Peter Norvig's Election 2008 FAQ | Hacker News Reader

Peter Norvig's Election 2008 FAQ

norvig.com

80 pointslogjam48 comments

Yes, we hate politics here....except this is a fantastic summary that has nothing to do with technology aside from the author. Still, if he had included technology issues in the analysis, Obama "wins" hands down, especially in specifics:

http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology/

http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/CBCD3A48-4B0E-486...

Just the URLs are pretty telling.

Facebook co-founder runs his web op:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html?_...

Gotta say, that's pretty cool. From dunce of the ranch to black technocrat...

This is a lame summary.

All the cool kids have woken up long ago to the unavoidable fact that involvement in the national political process is a waste of time. It's an exercise designed to distract you from enterprises that might actually help people and/or yourself.

The cool kids aren't voting anymore. You want to be cool, right?

It is TREMENDOUSLY biased, as Norvig has been in previous elections when he wrote about the topic.

One example: he mentions McCain receiving Fannie Mae money - but, Obama (despite his much shorter stint in the Senate and indeed, politics at the national level) is #2 on the list of those receiving the most money from Fannie Mae (McCain is about # 50 on the list) .

Source: http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/09/update-fannie-mae-an...

All the claims from both sides about "receiving money from" X corporation are rather misleading, since those numbers include employees. What, do you expect the candidates not to accept money from people just because they work for a given corporation?

If I worked for Fannie Mae and gave a hundred dollars to McCain, does that somehow affect what McCain thinks of Fannie Mae? I don't think so.

Well, not more than McCain's campaign manager receiving $15k/month from Freddie since 2005 and ending last month.

I never said that there weren't other influences going on, I was just saying that such (un-broken-down) numbers were rather misleading.

On a side note, I'm an Obama supporter ;)

The link has those amounts broken out by individual and by PAC, so you can read it and make up your own mind. I was pointing out that Norvig was being biased in not presenting both sides on what is after all a hot button topic.

if you were a lobbyist working for Fannie or Freddie and you were simultaneously employed by Obama or McCain, I would think it would affect how McCain or Obama would view Fannie Mae

Completely agree with you on this one.

No, no, no, no, no. Bad upvoters!

Seriously. This is a politics piece. Worse, this is a partisan politics piece. Worser, this is a partisan politics piece masquerading as a FAQ.

I'm going to do a FAQ on how political posters on HN are actually blathering idiots.

It's nothing opinionated, mind you. I'll just review each political post, point out what little was accomplished, show how dissenting views were downvoted, and then make my humble conclusion from the available evidence, citing lots of authorities along the way. Of course my questions will be leading, and if you look at them closely you can see somebody trying to make an argument, but pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

It's a FAQ, not an argument. Not an opinion piece. You see, if you use the word FAQ, that magically makes it something special.

My. No offense, but for someone with such strong feelings and a little name-calling and all about political posts, you certainly seem to make a lot of political posts yourself.

Tell you what. You make your FAQ, and I'll make a FAQ about how some political posters on HN who merely disagree with other political posters are actually blathering hypocrites.

Nothing opionionated, mind you...wink...

So you would rather argue politics then.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)

Is that a new guideline, by the way? It wasn't there in the old days -- presumably it postdates the "flag" feature.

In any case, I don't like that guideline much. Complaining about offtopicness is, in my opinion, the best substitute for downvoting. Sure, it means that every political story acquires a boring "!HN" thread, but that's exactly the point: the boring thread is the punishment for the story, and is designed to suck out all the oxygen from the _actual_ political debate which would otherwise ensue.

I know I post rather a lot of comments complaining about political stories. This isn't because I'm not interested in politics -- it's actually because I'm very interested in politics and have to actively stop myself from getting involved in internet-based political arguments (something I swore off many years ago as a waste of time).

I should write a Greasemonkey script that switches #FF00FF to... any other color.

I find the "zap" and "zap images" bookmarklets on the following page useful to sanitize formatting and hide distractions in textual content:

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html

I should write a Greasemonkey script that switches politics links to... I dunno, blog postings about wrapping bacon around things which one would not normally wrap bacon around.

Greasemonkey can do that, right?

Yes.

I'll even be glad to write the RegEx for you -- that's something I don't normally volunteer to do.

It'd be like that old George Carlin skit, where he says we should replace the word "kill" with the word "fuck" -- Changes everything. Picture an old Western. The bad guys are all standing around the sheriff, who is tied up. "We're not just going to fuck you sheriff. We're going to fuck you slow....."

You could substitute "Election" with "bacon". "2008" with "Weasel-like", and maybe FAQ with "Nosehair"

"Peter Norvig Bacon Weasel-like Nosehair"

(Apologies for the profanity. Kinda hard to do Carlin without it)

'The words "Nobel", "Economics" and "Scientist" do not appear on McCain's page.'

