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‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing This Country Today?’
- temporeka 10y agoMy biggest concern is highschools. They mould the citizens of this country and they are broken. Bullying is rampant and terrible and overall the conditions in american highschools seem to produce more school shooters than any other country. This is not a coincidence. But nothing ever changes because if youre smart the bullies leave you alone. If youre a bit slow in any way you get eaten alive. It has to change
- veidr 10y agoSeems to me that it is none of the things in that diagram, and there is a sort of supraproblem above all of those, which is the ongoing and increasing societal rejection of knowledge and facts. It's not just anti-intellectualism, it is more like "anti-realityism", in which simple things aren't knowable, in which facts and opinions aren't different. We've gone from corporate propaganda like "global warming isn't real", which is a lie but an understandable one, to this incomprehensible new state of "What is the murder rate? How high is unemployment? What is the purity of the drinking water? THESE THINGS ARE NOT KNOWABLE!!! ANY VALUE MAY BE ADVOCATED!!" And literally not one problem on that list can be solved in such an environment...
- tesseract 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
- 0xcde4c3db 10y agoProbably related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American...
- sandworm101 10y agoUnless an aware public is the problem. The first step in defining a new reality is destroying any current reality. Not everyone wants truth and facts. People, paticularly the US public, enjoy myths. They want to live the fantasy. They really dont see disconnection with reality as a problem. It is a necessary step towards a more universal acceptance of thier construct. The myth is simple and comforting. It is far easier to accept than gritty reality. But you first have to disconnect. Those who knowingly push disconnection upon others feel they are a force for good.
- veidr 10y agoPerhaps, but I would argue that they are wrong about that.
- hueving 10y ago>They really dont see disconnection with reality as a problem This is a misrepresentation. They don't see it as a disconnect with reality, they see it as reality. Through all sorts of biases and rationalizations, people will still think their model of reality is true with lots of exceptions that keep getting in the way. Once you take a belief to be true, you will go through incredible mental gymnastics to explain away any conflicting evidence without even realizing it.
- sandworm101 10y agoBut you forget the class structure of belief. At the top are pushers who dictate a reality to those below them. They don't buy into myths and instead use them. Watch a US senator spew lies and his supporters lap it up. The senator doesn't actually believe the lies, he just uses them to advance whatever agenda he thinks best. The senator thinks he is doing good because his agenda is better regardless of what he needs to do to sell it. The people trust and believe. They find it comforting. Everyone participates even though a chosen few do not believe. This class structure worked well enough for generations, although lately it is running off the rails. The top pusher appears to actually believe the myth. The monkeys is now his own grinder and nobody knows what will come of it.
- mc32 10y agoI'm really surprised healthcare isn't an bigger concern for people. Even while having good employer provided health benefits, I'm still worried about the costs --to employer or to out of pocket payers. The more money as a percentage spent on healthcare, the less available for other things, including compensation. It's really something which needs to be brought under control. Without healthcare we don't have a healthy American workforce.
- old-gregg 10y agoI agree. Mid-range $700/mo insurance plans on health exchanges have deductibles approaching $12K, meanwhile 62% of families have less than $1K in savings. This means that even after paying $8,400 per year in insurance premiums, a moderate illness automatically puts an average insured American family into a medical bankruptcy. The honorable American corporate tradition to have company-wide fundraisers to support the families of (insured!) employees who have gotten sick is... terribly out of place in a 21st century / 1st world country.
- majormajor 10y agoThis is only seen as a problem if the experts are seen as beneficial. For instance, even on HN people love to take potshots at nutritional guidelines that resulted in low-fat/high-sugar diets, or boneheaded regulation holding back [new cool disruptive thing]. It's not even relevant why (if the experts were just wrong, or bought off, or what), but the more examples you see, the less you'll just trust what "the establishment" tells you.
- ams6110 10y agoI wonder if any of this could be related to the past couple of decades trend in education that has reduced the emphasis on memorization of facts. People arrive at adulthood with very little objective factual knowledge, leaving them unable to discern fact from fiction or even really understanding why they should.
- aaron-lebo 10y agoPeople are clearly better educated than they used to be. What was the literacy rate in 1900, for example? How many people had college degrees in 1960? I think it's simpler than that. When anyone can pull out their smartphone and record someone or criticize someone in a blog post, it's hard to hide behind the naive notion that the authorities know what they are doing. For any given person or position you can find hundreds of examples of dishonesty, incompetence, or pure stupidity. In that environment, why would anyone trust the traditional gatekeepers? They aren't the gatekeepers anymore and in a bid to remain relevant they often sacrifice objectivity in search of cheap gimmicks and entertainment. Fareed Zakaria has put forward the notion that elites in the 50s and 60s used to see themselves as having a civic duty. That doesn't exist anymore. An easy comparison is the Ivy League generations of Bushes vs Trump. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom ...This is then applied to America to argue that the increased democratization of American society and culture is what has caused the perceived failures of the government and governing elites. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/overdoing-democracy.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/overdoing-democracy.... It sounds WASPish on its face, but there are some good points.
