The median voter is a 50-something white person who didn't go to college
slowboring.com
slowboring.com
The average person is simply unable to evaluate competence, especially from news clips and "debates". The median voter is not a highly competitive white collar knowledge worker with a background in STEM necessary to evaluate complex topics with objectivity. Instead its the fry cook, the retail worker, the warehouse stocker, blue collar tradesman, liberal arts graduate, etc.
What really happened was that the pool of politically active citizens expanded, and now because of the shape of the normal distribution we are dealing with a sort of political endless summer - which media in particular are all too eager to take advantage of for political power.
I'm more scared about highly competitive knowledge people with STEM degrees making political decisions. They might be naive enough to think they can engineer society to fit their whims with no unintended consequences.
Consider what would happen if rather than voting for your favorite you subtracted points from the candidate you dislike the most. It’s not better but suddenly everyone wants to be an inoffensive centrist. Which just shows how much incentives influence the system.
Would that work? If there are only two candidates, then it’s equivalent to casting the inverse votes for. If there’s three candidates, and one is literally horrid, then would people give all of their negative votes to the horrid candidate in fear of destruction and leave very few votes to differentiate the top two? Or, would voters cast all negative votes for one of the top two and hope enough _other people_ downvote the horrible candidate?
Sorry, I know your comment wasn’t meant to be serious, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.
The restaurant staff often know more about human nature and behavior than the Psychiatrist who’s been trained to see all our flaws as chemical imbalances to be fixed.
Comments like yours are increasing the divide in this country, and are deeply problematic.
The issue is that people come to psychiatrists seeking help and, at the moment, the majority of tools in their toolbox to help their patients are the drugs derived from our study of the role of neurotransmitters in the brain. Giving medication that changes the levels of those chemicals to patients who are suffering is all that modern medicine can offer them outside of therapy and electromagnetic stimulation of the brain or nerves.
This reads like parody.
Also, something weird has happened in the wrestling world. Once upon a time, heels were booed, and faces were applauded. Today... heels are increasingly popular and faces are getting boos. I can't explain this.
Kayfabe. And yeah, Hate Inc, was such a good book, I listened to it 3 times in 2 years and it's scary how closely this resembles most of the political theater that takes place around the World.
It's not just the US, though its the most visible, it's a systemic issue that is ultimately incredibly effective: it's the same formula that reality TV used but on steroids and for much higher stakes and with mentally sick participants (sociopaths willing to do anything for power and control).
As a long time channer, 4 and then 8 before things got incredibly violent, I highly recommend the Q: Into the Storm to see exactly what 'type of people' buy into these types of conspiracies.
Like most of the BS that went on chans, larping was always for the lulz, so whether it was John Titor, or the Time Traveler who predicted Bitcoin would destroy the Earth it's there for entertainment purposes to fill the void between the boring parts of life (think: something to read while waiting for a bus or taking an uber).
Instead it was taken seriously by a cohort of the population who were entirely destroyed economically and disenfranchised since the Reagan era in the US (and abroad) and it shows the perils of how basic the current Human Condition is when a pervasive narrative that suits your desired reality eventually becomes your entire reality.
It also underscores the reasons why Social Media is and has been a major source for anxiety, depression and suicide: the Human mind is just not optimized for that much input, so when coupled with low intellect, wide-spread loneliness and a need to feel accepted at all costs due to a loss of community it's not hard to see how this all turns out.
Cullen Hoback was recently on Joe Rogan and it was super insightful to hear his views on the entire thing (seeing Hotwheels' drama was utter insanity as I checkedout entirely from channing after the mass shootings) after watching it in utter disbelief when this documentary came out detailing how this whole thing took place and who was involved.
2,000 years ago people born into wealth and power fought amongst each other for leadership and control while the population simply learned to live with the results. The only thing that has changed since is that the process has been optimized: less bloodshed, less constant dramatic upheaval, the hills and valleys leveled a bit. This benefits everyone, including those on top. But let's not pretend we're engaged in some grand experiment for the betterment of mankind. We're living in a plutocracy. Always have, always will.
2,000 years ago even the plebeians had the right to vote.
> We're living in a plutocracy.
Agreed.
2,000 years ago they voted in meaningless elections while the emperor was nondemocratic. And before that when the elections weren't meaningless, the plebians of Rome could vote while anyone outside if Rome was barred.
They voted with their daggers
By what measure?
and 20-something percent of the population were slaves.
