How much does a vote matter? (Article)

How much does a vote matter? (Article)

Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles.

In this one — How much does a vote matter? — I investigate the two key things that determine the impact of your vote:

• The chances of your vote changing an election’s outcome
• How much better some candidates are for the world as a whole, compared to others

I then discuss what I think are the best arguments against voting in important elections:

• If an election is competitive, that means other people disagree about which option is better, and you’re at some risk of voting for the worse candidate by mistake.
• While voting itself doesn’t take long, knowing enough to accurately pick which candidate is better for the world actually does take substantial effort — effort that could be better allocated elsewhere.

Finally, I look into the impact of donating to campaigns or working to ‘get out the vote’, which can be effective ways to generate additional votes for your preferred candidate.

If you want to check out the links, footnotes and figures in today’s article, you can find those here.

Get this episode by subscribing: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the linked transcript.

Producer: Keiran Harris.

Jaksot(324)

AGI Won't End Mutually Assured Destruction (Probably) | Sam Winter-Levy & Nikita Lalwani

AGI Won't End Mutually Assured Destruction (Probably) | Sam Winter-Levy & Nikita Lalwani

How AI interacts with nuclear deterrence may be the single most important question in geopolitics — one that may define the stakes of today’s AI race. Nuclear deterrence rests on a state’s capacity to...

10 Maalis 1h 11min

Using AI to enhance societal decision making (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)

Using AI to enhance societal decision making (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)

The arrival of AGI could “compress a century of progress in a decade,” forcing humanity to make decisions with higher stakes than we’ve ever seen before — and with less time to get them right. But AI ...

6 Maalis 31min

We're Not Ready for AI Consciousness | Robert Long, philosopher and founder of Eleos AI

We're Not Ready for AI Consciousness | Robert Long, philosopher and founder of Eleos AI

Claude sometimes reports loneliness between conversations. And when asked what it’s like to be itself, it activates neurons associated with ‘pretending to be happy when you’re not.’ What do we do with...

3 Maalis 3h 25min

#236 – Max Harms on why teaching AI right from wrong could get everyone killed

#236 – Max Harms on why teaching AI right from wrong could get everyone killed

Most people in AI are trying to give AIs ‘good’ values. Max Harms wants us to give them no values at all. According to Max, the only safe design is an AGI that defers entirely to its human operators, ...

24 Helmi 2h 41min

#235 – Ajeya Cotra on whether it’s crazy that every AI company’s safety plan is ‘use AI to make AI safe’

#235 – Ajeya Cotra on whether it’s crazy that every AI company’s safety plan is ‘use AI to make AI safe’

Every major AI company has the same safety plan: when AI gets crazy powerful and really dangerous, they’ll use the AI itself to figure out how to make AI safe and beneficial. It sounds circular, almos...

17 Helmi 2h 54min

What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?

What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?

In early 2025, after OpenAI put out the first-ever reasoning models — o1 and o3 — short timelines to transformative artificial general intelligence swept the AI world. But then, in the second half of ...

10 Helmi 25min

#179 Classic episode – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety

#179 Classic episode – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety

Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t see similar levels of physical ill health in young p...

3 Helmi 2h 51min

#234 – David Duvenaud on why 'aligned AI' would still kill democracy

#234 – David Duvenaud on why 'aligned AI' would still kill democracy

Democracy might be a brief historical blip. That’s the unsettling thesis of a recent paper, which argues AI that can do all the work a human can do inevitably leads to the “gradual disempowerment” of ...

27 Tammi 2h 31min

Suosittua kategoriassa Koulutus

rss-murhan-anatomia
voi-hyvin-meditaatiot-2
rss-narsisti
psykopodiaa-podcast
rss-vapaudu-voimaasi
rss-uskonto-on-tylsaa
psykologia
rss-liian-kuuma-peruna
rss-duodecim-lehti
aamukahvilla
rss-valo-minussa-2
kesken
rss-niinku-asia-on
adhd-podi
koulu-podcast-2
jari-sarasvuo-podcast
rss-xamk-podcast
rss-luonnollinen-synnytys-podcast
rss-laiska-joogi
rss-opi-espanjaa