- veidr 10y agoI like your idea that being inundated with information is part of the cause. That seems likely. Still, I feel like the phenomenon that I'm trying (perhaps poorly) to articulate is distinct from education. I mean related to some degree, certainly, but I see it in highly educated people as well as the uneducated. E.g., a mechanical engineer with multiple degrees from prestigious universities going on about how the Sandy Hook mass murder of 20 young children was actually a hoax perpetrated by the US government as part of an elaborate scheme to rescind gun rights. He's a smart guy, at least in other contexts in which I've interacted with him; he should be able to use the information readily available to him and come to his own conclusion that this idea is completely preposterous. And yet, he can't. Or less heart-stopping but still baffling: a fake news item I actually saw people I know professionally forwarding around during the election: "Outrage: Obama bans national anthem from all major sporting events!" I mean you don't have to click through to know. That's not real; it can't be real; no president has ever or would ever do that; etc... And these people are educated, I mean they are at least college graduates, mostly... I agree that trust in gatekeepers has declined, but I think that makes sense. I suspect though, that people in America are also declining in their ability to serve as their own judges of information, and that is the thing I am talking about. It's of course possible that I'm wrong; maybe it just used to be less evident how many people were unable to arrive at a plausible conclusion from a set of facts, and now it's more obvious because the culture normalized confidently spewing completely unsubstantiated horseshit, while the technology has emerged to let anybody who feels like it do it all day long...
- Meta1234 10y agoI think this is a cause of individualism in society today and the lack of proper debate as it was intended. The effects of this are as you say. People are forming their own realities and picking bits and pieces of the truth from wherever they frequent for their news and discarding anything that they don't agree with. That in turn is spewed out in many different forms which will eventually spread its way into society. The effect is only amplified by everyone being always connected and able to share their thoughts. I think this is one of the more pressing issues we deal with as a society today.
- hueving 10y agoI suspect one of the causes of this is that it's so incredibly easy now to find articles in the Internet that support your viewpoints that can then be shared rapidly amongst your filter bubble. It used to be the case that there was a non negligible barrier to get an idea published and in front of the eyes of millions of people. You had to find a publisher, pay for publication, and then convince stores to carry a book/magazine/whatever. With the Internet, you can put up a blog post and share it on Facebook with a budget of $0 (or bus fare to the library). It's just as simple to find websites that support a view of the moon landing not happening as it is to find websites that do. Both are just a Google search away.
- themaninthedark 10y agoAnd before there was a huge barrier to entry you had many small news papers and Gadfly's. And then before the printing press the barrier to entry was high again.
- sgustard 10y agoThis view is too simplistic. Many people believe that truths are being hidden from them or intentionally distorted. Distrust of the media and belief in conspiracy theories are rampant. So it's not rejection of facts, it's rejection of the corrupt elites that are reporting them. Obviously I don't believe this and I find it hard to empathize with these folks. I spent the holidays listening to my cousin tell me how naive I was for believing what I read in the New York Times, then rant for hours about how mass shootings are all staged hoaxes.
- vosper 10y agoI am constantly surprised by how many intelligent, generally rational people I meet also believe in (what I consider) absurd conspiracy theories. I've had people talk to me seriously about chemtrails, free energy devices being suppressed by oil company assassins, flouride in the water for mind control...
- anigbrowl 10y agoConspiracy theories are sort of a hobby of mine - I've gone from feeling disappointed that they almost never turn out to be true (since they often make interesting claims) to fascination with why people believe them. Most conspiracy theories start with a false premise to which logic is then applied -often correctly. A trivial example popular among geeky music lovers is that instruments and whole compositions sound better tuned to 432Hz rather than the more common 440Hz. Much effort i devoted to showing why 432 is more numerically interesting than 440, and since 99% of music is about the juxtaposition of numerically interesting frequency rations, the arguments are superficially quite convincing, especially from an aesthetic point of view. Where it falls down is right at the beginning - not in the idea that 432 is an interesting number (it is) but in the idea that 432 cycles per second is important. People tend to forget that the second is a pretty arbitrary time division; we're just used to think about time as a fact because it is convenient in everyday life. Pro musicians and sound engineers are constantly thinking about frequencies to the quantity of a second comed to seem as real as the pull of earth's gravity to an aerospace engineer. In my experience, the longer the argument between an initial false premise and the conclusion, the more firmly the proponent will resist attacks on the theory, perhaps because it has required a higher initial investment of work to validate all the logical steps.
