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Articles like this always renew my distaste for discussing politics. There are clear problems with the US's legislative process and elected officials, but there

by prawks 14y ago

Articles like this always renew my distaste for discussing politics. There are clear problems with the US's legislative process and elected officials, but there seems to be no way to effectively induce change in them, especially as an individual. Not just riding the science bandwagon here either; partisanship in general, etc. are all incredibly frustrating to discuss, and I'll almost always just stay out of discussions on politics as a result. I'd love to help change these kinds of things, but I don't feel I could give up my job to start some sort of organization against it, nor do I feel such an organization would gain much traction anyhow. Maybe I'm just an a-typical slacktivist. Any suggestions on stifling my feelings of futility? It seems the only way to affect change in this country is to get enough upvotes on reddit (see: SOPA). So I'm upvoting this.

goostavos 14y ago
I'm right with you on your slactivism. I like the idea of being very involved in politics, but I just cannot stand (a) listening to politicians, or (b) talking about politics. I just don't have the heart for the current discourse in the country. Every once in awhile, I'll try to go the good citizen route, look into the current issues, and then draw my own conclusion.. but what was all that effort for? I've tried my best to present logical rebuttals to people's points. I try to source only relevant, publicly available government data when possible, but it means nothing. The response I usually get? "Yeah, but.. still.." and then they go back to making their talking point. "But still.." is not a rebuttal, people. I spent several hours investigating the energy policy of the candidates. I pulled a bunch of charts from the EPA, compiled them all into an email, and then gave my armchair analysis of the policy given the available data. I was told that "I'm missing the important issue." So... fuck it. I'll just go back to studying.
- jessedhillon 14y ago
  IME the role of logic in decision-making has been greatly overemphasized. People need to first be convinced in an emotional/intuitive way, then given logical arguments to support what they are experiencing. The idea that a person -- anyone, not just "dumb people" -- think first about a matter rationally and then act in a matter consistent with logic, is failing to address a huge component of human behavior: people only behave in their rational best interests if/when they are not emotionally invested in the outcome.
  - gmaslov 14y ago
    Well, an obvious way to address this would be to become emotionally invested in acting rationally. It's a pity that so many people aren't.
    - jessedhillon 14y ago
      I'd be writing from the Moon right now if obvious-to-state were the same thing as obvious-to-achieve. Even if we accept your unwarranted assumption that strict rationality is unilaterally superior to experiential and intuitive modes of being, which is not at all a given: how do you propose we induce a widespread emotional investment in living life like a Vulcan, something that runs counter to the instincts of many/most people? Edit: sorry that came out quite jerk-like. Point is, why is rational always better than intuitive, and how could anyone hope to create such a massive emotional investment in an intellectual concept.
- mikeash 14y ago
  The current US government is mostly atrocious, but I'm convinced that the American people have the government they, or we, collectively deserve. Congress hasn't become horribly dysfunctional and stupid because they've somehow become disconnected from the people. Rather, the electorate has become horribly dysfunctional and stupid, and Congress simply follows along. I think the main problem is that our system is set up so that fringe elements have much more power. Voting happens in the middle of the week and is not an official holiday. Who turns out to vote, then? The people who care most passionately will inevitably show up in much greater numbers than people who are less enthusiastic. Passion is great, all else being equal, but I believe that passion correlates strongly with craziness in the political arena. Primary elections are even worse in this respect, since most people don't care about them, and the result is that you end up with two major ballot choices, both of whom are nuts, because the primaries got decided by the fringes. A lack of term limits means that members of Congress get deeply entrenched, with a result that turnover is not all that high. Why bother voting when the winner is a given anyway? Why bother voting even when the winner isn't a given if it's pretty much a given that the overall structure of power at the national level won't change? And even if that might happen, why bother voting when the other party will just filibuster the shit out of everything anyway? Finally, the Electoral College means that the decision for the top man in government gets decided by, what, maybe 10% of the total population of the country? Presidential candidates concentrate on swing states because they're the only ones that actually count, and that makes the whole business even more fringe. In short, it seems like the whole system is rigged to discourage moderate, sane people from wanting to participate in any meaningful way. I know it works on me. I vote in Presidential elections and midterms, but not enthusiastically. I would never dream of joining a political party, let alone volunteering for one. I hang up on surveys, ignore campaign flyers, and never, ever donate. I haven't even written a letter to my representative in years, after realizing that all it does is generate a mail-merged form response.
  - scarmig 14y ago
    I'm sympathetic to much of your comment. But I'm pretty skeptical that the solution to problems in American federal government is to make our federal government more similar to California's state government by adding term limits. That simply shifts power from individual legislators to unelected party apparatchiks.
wmeredith 14y ago
Hands down the best way to affect change in politics is to get involved locally. (e.g. School board, voluntary emergency response services, local PACs etc...) The only thing more powerful than the lobby is true grass roots (not astroturf). And I don't mean voting in gerrymandered districts, I mean true political activism.
jordanb 14y ago
