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Comment by rococode | Hacker News Reader

A person tries to anonymously reassure the public while putting their career at risk if they are found out, and the response to their good intentions is to try to out them and destroy their career as a result? I feel that's a little messed up, especially when NYTimes states they are aware of the identity of the person so it's not like the validity of the article is suspect.

Regardless of how you might feel about everyone in the administration, it'd certainly be a clear warning to people about the risk of making such statements in the interest of transparency, and you can be sure we'd never see one ever again, from any politicians on any side of the political spectrum.

For the sake of discussion, what ethical arguments do you think there are for finding out who wrote this? Let's assume you aren't in the Trump camp, since it'd be reasonable to say that if you support Trump then you might be more motivated to find out who it is, and there's nothing wrong with that I suppose.

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The author of this paper just admitted to being part of an unelected group of individuals who are looking to forcefully impose their ideology on and against the country by active deceit, treachery, and sabotage. If you could avoid letting your views against their target cloud your judgement, you'd see how incredibly broken and dangerous this.

For instance imagine this individual's cabal has an opportunity to engage in an awful act, but due to their position they believe this act will be blamed on the administration or even the president himself. Do you think they would hesitate to do so? This is one of the many reasons that, for instance, in war traitors tend to be treated much more harshly than even the enemy. There's a difference between open disagreement, even when that disagreement escalates into something beyond just words, and an individual that pretends to be an ally and instead is attempting to destroy somebody from within. The latter is already shown to have placed no value on anything except their own world view.

And the purpose of publishing this letter is not to "reassure the public." You should not trust a liar just because he's saying something you want to believe. Occam's razor is highly effective in getting at the truth and in this case it's almost certain that the purpose of publishing this letter is to try to increase the paranoia of the president, and to increase the probability of his engaging in ostensibly irrational behavior. That's just a great idea, right?

Mostly agreed. I was a bit surprised that the NYT published it. I worry a bit that they let themselves be played, given the way it will be interpreted/used vs. what (I think) was actually meant.

But I suppose there's nothing abnormal in publishing an op-ed by a current official. (The anonymity aside.) And it's certainly newsworthy even if it is a sort of wolf in sheep's clothing.

The author is employed by the President and can be fired at any time. It's not our job to second guess the duly elected President's choice of advisers.

I found the article to be mostly self-aggrandizing. With full respect for you, I think it is naive to believe that the author wrote this out of altruism.

I do believe the motivation could be as simple as wanting the public to know that it's really as bad as they hear. However, you're probably right. The Republican presidential field is going to be crazy in 2012. I'm tempted to see this is the first step in a "re-elect Pence" campaign to position Mike Pence as a sober, safe leader who protected the United States from Donald Trump's worst tendencies and deserves to take official control of the White House.

The Republicans are going to be split between those supporting their incumbent and those wanting to declare a mulligan on 2016 and say the country needs a safe "real Republican" president to restore our equilibrium. Mike Pence could go with either camp, but I bet he abandons Trump and tries to get the presidency himself. Fortune favors the bold.

Imagine Donald Trump trying to campaign for the nomination while his vice president campaigns against him and calls him mentally unfit to govern. There's no reason that can't happen except that it seems too crazy to be allowed to happen.

Here [1] is a overview of presidential approval ratings from Gallup. You'll find that nearly all republicans approve of the job that Trump is doing as well as a fair chunk of independents. What you'll also find is a single digit approval rating among democrats. During this term in Obama's presidency, his approval rating was 45%. Trump's most recent approval rating according to Gallup is 41%. More recent polls from the Economist/Rasmussen/Reuters put it at 43/44/42 respectively.

Isn't it interesting how social media (and in this case the traditional media as well) has so completely distorted reality? Effectively the same approval rating as Obama yet here you are quite genuinely suggesting that perhaps his VP will start declaring the president crazy and openly run against him. This is a consequence of people surrounding themselves only with voices that they are ideologically aligned with. You tend to lose sight of what people, as a whole, actually think. This, in turn, fuels radicalism. It's not a great system.

[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ra...

The approval rating itself is a result of the mechanisms you describe: polarization in social and traditional media, low standards of evidence etc.

Adjusting across polls, Trump's approval rating is probably under 40% [1] which is very unusual for a first-term President [2]. Not sure where you got the idea that his numbers are "basically the same" to Obama. Trump is an unusually unpopular President by virtually any measurement [3].