- gydfi 10y agoIt strikes me that the people who crow about "facts" the loudest are the ones most likely to be conflating facts with their own opinions. I'm a scientist. I don't believe in facts. I believe in models, explanations, measurements with appropriate error bars, provisional theories and educated guesses, but never facts. When somebody comes to me claiming that they know "the facts" I put up my defences. Perhaps what people really need is not a better appreciation of facts but a more realistic appreciation of uncertainties. Perhaps if we could all stop arguing about whether the probability of disastrous climate change is 0 or 1, and instead accept that it's somewhere between 0.01 and 0.99, then we could make some progress on the issue.
- veidr 10y agoPerhaps, but good luck getting people to do that. I don't think the climate change "argument" the American society is currently having is about whether the probability of its existence is 0 or 1; it's about whether it's 0 or not 0.
- gydfi 10y agoNot at all, it seems to me it's more like whether it's 1 or not 1. Expressing any skepticism gets you branded as a "skeptic" and then a "denier". Of course what the "not 1" crowd tend to miss is that you don't need 100% certainty about something before you take action on it. If you're in a plane with a 50% chance of fire on board then the procedures are pretty much the same as a plane with a 100% chance of fire on board.
- flukus 10y ago> Expressing any skepticism gets you branded as a "skeptic" and then a "denier". Usually I see (and throw out myself) these terms when someone bandies around any of the common denialist talking points like "we used to be concerned about global cooling" or "it hasn't cooled since '98". Unfortunately the "ladder of knowledge" is more of a mouse wheel and the same people will end up using the same arguments, even when they're shown to be wrong.
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- nilkn 10y agoWhat I've noticed is that folks are taking a pretty healthy mistrust of the establishment and turning it into the opposite extreme without realizing what they're doing. Instead of maintaining skepticism towards both the establishment and anti-establishment (of which Trump was a part), they do two things: (1) elevate their moderate mistrust of the establishment into total, exhaustive mistrust (i.e., they assume everything from the establishment is a lie with a malicious motive). (2) place total, exhaustive trust into the anti-establishment (i.e., Trump is perfect, every cabinet pick is perfect, every EO is perfect, everything Spicer says is completely true, everything Trump says is completely true, etc.). It's this extreme warping of trust which causes people to be so incredibly susceptible to genuine fake news. When you combine (1) and (2), you end up with conspiracy theories and lots of people who sincerely believe them with no evidence. The idea that Clinton is/was running pedophilia and child sex trafficking rings out of pizza shops is a great example.
- csallen 10y agoI've seen the same. There's a stunning lack of nuance in public thought. Thinking in degrees is difficult, so things get reduced to good vs evil, black vs white, all or nothing. Even amongst friends I respect, I have a hard time getting people to do the hard work of looking past high level simplifications and enumerating specific costs and benefits of any decision or proposal.
- nojvek 10y agoWe are getting to a point where "trust" is the biggest issue. Can you trust govt, big corporations, universities? It's like everyone is optimizing for their gain and deceiving the other side with what they need to hear. We are in the era of information overload without a good way of filtering fact from dogma. I hope there is some development of good AI that helps the average Joe hunt this facts down for him/her. Google's fact verification algorithm is in the right direction. Can we trust it? I hope Facebook implements something similar but that's unlikely since they're in the entertainment and ads business. I really hope orgs like openai are able to create something like this for the world.
- cel1ne 10y agoYou can call it stupidity and it keeps growing since many years. I guess TV started it. Main reasons for it are a mixture of loss of introspection and completely unrealistic expectations due to constant medial input and constant communication with peers. You want better people? Make parents sit down and talk to their children every single day: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/diet-is-4-letter-word/201309/the-death-the-family-meal https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/diet-is-4-letter-word/2... Of course it will take at least one generation to undo the damaged that has been done. Don't keep searching for simpler reasons or solutions. I don't believe there are any. The rest of this post is a repost from me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724851: We live in the age of fear because the hose of information that floods us is constantly opened further: Letters → Telegram → Telephone → Radio → TV → Internet → Mobile Internet. Human beings need time to manage their emotions. Time spent waiting. Time being bored. Time when NO new information, not even positive, is arriving. We are constantly distracted and thus increasingly unable to sort out our feelings. That is the reason. And distracted parents that can't give their children at least 15 minutes of absolutely undivided attention per day worsen their offspring's ability to manage emotions even further. That is why Zuckerberg/Facebook's idea "just flood everyone with everything and it will get better" is dead-wrong. What Facebook could do to really help the world is turning off it's platform for one day each week.