I think it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. There are billions of problems with the American system, but if you take a step back you see that, as a whole, it works pretty well -- especially in comparison to the rest of the world. Consider science funding, for instance. Despite the neanderthals on the house committee, US funding is still comparatively extremely generous on a per-capita basis: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0012203?imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0012203.g008 http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...
saraid216 14y ago
This is Hacker News. Most of us are either entrepreneurs or understand the fundamental thinking behind being entrepreneurial. Surely we can do better than upvoting. If you can't do anything effective as an individual, stop being just an individual. My path has been to develop an idea of what I want government to look like, and then start convincing other people, getting feedback to tweak my vision, and convincing more people. I won't recommend my path, since it's slow and probably will take longer than my lifetime; I have friends who are bootstrapping legislative bodies and know other people who are working on creating better cross-partisan dialogue and so on and so on. Figure out what you want, figure out what it would take, and start climbing. This is a lot like entrepreneurship. Don't sit in your cube and imagine how much better it'd be to be your own boss; get an idea, get a prototype, get a notion of the market, get going.
- javajosh 14y ago
  Well Jesus, you can't say something like this and then not share your vision! Not an effective strategy.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    /me snickers. I have my whole lifetime to finish writing it out and you want it now? Geez. Such a hurry. Here's what I can give you. You'll see no lasting systemic change until people start growing up understanding the ins and outs of democracy by the age of 15. This does not even happen in the most affluent neighborhoods today. Education focuses on producing workers for the job market, rather than producing citizens for a democratic society. That's what needs to change. An adult graduating from high school needs to be capable of the highest offices of government immediately, even if they don't meet the age qualification. That capability gives them the tools to intelligently engage with their representatives and public servants as equals: as co-governors. Lobbying cannot be the job of an elite minority; it has to be that thing we all do from 4-6pm, after working from 8-4 and before enjoying dinner and leisure from 6-10. Because the capacity to govern is properly distributed, you should see the end of the career politician. Instead, occupying offices should have a higher churn rate as more people run and more people qualify and more people have jobs to return to after their stint in office; the actual electoral result approaches random, negating any effective campaign strategy and thus any influence of money. Instead of campaigning for office, office-holders become facilitators for citizen discussion of policy. Their job is primarily to gather and synthesize, to properly weight authority, and to transparently explain how they determined which policy to adopt. The vote becomes a formality, rather than a nail-biting contest aired on national television. That's what I have right now. It's not much, and it's pretty flimsy, but it's a skeleton to hang my coat on. Enjoy.
woodchuck64 14y ago
Partisanship is not the problem, anti-science is the problem. A major political party should not be anti-science and until people who respect science stop voting GOP, this won't get solved.
eru 14y ago
Have you considered voting with your feet?
rayiner 14y ago
I think the best thing is to cultivate some perspective, and not hold the political system to unrealistically high standards. We live in a 236 year old democracy of 310 million people. Let that sink in. We have more people than there are lines of code in an entire Linux distribution. Think of the complexity of a human being, over a human being's lifetime, versus a line of code. We're an incredibly heterogeneous, diverse country that has never agreed on anything, not even on our founding documents.* We are, by virtue of our post-WWII status, the de-facto political and military leader of the world. We're the world's largest economy. We're the world's reserve currency. We have all of the responsibility that comes with that status. We do not blink twice when we hear of a company like Yahoo (14,000 employees) or Nortel (86,000 employees at peak) becoming unmanageable basket cases. Yet we rail on the President for not getting more done than he does! We forgive Windows for being layers upon tangled layers of bug-for-bug compatible code, but complain endlessly about the complexity of a tax code designed to regulate 300m people acting together in a $15 trillion economy. I am of the opinion that too many people, especially engineers who maybe have a particular love of simplicity, simply expect too much of the country they live in, and as a result become disillusioned with the whole system. It is my opinion that these expectations are unreasonable and counter productive. The fact of the matter is that the US government is a paragon of virtue and efficiency compared to most others. Some of the western European countries may have better governments, but they also have far simpler and more homogenous societies to govern. We certainly have a better government than most any country in Asia. China, which has no particular love of anything American, has spent the last couple of decades trying to model their legal system after America's. Think about that: something that most Americans consider to be a broken part of our society, is a model for a country looking to cement it's place among the world's great societies. So if you're frustrated by the system, take a step back and appreciate the fact that it probably doesn't get any better than it is now. As I've gotten older and this realization has sunk in, I have found politics far more enjoyable. *) The more you learn about the Constitution, the more you realize it's ridiculous to ask "what does the Constitution mean?" The 40 signatories to the Constitution had 40 different opinions about the meaning of the document they were signing!
- maratd 14y ago
  The more you learn about the Constitution, the more you realize it's ridiculous to ask "what does the Constitution mean?" The 40 signatories to the Constitution had 40 different opinions about the meaning of the document they were signing! And yet, it is the oldest working constitution that still grants rights to its citizens rarely found elsewhere. It has provided for our prosperity for over two centuries. Whatever it means, it means well.