It is interesting though how people blame the media for their own distorted views of reality. The American media is objectively awful by most first-world standards, but that doesn't explain the extraordinary ignorance of Americans themselves.

[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ra...

[3] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-year-in-trumps-appr...

'RealClearPolitics' keeps a decent aggregation of poll numbers. You can see them here [1]. His average approval for their rolling period is 41.7%. You'll scarcely find any poll that drops below 40%. Their table copy pastes nicely and you can easily drop it into a calc table to run whatever analysis you want. For instance of the past 50 polls (going back to july) there have been only 5 pollsters report anything below 40% - they were 39/38/38/38/36. The average is 42.98% approval. Obama's rating for this quarter, at least according to Gallup was 45. That 2% is going to fall within their margin of error which is why I think it's safe to call them basically the same, at this time. Obama was unusually popular early on in his presidency as he was hugely charismatic, Bush received a huge popularity boost following 9/11, so aggregate values can are not necessarily indicative of how presidents were viewed throughout their terms or at any given moment.

But in any case getting below 40% would indeed require substantial "adjusting."

[1] - https://realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_j...

I included links to past popularity ratings. That article makes it clear that Trump has been unusually unpopular from his inaguration.

> The average is 42.98% approval.

I don't think your polling model actually means anything. As the RCP data makes clear there's an enormous spread to those polls. What do you think that average represents?

> Obama's rating for this quarter, at least according to Gallup was 45.

Why do you only consider Gallup's poll for Obama at this time. Why not consider averages? Isn't that your model?

You seem to be trying very hard to suggest that Trump and Obama have "basically the same" popularity at this time but it doesn't make any sense. Trump's approval rating never rises above 45% for his second term but Obama's approval rating almost never falls below 45%. It's quite a stretch to suggest their popularity is comparable.

[1] https://qz.com/889644/obamas-approval-rating-from-his-first-...

That's definitely a fair point. The reason I was using Gallup is because they tend to be a high quality pollster and I'd assumed the aggregate data for Obama would be a bit more difficult to find. It's not. Here [1] are the aggregate data for Obama's presidency. At this point in time during his presidency he was rolling at an aggregate 44.3% approval, so we have a total aggregate popularity difference of 2.6%.

And once again, as I've constantly stressed, I'm speaking about this moment in time as that is generally what people are referring to when comparing presidents at any given moment in time. E.g. you would not say Bush was a popular president, yet he had an average approval rating of 49.4%, which was even higher than Obama. The thing that confounds it is averages -- his popularity shot to near 100% after 9/11 from which it started a long slow downward slide as the 'rally around the flag' effect waned. And similar for Obama. He is an absolutely phenomenal and charismatic speaker and he seemed to be living up to his promises at first, which made him tremendously popular. But as it became clear that his early actions belied his actual character, his popularity waned -- leaving him, moment for moment, pretty comparable to Trump at this point in time.

Yet if you polled people on these issues I think there's no doubt that perception vs reality would be incredibly skewed. And for this I think both the social media and the media have played major roles. And this distortion of reality is not productive for a healthy democracy.

[1] - https://realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obama_j...

I'm not arguing that popularity with the voters is driving this. It's the disdain that Republicans in Washington feel for him. In the Bush and Obama years it wasn't hard to find voters who thought Dubya was a frivolous dumbass party boy whose dad's friends made him president so they could run the country, or that Obama was secretly a brainless bimbo benefiting from a liberal conspiracy to manufacture the illusion of a smart capable black man, but you couldn't find high-ranking members of their own party who voiced that opinion about them or even hinted at it outside of a primary, much less multiple White House sources to confirm it.

Comparing numbers comes with an implicit "all other things being equal..." which is a huge disclaimer in Trump's case. Anyway, his persistent popularity with a certain percentage of the population, far from not penetrating the liberal bubble, is the most famous thing about him. From early in the Republican primary, his opponents have been burned over and over again by assuming that this time his popularity will suffer, this time it's safe to bet against him. I predict that in 2020 there will be more big Republican names ready to bet against Trump.

> It's the disdain that Republicans in Washington feel for him.

You say this as if it's a bad thing. Trump met disdain from Republicans during his entire run and tenure as president. It only adds to his popularity. People are tired of typical politicians.

I believe the highest quality aggregator is the one published by 538:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/...

and I think the most meaningful metric is the "net approval", i.e. the difference between the approval and disapproval rating. You will see that at this time in the Obama presidency, Obama had a net approval of -2.6 while Trump has a a net approval of -13.6 at this time of writing.