- veidr 10y agoI guess the reason I feel it's different than "stupidity" is I think of that as a trait, whereas this thing feels like a new (or at least increasing) behavior. Not like "you cannot derive basic conclusions from simple inputs because you were unfortunately born without ability to do that", but more like "you refuse to derive basic conclusions from simple inputs because _________________." The reasons aren't clear and are possibly complex and subconscious, but it seems more about refusing to do the basic mental processing, despite having the capability to do it.
- _98fj 10y agoRefusing to do mental processing, despite having the capability. Sawing at the branch you're sitting on. That fits my description of acting and behaving stupid. The reason are emotions, many of them subconscious, like you said. Emotional patterns can be complex, but the solution isn't: Less pressure and fear mongering. More appreciation, time and space for children to grow into responsible adults. I don't think we're able to steer the ship around though, unfortunately.
- xyzzy123 10y agoWell, the more politicised something is, the less "knowable" it is without serious research. For example if we were to talk about unemployment rate (e.g. discouraged workers vs total labour force participation vs e.g. push towards counting long term unemployed as disability, statistical corrections for season, definition of temporary versus permanent) it's possible to pick a metric which will satisfy almost any narrative. Taking into account changes in definition, policy changes and then segregating by demographic to create factoids at will and yeah, I do think that's a real problem. Just out of interest, do you believe unemployment is up or down compared to this time last year?
- veidr 10y agoYou make a good point. Especially if the definition of "politicizing" something includes "lying, subtly or blatantly, about something in order to advance your agenda". (Which I think it always has.) That does make things harder to know, and unemployment is a good example. To answer your question, off the top of my head I think the unemployment rate is about the same (+/- 0.5%?) as it was this time last year, and rounds to 5%. However I am pretty sure that the reason I think that is because that's what the US Dept. of Labor says. It's an interesting example because it's not a topic on which I have expertise, so I've (tentatively, maintaining some uncertainty) decided to go with what I perceive to be the most credible authority on the matter. I've heard many of the alternate narratives, but haven't been convinced, probably because I usually perceive some ulterior motivation along with them (leaving aside candidate Trump's insane "42%" claim, which is something different). This is exactly what makes me despair of the current environment; I don't want to do a bunch of my own research to tease out the unemployment rate. I would much prefer it if society would promote achieving an accurate consensus on this kind of issue, by collectively punishing blatant liars and diminishing their credibility, and on the other hand reacting with outrage if the official government statistics were politicized. That seems not to be the trendline we are on, though... P.S. Am I wrong to place my trust in the official unemployment statistics? ;-)
- MagnumOpus 10y ago> I don't want to do a bunch of my own research to tease out the unemployment rate. Conspiracy theorists and the people who sell them newsletters don't want to do that either. That's why most of these conspiracist stories boil down to either amateurishly misinterpreting existing measures - e.g. alleging that the unemployment rate must be 100% minus the employment/population ratio - or trying to spin conspiracy where it doesn't exist, say by alleging that the US government is fudging statistics by not reporting the higher/wider U-6 measure of unemployment more prominently (U-6 is about twice the "official" unemployment rate at any given time - and has been for ever).
- DanielBMarkham 10y agoThis is because it's become quite common knowledge that wherever there's management to the numbers or the numbers relate to any kind of political issue, the numbers are rigged in some way. Want to make it look like the U.S. has a lower life expectancy? Include preemie deaths (The U.S. has the highest rate of trying to save premature babies. Many die. In other countries these deaths are not considered part of the life expectancy measurement) Want to show gun violence is bigger than it is? Include gun suicides. What's the unemployment rate? Are you including people looking for work or people who have given up? How about the under-employed? Now it's perfectly fine to argue the points and definitions on any of these stats and measurements, but the average person has realized that stats are all like that. Any stat that includes the human experience across multiple dimensions is suspect. I'm fortunate in that I remember back the "old days" of the net where we had the same amount of political BS but fewer sources of "facts". We'd argue for a while then somebody would take an hour or two and dig up an academic study and that would quiet things down. This is no longer the case. What happens now is that no matter your opinion, there are studies and internet sites dedicated to providing you with supporting material. Add in a few rhetorical tricks you see on TV and you can carry on any argument based around "science" ad infinitum. So I don't see this as some new form of anti-intellectualism. Rather I see it as people -- perhaps people who aren't so smart, admittedly -- figuring out what the game is and moving on to more personally important things in their lives.
