> I think it depends on what you count as political persuasion. I think it is more than adds and media. It includes conversations at dinner tables and in lunchrooms. It includes school curriculum, protesters, and door to door political canvasing. I would agree that political advertising and media is often inconsistent with general well being. I think that it is disingenuous and often exerted to benefit a small subset of the population, either corporate shareholders or individual politicians. That said, in my opinion, the influence of advertising and media is relatively small in comparison to the other factors. Sometimes, like a swing voter, it might sway the public a critical 1%, but collectively, the other forces are far more influential.
This is all true, but my concern is that which seems to go unnoticed, and that is: the nature of "conversations at dinner tables and in lunchrooms", or in internet social media, forums, etc, seems to be highly influenced by the initial framing of the stories by politicians, journalists, thought leaders, etc. These topics do indeed get discussed, but are these discussions comprehensive of all dimensions and perspectives? Or, is it something more along the lines of: an event occurs, and various entities "get out in front of it", establishing specific narratives and perspectives for the public to argue over, and exerting ongoing maintenance of these narratives, discrediting or redirecting discussions that go off script, and amplifying those that are on script? If one pays very close attention to stories from a meta-perspective, I propose that these techniques can be seen clear as day (and this theory is far from novel- it's as old as the hills).
> The ideal parties to persuade are those with weakly held views. 40% of Americans don't vote. Most of those who do vote have very little information and opinion on down ballot positions and propositions. If someone wanted to, I think they could persuade an indifferent or marginal neighbor or coworker to vote on a topic with an hour of face-to-face conversation.
No doubt. And if executed skilfully, one may actually achieve the watered down proposals tabled by politicians, as opposed to the true democratic desires of the population (see: single-payer Medicare for All). And even when someone is on to this and tries to beat them at their own game?
"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejects left-wing calls to force Pelosi to hold a 'Medicare for All' vote in exchange for her vote for the speaker"
https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-rejects-left-wing-calls-...
Pay attention to the language and assertions in that article, as well as AOC's hypocrisy (prior complaints vs current stance):
"Gray and Dore pointed out that Ocasio-Cortez had previously suggested she supported holding a House vote on Medicare for All." "We can't even get a floor vote on Medicare for All," the congresswoman said in January. "Not even a floor vote that gets voted down. We can't even get a vote on it."
This is what I would call professional lying (or, Public Relations, Mass Perception Management, etc).
Is no one able to see the amount of persuasion that exists in "the news"? Am I imagining this? Do politicians not have a history of sticking to talking points?
Why does this abstract aspect of the situation so rarely get discussed on an intellectual site like HN? Why do we fight with each other over the same old object level nitpicks that one finds on Reddit? Are we not capable of more than that?
> This is a such a huge an interesting question, I'm not sure we could even define the scope or definitions on HN. I would be happy to follow up via email if you are interested.
I believe that this community should put some genuine honest effort into realizing that abstract perspectives and discussions on these matters is "the" path to eventual resolution, rather than succumbing to our intuitive Pavlovian behavior of reacting to the latest outrage ju dour that the media pushes into people brains. The underlying situations are not this dynamic, they are largely static across time...so, why do we not analyze and discuss them accordingly?
Is the way we undertake system analysis of Project Planet Earth (emotional, tribal, chaotic and disorganized, no documentation or tasks or timelines) similar to how we do the same for the complex (but far simpler) systems most of us work on at our days jobs?
EDIT: This "fresh daily news for the proletariat to argue about" approach to journalism reminds me of an old Joel Spolsky post:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
>> When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The firing forces him to keep his head down so he can’t fire at you. (That’s what the soldiers mean when they shout “cover me.” It means, “fire at our enemy so he has to duck and can’t fire at me while I run across this street, here.” It works.) The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy, where your shots are much more likely to hit their target. If you’re not moving, the enemy gets to decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you’re not firing, the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down.
>> I remembered this for a long time. I noticed how almost every kind of military strategy, from air force dogfights to large scale naval maneuvers, is based on the idea of Fire and Motion. It took me another fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how you get things done in life. You have to move forward a little bit, every day. It doesn’t matter if your code is lame and buggy and nobody wants it. If you are moving forward, writing code and fixing bugs constantly, time is on your side. Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can’t move forward?
>> Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft.
Sound familiar? Why can we only achieve the smallest of accomplishments on matters that have (or would have, ex-propaganda) widespread public support, often for years if not decades, often bi-partisan? Might it be because the public is always reacting to the latest outrageous development, always in a state of confusion, never spending significant amounts of time focusing on one issue until it is fixed?