4 ms·

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 to

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.
    - innguest 12y ago
      > 2. We don't know any way to define 'best outcome' besides ask everyone what they think I disagree. Here's a better way: empiricism (through federalism). Let different US states have different laws (that the Federal law cannot trump) and let's see through experimentation which set of laws is best for different sets of people. But we've long closed the federalist "democracy lab" dream. I'm sorry if this comes across as poorly thought out and entitled. I have thought long and hard about these things and I'm a libertarian so there's very little I think I'm entitled to (especially by the government).
      - NotAtWork 12y ago
        > Let different US states have different laws (that the Federal law cannot trump) and let's see through experimentation which set of laws is best for different sets of people. This only makes the chunking smaller, not fundamentally removes the chunking that you objected to. ("Chunking" in this sense meaning that we have a region ("chunk") that has to all follow the same law picked by some fixed (possibly local) strategy, such as majority wins or other common voting strategy.) I actually agree with the concept that the chunks should be smaller about many things than they currently are in the US, and that the US generally has too many federal laws. The problem with your answer to the question posed, however, is that we still aren't sure what we mean by "best", except just to ask every body and take some kind of "most popular answer wins" or averaging strategy. Fixing a heuristic like "best" allows you to deduce (most of) the rest of the things you need to figure out. One obvious potential problem with this strategy, which is the point of federalism to address, is that the equilibrium reached by allowing each chunk to vary its laws and people to move freely between them, is that we might settle on to a suboptimal equilibrium (or never converge) which is considerably worse than one we might have discovered via planning. Obviously, the current state of affairs isn't what many people would think of as optimal either. So the question, at least as I see it, becomes "What mechanic do we focus our effort on to fix?" As someone who thinks that voting is a useful mechanic, my answer would be that addressing the voting mechanics would allow the law to more accurately reflect the desires of people governed and allow for better selection of heuristics for decision making. Your stance seems to favor just removing large segments of what exists, and seeing what gets invented to fill in the gaps.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    > 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? Robin Hanson proposed[0] an interesting form of such system - named "Futarchy". The basic idea is that people vote on what things they care about, but to determine how to get them, they use prediction markets. Hence, "vote on values, bet on beliefs". [0] - http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html
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?

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.
  - innguest 12y ago
    > 2. We don't know any way to define 'best outcome' besides ask everyone what they think I disagree. Here's a better way: empiricism (through federalism). Let different US states have different laws (that the Federal law cannot trump) and let's see through experimentation which set of laws is best for different sets of people. But we've long closed the federalist "democracy lab" dream. I'm sorry if this comes across as poorly thought out and entitled. I have thought long and hard about these things and I'm a libertarian so there's very little I think I'm entitled to (especially by the government).
    - NotAtWork 12y ago
      > Let different US states have different laws (that the Federal law cannot trump) and let's see through experimentation which set of laws is best for different sets of people. This only makes the chunking smaller, not fundamentally removes the chunking that you objected to. ("Chunking" in this sense meaning that we have a region ("chunk") that has to all follow the same law picked by some fixed (possibly local) strategy, such as majority wins or other common voting strategy.) I actually agree with the concept that the chunks should be smaller about many things than they currently are in the US, and that the US generally has too many federal laws. The problem with your answer to the question posed, however, is that we still aren't sure what we mean by "best", except just to ask every body and take some kind of "most popular answer wins" or averaging strategy. Fixing a heuristic like "best" allows you to deduce (most of) the rest of the things you need to figure out. One obvious potential problem with this strategy, which is the point of federalism to address, is that the equilibrium reached by allowing each chunk to vary its laws and people to move freely between them, is that we might settle on to a suboptimal equilibrium (or never converge) which is considerably worse than one we might have discovered via planning. Obviously, the current state of affairs isn't what many people would think of as optimal either. So the question, at least as I see it, becomes "What mechanic do we focus our effort on to fix?" As someone who thinks that voting is a useful mechanic, my answer would be that addressing the voting mechanics would allow the law to more accurately reflect the desires of people governed and allow for better selection of heuristics for decision making. Your stance seems to favor just removing large segments of what exists, and seeing what gets invented to fill in the gaps.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > 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? Robin Hanson proposed[0] an interesting form of such system - named "Futarchy". The basic idea is that people vote on what things they care about, but to determine how to get them, they use prediction markets. Hence, "vote on values, bet on beliefs". [0] - http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html

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?