Hacker News Reader

Comment by quadrangle | Hacker News Reader

"It is easier to avoid temptation than to resist it" — Dan Ariely.

All the research in the world about the details may be interesting, but all anyone needs to know about Hillary Clinton is that she claims that huge quantities campaign contributions and face-to-face meeting time from Wall Street have no impact on her decisions and priorities. That claim alone is enough to completely discredit her. Period.

Never never never trust any person who says "I'm immune to this apparent conflict of interest." I'm not even making a judgment about whether Hillary Clinton believes her own claim. She might be flat-out lying or she might be completely honest yet totally deluded. Either way, she's untrustworthy.

The only way to trust someone is if they say "I am human, and so I am susceptible to conflicts of interest, so I am actively avoiding such conflicts (or, if any conflicts arise, I will recuse myself or at least acknowledging the conflict)." A person who denies the significance of conflicts of interest is a person unfit for decision-making.

View on HN

> all anyone needs to know about Hillary Clinton is that she claims that huge quantities campaign contributions and face-to-face meeting time from Wall Street have no impact on her decisions and priorities.

In the most recent Clinton/Sanders debate, she made two claims within a few sentences of each other:

1. That the Koch brothers are using their vast wealth to bankroll elections for politicians in exchange for influence in lawmaking.

2. That contributions to her campaign had no strings attached and that she was immune to such corruption.

I was hoping that Sanders would pick it up but he missed that opportunity to expose her hypocrisy.

You can reconcile those claims under a model in which most politicians (including Clinton) have genuine beliefs that are not corruptible by money, but the Koch brothers can buy political outcomes by bankrolling those politicians whose genuine ideological beliefs align with theirs. That is, they are not changing the beliefs of individual politicians, just replacing politicians that disagree with them with others that don't.

To first order I think this is a pretty good model of money's influence on politics, though it's definitely not the entire story.

Indeed. Hillary's claims are deductively logical and consistent internally. It's logically possible for there to be corrupt sell-out politicians and others who are incorruptible.

However, empirical research provides overwhelming evidence that basically everyone is susceptible to conflicts of interest. In other words, that logical model you describe doesn't fit observed reality.

Either Hillary is lying or she has delusions about her own immunity to influence. The only way to not get influenced is to avoid the things that would influence you.

FWIW, I care more about educating people to understand that all people are susceptible to conflicts of interest than about pointing out Hillary's particular conflicts of interest. I'm somewhat more offended that she is spreading the myth that people can be immune to influence than I am about whatever particular influences she's subjected herself to.

I think you're misunderstanding davmre's proposed model, which is not about there being corruptible politicians and incorruptible ones. The idea, rather, is that even without corruption big donors can effectively buy influence, because what they do is to help politicians who (honestly, sincerely, without corruption) happen to share their goals.

So, e.g., suppose that before any money gets thrown around there are exactly two Democratic presidential candidates: Hillary Clinton (who loves Wall Street, just because she does) and Bernie Sanders (who hates Wall Street, just because he does). Then Wall Street donates a bazillion dollars to HC's campaign, she squashes BS like a bug with her superbly-resourced campaign, and becomes president. Since she (honestly, sincerely, incorruptibly) loves Wall Street, she uses all the power the presidency gives her to advance the interests of Wall Street. And, bingo, Wall Street has got what it wants by spending money, without any politicians being corruptible. In a parallel universe, Wall Street has no money to spare for political donations (that would eat into their bonuses, which would never do) and Occupy Wall Street donates a bazillion dollars to BS's campaign instead. Now he squashes HC like a bug with his superior campaigning firepower, becomes president, and makes banking a felony -- and, bingo, OWS has got what it wanted by spending money, again without a shred of corruption being needed.

Back in the real world, of course no one is incorruptible, and indeed I bet real-world-Hillary is influenced by all those donations, but it seems pretty plausible to me that the mechanism davmre describes is in fact at least as important as corruption in explaining why large donors make large donations.

(But I also agree with whoever it was that said any answer less definite than "no, of course I am not influenced" would likely be political suicide, and a policy of never voting for anyone who makes that claim is in practice probably equivalent to a policy of never voting for anyone who has large enough conflicts of interest for the question to be put in the first place.)

Which is why money being speech is absolutely bullshit and anti-democratic, because only the very loudest (read: richest) voices are heard.

Incidentally, an American can praise Al Qaeda all they want (free speech), but they can't send money to them.

You see, money isn't speech when it comes to funding terrorism. Money is only speech when it suits the 1% who own and run the corps that pay the legislature to enact law.