Maybe the difference is less than what some people think, but there is still quite a difference.

An aggregator is just a site that just shows others' data. That site is showing what is the result of "adjusting" others' data to create new predictions. Those "adjustments" led to phenomenal accuracy in the 2008 and 2012 general elections, and abysmal accuracy in the most recent general election.

You end up with the same problem of centralization that aggregation aims to avoid.

538 was one of the least wrong predictions in the 2016 elections, to the point that Nate Silver was getting shit from all over the place for not giving Clinton better odds.

The inherent variance in elections is extremely minimal. The odds in elections are more representative of confidence in your sampling than a product of randomness. What I mean here is that if you polled each and every person who would vote, the result of that would tell you who is going to win with a practically negligible level of variance. By contrast, even the best model for something like a sports game is going to be probabilistic.

Imagine a thought experiment. We're able to do something 100 times, each on a consecutive day, but without any knowledge of what happened on previous days affecting the future, and without any future information or events affecting original 'intent'. If you played a sports game 100 times you'd generally get a wide distribution of results. But if you ran the election 100 times, you're generally going to get the same result.

The point here is that Trump winning did not indicate a 'low probability' event. It indicated a dramatic failing in sampling. Why was this? The 'art' in sampling is not only obtaining a representative sample, but actually determining what a representative sample even is. And the radicalization of our society is making this more and more difficult. The media was running bits literally comparing Trump to Hitler, individuals have been assaulted, robbed, and denied service simply because somebody became aware they supported Trump, and even business leaders have been harassed to no end for doing things that could be seen as supportive of Trump. Like you mention even pollsters that didn't cheerlead a completely crushing Clinton victory "got shit" -- that's all just completely absurd! This creates a chilling effect where individuals are going to be less inclined to respond, and/or respond honestly, when queried about their views. Then pollsters are left to rely on incorrect information which hampers not only sampling but even in the determination of a representative sample.

And the point of all of this now is that presumably most pollsters have tried to change their ways. But this will be the first election where that will be put to the test. So unbiased aggregation is more informative than ever. 538's "adjustments" were based on past polls before we had such social extremism, and by relying on them alone for their first real test - well, that's a huge leap of faith.

Your explanation doesn't really explain much. These polls have generally been accurate in the past, but they were very wrong here. Was that because the "art" of finding a representative sample got worse, it was never good to begin with, or something in society changed making this much more difficult?

Like I said, I think it was the change in society. We've become aggressively intolerant which is manifesting in various ways. Do you recall during the primaries when Trump supporters were literally being assaulted and hounded, just for being Trump supporters? Or how the media was running, non ironically, pieces literally comparing Trump to Hitler. The sort of stuff you might expect from internet trolls, not actual reporters.

Compare this to, for instance, how the media and society society responded to e.g. Romney, McCain, or Bush. Society has shifted sharply towards intolerance which is making obtaining accurate information very difficult when that information might leave one within the crosshairs of said intolerance. This creates a major chilling effect which leads people to misrepresent their views. Take the state of society today and then imagine somebody calls you and asks if you're voting and if so, for who. You're going to get some decent chunk of Trump supporters that will lie here. Voting is anonymous, but phone calls are not.

The burden of somehow trying to overcome this problem is on pollsters, and the only thing that's certain is that it's not going to be easy. Gallup was way ahead of the game here -- deciding for the first time ever to not make predictions about the 2016 election.

Polls would still have non-negligible variance in the scenario you suggest because people can change their minds and polls can't be conducted instantaneously. The director of the FBI publicly stating that one candidate is under investigation will probably change the outcome, but if it happens 12 hours before the election no poll on earth will be able to catch it.

You also seem to be under the impression that the polls were drastically off in 2016. They weren't: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right National polls in 2016 were better than average, and while state polls were worse-than-average it still wasn't the worst error in the last 30 years.

The problem was never really with the polls (though there are problems there, most notably herding). The problem was with the narrative around the election which cited polls as evidence that Clinton was a sure bet even though the polls didn't really say that.

Of course, if you have evidence that the polls were more wrong than this I'd like to hear it.

That's pretty disappointing. Nate is clearly a smart guy who I ha.. a decent degree of respect for, but he's being quite disingenuous there. I predict a crushing win in a football game. I get a crushing loss. I respond, 'Well I think I was about as right as usual since I predicted just about the right number of shots on goal.' Presidential elections are decided exclusively by the electoral college, which is what everybody bases their predictions on. As everybody got this unbelievably wrong, he's instead looking at the popular vote and arguing that 'Well we were pretty much right there, so there was no problem.'