- dredmorbius 10y agoI do agree that the problems listed are more on the order of symptoms than fundamental causes. I'm not convinced that anti-realism is that fundamental cause, though it's quite certainly a major confounding factor. Cory Doctorow in a recent Boing Boing article: "we're not living through a crisis about what is true, we're living through a crisis about how we know whether something is true. We're not disagreeing about facts, we're disagreeing about epistemology." https://boingboing.net/2017/02/25/counternarratives-not-fact-che.html https://boingboing.net/2017/02/25/counternarratives-not-fact... I see the problems as of limits and distributionalism, most fundamentally. That's a longer story.
- pokemongoaway 10y agoThere's no such thing as "anti-realityism." Yes, we really have this many deluded and/or mentally ill people in our world.
- wtf_is_up 10y agoIt's amusing how much "Civil Rights and Race Relations" ballooned after Obama took office.
- danso 10y agoMake sense. For starters, the economy was in such a crisis that economic concerns took priority over everything else when Obama entered office. Second, his office made dealing with civil rights a priority, which meant that the costs of prioritizing civil rights suddenly drew more attention than when it was a backburner issue.
- rdtsc 10y ago> his office made dealing with civil rights a priority, which meant that the costs of prioritizing civil rights suddenly drew more attention than when it was a backburner issue. I've been wondering about that. What did he do specifically for the Black community who pretty much voted as a block for him. Are they able to get access to jobs, housing, education because of him. Do kids feels safer walking home from school? I don't really now, I am not asking because I know it is not, just curious if anyone has a better idea.
- danso 10y agoAdministrations may not necessarily make new laws/regulations, but they are able to make priorities. For example, the Bush Administration had a bigger focus on stopping illegal immigration and enforcing the Patriot Act: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/politics/gonzales-lays-out-his-priorities-at-justice-dept.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/politics/gonzales-lays-out... In contrast, the Obama administration was seen to have "rebuilt" the civil rights arm of the Justice dept into its "crown jewel": http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-justice-department-trump-20161117-story.html http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-justice-department-tru... One of the more well-known initiatives of the Justice Dept. under Obama's administration is the police data initiative, something that was sparked after officer-involved shootings (Ferguson, etc.) revealed that the FBI was doing a shoddy job of tracking these incidents nationwide: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/04/22/fact-sheet-white-house-police-data-initiative-highlights-new-commitments https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/0... A non-justice example: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's work in looking at fairness in lending and housing: - https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/consumer-financial-protection-bureau-and-department-justice-action-requires-bancorpsouth-pay-106-million-address-discriminatory-mortgage-lending-practices/ https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/consumer-f... Incidentally, this initiative has led to one of the best government datasets: 9.2 GB of mortgage data: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/hmda/ https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/hmda/
- danso 10y agoSeems like a lot of the problems for Feb. 2017 are a lot more varied and existential ("Dissatisfaction with government", "Immigration") versus Feb. 2009, where "Economy in general" and "Unemployment" and other material economic metrics are by far the main worries of America. As ugly as politics have gotten today, at least the presiding concern for most Americans isn't "can I afford my mortgage/rent next month?".
- vacri 10y agoWell, 2009 was immediately after the GFC, which was an unusual event (and consuming all the news cycles).
- rdtsc 10y agoQuite the opposite, I would think. Not having employment, seeing economy going down the drain is a lot more and immediately existential to people than not liking the people in Washington, or disagreeing with how they tweet and so on. One can argue that government is eventually to blame for employment anyway, but is one step removed from "I might not be able to pay my bills in a month or two". In a way I am happy to see "Dissatisfaction with the government" be the top worry pushing economy to the side.
- exabrial 10y agoAuthoritarianism.
- randcraw 10y agoIt's remarkable that "global warming" didn't make the list given its potential for $trillions in damages and vast loss of life if left unchecked. In terms of severity, there is no second place.
- corporateslave 10y agoGlobal warming is a lie
- thisnotmyacc 10y agoI think a question like this is so nebulous that people can answer it in a multitude of ways, none more or less valid. Global warming doesn't really affect the USA specifically and/or uniquely, so maybe that biases the answer? Also, dying of smoking is less a worry when you see a truck about to run you over. Maybe people preference immediate danger over longer term danger? The issue of "country" is an interesting one in the other direction as well. If a state/city/county has 16% unemployment, but the country has low unemployment, some people may think it is a country-wide issue, and preference that. Ditto other issues that are state or local level issues. In any case, I can see why almost any answer is valid, which kinda makes the whole question an odd one.
- danans 10y agoPolitical economist Mark Blyth recently proposed an explanation for this [1]. He suggests that phenomena on the scale of climate change - i.e quadrillions of gallons of water entering the ocean - are something that our brains have a hard time contemplating on a day to day basis, because we haven't evolved to think about things that happen on that scale. [1] https://youtu.be/VBQ4MLodVKU?t=449 https://youtu.be/VBQ4MLodVKU?t=449
- p1mrx 10y agoI would categorize that under "energy", which is still oddly absent from the 2017 version. People must see a few solar panels around and assume the problem's fixed.
