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> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it. Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit, what polit

> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it. Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit, what politicians want is to market their "success" and to pass off their "failure." It's been studied and is kinda true. You can pretty reliably do something like, over a controversial tax hike that affected 2% of the population, get 30% of respondents to claim it made their taxes go up, if there was a heavy media push about how it'd make everyone's taxes go up, and that's for something they should have direct experience with. You can also do things like get an amusingly-high percentage of people who oppose various social programs by name to tell you they'd support a law to replace them with some other program you describe... that's identical to what the program already does. Then there's all the people who tell you how much more dangerous America is now than when they were growing up in the 1960s or 70s. I dunno about dumb, but voters' views are rather less connected to reality than one might hope, and seem to have a whole lot more to do with what they're being told by pundits.

mjevans 4y ago
Emotions, rather than logic. Irrespective of party, for a sadly large portion of voters. Not everyone in every party, maybe more in some parties than others (I don't have any data for that, this is just a theory / supposition); but even for whatever party you the reader is most aligned with, there will be some who blindly follow that party and do not think for themselves.
- kaba0 4y ago
  While I agree with you, I think it is easy to think of ourselves as “we are not the ones that are emotional, we think logically”. But the thing is, human beings are just emotional to the core and every sensory input is sensed as per the actual emotional state we are in, biased towards our inherent biases. Party alignment has unfortunately devolved into this “us vs them” pack mentality, and at this point I honestly question the point of parties at all. Why don’t we instead vote on individuals only, and make parties straight up illegal?
  - nixnax 4y ago
  - 20after4 4y ago
    That would be great but I don't see how we get there. The parties are in control, they choose who we are allowed to vote for.
  - brnaftr361 4y ago
    Ostensibly the parties are choosing select people through a strict vetting process. I think informing yourself about individuals would be much more difficult than picking a party with a long, presumably representative history. There's also a considerable barrier to entry. Louis Rossmann had Larry Sharpe on, who had an interesting talking points in the first three minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhqTxlxOQBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhqTxlxOQBM I think the key point is that the media wouldn't cover him if he didn't buy ads, and the cost of a poll stood at $40,000. How far can you campaign on a shoestring budget? It's a little easier when you can pool resources through an institution or a party while also gaining the immense benefit of a much more robust network of connections. Those are some of the infrastructural barriers we've got to overcome, and I can't imagine that movement in that direction would go uncontested. It's quite the uphill battle.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      Well, I don’t know. In many countries it has devolved into football-fan level love/hatred that benefits no one. Also, chances are neither of the two parties fit what you want. Especially in the US it is basically choosing the lesser evil..
      - brnaftr361 4y ago
        You might give Neil Postman's "How to Watch the TV News" a shot. He had some very prescient points regarding media and how it has transformed politics. Chomsky also has some interesting points on partisan politics. But yeah, I totally agree, it just seems like very narrow minded allegiance. I think in the US it has a lot to do with conflicting interests of people in high-density places and the rural. I've got a population map overlayed on election results right now, and the data seems to fit that conclusion. "We" are all held, arbitrarily, in the same group, which is... Absurd. It's like a hostage situation and it seems nobody has recognized that we're being held involuntarily.
kaba0 4y ago
Thanks, interesting comment. Thinking along, could we perhaps rather vote on things that worry us, instead of people (or sometimes just a color) that may (likely not) do something about it? E.g. salary of teachers, climate change, etc. And then every law/change has to be derived from that “wishlist”. Because political programs, while originally similar, have been misused greatly. It is still prone to abuse, but perhaps it would increase accountability of politicians and decrease the amount of laws that are only meant to distract the public from something much worse in the background. But surely everyone wants “free beer and immortality” (the program of a joke party where I live), so it would likely fail for other reasons, but a more direct democracy also has the shortcome of.. well, dumb people.
- notriddle 4y ago
  The ballot I filled out a few weeks ago had several such things on it. They are called "ballot measures," or "referenda," and the overall ideology for them is called "Direct Democracy." Obviously, they are subject to all the typical "push polling" weaknesses, where people can be coaxed into voting a certain way using manipulative wording.
roenxi 4y ago
> I dunno about dumb, but voters' views are rather less connected to reality than one might hope. What voters say is disconnected from reality, because the average voter has average skill at articulating their thoughts and usually only knows how to navigate their own social context. That voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world. You can tell by looking at what the polity does, it is often turns out in hindsight that it is quite an intelligent and practical beast. It is really hard to outdo a democracy when it comes to having a finger on the pulse of what is really going on. It is a gross unfairness in politics that people so often deal with sound bite caricatures of their opponents rather than being forthright about what motivates their position.
- areoform 4y ago
  > That voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world. I might be off-base here, but I am unsure if you have thought through the ramifications of your statements. What your statement seems to be implicitly saying is that, (a few examples) - Surgeons who stitch up gunshot wounds in ERs - Doctors & nurse practitioners who deliver care to communities across the US - Developers who write the critical code that runs airplanes - Scientists & engineers who do nanoscale fabrication - Environmental scientists embedded inside local communities, studying long-term environmental changes e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/climate/climate-change-marine-science.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/climate/climate-change-ma... - Embedded anthropologists studying populations & subcultures in Iraq & Afghanistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Terrain_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Terrain_System - Poets and artists living in these communities - Social scientists who study how rural Americans are used as a cheap workforce https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/mlg/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/mlg/ - Developers at Google & DDG writing the code that allows billions of people to do work every day - Scientists managing the US food supply and researching new ways to protect it, https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-10-19 https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-10-19 - Devs at companies like Stripe that power significant parts of the US economy Your text suggests that all of these people (and the millions more who aren't on the list) are less in tune with "reality" by default as compared to a random plumber or electrician. (I assume that you are referring to working class professions when you say "average voter") The text also says that they don't "go out and do things in the real world." It would be deeply wrong to assume that a random plumber or electrician is somehow lesser or incorrect by default. But it's also deeply wrong to say that the people who make important contributions that keep the lights of civilization on aren't somehow connected to reality by default.
w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
I don't need Obamacare, I have already benefits from Affordable Care Act. Repeal Obamacare.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
MichaelDickens 4y ago
> You can pretty reliably do something like, over a controversial tax hike that affected 2% of the population, get 30% of respondents to claim it made their taxes go up, if there was a heavy media push about how it'd make everyone's taxes go up, and that's for something they should have direct experience with I don't think this is necessarily because those voters are stupid. It could be that they oppose the tax, and they will give whatever answer best signals "I oppose this tax", regardless of whether their answer is literally true. This is a reasonable strategy and it makes sense why they'd do it.