Everybody was predicting a crushing electoral victory for Clinton. Instead she suffered a crushing electoral defeat. Look at 538's own forecasts [1]. You'll note he put the odds of Clinton Winning the popular vote but losing the electoral college at just 10.5% when not only is that what happened, but it happened by a wide margin with Trump's electoral victory margin being even greater than was predicted for Clinton's.

As an aside, even the popular vote aggregates are somewhat disingenuous since they're heavily based on major polling screw ups. For instance Clinton's margin of victory in the popular vote nation wide is smaller than her margin of victory of victory in California alone. 538 was off by more than a million votes there, which they're now using to try to spin into defending the aggregate numbers (which are not even what the election was predicted on to begin with.) This is just really disingenuous stuff.

[1] - https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/

If you think someone should not take an action, the burden of proof is on you to prove the action is unethical, not the other way round. This is not the same as a whistle blower unearthing provable crimes. This is someone in the president's cabinet admitting to acting against a duly-elected president's will.

> This is not the same as a whistle blower unearthing provable crimes

Yet.

> This is someone in the president's cabinet admitting to acting against a duly-elected president's will.

Being duly-elected does not make your actions moral, nor above reproach.

Did YOU find that op-ed reassuring??

The information is out there, due to the authors indiscretion in getting it published in the first place. Someone was always going to do this analysis. The only thing an individual can affect is whether it happens sooner or later.

Even if a person doesn't support Trump, actively interfering with and sabotaging an elected official who holds the highest executive office in the country seems like a bad thing to do.

If a person doesn't like the president, the proper recourse is public criticism working to ensure he doesn't get re-elected and if possible impeachment . . . the proper recourse is never actively sabotaging the president of the United States. There may be exceptional circumstances where the president is violating the constitution, however, we still have a functional supreme court so that exception isn't raised in this circumstance.

I am not so sure about this argument.

Each person is their own person. Employees are not computers. Provided they are not breaking any laws, but merely using the resources and power at their disposal. I think the truth of it is.. this is just how government functions.

In fact, no one would bat an eyelid if this were for personal gain. Ideology seems to really bother people from either side of the political spectrum.

But I mean, personally I would have an issue with doing something like this myself. It does seem dishonest, but then.. Trump.

Glenn Greenwald (a favorite for those who tend left) agrees with parent: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1037450113004785666

Oooh, I like and read (and frequently disagree with) Glenn and I really don't consider myself "left." Glenn is one of the better journalists around. Especially when you disagree with his point. It's well argued and well supported. To hell with the Donald, Glenn makes a solid point here. Un-elected cabals secretly usurping democratically elected politicians aren't a good thing for democracy, left and right.

I don't disagree with Glenn's point of view, and certainly was not suggesting I agree with the behaviour. Quite the opposite. As I pointed out, i think it is grossly unethical.

I was making a couple of more subtle points. What I was getting at is that the only difference between this unelected group of people trying to usurp government and others is they think they are not doing it primarily for personal gain. And that it is the ideology (whichever political side it is on or against) and the fragility of democracy, that is actually what scares people rather than the usurping bit.. that is just business as usual.

The other point is that if you allow yourself and your position to be used to do things you think are wrong, this is also unethical. You have a responsibility as a person to use what power you have to change things for the better. I don't personally believe you should compromise your ethics to do this. There is tension between these two things.

My view is that whomever authored the anonymous letter believes they are a true patriot and I agree with them at least within the motivations presented in the letter.

It is better for someone to be loyal to the ideals of freedom, democracy, and making the world a better place, even if only out of purely selfish interests (that still fits an enlightened nationalist ideology, which is also plausible of whomever wrote the letter); than it is to be loyal to any single individual. Particularly one whom someone believes does NOT ascribe or live up to those ideals.

> My view is that whomever authored the anonymous letter believes they are a true patriot

Very well may be. But it also very well may be somebody like Timothy McVeigh or David Duke believed they are true patriots. That does not make their actions any better - of course, their actions are very bad, and incomparable with writing an article in NYT, the point is even such bad people can claim to be "true patriots" - anybody can. Believing you yourself is a good guy is not enough, everybody is a hero in their own story. But we have certain rules to ensure that does not lead one too far out - both inside and outside the law.

