6 ms·

"People would probably be better off if they knew more than they do about a lot of things (or at least, I am assuming so, though there is research on this sort

by tboyd47 12y ago

"People would probably be better off if they knew more than they do about a lot of things (or at least, I am assuming so, though there is research on this sort of thing). Politics might, however, be the last thing on that list... and yet, politics is the one area in which we get irritated when other people are apathetic or ignorant." In America, anyway -- I don't know about other democratic countries -- this is so true. And as an apathetic person, let me say that it's so satisfying to hear a voice in political science say it. People seem to have this superstitious obsession with the democratic ritual. The act of filling in a circle in a ballot box is so important to them that they just cannot accept the fact that someone would choose not to participate. This way of thinking makes less sense to me than someone who's fanatic about a sports team. If you tell a fan of a football team that you don't watch football, at least he'll respect this about you. Try telling some party activist that you don't vote and see if they ever let it go. Edit: my post is being downvoted to oblivion anyway, but removed some hyperbolic language that wasn't helping my case.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
"Completely symbolic and pointless"? I call cynicism.
- innguest 12y ago
  It's symbolic because you can only choose who to vote on out of the options presented to you. It's pointless because (at least in the US) the government has too much power and it sells that power to lobbyists.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    US Government is only a tiny fraction of whom I vote for. From State officials through City and County, School Board, even Township and Water Board. All of them affect me, including my tax rates and property rights.
    - tboyd47 12y ago
      Fair enough. "Completely symbolic and pointless" was a tad too far.
    - innguest 12y ago
      > All of them affect me And none of them really care about you, which can be evidenced by the amount of corruption that goes on everywhere. Also, "voting" is inherently dumb because it's just "majority wins". Shouldn't the best outcome win? Why can't we have a system where we argue things out and have some heuristics for finding out what the best decision is for a given group of people? Are you sure voting for representatives, as we currently do, is the best possible way to run countries, states, cities? If not, where are we trying to find better ways? Can you then see why some don't see the value in "voting"?
      - NotAtWork 12y ago
        > Why can't we have a system where we argue things out and have some heuristics for finding out what the best decision is for a given group of people? We do this. We just haven't resolved two fundamental problems: 1. The heuristics are not faithfully stated nor evaluated. This actually has upsides and downsides, as it allows them to be unexpectedly flexible and comprehensive at the cost of some corruption and unpredictability. This may just be a fundamental trade-off of such metrics. The heuristics are just currently embodied in little sacks of meat with some extra processes happening, because of stand-alone computers being a relatively new thing. (I'm actually not sure how much better with regards to lack of corruption and transparency we could make the heuristics than "just pick a guy to choose", because of limits in decidability and other related computer science/math.) 2. We don't know any way to define 'best outcome' besides ask everyone what they think, and resolve conflicts with some kind of strategy like "go with what the most people think is the right answer". So I really don't understand your position: it's essentially that you don't see value in participating in which heuristics are chosen, and think that people should pay more attention to your wants and desires, even if you don't advocate for them with the same strength as other people. Honestly, your position mostly sounds poorly thought out and entitled.
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    "The options" are in actuality other citizens who have done a lot of hard work to build coalitions and support, and get themselves on the ballot. Voting is not a service that the government offers its citizens. It's a system that the citizens run to select leaders from amongst themselves. If you don't like the options, it's worth asking what you, as a citizen, have done to improve them.
    - innguest 12y ago