mjevans 4y ago

Emotions, rather than logic. Irrespective of party, for a sadly large portion of voters. Not everyone in every party, maybe more in some parties than others (I don't have any data for that, this is just a theory / supposition); but even for whatever party you the reader is most aligned with, there will be some who blindly follow that party and do not think for themselves.

kaba0 4y ago
While I agree with you, I think it is easy to think of ourselves as “we are not the ones that are emotional, we think logically”. But the thing is, human beings are just emotional to the core and every sensory input is sensed as per the actual emotional state we are in, biased towards our inherent biases. Party alignment has unfortunately devolved into this “us vs them” pack mentality, and at this point I honestly question the point of parties at all. Why don’t we instead vote on individuals only, and make parties straight up illegal?
- nixnax 4y ago
- 20after4 4y ago
  That would be great but I don't see how we get there. The parties are in control, they choose who we are allowed to vote for.
- brnaftr361 4y ago
  Ostensibly the parties are choosing select people through a strict vetting process. I think informing yourself about individuals would be much more difficult than picking a party with a long, presumably representative history. There's also a considerable barrier to entry. Louis Rossmann had Larry Sharpe on, who had an interesting talking points in the first three minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhqTxlxOQBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhqTxlxOQBM I think the key point is that the media wouldn't cover him if he didn't buy ads, and the cost of a poll stood at $40,000. How far can you campaign on a shoestring budget? It's a little easier when you can pool resources through an institution or a party while also gaining the immense benefit of a much more robust network of connections. Those are some of the infrastructural barriers we've got to overcome, and I can't imagine that movement in that direction would go uncontested. It's quite the uphill battle.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    Well, I don’t know. In many countries it has devolved into football-fan level love/hatred that benefits no one. Also, chances are neither of the two parties fit what you want. Especially in the US it is basically choosing the lesser evil..
    - brnaftr361 4y ago
      You might give Neil Postman's "How to Watch the TV News" a shot. He had some very prescient points regarding media and how it has transformed politics. Chomsky also has some interesting points on partisan politics. But yeah, I totally agree, it just seems like very narrow minded allegiance. I think in the US it has a lot to do with conflicting interests of people in high-density places and the rural. I've got a population map overlayed on election results right now, and the data seems to fit that conclusion. "We" are all held, arbitrarily, in the same group, which is... Absurd. It's like a hostage situation and it seems nobody has recognized that we're being held involuntarily.

