I decided to incur the personal cost of not getting vaccinated as a sign of protest.
If you think vaccination is a good idea but forcing people to prove vaccination status is bad, wouldn't it make more sense to get vaccinated but to refuse to provide proof to gatekeepers? I'd worry that being unvaccinated sends the wrong signal, that you're anti-vaccine and not anti-vaccine-mandate.
That's an interesting approach. My thinking at the time was that the number of vaccines administered gives legitimacy to the government's decisions. There were several other factors I considered besides the mandate:
Just to be clear, I still wasn't sure I was making the right choice at the time and I would have gotten vaccinated if there was no mandate.
epistemic status: exploratory
With a few exceptions, individual actions have negligible large-scale impact, provided everything else remains unchanged. Then, what does it mean to lead by example and is it actually a valuable strategy?
In 2021, the french government was seriously restricting the rights of people and businesses, with the stated goal of dealing with COVID. One aspect of this was imposing vaccination requirements for all kinds of activities. I was living in France at the time and considered this an overreach driven by motives other than people's health. I wasn't that concerned about the safety of the vaccine, but by how authoritarian the government was becoming (the details are irrelevant in this discussion). I decided to incur the personal cost of not getting vaccinated as a sign of protest.
Near the end of 2021, I got moderately sick from COVID. Even though lots of people were unhappy with the government's decisions, most of them didn't go as far as me. People seemed to prioritize their own health and quality of life. Me "leading by example" didn't matter in this case.
Suppose there is a set of agents and the outcome is a function of each agent's actions. If your action in the hypothetical case when the optimal outcome is reached dominates your other possible actions, then there is not much to discuss - you should take that action. The interesting case is when you could potentially incur a cost for choosing that action.
Your actions are logically correlated to the actions of agents similar to you. Logical decision theory lets you leverage that for making better decisions. "Leading by example" can be seen as the vernacular way of stating this. So you try to predict whether the action would be costly and whether taking it is worth it (which could be described as maximizing some expected utility). In the case of not taking the COVID vaccine, one needs to weigh the health and lifestyle cost against the benefit of keeping the government in check. Today I consider my choice of not getting vaccinated irrational because the indifference and self-interest of others was predictable.
Things get a little more complicated in an iterated game where leading by example can be seen as a costly signal of your preferences. This informs other agents for the next iteration and could actually lead to a better outcome after several iterations - you pay a cost in the short term, but it is compensated in the long term. This only works if enough agents adopt the same strategy of costly signaling. Here, logical decision theory does not prescribe that one should lead by example. It merely states that leading by example could help others establish that your and their decisions are logically correlated [1]. Whether the costly signaling is worth it depends on how other agents would react to your signal.
What got me thinking about the topic of leading by example was a discussion on whether one should stop eating meat.
Suppose we want to reduce suffering by not eating animals, while respecting some unspecified constraints [2]. A single person's effect on animal suffering is negligible so stopping to eat meat mostly makes sense only as a signal in an iterated game, and only if one is convinced others would follow. Here, it is not my goal to argue about the merits of not eating meat. I am simply pointing out what considerations are relevant for that decision. It's also important to think what the final goal would be (e.g. humans don't eat meat, but lions do; population sizes are bottlenecked by hunger).
Whether to vote is another question which boils down to leading by example.
Some could argue the cost of voting is insignificant. This would be true if one votes at random, at which point that voter is only adding noise to the collective decision process. Besides the obvious cost of getting to the actual polling station (and maybe taking a day off work), there is some cost to keeping yourself informed.
With a ton of simplifying assumptions (rational electorate, preference invariance over time, etc.), the expected utility of an individual vote diminishes with the number of voters. For every person there is a threshold beyond which the cost of voting dominates the utility. The more people are expected to vote, the smaller the incentive to vote. There is some equilibrium on the number of voters. In this case, leading by example is counterproductive.
Leading by example is more complicated than following a principle such as "Be the change you wish to see in the world".
Of course, most people don't actually think in these terms.
Without the unspecified constraints, we get the pro-mortalist view that we should extinguish all life in order to minimize suffering. I'm also not convinced reducing suffering by not eating animals is a viable target, but this is a separate discussion.