by prawks 14y ago

goostavos 14y ago

I'm right with you on your slactivism. I like the idea of being very involved in politics, but I just cannot stand (a) listening to politicians, or (b) talking about politics. I just don't have the heart for the current discourse in the country. Every once in awhile, I'll try to go the good citizen route, look into the current issues, and then draw my own conclusion.. but what was all that effort for? I've tried my best to present logical rebuttals to people's points. I try to source only relevant, publicly available government data when possible, but it means nothing. The response I usually get? "Yeah, but.. still.." and then they go back to making their talking point. "But still.." is not a rebuttal, people. I spent several hours investigating the energy policy of the candidates. I pulled a bunch of charts from the EPA, compiled them all into an email, and then gave my armchair analysis of the policy given the available data. I was told that "I'm missing the important issue." So... fuck it. I'll just go back to studying.

jessedhillon 14y ago
IME the role of logic in decision-making has been greatly overemphasized. People need to first be convinced in an emotional/intuitive way, then given logical arguments to support what they are experiencing. The idea that a person -- anyone, not just "dumb people" -- think first about a matter rationally and then act in a matter consistent with logic, is failing to address a huge component of human behavior: people only behave in their rational best interests if/when they are not emotionally invested in the outcome.
- gmaslov 14y ago
  Well, an obvious way to address this would be to become emotionally invested in acting rationally. It's a pity that so many people aren't.
  - jessedhillon 14y ago
    I'd be writing from the Moon right now if obvious-to-state were the same thing as obvious-to-achieve. Even if we accept your unwarranted assumption that strict rationality is unilaterally superior to experiential and intuitive modes of being, which is not at all a given: how do you propose we induce a widespread emotional investment in living life like a Vulcan, something that runs counter to the instincts of many/most people? Edit: sorry that came out quite jerk-like. Point is, why is rational always better than intuitive, and how could anyone hope to create such a massive emotional investment in an intellectual concept.
mikeash 14y ago
The current US government is mostly atrocious, but I'm convinced that the American people have the government they, or we, collectively deserve. Congress hasn't become horribly dysfunctional and stupid because they've somehow become disconnected from the people. Rather, the electorate has become horribly dysfunctional and stupid, and Congress simply follows along. I think the main problem is that our system is set up so that fringe elements have much more power. Voting happens in the middle of the week and is not an official holiday. Who turns out to vote, then? The people who care most passionately will inevitably show up in much greater numbers than people who are less enthusiastic. Passion is great, all else being equal, but I believe that passion correlates strongly with craziness in the political arena. Primary elections are even worse in this respect, since most people don't care about them, and the result is that you end up with two major ballot choices, both of whom are nuts, because the primaries got decided by the fringes. A lack of term limits means that members of Congress get deeply entrenched, with a result that turnover is not all that high. Why bother voting when the winner is a given anyway? Why bother voting even when the winner isn't a given if it's pretty much a given that the overall structure of power at the national level won't change? And even if that might happen, why bother voting when the other party will just filibuster the shit out of everything anyway? Finally, the Electoral College means that the decision for the top man in government gets decided by, what, maybe 10% of the total population of the country? Presidential candidates concentrate on swing states because they're the only ones that actually count, and that makes the whole business even more fringe. In short, it seems like the whole system is rigged to discourage moderate, sane people from wanting to participate in any meaningful way. I know it works on me. I vote in Presidential elections and midterms, but not enthusiastically. I would never dream of joining a political party, let alone volunteering for one. I hang up on surveys, ignore campaign flyers, and never, ever donate. I haven't even written a letter to my representative in years, after realizing that all it does is generate a mail-merged form response.
- scarmig 14y ago
  I'm sympathetic to much of your comment. But I'm pretty skeptical that the solution to problems in American federal government is to make our federal government more similar to California's state government by adding term limits. That simply shifts power from individual legislators to unelected party apparatchiks.

wmeredith 14y ago

Hands down the best way to affect change in politics is to get involved locally. (e.g. School board, voluntary emergency response services, local PACs etc...) The only thing more powerful than the lobby is true grass roots (not astroturf). And I don't mean voting in gerrymandered districts, I mean true political activism.

jordanb 14y ago

I think it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. There are billions of problems with the American system, but if you take a step back you see that, as a whole, it works pretty well -- especially in comparison to the rest of the world. Consider science funding, for instance. Despite the neanderthals on the house committee, US funding is still comparatively extremely generous on a per-capita basis: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0012203?imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0012203.g008 http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...