> It is better for someone to be loyal to the ideals of freedom, democracy, and making the world a better place

There's no objective test for being loyal to the ideals, only subjective opinion. And everybody is willing to declare themselves lovers of freedom. Some terrorists could talk about their love of freedom for hours. Of course, what they mean by "freedom" is different from what you and I would mean. But allowing people to issue themselves indulgences from otherwise unacceptable behavior just because they believe it's for the best purposes is too easy road to abuse to take it as any kind of an acceptable rule.

> the proper recourse is never actively sabotaging the president of the United States

Why not?

> however, we still have a functional supreme court

We don't. Mitch McConnell saw to that 2 years ago.

> Why not?

Because that's undermining the will of the people. Like it or not, per today, Trump was legitimately and fairly elected. This very well might change in the future, but as of now, we have to assume his presidency is legitimate, no matter how vile or incompetent he is.

I can question trump legitimacy and the elections fairness, but I know without question that the ‘resistance’ inside the White House is composed of people who were not elected by the American public. Whatever one thinks of trump legitimacy, you have to, by definition, think less of this coup’s legitimacy. Nobody voted for them, and as such they have no right to dictate American policy on any matter.

I agree, but I'm a lot more fine with disruption, delays, and anything constitutionally allowed coming from outside the executive branch.

Are you asking why Americans shouldn’t support an unelected cabal of secret plotters who seek to impose their ideology onto America by staging a coup?

No, I'm saying "don't undermine the president" applies, at most, to the people in the executive branch of the government.

The op-ed was written by a senior member of the executive branch, so I’m not sure how that has any bearing on what’s being discussed here.

Oh I totally agree with the statement when restricted to people like the author. Even then it depends on the definition of "undermining".

I think the author is cowardly, disingenuous, and dangerous.

There's no coup here. There are people upholding their sworn oath to defend the Constitution, and trying to make sense out of a logically incoherent President who hired them to do just that. The President can fire them at any time if he dislikes their work.

I found it horrifying. Finally legitimate proof of the fifth estate fighting the elected politician. Beaurocrats always had their own aims, but the fact they feel comfortable saying so it's a huge step towards autocracy.

I don't like Trump but this is even worse.

I find your viewpoint shortsighted and praising authoritarianism.

Although I personally voted against him, I believe Donald Trump was elected by the American voters and those American voters have a right to have their policy preferences implemented by the person they’ve elected to do so. If any person with integrity can not carry out their democratically elected leaders orders to the best of their ability, the only recourse they have is to resign and give a full accounting of why they can’t to the American people, if they feel so strongly about it.

What I’ll NEVER support is a secret, unaccountable cabal of plotters who have decided their opinions are more important than American democracy and rule the country according to their personal whims.

To be perfectly blunt, I don’t see what the difference is between that op-ed writers actions and a coup.

Why should any politician get to write an anonymous "covering my ass" style article like this?

> NYTimes states they are aware of the identity of the person so it's not like the validity of the article is suspect.

That requires to place 100% trust in NYT, which you may be willing to do, but it's not a law of nature. Journalists in search of a scoop have been known to confuse what they want with what really is (remember the sordid Bush memo affair that ruined Dan Rather's career?) and even if not intentionally deceitful, being easier to deceive if the information confirms their biases.

> For the sake of discussion, what ethical arguments do you think there are for finding out who wrote this?

Knowing who wrote this allows to adequately evaluate whether what is said there is true, what vested interests or grudges may the author have and what information may they have from the first hand, second hand and what information they couldn't have and if they claim they have it they must be lying. E.g. if somebody who doesn't have clearance says they have been on classified briefing and heard Trump say so and so, it would be clear they are either lying or relaying third-party information as first party.

While for the author of the article discovery would be a negative, for a voter that wants to be informed, and wants to independently evaluate the worth of the information knowing the source may be very useful.

Also, since this article does not seem to be disclosing any classified information, the worst thing that could happen is that person would be fired. People got fired from Trump administration many times, some after a very short time, and none of them suffered any heavy consequences that would make any act leading to such outcome unethical, such as death, heavy bodily or mental harm, full financial ruin, etc.

So it appears to be clearly within ethical bounds to research this question, no less than any question that any politician would like to hide to promote their goals. While each such revelation inevitably would hurt somebody's interests (otherwise nobody would try to hide it!), there's nothing unethical in still trying to reveal it.

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