- rdtsc 10y agoThere are multiple ways to look at this depending how you view people in your country People's opinions are manipulated by either media (i.e. corporations) or government and they are told what to worry about. Just because economy seems to be doing well in this poll, it could be because people are told it is doing well. Now I haven't looked at any indicators, so maybe it is actually doing well, but I am using it as an example here. Unemployment could be an exception here. People do feel that personally, it is a lot less abstract. So maybe that is closer to reality. But even healthcare, so many think it is now "being fixed" so they stop worrying about it. During Bush's time we see worrying about a moral decline, It is likely not because people were particularly immoral then but his rhetoric focused on religious groups (Evangelicals) and he used them as a block pretty much to vote for him. Then guns. Look at that, in 2013 people were so worried about them. Why? Almost just as worried as the "Lack of money". It is probably not because people were shot left and right, but because the administration, the media, and various gun groups (NRA) picked that as a talking between them. So this is just as much about what is really wrong with the country vs what people believe is wrong with the country and the two things don't have to be the same. It also shows how easy it is to manipulate people and changing their political agenda.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- passivepinetree 10y agoI can't believe that the environment isn't on a single one of these lists.
- quadrangle 10y agoIt's distressing that it's small, but I saw it on many of the lists, including the top one from right now.
- CalRobert 10y agoI agree with the sentiment, but it is there. It's depressing, but my experience was that most people simply do. not. care. about the environment, unless it's literally something they can see _in their front yard_. Hot this year? Turn up the AC! Even when it _is_ in their front yard, if they can't see it they don't care. Worrying about the health effects of pesticides and then going for a jog and inhaling auto exhaust is inconsistent, but not a rare behaviour.
- passivepinetree 10y agoYou're right; I missed that. IMHO it should be much bigger, but I'm not sure there's a good way to raise awareness and start change.
- nostrademons 10y agoInteresting pattern in these: In times when we're clearly in crisis (financial crisis of 2009, stagflation in the 70s, Vietnam & the Civil Rights movement of the 60s, and WW2 in 1941), the graph is dominated by a single issue that takes up greater than half the plot. In times when things are basically humming along smoothly, everybody complains about everything, and the poll reflects a huge variety of problems. This would tend to suggest that objectively, we're actually in pretty good times right now. This doesn't preclude us facing a crisis in the near future - notice how "Keeping out of war" was a relatively small but noticeable box in 1935, but absolutely huge in 1941 - but it is fairly likely that if a crisis does occur, it'll come from a box that isn't a huge problem right now. It's unlikely that "immigration" or "dissatisfaction with government" will be a massive crisis in 2021, but we could easily see "unifying the country", "environment", "unemployment", or "civil rights & race relations" become a huge issue in the next election.
- alphabettsy 10y agoI found an interesting distinction between the two candidates was this is a disaster needing fixing versus things are pretty good and let's do better. That seemed to be the gist of their messages. I'd be interested to see the change from 2013-2016 for example.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 10y agoQuite. Also, when things are going relatively well, domestic social issues take the fore. Sometimes those are materially significant (I'd say the Civil Rights battle was worth fighting), often not so much. I did a tally of issues, high was about 47, low was 7. Quite a range.
- spoinkaroo 10y agoIt's interesting to see the degree that opinions have changed in time, the contrarian relationship between economic expectations and economic performance, and other fear mongering issues that don't tangibly affect people's quality of life. For the latter, these include National Security, Terrorism, Immigration, Government Satisfaction, Budget, ... really most of this stuff. I wonder how the graph would look if the same question was posed to a set of 'experts'. Say a set of economists at top business schools, or really a spattering of economists from reputable universities. My suspicion is the issues would suddenly become much more consistent. Especially with a focus on institutions, economic growth, tangible quality of life metrics, and efficacy of government redistribution programs among others 'real' measures. It's not to say that fears over government functioning, or the economy, or morals are irrelevant - these factors shape how we perceive the world and subsequently how we feel. This graph displays how resilient we are to these emotionally charged 'issues'. The average poll respondent will likely continue following the general sentiment from media, conversations, etc. Meanwhile, tangible issues will continue to be acknowledged by a very small sliver of the population. These sorts of results make me cynical of voting in general. Our current system with the electoral college, special interests, lobbying, advertisements etc. is already a clusterfuck. Ignoring experts opinions and focusing on emotionally charged issues is probably worse off for the country as a whole. I, for one, am glad that voter preferences currently represent the preferences of elites when it comes to contentious issues. (see Martin Giles' Affluence and Influence). Our 'every person gets an equivalent vote regardless of education for the minority that actually votes across varying demographics with messed up electoral colleges and voting districts and advertising influences' ... system seems inefficient to me. While a dystopian future of 'educated elites' controlling voting isn't the answer, neither is an equivalent, electoral college based system. It encourages appealing to the lowest common denominator, and a whole lot of people are unintentionally voting against their own interests.
