB feed operate similarly. FB gives you more of what you choose on FB. If you post more X, you get more X. But your vote for a candidate does not necessarily operate to prioritize an issue. In fact, it would seem that artificially prioritizing No. 20 of your political goals by voting for the leading animal cruelty candidate could promote unwanted results. What if climate change is your No. 1 political goal and the leading animal cruelty candidate is also the leading climate-change denier? Or if the animal cruelty candidate was good on climate change, but another candidate was substantially better on that issue. Voters who prioritized animal cruelty may help elect an inferior candidate on their principal political goal, no?
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