saraid216 14y ago

This is Hacker News. Most of us are either entrepreneurs or understand the fundamental thinking behind being entrepreneurial. Surely we can do better than upvoting. If you can't do anything effective as an individual, stop being just an individual. My path has been to develop an idea of what I want government to look like, and then start convincing other people, getting feedback to tweak my vision, and convincing more people. I won't recommend my path, since it's slow and probably will take longer than my lifetime; I have friends who are bootstrapping legislative bodies and know other people who are working on creating better cross-partisan dialogue and so on and so on. Figure out what you want, figure out what it would take, and start climbing. This is a lot like entrepreneurship. Don't sit in your cube and imagine how much better it'd be to be your own boss; get an idea, get a prototype, get a notion of the market, get going.

javajosh 14y ago
Well Jesus, you can't say something like this and then not share your vision! Not an effective strategy.
- saraid216 14y ago
  /me snickers. I have my whole lifetime to finish writing it out and you want it now? Geez. Such a hurry. Here's what I can give you. You'll see no lasting systemic change until people start growing up understanding the ins and outs of democracy by the age of 15. This does not even happen in the most affluent neighborhoods today. Education focuses on producing workers for the job market, rather than producing citizens for a democratic society. That's what needs to change. An adult graduating from high school needs to be capable of the highest offices of government immediately, even if they don't meet the age qualification. That capability gives them the tools to intelligently engage with their representatives and public servants as equals: as co-governors. Lobbying cannot be the job of an elite minority; it has to be that thing we all do from 4-6pm, after working from 8-4 and before enjoying dinner and leisure from 6-10. Because the capacity to govern is properly distributed, you should see the end of the career politician. Instead, occupying offices should have a higher churn rate as more people run and more people qualify and more people have jobs to return to after their stint in office; the actual electoral result approaches random, negating any effective campaign strategy and thus any influence of money. Instead of campaigning for office, office-holders become facilitators for citizen discussion of policy. Their job is primarily to gather and synthesize, to properly weight authority, and to transparently explain how they determined which policy to adopt. The vote becomes a formality, rather than a nail-biting contest aired on national television. That's what I have right now. It's not much, and it's pretty flimsy, but it's a skeleton to hang my coat on. Enjoy.

woodchuck64 14y ago

Partisanship is not the problem, anti-science is the problem. A major political party should not be anti-science and until people who respect science stop voting GOP, this won't get solved.

eru 14y ago

Have you considered voting with your feet?

rayiner 14y ago

I think the best thing is to cultivate some perspective, and not hold the political system to unrealistically high standards. We live in a 236 year old democracy of 310 million people. Let that sink in. We have more people than there are lines of code in an entire Linux distribution. Think of the complexity of a human being, over a human being's lifetime, versus a line of code. We're an incredibly heterogeneous, diverse country that has never agreed on anything, not even on our founding documents.* We are, by virtue of our post-WWII status, the de-facto political and military leader of the world. We're the world's largest economy. We're the world's reserve currency. We have all of the responsibility that comes with that status. We do not blink twice when we hear of a company like Yahoo (14,000 employees) or Nortel (86,000 employees at peak) becoming unmanageable basket cases. Yet we rail on the President for not getting more done than he does! We forgive Windows for being layers upon tangled layers of bug-for-bug compatible code, but complain endlessly about the complexity of a tax code designed to regulate 300m people acting together in a $15 trillion economy. I am of the opinion that too many people, especially engineers who maybe have a particular love of simplicity, simply expect too much of the country they live in, and as a result become disillusioned with the whole system. It is my opinion that these expectations are unreasonable and counter productive. The fact of the matter is that the US government is a paragon of virtue and efficiency compared to most others. Some of the western European countries may have better governments, but they also have far simpler and more homogenous societies to govern. We certainly have a better government than most any country in Asia. China, which has no particular love of anything American, has spent the last couple of decades trying to model their legal system after America's. Think about that: something that most Americans consider to be a broken part of our society, is a model for a country looking to cement it's place among the world's great societies. So if you're frustrated by the system, take a step back and appreciate the fact that it probably doesn't get any better than it is now. As I've gotten older and this realization has sunk in, I have found politics far more enjoyable. *) The more you learn about the Constitution, the more you realize it's ridiculous to ask "what does the Constitution mean?" The 40 signatories to the Constitution had 40 different opinions about the meaning of the document they were signing!

maratd 14y ago
The more you learn about the Constitution, the more you realize it's ridiculous to ask "what does the Constitution mean?" The 40 signatories to the Constitution had 40 different opinions about the meaning of the document they were signing! And yet, it is the oldest working constitution that still grants rights to its citizens rarely found elsewhere. It has provided for our prosperity for over two centuries. Whatever it means, it means well.