Also, the idea that being rich is bad pervades your post. I see this idea expressed more and more commonly. The truth is that, unlike you, the populace doesn't view politics as class warfare. Middle class American does not feel that only a middle class politician can represent them. As far as I'm concerned, this is a good thing.
I've been hearing about the destruction of the middle class from middle class Americans since the Clinton era. In many ways, they were right, as I can look at some of those same people 30 years later and see how housing and medical debt, wage stagnation and the restructuring of the economy post-2008 have put those once middle class Americans into the lower class.
Are middle class Americans given a choice between being represented by people from their social and economic strata, versus representation from upper classes? Most middle class Americans have to work, they don't have the time, money or connections for effective political campaigns, especially at the national level.
You're adopting this class warfare perspective and it's simply not how normal people look at things. To a man on the street, being rich is not bad, it doesn't mark one as an exploiter. Normal people have also not accepted this theory, oh-so-common on internet message boards, that rich people are responsible for everything bad.
--- George Washington, Farewell Address
If you win the election but make the country a worse place, you've still lost.
The issue is the rhetoric these days is dominated by useful idiots online spouting talking points and propaganda to the point that "debates" are nothing more than whatever scores points (literally points = social media likes).
So yes, it's absolutely about winning. Losing means that your group suffers, and eventually that your group (ideologic, geographic, economic or, grimly, even ethnic) ceases to exist.
That is a pretty subjective statement, "better" and "correctly" all have different definitions to different people.
Some people care about climate change (or lack thereof) and others about women's rights (or lack thereof), so even if voters could be quantified, it would at least be a multi dimensional problem.
Kind of funny to think of peoples skin color on a sliding scale like a gradient and picking the median.
And even if you could find the median, you can’t then just combine the medians for three completely separate characteristics and then say that is the median person.
Planet money did a really cool show about trying to find the modal American, and touched on that point: https://www.npr.org/2019/08/28/755191639/episode-936-the-mod...
I want to know who is the median voter group most likely to hand over control of the House, Senate and Presidency.
There is no median on a distribution that can't be sorted.
You're right that the game theory is more complicated than it would be in a national popular vote contest, but I suspect that the optimal position isn't all that far off from where it would be in a single nationwide Hotelling game.
(1) Mostly, at least, I know they can of course run different ads and given different speeches in different states, flip flop, etc, but their reputation and messaging is inevitably going to bleed across state lines / time quite a bit.
The basic reality of America is much more boring than the fancy hipster media tends to portray. They invented a virtual reality for themselves, and are living in it.
My political theory of America is that it is much more boring, and straightforward predictable politically, than any popular media portrayal.
And it is so because most media portrayals are partisan, created much to the ends of the respective party drawing it. A wishful thinking picture of reality.
Go figure.
Yap, over past few decades the people running the popular media started to drink their own coolaid, and these popular media portraits went on to live their own lives fully detached from the reality.
When people on the TV now tell of American elections being totally unpredictable, it's hard to not to notice how the popular sentiment is actually very accurate at predicting the outcome. US elections are basically the anger-meter.
As far as I know, 99.999999..% of the voters are not at the median, so it escapes me why anyone should be concerned with the person in the middle.
Also, what if the number of voters is even? Then there is no median voter, it's just an abstraction.
What is a median in multiple dimensions, anyway? Couldn't it easily be far away from any individual? There was a thing that's probably been on HN multiple times about how virtually nobody is "normal" in, say, five or more characteristics at once.
In this case, it was bad enough I refuse to read the article.
Are you saying I would find the article to use "median" appropriately, if I bothered to check?
By analogy, it's accurate to say that the US median household income is $67,521, even though the number of people who make exactly that many dollars per year is probably quite small.
The only reason to think of the voters is as a bugbear to keep your own folks in line. If their behavior gets too egregious the voters might wake up and realize "ants don't need to serve grasshoppers" and then there's all sorts of fuss.
The Blues should steal The Reds "theme song"? Aside from being a marketing / identity mistake, this won't be true much longer. The demographic trends seem to favor The Blues. That is, the country is getting less white and more like the demos that tradionally favor The Reds. Mind you, of course, not every one of these will go Red, but unless there's some sort of crazy inversion, time favors Team Red.
Will some collective demo switch sides entirely? That too seems unlikely unless there's some other traumatic event.
While it's true, no one can predict the future. As things are, odds favor the Blue.
Opps. That should have been Blues. The trends in demos favor Blue.