Thanks for the nicely stated thoughts, but I understood the model the same way you describe. My reply can be summed up as: "that model can indeed work as a model, but it doesn't match reality". That is to say, reality certainly has elements of that model, but it is far from complete.

The entire gist of Lawrence Lessig's arguments of late are that we really are not seeing successful politicians simply being those who already love Wall Street and rich corporations. Instead, we are seeing those with some leanings in that direction also being normal people influenced in predictable ways by the system being set up so that most of their time and energy is spent with these biased sets of constituents.

In other words, politicians do change their views based on who they talk to and what they learn. And the system just works so that the people they talk to and learn from are almost always representatives of Wall Street and big corporations.

In the end, there's certainly both factors happening. Big money goes to elect those who already serve big money's interests, but big money also goes toward being in the place where its message gets heard by whoever is there. There's certainly lots of cases of big money donating to both sides of a two-way race.

> the Koch brothers can buy political outcomes by bankrolling those politicians whose genuine ideological beliefs align with theirs.

Well here you go: https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cid=N000...

So, by this logic, we merely need to decide whether we wish to elect the politician who meets the needs of Wall St., the prison industrial complex, and war profiteers. If so, we vote for Clinton, because she is extraordinarily favored by those interests. As you note, a politician could be entirely honest and sincere in their beliefs, and still be supported by a corrupt system...so long as their sincere and honest beliefs happen to coincide with the needs of the corrupting parties.

I'm not particularly political, but Clinton is a particularly unnerving example of the kind of politics I find distasteful and a symptom of our broken democracy.

I can't imagine any politician making that claim publicly. It'd be political suicide. Their opponent would immediately run "I am susceptible to conflicts of interest" attack ads.

(Not denying that the original statement is unrealistic and that political donations are problematic.)

Hillary has claims that her taking tons of donations from Wall Street etc. has no effect on her.

From http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/clinton-plays-defe...

> "I have never heard a candidate," Sanders said, "who has received huge amounts of money from oil, from coal, from Wall Street, from the military industrial complex, not one candidate say: 'Oh, these campaign contributions will not influence me. I'm going to be independent.' Well, why do they make millions of dollars of campaign contributions? They expect to get something. Everybody knows that."

> Clinton snapped back, "Wait a minute, he has basically used his answer to impugn my integrity."

This pattern is consistent too. She never says, "yes, of course conflicts of interest exist, but here's why this is not one" or "here's what I'm doing to address the influence this could have on my decisions" or anything of that style. She always says that somehow it's wrong and unfair for people to even suggest that she's susceptible to influence relating to who her donors are and the time she spends with them…

Effectively, Hillary is exactly making the claims you say are political suicide. And Sanders is continuing to mention that he has avoided this particular source of influence and Hillary has not. He's refusing to do real personal attack ads because Sanders has never run such true negative attack ads in his whole career. He'll never attack Hillary that boldly. He won't go beyond talking about the issues with her influence and priorities. He won't jump to saying she's a deluded or dishonest person or anything like that.

I think the claims the parent post meant are political suicide are admitting to being human and that the candidate is "susceptible to conflicts of interest."

Saying "how dare you even question that," as Hillary does, has turned out quite well, and she's never had to admit her human frailties that way.

I think a good question: do people like to vote for someone who admits to having limitations and weaknesses, even though they are running for one of the most powerful positions in the world?

Better to expose the least possible front to attack. Especially when it's potentially your election to lose.

You've misconstrued my argument. The other reply explains what I meant.

While Sanders might play a straight bat (cricketing term I think, but you can guess the meaning) you can bet Clinton's potential GOP opponent down the track will not at all. Hell, even amongst the Republican candidates it's an out and out poo-flinging war.

Oh oh I see. Well, you might be right that "I'm human and have biases" is political suicide, but if that's true, then our system is far more messed up than I even wanted to consider. However, maybe you actually mean that the specific case of someone who has taken huge donations from Wall Street saying "Yes, I'm influenced by my Wall Street donors" would be political suicide. If that's the point, then, I suppose you're quite right.

Hillary is indeed in a position where she has to claim to be super-human and immune to influence because the ramifications of acknowledging her influences are too problematic. But I want people to be more offended and distrusting over her claims of super-human objectivity than over her (still quite troubling) Wall Street connections. But I'll admit that isn't likely the case. I hope we'll keep working to educate the general public about basic science of human psychology and conflicts-of-interest…

Anyway, apologies for misconstruing your comment.

Cheers for the reply. But yes, I think the system is far more messed up than we think. I am not in the US, but the situation is not always too different here.

