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> Arguing about positions or policies or whatever else some 101 class tells you about makes no sense. I’m not sure I follow. The elective office isn’t magicall

> Arguing about positions or policies or whatever else some 101 class tells you about makes no sense. I’m not sure I follow. The elective office isn’t magically conferred to a person, it’s voted on. And arguing about positions and policies is exactly how we decide who is worthy of this office. > Aggregations of different people over different time with unformed beliefs are meaningless. Really though? Isn’t that how society has progressed? I want to understand this comment but all I’m hearing is “why care about policies and people in power, someone’s going to be in office and most voters are clueless anyway”. > Confusing, "i hate repubs and dems" with "i hate the 2 party system" is a mistake. Eh, depends on the era. It’s always been a 2-party system and for the present day it’s effectively R+D. Maybe there will be a resurgence of parties like the Know Nothings but for the average person today, it’s the same thing.

nh23423fefe 3y ago
I was responding to > every issue and potential solution is nuanced. By extension, this means that every person outside of the most extremist is nuanced as well. I think the article has it backwards. It asserts complicated people with uncorrelated beliefs (random vectors) and how impossible the task of self-categorization becomes (i'm so unique that im far from each parties centroid, which of course neglects those who are close to the centroid). This is a fake task. Candidates self-sort into parties to gain nominations by making promises to party insiders and voters choose among candidates during elections. The apparatus of party isn't relevant to the choice in the ballot box. Neither is the alignment of the candidate with the voter. You make a choice A or B. It's only the difference in A vs B not the alignment with A or with B. Alignment is correlated with the difference, sure, but its not the reason to choose A over B. That's what I meant by the aggregations comment. Parties cover/split voters and the centroid drifts over time. That drift is irrelevant to the task of candidate choice.

nh23423fefe 3y ago

I was responding to > every issue and potential solution is nuanced. By extension, this means that every person outside of the most extremist is nuanced as well. I think the article has it backwards. It asserts complicated people with uncorrelated beliefs (random vectors) and how impossible the task of self-categorization becomes (i'm so unique that im far from each parties centroid, which of course neglects those who are close to the centroid). This is a fake task. Candidates self-sort into parties to gain nominations by making promises to party insiders and voters choose among candidates during elections. The apparatus of party isn't relevant to the choice in the ballot box. Neither is the alignment of the candidate with the voter. You make a choice A or B. It's only the difference in A vs B not the alignment with A or with B. Alignment is correlated with the difference, sure, but its not the reason to choose A over B. That's what I meant by the aggregations comment. Parties cover/split voters and the centroid drifts over time. That drift is irrelevant to the task of candidate choice.