kaba0 4y ago

Thanks, interesting comment. Thinking along, could we perhaps rather vote on things that worry us, instead of people (or sometimes just a color) that may (likely not) do something about it? E.g. salary of teachers, climate change, etc. And then every law/change has to be derived from that “wishlist”. Because political programs, while originally similar, have been misused greatly. It is still prone to abuse, but perhaps it would increase accountability of politicians and decrease the amount of laws that are only meant to distract the public from something much worse in the background. But surely everyone wants “free beer and immortality” (the program of a joke party where I live), so it would likely fail for other reasons, but a more direct democracy also has the shortcome of.. well, dumb people.

notriddle 4y ago
The ballot I filled out a few weeks ago had several such things on it. They are called "ballot measures," or "referenda," and the overall ideology for them is called "Direct Democracy." Obviously, they are subject to all the typical "push polling" weaknesses, where people can be coaxed into voting a certain way using manipulative wording.

roenxi 4y ago

> I dunno about dumb, but voters' views are rather less connected to reality than one might hope. What voters say is disconnected from reality, because the average voter has average skill at articulating their thoughts and usually only knows how to navigate their own social context. That voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world. You can tell by looking at what the polity does, it is often turns out in hindsight that it is quite an intelligent and practical beast. It is really hard to outdo a democracy when it comes to having a finger on the pulse of what is really going on. It is a gross unfairness in politics that people so often deal with sound bite caricatures of their opponents rather than being forthright about what motivates their position.

areoform 4y ago
> That voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world. I might be off-base here, but I am unsure if you have thought through the ramifications of your statements. What your statement seems to be implicitly saying is that, (a few examples) - Surgeons who stitch up gunshot wounds in ERs - Doctors & nurse practitioners who deliver care to communities across the US - Developers who write the critical code that runs airplanes - Scientists & engineers who do nanoscale fabrication - Environmental scientists embedded inside local communities, studying long-term environmental changes e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/climate/climate-change-marine-science.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/climate/climate-change-ma... - Embedded anthropologists studying populations & subcultures in Iraq & Afghanistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Terrain_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Terrain_System - Poets and artists living in these communities - Social scientists who study how rural Americans are used as a cheap workforce https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/mlg/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/mlg/ - Developers at Google & DDG writing the code that allows billions of people to do work every day - Scientists managing the US food supply and researching new ways to protect it, https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-10-19 https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-10-19 - Devs at companies like Stripe that power significant parts of the US economy Your text suggests that all of these people (and the millions more who aren't on the list) are less in tune with "reality" by default as compared to a random plumber or electrician. (I assume that you are referring to working class professions when you say "average voter") The text also says that they don't "go out and do things in the real world." It would be deeply wrong to assume that a random plumber or electrician is somehow lesser or incorrect by default. But it's also deeply wrong to say that the people who make important contributions that keep the lights of civilization on aren't somehow connected to reality by default.

w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago

I don't need Obamacare, I have already benefits from Affordable Care Act. Repeal Obamacare.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

MichaelDickens 4y ago

> You can pretty reliably do something like, over a controversial tax hike that affected 2% of the population, get 30% of respondents to claim it made their taxes go up, if there was a heavy media push about how it'd make everyone's taxes go up, and that's for something they should have direct experience with I don't think this is necessarily because those voters are stupid. It could be that they oppose the tax, and they will give whatever answer best signals "I oppose this tax", regardless of whether their answer is literally true. This is a reasonable strategy and it makes sense why they'd do it.