LOL, very telling! :)

"Nobel", "Economics" and "Scientist"

When was the last time any of those words were used to describe a great business leader? Someone like Jack Welch, etc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch). Maybe the Google founders... but I rarely hear them described as great from a business sense.

As for counter examples from McCain... it wasn't hard to find:

http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/News/PressReleases/c9068...

300 economists, including multiple Nobel winners, that agree with McCain on his "Jobs for America" plan.

I thought there was "NotHackerNews" et. al. for a reason.

This is more evidence of the bizarro universe taking ours over. For the first time I can recall, Peter Norvig is being labeled "NotHackerNews"

In this instance, the author is irrelevant. This would have been more aptly titled "2008 Election FAQ (by Peter Norvig)".

Or even better, "Why I prefer candidate A to candidate B, phrased in FAQ form with occasional attempts to sound impartial by pointing out [before immediately dismissing] the arguments the other way, by Peter Norvig".

Don't get me wrong -- as far as party-political blog postings go this one is by no means especially bad, but nor is it good enough to transcend its genre of the usual douche-is-better-than-turd politics.

It's a hacker writing about politics. Unless he developed some algorithm to determine the winner based on number of lies and non-answer-answers, I don't really give a damn about his "objective" analysis.

He cites 538 a few times. That's good enough for me. Some of the best "objective" analyses, based on evolving algorithms of poll data, are being done there. 1000 simulations/day across each of the 50 states. Watch how accurate they end up being.

EDIT: That's 10,000 simulations/day.

I'm sorry, this is an instance of snark gone wrong. I don't disagree with your "NonHackerNews" assessment. I just think it's funny that it applies to Peter Norvig too.

Well, then it fits as well as any of PG's essays that don't explicitly discuss 'hacking' and those never get this complaint.

That's the benefit of owning the keys to the server room :)

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've always found this copy-paste rather hypocritical since by responding to my comment you are submitting a comment complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site instead of flagging it, thereby contradicting your entire stance on the issue.

If you don't like my comment, flag it, don't tell me something I already know.

Edit: Also, it would seem that down-voting would serve an even better purpose here since while you can down-vote my comment, there's nothing of substance I can do about this stupid article w/o commenting on it since, historically, I have seen no effect from flagging.

"there's nothing of substance I can do about this stupid article w/o commenting on it".

You can ignore it.

Actually one of the few threads where I've done this in the past was killed, presumably by flagging. I don't think it takes that many flags to kill a story.

In the end my comment is certainly wasting space, but in the end hopefully it results in less people complaining about submissions. Finally if you want to play semantics, the guidelines say don't complain about a "submission." Complaining about comments is fair game.

Ah, well I stand corrected then. My argument of semantics was perhaps not warranted, I was just frustrated by this and another recent article. I'm not sure which is more annoying, political submissions or articles that are on-topic but simply idiotic (see: TC article @ #8.)

At least HN remains the best alternative.

Posted as an example of a refreshing, rational, surprisingly lucid way to look at making a particular decision using messy data. Norvig's analysis, whether you agree with it or not, is a good example of using a particular tool occasionally prized by some scientists and engineers -- reason.

Some folks do seem to get a bit upset when reason interferes with their own irrational, sacred cows. Understandable.

It's NonHackerNews.com.

So what the heck are we supposed to do with this?

I can say something like "Heck yes! This is a good article" I would supposed that would generate very little discussion.

Or I could say, "Gee. I disagree with a lot of these points. I think the author oversteps in many instances." and immediately were arguing politics again.

So this is an article that I think is a worthless waste of time on this site. It exists only so that like-minded people can upvote it.

POS posting.

Might I recommend http://nonhackernews.com ?

"FF00FF means maximum red and maximum blue in the naming convention for web colors and is the magenta/purple background here. It is garish, but that's what you get when you combine two extremes."

OK, that is WAY too funny on at least three levels and deserves it's own comment.

Surprised by the tax charts.

They are are actually sticking to their left/right positioning.

Anyone able to access the link? Seems to have been down for the last couple of hours, even though the main site norvig.com comes up just fine.

I also had trouble at first but its okay now. You can always use the google cache of course (note that it looks the same way): http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:WpuLq6wYdewJ:norvig.com...

BTW, why doesn't Norvig use googlepages or blogger? Research?

all I'm going to say is aside from presentation there's very little difference between Obama and Mccain (both support the bailout, the Bush doctrine, FISA, - need I go on?).

I'm going to have to agree with PG on this one: http://www.paulgraham.com/charisma.html

Biased. On the list of supposedly conservative people who don't like Palin it has Andrew Sullivan. He abandoned the war bloggers years ago and went kinda lefty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com