- rebootthesystem 10y agoQuestion: Why do you think Peter feels sick? 100 people surveyed. 80% of respondents think he has food poisoning. Peter accepts this and endures several additional weeks of pain. Peter finally goes to a hospital to get checked out. He has colon cancer. Peter dies three weeks later. What people think has nothing whatsoever to do with reality. That's what this article is about, what people think, not reality.
- vixen99 10y agoNailed on the head!
- dredmorbius 10y agoFair point, though what public perception polling does tell you is what the public is thinking. That itself might reflect on a state of ignorance or knowledge, or on how well your Weapons of Mass Distraction campaigns are working.
- rebootthesystem 10y agoWhat the public is thinking is useful for politicians who need to choose which lies to tell during a campaign in order to gather the most votes. Or for a marketing person in need to alter their approach for maximum ROI. That's about it. If we switch to entrepreneurship for a moment, here's another case where public opinion is of little use: The crowds don't know what they want next. How many people wanted Instagram before it existed? Or Facebook? Amazon? eBay? How many people know that it is critical we switch to streamlined digital medical records? People know and form opinions based on past events. As a mass they rarely know where to go in order to solve real rather than imagined problems. This is particularly true of uncomfortable long-term planning. Take the situation we have in the US with Welfare and Social Security. By some accounts these programs might implode in as little as 10 to 20 years. They are the elephants in the room. The federal budget reveals this fact. Yet people are focusing on nonsense every day. The masses are not talking about this. The surveys indicate nobody thought these issues were important for decades, even today. Yet, reality, if I were a parent guiding my kids, is that this is one of the most important issues. One requiring immediate attention. It is not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of mathematical certainty.
- chatterbeak 10y agoI'm astounded by the state of denial we Americans are in! The biggest problem facing this country is obesity. 2/3rds of Americans are overweight or obese. And it costs us 300,000 lives/year, and hundreds of billions of dollars. It's getting so it's unusual for me to see other people who aren't overweight or obese when I'm out shopping, etc.
- rat87 10y agoPresident Trump and his administration, we can all debate till we are blue in the face why he was elected but he was in a, what's a good word for a reverse miracle? a disaster maybe? His administration seems likely to kill constructive politics, increase distrust & conspiracy theories and spread racism.
- burgreblast 10y agoIt's hard for me to interpret this outside the 2017 pressure chamber of headlines/advertising. It's remarkable similar to a top of mind recall of "what last 10 news articles have you seen published recently?" There are many good and important issues that didn't make the list, and I wonder if prompting or discussion would increase the breadth. This seems to be the list of issues that many articles have been talking about for the last month. Things we're supposed to care about, because, social proof. One can either believe news articles are crafted to deliver what we want to hear (appeal to our beliefs) or that we are remarkably adept consumers, champions and descerners of (unbiased!) truth. 9 out of 10 doctors agree!
- Retra 10y agoCorruption. It's always been one of the greatest problems facing humanity, and seemingly impossible to effectively combat.
- defen 10y agoHow about dysgenic fertility? > Meisenberg (2010) found that intelligence in the US was negatively related to the number of children, with age-controlled correlations of −.156, −.069, −.235 and −.028 for White females, White males, Black females and Black males. This effect was related mainly to the general intelligence factor and was caused in part by education and income, and to a lesser extent by the more "liberal" gender attitudes of those with higher intelligence. Without migration the average IQ of the US population will decline by about 0.8 points per generation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
- guelo 10y agomeh, that's probably swamped by the effects of reducing lead poisoning in children. The younger generations today are probably the smartest in human history with the added benefit of being the best educated and having access to the best information.
- defen 10y agoNot poisoning ourselves with lead is great, but I'm not sure that the younger generations today are the smartest in human history - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000470 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613...
- hexane360 10y agoI personally find those results really dubious. How accurate were the measurements from the mid 19th century? And even then, the leverage on those scatter plots is huge. (eg: http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs199/lectures/one-outlier.png http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs199/lectures/one-outlier.png) Additionally, because of a lack of a data, they used means instead of medians on highly skewed data. A few individuals could have a much larger effect on results this way. Finally, just because we measure good correlations between IQ and RT in modern times doesn't justify extrapolating these conclusions to the 19th century. P.S. I find this a little dubious "The Victorian era was characterized by great accomplishments. As great accomplishment is generally a product of high intelligence. . ." Sure the 19th century had better innovation than came before, but so did the 20th and 21st century. This doesn't have much impact on the findings, but it still bugs me.