In Australia, I believe that the biggest companies can gain favour with unspoken pressure (threats of capital flight, unfavourable advertising, etc) as much as any donations. One politician recently suggested that there are 10 companies which basically dictate terms in this country: four banks, two supermarket giants, three mining giants and a telco.

If you apply rigorous filters ("I will never vote for a person who _____.") to all political candidates, you will have nobody to vote for. You can't isolate in on one aspect of one candidate, in isolation from the other qualities of the other candidates, and say that disqualifies them.

Nonsense. You can totally say, "I will never vote for a person who says they are immune to bias". Well, that leaves most politicians available to consider still. All people have biases. Most politicians will admit at least that fact.

Here's another: "never vote for someone who claims to be omniscient and basically know everything". How about this: "Never vote for someone who claims to never need advice from others". I support "never vote for someone who claims to have all their decisions dictated to them by God".

There are all sorts of extremely low bars that can and should be set. We can easily find tons of people who pass them. Anyone who doesn't pass very basic requirements like this should indeed be disqualified.

To be clear, if Hillary came out and said, "I never meant to say I was beyond bias or that the time and money from my supporters has no influence at all. I'm human. But I meant that there's no quid pro quo. I'm not specifically going to do whatever Wall Street asks, I'm going to do research and listen to other views as well when making decisions," then I would immediately say "okay, she retracted / qualified her previous claims, so she passes that minimum test of acknowledging one's own bias after all".

Currently, she seems to be saying, "oh, I got millions from financiers and gave lots of speeches to Wall Street, but that doesn't influence my views at all". That disqualifies her. Nobody should support anyone who claims such bullshit.

Every candidate has broken one or more of you "never vote for" rules.

That's simply not true. I count 4 rules in the post, and most of the candidates for US president this year have not broken any of them.

(It's even arguable that Clinton hasn't; she doesn't claim immunity to all bias, she just claims that receiving millions of dollars from the titans of the financial industry somehow doesn't bias her.)

It's definitely possible that all this money doesn't affect her positions and that the contributors already know that she would make decisions in their favors (as opposed to other candidates)... so either way it is bad.

So then simply stay home. Or go and write in "none of the above" to avoid being shamed by the zealous democracy-boosters naively supporting their new salesmen of corruption.

When people mistakenly believe that they have to vote for one of the few options given to them, candidates only need to seem decent enough to possibly edge out the others. As different people value different priorities, this inevitably results in a race to the bottom. The only winning move is to not play.

I won't be fooled into thinking that steering the 5% of difference between candidates is worth endorsing the common 95% that is never up for discussion.

A vote for a candidate is not an unqualified endorsement of the candidate.

There are plenty of people I've voted for, even though I don't think they have great character and/or have done shady things in the past and/or have shown poor judgement on some issues.

For instance, my present city council member has had an extramarital affair with one of his staffers, but OTOH he's something of a visionary as far as city planning goes. I would vote for him again, despite the fact that his actions were deplorable.

Aside: my views on this used to be closer to yours. As years went by I became convinced that withholding my vote was not sending any message (in a Turing sense, principled apathy looks a lot like mere apathy, and may indeed lead to it). Witnessing some very, very close elections was also a factor.

That's obviously not true. An easy example:

"I will never vote for a person who supports general warrants"

I can apply that to the candidates, and it's extremely helpful in filtering out the really bad ones. That one issue - being in favor of general warrants - is more than enough to disqualify a candidate as being worthy of the presidency.

As with any filter and context, it depends on what filter you choose to you apply, and sometimes how many filters.

I think is important quantify the problem and look into the numbers. I did and found it astonishing.

I mean, the campaign contributions for H.Clinton for all its career come from the usual suspects, but the quantities involved are ridiculous, if you compare it with the quantities she and her husband received from speeches. And then there is the Clinton foundation.

Any honest person that look into it should have a problem with this.

That's all fair, but, as I've said elsewhere, I want people to be that much more offended about claims to be immune from bias than about the other sorts of corruption. Basically, I think Hillary's particular corruptions are less outrageous and dangerous than the message that people can be objective and immune to influence.

I think the number one most important lesson we can teach people in life overall is to understand the ways in which we all, as humans, are susceptible to bias. So I see Hillary's claims as an attack on this most fundamentally important principle and thus worse than any of her political dealings otherwise.