      > If you don't like the options, it's worth asking what you, as a citizen, have done to improve them. I can revert that and ask you, what have you done, as a citizen, that you've made the choices so awful for everyone else? See, that's easy to say, but I don't think we really do have an impact over who our candidates are.
      - NotAtWork 12y ago
        > > If you don't like the options, it's worth asking what you, as a citizen, have done to improve them. > I can revert that and ask you, what have you done, as a citizen, that you've made the choices so awful for everyone else? I picked people who would act in my interest, and since you didn't participate, they only care about my interests, not yours. Why should I care about your interests, when you can't be bothered to represent them as part of the process? Edit: Your comments seem to not really reflect the scale and complexity with which the system you're talking about operates.
        pitt1980 12y ago
        did they act in your interest? you threw out the CIA torture thing above let make a not-necessarily-called-for leap, lets say you voted for Obama did telling Obama that he did enough to earn your vote help or hurt those affected by CIA torture? (if you're not an Obama voter you have my apologies)
        NotAtWork 12y ago
        > did they act in your interest? To address this, we have to reintroduce the complexity that I had omitted in my comment: there are other people besides me and the (figurative) person I was addressing. I think the honest answer here is that yes, the CIA staff did what people wanted, likely in violation of what the law actually was, because they saw it as their duty to undertake such tasks when the public clamored that they needed safety from a dangerous world, everything else be damned. One of the hardest and most interesting questions about government is how do we stop ourselves from making collective bad decisions on effectively a whim in a moment of weakness/fear/etc?
erehweb 12y ago
Are you apathetic to: - whether your fellow countrymen go to war? - who gets to marry? - abortion rights? If you are, then that's your right, but please don't act surprised when people who care about these things get irritated.
- tboyd47 12y ago
  What I am apathetic to is which liar gets elected into office, the red liar or the blue liar? What surprises me is that people seem to have an irrational trust in these political figures.
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    Who trusts political figures? Repeated polling shows that most people don't, even if they vote. Maybe you're down on voting because you think it's supposed to solve all the problems. So since it doesn't, it must be broken. The truth is that voting is just a very small part of trying to make the world look more like you think it should. It's like developing a software application. No one would expect that buying a computer would take care of everything. But you can't start until you have a computer. And while the computer isn't everything, some are still going to be better for what you want than others.
    - tboyd47 12y ago
      If you vote for a certain candidate, that's a sign that you believe he's going to act a certain way in office. And unless you know him personally, that can only be based on what he said on the campaign trail. So the fact that you voted for him shows that you at least trusted him to do what he said he would do.
      - snowwrestler 12y ago
        Remember that you can often vote for or against officials running for re-election, in which case you can vote based on their actual record of work. Many challengers have records of work by which to judge them as well.
MarkPNeyer 12y ago
politics is the primary mechanism by which society regulates its emotion. people get emotional when you say that you don't follow politics because that is how the 'politics' mechanism operates. people express anger outwards - at the out groups who are seen as 'not helping' - and upwards, where it is packaged and managed by people who are capable of handling intensely powerful emotions - many of them are sociopaths, who simply don't care. try watching house of cards with the 'politics as emotional transfer mechanism' model running. see how many decisions are made on the basis of creating or moving jobs. having a job makes people calm. not having a job makes them worried. you can start to view the capital building as the 'central emotional processor' of the nation, where emotions are packed up in intense chunks and moved around between people who believe they are just trying to get more power, but are effectively reducing emotional tension.
- tboyd47 12y ago
  Nice analysis.
aestra 12y ago
People tend to think the things they really care about should be universal. You see it all the time here with the "everyone should learn how to program" camp.

