5 ms·

I dont know if we are or not, but that isnt the point. The point is that prior to the reforms, campaign finance was problematic. Since it is still a problem, I

by rpedela 11y ago

I dont know if we are or not, but that isnt the point. The point is that prior to the reforms, campaign finance was problematic. Since it is still a problem, I would say the reforms didnt fix the problem completely if at all. Therefore we need another, better reform rather than going backwards in my opinion.

jessaustin 11y ago
If you don't know why reform didn't fix the problem, and you propose even more reform, that is very much to the point. We're deep in the hole already, and you're ordering more shovels.
- rpedela 11y ago
  Let us use a CS analogy. There is a critical bug A and solution B does not completely fix the problem. What do you do? 1. Throw your hands up and remove the imperfect solution. 2. Leave it alone because solution B partially fixes the problem. 3. Find solution C which completely solves the problem. I hope you would pick #3 like all great engineers would.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    At the risk of engaging in activity that Neal Stephenson would consider "undignified", I'm going to criticize this analogy, and offer a different one. No government has ever had the command over its subjects that a programmer has over the components of a computer. Human societies are extremely nonlinear and resistant to arbitrary commands. Thus seemingly simple laws, like an alcohol prohibition, lead to wildly flawed results. Political advertising is even more closely coupled with other aspects of the system than is drinking alcohol. It's not a surprise that attempts to control political advertising of the naive, "we'll make a law against it" variety have failed to achieve their goals. They already tried using your analogy, and it didn't work. Instead, I'd suggest the process of A/B testing as a potentially insightful analogy. It's a bit of a dark art, but in general we can say that after injecting orange into the color scheme on the site, and finding that CTR drops 30% as a result, the next step is not to make the color scheme completely orange. Lessig needs to go back to the drawing board. He wants to fight corruption, and on that point I agree with him. He fixates on overturning Citizens United, which had precisely nothing to do with corruption, and on that point I think he suffers a failure of imagination.
    - rpedela 11y ago
      > At the risk of engaging in activity that Neal Stephenson would consider "undignified", I'm going to criticize this analogy, and offer a different one. I dont understand the reference. Can you elaborate?
      - jessaustin 11y ago
        Long ago Neal Stephenson wrote a long rambling meditation on operating systems called In the Beginning Was the Command Line. At one point he compared Unix to the Hole Hawg by Milwaukee Tool, and found that other OSes were like Black & Decker toys in comparison. Nathan Myhrvold (later of Intellectual Ventures infamy, but then with M$) was moved to send him a different interpretation of the drill analogy. In the second edition of ItBWtCL (which edition it seems is not online in any form), Stephenson mentioned Myhrvold's disagreement, but declined to compare the analogies in any detailed way, considering such an exercise undignified.
  - maxlybbert 11y ago
    I believe just about every programmer has fallen victim to this before. I have. But the fact that B does not fix the problem suggests that the programmer who wrote it didn't understand the problem. The most common, but very wrong, answer is to keep tinkering. As Andrew Koenig says in C Traps and Pitfalls, "Fiddling with a program until it appears to work is a reliable way of obtaining a program that almost works." Campaign finance reform strikes me very much as a collection of ill-considered patches on top of other ill-considered patches.

by rpedela 11y ago

jessaustin 11y ago

If you don't know why reform didn't fix the problem, and you propose even more reform, that is very much to the point. We're deep in the hole already, and you're ordering more shovels.

rpedela 11y ago
Let us use a CS analogy. There is a critical bug A and solution B does not completely fix the problem. What do you do? 1. Throw your hands up and remove the imperfect solution. 2. Leave it alone because solution B partially fixes the problem. 3. Find solution C which completely solves the problem. I hope you would pick #3 like all great engineers would.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  At the risk of engaging in activity that Neal Stephenson would consider "undignified", I'm going to criticize this analogy, and offer a different one. No government has ever had the command over its subjects that a programmer has over the components of a computer. Human societies are extremely nonlinear and resistant to arbitrary commands. Thus seemingly simple laws, like an alcohol prohibition, lead to wildly flawed results. Political advertising is even more closely coupled with other aspects of the system than is drinking alcohol. It's not a surprise that attempts to control political advertising of the naive, "we'll make a law against it" variety have failed to achieve their goals. They already tried using your analogy, and it didn't work. Instead, I'd suggest the process of A/B testing as a potentially insightful analogy. It's a bit of a dark art, but in general we can say that after injecting orange into the color scheme on the site, and finding that CTR drops 30% as a result, the next step is not to make the color scheme completely orange. Lessig needs to go back to the drawing board. He wants to fight corruption, and on that point I agree with him. He fixates on overturning Citizens United, which had precisely nothing to do with corruption, and on that point I think he suffers a failure of imagination.
  - rpedela 11y ago
    > At the risk of engaging in activity that Neal Stephenson would consider "undignified", I'm going to criticize this analogy, and offer a different one. I dont understand the reference. Can you elaborate?
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      Long ago Neal Stephenson wrote a long rambling meditation on operating systems called In the Beginning Was the Command Line. At one point he compared Unix to the Hole Hawg by Milwaukee Tool, and found that other OSes were like Black & Decker toys in comparison. Nathan Myhrvold (later of Intellectual Ventures infamy, but then with M$) was moved to send him a different interpretation of the drill analogy. In the second edition of ItBWtCL (which edition it seems is not online in any form), Stephenson mentioned Myhrvold's disagreement, but declined to compare the analogies in any detailed way, considering such an exercise undignified.
- maxlybbert 11y ago
  I believe just about every programmer has fallen victim to this before. I have. But the fact that B does not fix the problem suggests that the programmer who wrote it didn't understand the problem. The most common, but very wrong, answer is to keep tinkering. As Andrew Koenig says in C Traps and Pitfalls, "Fiddling with a program until it appears to work is a reliable way of obtaining a program that almost works." Campaign finance reform strikes me very much as a collection of ill-considered patches on top of other ill-considered patches.