> never never never

to answer one idiom with another, never say never. if a politician was sufficiently transparent about who they met with and took money from, acknowledged the potential conflicts of interest, documented decisions, sourced research thru firewalls, and generally had a system in place to prevent the temptation from manifesting, i'd be inclined to trust them

a good regulator might benefit from understanding the impact they're having, and that means talking to businesses. and an honest business that works with a bright and honest politician would have an incentive to help them stay in office, even if that money didn't buy them consideration. so there's potential non-corrupt reasons that these "donations" could happen

that said, i'm not claiming that hillary clinton, or any other politician that i'm aware of, has done this

indeed. and my point is that all Hillary had to do to retain some benefit-of-the-doubt was to say "yes, of course, influence happens, but…" blah blah, whatever excuses or transparency or anything. The only thing I was commenting on was the complete unacceptability of claiming to be immune from influence. The "never never never" comment was about trusting someone who claims immunity from bias. All people have biases and influences.

From a game theoretic point of view, you can easily see why they raise this much much money. While I think it's obscene that 1 billion will be spent on the campaign of one candidate, this is necessarily a problem with the system rather than the actors within it.

I didn't say anything about them raising money or not. Hillary could avoid the complete destruction of credibility by simply saying "of course, raising money this way creates biases, but that's the challenges of the system and here's how we're working to minimize the biases…" or something like that. It's precisely by denying any influence that her credibility is utterly erased.

Never trust any person who says "a chicken in every pot," or more precisely, "I'm going to give you exactly what you want, even though it will require congressional approval that I can't get." That's enough to discredit a candidate. Period.

Now we don't have any primary candidates to vote for.

This is not my election; I'm not American but I'm following it pretty close because what the White House do affect all of us.

You accuse Sanders of populism, but his program is a lot more detailed than Clinton's and, the economic part, has been endorsed by professional economists: http://usuncut.com/politics/170-top-economists-back-bernie-s...

About the congressional approval, obviously, you need new blood there too. Sanders and his supporters are very aware of this.

I think is funny that the guy calling things by their name is, precisely, the guy accused of being naive and unrealistic.

Am I the only one that thinks this whole controversy is extraordinarily silly? In order to do work, you have to understand the effects of your work. And that can require having close conversations with the parties you are trying to regulate, both to ensure that the regulations have the desired effect, while also ensuring that they don't have undesired side effects. It's pretty easy to model an interaction where the party being regulated would pay to make sure their concerns are being heard, while the regulator still has every intention of implementing an effective solution.

Yes, politics are messy and there is more give and take than that, but even with that it doesn't necessarily rise to the level of true corruption.

I dislike that the whole lobbyist conversation has gotten dumbed down to the point that any kind of conversation is by definition evidence of corruption. It could just as easily be described as another form of diplomacy. But we don't tend to claim (at least not since the days of Karl Rove scoffing about the desire to "understand" our enemies) that diplomatic ties are by definition a "conflict of interest".

> I dislike that the whole lobbyist conversation has gotten dumbed down to the point that any kind of conversation is by definition evidence of corruption.

quadrangle talked about conversation and campaign contributions together. Conversation by itself is fine. But I see no reason why payments by lobbyists shouldn't be de facto evidence of corruption.

It's not silly at all.

Yes, politics are messy, but there is a huge chasm between talking to lobbyists and taking their money. The former is, as you point out, necessary to the process. But the latter inherently undermines the process.

As soon as you can legitimately ask whether or not a donation has affected policy, it becomes impossible to fully trust the system. And the more relevant the question becomes (i.e. the more money that has changed hands) the less trust you can have.

Being a representative democracy, we're forced to trust our elected representatives to do what is in our best interest, which may be at odds with what the lobbyists want, because 99.98% of us don't have the money or influence to compete with the lobbying arm of an entire industry.

For example, do you think there is a reason that politicians who take money from oil interests are strongly correlated with those who deny climate change?

If by "this whole controversy" you want to talk about the fact that Hillary gets lots of big money contributions, that's not what my comment was about.

My comment was about her denying the overwhelmingly scientifically-supported fact that people are influenced and biased by conflicts-of-interest and by those they spend their time around. Sure, someone could say, "I work at a Starbucks on Wall Street and spend my time mostly around bankers and such, and I hate them." I mean, I wasn't saying that spending time with people necessarily makes you sympathetic. But it certainly affects you in some ways.

I didn't say "Hillary is disqualified because she's corrupt" (although that may be true, that wasn't my comment).

My point is this: understanding the power of conflicts-of-interest over even totally well-intentioned people is among the most important things for anyone to understand in life (both about themselves and others). Hillary is spreading a message that even questioning someone about conflicts-of-interest amounts to calling them ill-intentioned. That idea is among the worst, most dangerous, most destructive ideas anyone could spread. Someone who claims effectively that only bad people are influenced by conflicts-of-interest is someone who has such wrong ideas about reality that they should never get any power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com