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There are a lot of fallacies here. I'll take just one. If you'll allow, I'll use a political example from 15+ years ago. When young Bush was running for presi

There are a lot of fallacies here. I'll take just one. If you'll allow, I'll use a political example from 15+ years ago. When young Bush was running for president, you'd see commentators on TV talking about which candidate had some demographic. Such-and-such had the 50+ white male vote, so-and-so had the hispanic vote, and so on. These people did not know what they were talking about, but it made for good TV. The people who knew what they were talking about, the folks like Karl Rove, knew that today they were looking to talk about subject X in context Y to a certain type of voter described by several adjectives in precinct 7 of the south side of Columbia, SC. Pick a word that describes a social problem, say homelessness. There's not one homelessness, there's a dozen or more, each with their own qualities. There's people who are the victim of a disaster, people who have medical bills, people with addiction problems, people living in poverty on purpose for religious reasons, etc. Not only do the reasons vary, the possible solutions vary by personality, demographic, geographic location and resources, and so on. Your response to my point demonstrates the problem. We talk about social problems in grand and expansive terms because we have to. Otherwise we'd spend forever in analysis. Politicians get elected based on grand visions for social problems expressed in expansive terms. But the actual problems themselves are highly nuanced. So what you're suggesting is that we throw everybody worldwide into one bucket, stick a label on them, and attempt to help them. That's only going to be a workable solution in only the most simple cases. In fact it's not workable. I'm being kind. Worse, for all of the cases where it doesn't help, you've just given over a monopoly of ideas, labels, and solutions to some company that's beholden to nobody, Facebook. So what will happen, what is happening now, is that people looking to exploit problems are working at the very detailed level. Right now there's probably some scammer looking to target 70+ white females in Sioux City Iowa who voted for Bernie last time. That guy is going to exploit the hell out of his target. There are thousands of targets like this. But when we identify the problem, all we get is how great it is to have some universal solution to addiction or something. Yes, in grand terms wouldn't it be great to have some solution to X? I'd love it. But that's not how these kinds of solutions work. What we're doing is enabling the people with bad intent to have their way while justifying it all with promises of how huge categories of people might be helped. That's bullshit, and it's the kind of bullshit we've put up with for far too long from SV, making money with one hand while giving out platitudes with another, trusting on the complexity of the application to hide what's really happening from the average voter. It's only continuing. Now, however, we're going to take it to the next level, regulatory capture.

dbspin 7y ago
While it's true that social problems are complex and multivariate, what gets missed in the American context is the importance of virtuous and viscous circles. So for example the net cost of normalising college debt, and the regulatory exceptions to bankruptcy etc around this form of debt, is not simply a generation entering the workforce in debt. It's massive concrete measurable inequality between those who can afford to work in internships (unpaid or underpaid) and those who's loans prevent that. It's exclusion from education for those who cannot take on enormous debt (or won't be granted loans). It's a shift to crude utilitarianism in education generally, because the insane cost of a degree means you'd be insane to do one that doesn't 'repay' its perceived value etc etc. This is true again and again for the social issues created by the American economic-social pact (call it neoliberalism or what have you). From the knock on domestic violence, abuse and intergenerational trauma caused by the warrior culture of Americans gargantuan military, to its normalisation of militarised policing. What all these issues have in common it a cultural unwillingness to tackle what are often substantively simple root causes. Issues which have been dealt with successfully in other cultures. So in confusing how the electorate can be trivially manipulated by playing into their psychographic preferences and prejudices, with the relative complexity of social issues you're actually conceding to the delusion that politics is entertainment. That it's not candidates positions that matter, but the perception of those positions. That really most problems are simply impossible to solve (rather than politically unfeasible in the American context). That the political confusion and anger of the present moment is exclusively generated through persuasion rather than the justifiable (though often misdirected) result of concrete solvable issues. We can disagree about the causes of social issues in America, and their solutions; but its inarguable that there has been no effort to systematically test and deploy policy interventions at a national level in any kind of evidence based way. The map in America, has become the territory.
- DanielBMarkham 7y ago
  I do not think politics is entertainment, and I support the creation of virtuous cycles. I think you've created a bit of a dichotomy where none was implied. All of our experiences online can be a form of entertainment, at least in part, politicians may be elected or not based on perception, and it's critically important to have and express values using good people. These ideas do not have to be in conflict with one another, and no cynicism on my part was intended.

dbspin 7y ago

While it's true that social problems are complex and multivariate, what gets missed in the American context is the importance of virtuous and viscous circles. So for example the net cost of normalising college debt, and the regulatory exceptions to bankruptcy etc around this form of debt, is not simply a generation entering the workforce in debt. It's massive concrete measurable inequality between those who can afford to work in internships (unpaid or underpaid) and those who's loans prevent that. It's exclusion from education for those who cannot take on enormous debt (or won't be granted loans). It's a shift to crude utilitarianism in education generally, because the insane cost of a degree means you'd be insane to do one that doesn't 'repay' its perceived value etc etc. This is true again and again for the social issues created by the American economic-social pact (call it neoliberalism or what have you). From the knock on domestic violence, abuse and intergenerational trauma caused by the warrior culture of Americans gargantuan military, to its normalisation of militarised policing. What all these issues have in common it a cultural unwillingness to tackle what are often substantively simple root causes. Issues which have been dealt with successfully in other cultures. So in confusing how the electorate can be trivially manipulated by playing into their psychographic preferences and prejudices, with the relative complexity of social issues you're actually conceding to the delusion that politics is entertainment. That it's not candidates positions that matter, but the perception of those positions. That really most problems are simply impossible to solve (rather than politically unfeasible in the American context). That the political confusion and anger of the present moment is exclusively generated through persuasion rather than the justifiable (though often misdirected) result of concrete solvable issues. We can disagree about the causes of social issues in America, and their solutions; but its inarguable that there has been no effort to systematically test and deploy policy interventions at a national level in any kind of evidence based way. The map in America, has become the territory.

DanielBMarkham 7y ago
I do not think politics is entertainment, and I support the creation of virtuous cycles. I think you've created a bit of a dichotomy where none was implied. All of our experiences online can be a form of entertainment, at least in part, politicians may be elected or not based on perception, and it's critically important to have and express values using good people. These ideas do not have to be in conflict with one another, and no cynicism on my part was intended.