by tboyd47 12y ago

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

"Completely symbolic and pointless"? I call cynicism.

innguest 12y ago
It's symbolic because you can only choose who to vote on out of the options presented to you. It's pointless because (at least in the US) the government has too much power and it sells that power to lobbyists.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  US Government is only a tiny fraction of whom I vote for. From State officials through City and County, School Board, even Township and Water Board. All of them affect me, including my tax rates and property rights.
  - tboyd47 12y ago
    Fair enough. "Completely symbolic and pointless" was a tad too far.
  - innguest 12y ago
    > All of them affect me And none of them really care about you, which can be evidenced by the amount of corruption that goes on everywhere. Also, "voting" is inherently dumb because it's just "majority wins". Shouldn't the best outcome win? Why can't we have a system where we argue things out and have some heuristics for finding out what the best decision is for a given group of people? Are you sure voting for representatives, as we currently do, is the best possible way to run countries, states, cities? If not, where are we trying to find better ways? Can you then see why some don't see the value in "voting"?
    - NotAtWork 12y ago
      > Why can't we have a system where we argue things out and have some heuristics for finding out what the best decision is for a given group of people? We do this. We just haven't resolved two fundamental problems: 1. The heuristics are not faithfully stated nor evaluated. This actually has upsides and downsides, as it allows them to be unexpectedly flexible and comprehensive at the cost of some corruption and unpredictability. This may just be a fundamental trade-off of such metrics. The heuristics are just currently embodied in little sacks of meat with some extra processes happening, because of stand-alone computers being a relatively new thing. (I'm actually not sure how much better with regards to lack of corruption and transparency we could make the heuristics than "just pick a guy to choose", because of limits in decidability and other related computer science/math.) 2. We don't know any way to define 'best outcome' besides ask everyone what they think, and resolve conflicts with some kind of strategy like "go with what the most people think is the right answer". So I really don't understand your position: it's essentially that you don't see value in participating in which heuristics are chosen, and think that people should pay more attention to your wants and desires, even if you don't advocate for them with the same strength as other people. Honestly, your position mostly sounds poorly thought out and entitled.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  "The options" are in actuality other citizens who have done a lot of hard work to build coalitions and support, and get themselves on the ballot. Voting is not a service that the government offers its citizens. It's a system that the citizens run to select leaders from amongst themselves. If you don't like the options, it's worth asking what you, as a citizen, have done to improve them.
  - innguest 12y ago
    > If you don't like the options, it's worth asking what you, as a citizen, have done to improve them. I can revert that and ask you, what have you done, as a citizen, that you've made the choices so awful for everyone else? See, that's easy to say, but I don't think we really do have an impact over who our candidates are.
    - NotAtWork 12y ago
      > > If you don't like the options, it's worth asking what you, as a citizen, have done to improve them. > I can revert that and ask you, what have you done, as a citizen, that you've made the choices so awful for everyone else? I picked people who would act in my interest, and since you didn't participate, they only care about my interests, not yours. Why should I care about your interests, when you can't be bothered to represent them as part of the process? Edit: Your comments seem to not really reflect the scale and complexity with which the system you're talking about operates.
      - pitt1980 12y ago
        did they act in your interest? you threw out the CIA torture thing above let make a not-necessarily-called-for leap, lets say you voted for Obama did telling Obama that he did enough to earn your vote help or hurt those affected by CIA torture? (if you're not an Obama voter you have my apologies)
        NotAtWork 12y ago
        > did they act in your interest? To address this, we have to reintroduce the complexity that I had omitted in my comment: there are other people besides me and the (figurative) person I was addressing. I think the honest answer here is that yes, the CIA staff did what people wanted, likely in violation of what the law actually was, because they saw it as their duty to undertake such tasks when the public clamored that they needed safety from a dangerous world, everything else be damned. One of the hardest and most interesting questions about government is how do we stop ourselves from making collective bad decisions on effectively a whim in a moment of weakness/fear/etc?

erehweb 12y ago

Are you apathetic to: - whether your fellow countrymen go to war? - who gets to marry? - abortion rights? If you are, then that's your right, but please don't act surprised when people who care about these things get irritated.

tboyd47 12y ago
What I am apathetic to is which liar gets elected into office, the red liar or the blue liar? What surprises me is that people seem to have an irrational trust in these political figures.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  Who trusts political figures? Repeated polling shows that most people don't, even if they vote. Maybe you're down on voting because you think it's supposed to solve all the problems. So since it doesn't, it must be broken. The truth is that voting is just a very small part of trying to make the world look more like you think it should. It's like developing a software application. No one would expect that buying a computer would take care of everything. But you can't start until you have a computer. And while the computer isn't everything, some are still going to be better for what you want than others.
  - tboyd47 12y ago
    If you vote for a certain candidate, that's a sign that you believe he's going to act a certain way in office. And unless you know him personally, that can only be based on what he said on the campaign trail. So the fact that you voted for him shows that you at least trusted him to do what he said he would do.
    - snowwrestler 12y ago
      Remember that you can often vote for or against officials running for re-election, in which case you can vote based on their actual record of work. Many challengers have records of work by which to judge them as well.

MarkPNeyer 12y ago

politics is the primary mechanism by which society regulates its emotion. people get emotional when you say that you don't follow politics because that is how the 'politics' mechanism operates. people express anger outwards - at the out groups who are seen as 'not helping' - and upwards, where it is packaged and managed by people who are capable of handling intensely powerful emotions - many of them are sociopaths, who simply don't care. try watching house of cards with the 'politics as emotional transfer mechanism' model running. see how many decisions are made on the basis of creating or moving jobs. having a job makes people calm. not having a job makes them worried. you can start to view the capital building as the 'central emotional processor' of the nation, where emotions are packed up in intense chunks and moved around between people who believe they are just trying to get more power, but are effectively reducing emotional tension.

tboyd47 12y ago
Nice analysis.

aestra 12y ago

People tend to think the things they really care about should be universal. You see it all the time here with the "everyone should learn how to program" camp.