- lend000 10y agoCTRL-F "debt": 0 of 0 (on these HN comments) That's a problem in and of itself. And the only reference to "environment" was someone asking why environment hadn't been mentioned, as of the time I started writing this.
- chis 10y agoThe national debt? My understanding was that most economists don't rate that as a very significant issue. But I'd love to be linked to something proving me wrong.
- lend000 10y agoAll kinds of debt, but government sponsored/owned debt in particular. It's a significant problem in our country when the economists in power do not consider (or pretend to not consider) the debt or the deficit trajectory, let alone unfunded liabilities, to be the serious problem that they are. Something has to give, whether it's a debilitating depression brought on by balancing the spreadsheet or significant devaluation of the US dollar to fraudulently meet obligations.
- uptownfunk 10y agoThe flaw in this whole analysis is that we are looking at the problems in relation to one another instead of in an absolute measure. I don't even think the question is that relevant in this administration. Why? Because there a lot of really big problems right now of really high magnitude. Race inequality, income inequality, healthcare, global warming, etc these are all huge problems and it is likely they will grow worse in magnitude, it's less relevant what the most important problem is, the real observation is that there are big problems and they ain't going away anytime soon. What I mean to say is the boxes under the trump administration should be really huge in certain areas compared to other administrations
- suprgeek 10y ago"Narcissistic Crazy person who might end civilization due to something he just saw on Fox news or because someone dissed him on Twitter" seems to be missing from the latest set of boxes.
- jeffdavis 10y agoWe form opinions far too fast and blithely assume that the only possible viewpoints are those that occur to us after 30 seconds of thought (plus the one or two viewpoints fed to us in the first article). Once a person publicly expresses an opinion, it is very hard to change. We just fight and rationalize from that point on, digging in deeper. And no, we bay area NPR-listening NYT-reading folks are far from immune.
- known 10y agohttp://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/11/daily-chart-17 http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/11/daily-c... looks much better article
- dredmorbius 10y agoInformationally, it's talking about something quite different. The NY Times piece looks at what specific issues are front-of-mind. The Economist, whether or not things are "on track". And at a single point in time rather than over 70 years, as with the Times.
- lkrubner 10y agoI am disappointed that "The Constitution" doesn't get mentioned by more people. Clearly, the USA has a terrible Constitution and it needs a new one. What might have seemed sensible 1787 certainly does not make sense in 2017. And many of the items that people do list are merely symptoms of the sickness of the Constitution. Among its many flaws, perhaps the most obvious is the "Rotten Borough" problem of the less populated states. Britain faced this problem in the early 1800s and resolved it with the reforms of 1832: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs I have a personal list of things I'd like to see in a new Constitution, but what I personally want is not very important. What is important is that the citizens of the USA realize what is the root cause of the many ills they complain of: the Constitution.
- erelde 10y agoIn the same kind of issue (IMO): voting on weekdays. I don't know if that's in the US constitution (I'm French), but really, who thought that was a good idea. It seems like a systemic issue easier to address than the whole constitution and electoral college system.
- taejo 10y ago> I don't know if that's in the US constitution (I'm French), but really, who thought that was a good idea. FYI: it's not, but it's been set by statute since 1845.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoThe less populated states are not a "rotten borough" problem. For that, you'd have to have literally an uninhabited state that still got to "elect" two Senators and one Representative. What we actually have is states that get to elect two Senators, even though they have much fewer people than other states that also get to elect two Senators. It's that way for a reason, and that reason still makes some sense in 2017. I'd say we suffer far more from the opposite problem: Parts of the Constitution that have not been repealed, but which are no longer in force because various court decisions have gutted them. (The Tenth Amendment comes to mind.)
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- kingmanaz 10y agoDysgenic trends in demographics.
- kapauldo 10y agoThese all point to one basic problem, overconfidence. Half of our country has replaced logic with confidence. Its roots, i speculate, are in mob reinforcement (religion and tv and talk radio), and our sports and entertainment centered yardstick for achievement. Any common person can now stare into the eyes of a scientist and say they disagree and have a mob of people cheer.
- Taylor_OD 10y agoIt's interesting to see this. If you asked me Americas biggest problems it would be that we spend an incredible amount of money in foreign wars, have mass incarceration, a healthcare system that is difficult to use and expensive, and that our education system is quickly falling being other countries. The further back you go in this list you see things that we just accept as reality now.
- johnsmith21006 10y agoTrump