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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

> it's really really hard to accurately ascribe meaningful credit (or guilt) for any change

It's a bitter pill to swallow that I not only have to give these people my money to do this work, but they're wasting time trying to ascribe credit or blame for it.

> and especially to do so in a way that is understandable by voters.

This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it. Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit, what politicians want is to market their "success" and to pass off their "failure."

Again.. using our own funds to do it. I find the whole thing inappropriate. If we decide to credit you, you will be re-elected, if we decide to blame you, we will invoke the courts.. and I doubt they will have a "really really hard time ascribing guilt" to the appropriate party.

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> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it. Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit, what politicians want is to market their "success" and to pass off their "failure."

It's been studied and is kinda true. You can pretty reliably do something like, over a controversial tax hike that affected 2% of the population, get 30% of respondents to claim it made their taxes go up, if there was a heavy media push about how it'd make everyone's taxes go up, and that's for something they should have direct experience with. You can also do things like get an amusingly-high percentage of people who oppose various social programs by name to tell you they'd support a law to replace them with some other program you describe... that's identical to what the program already does. Then there's all the people who tell you how much more dangerous America is now than when they were growing up in the 1960s or 70s.

I dunno about dumb, but voters' views are rather less connected to reality than one might hope, and seem to have a whole lot more to do with what they're being told by pundits.

Emotions, rather than logic. Irrespective of party, for a sadly large portion of voters. Not everyone in every party, maybe more in some parties than others (I don't have any data for that, this is just a theory / supposition); but even for whatever party you the reader is most aligned with, there will be some who blindly follow that party and do not think for themselves.

While I agree with you, I think it is easy to think of ourselves as “we are not the ones that are emotional, we think logically”. But the thing is, human beings are just emotional to the core and every sensory input is sensed as per the actual emotional state we are in, biased towards our inherent biases.

Party alignment has unfortunately devolved into this “us vs them” pack mentality, and at this point I honestly question the point of parties at all. Why don’t we instead vote on individuals only, and make parties straight up illegal?

That would be great but I don't see how we get there. The parties are in control, they choose who we are allowed to vote for.

Ostensibly the parties are choosing select people through a strict vetting process. I think informing yourself about individuals would be much more difficult than picking a party with a long, presumably representative history.

There's also a considerable barrier to entry. Louis Rossmann had Larry Sharpe on, who had an interesting talking points in the first three minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhqTxlxOQBM

I think the key point is that the media wouldn't cover him if he didn't buy ads, and the cost of a poll stood at $40,000. How far can you campaign on a shoestring budget? It's a little easier when you can pool resources through an institution or a party while also gaining the immense benefit of a much more robust network of connections.

Those are some of the infrastructural barriers we've got to overcome, and I can't imagine that movement in that direction would go uncontested. It's quite the uphill battle.

Well, I don’t know. In many countries it has devolved into football-fan level love/hatred that benefits no one.

Also, chances are neither of the two parties fit what you want. Especially in the US it is basically choosing the lesser evil..

You might give Neil Postman's "How to Watch the TV News" a shot. He had some very prescient points regarding media and how it has transformed politics. Chomsky also has some interesting points on partisan politics.

But yeah, I totally agree, it just seems like very narrow minded allegiance. I think in the US it has a lot to do with conflicting interests of people in high-density places and the rural. I've got a population map overlayed on election results right now, and the data seems to fit that conclusion.

"We" are all held, arbitrarily, in the same group, which is... Absurd. It's like a hostage situation and it seems nobody has recognized that we're being held involuntarily.

The US heavily values the protection of speech. I think political speech is among the most deserving of that protection.

“I, candidate for office, align myself to and support the goals of the DNC, GOP, or XYZ” is pretty clearly political speech.

You could nibble away at the edges, maybe eliminate state support for primaries, change funding rules, but I think it’s ultimately not going away and probably not even getting diluted much if we keep the first past the post voting method.

Thanks, interesting comment.

Thinking along, could we perhaps rather vote on things that worry us, instead of people (or sometimes just a color) that may (likely not) do something about it? E.g. salary of teachers, climate change, etc.

And then every law/change has to be derived from that “wishlist”. Because political programs, while originally similar, have been misused greatly. It is still prone to abuse, but perhaps it would increase accountability of politicians and decrease the amount of laws that are only meant to distract the public from something much worse in the background. But surely everyone wants “free beer and immortality” (the program of a joke party where I live), so it would likely fail for other reasons, but a more direct democracy also has the shortcome of.. well, dumb people.

The ballot I filled out a few weeks ago had several such things on it. They are called "ballot measures," or "referenda," and the overall ideology for them is called "Direct Democracy."

Obviously, they are subject to all the typical "push polling" weaknesses, where people can be coaxed into voting a certain way using manipulative wording.

> I dunno about dumb, but voters' views are rather less connected to reality than one might hope.

What voters say is disconnected from reality, because the average voter has average skill at articulating their thoughts and usually only knows how to navigate their own social context. That voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world.

You can tell by looking at what the polity does, it is often turns out in hindsight that it is quite an intelligent and practical beast. It is really hard to outdo a democracy when it comes to having a finger on the pulse of what is really going on.

It is a gross unfairness in politics that people so often deal with sound bite caricatures of their opponents rather than being forthright about what motivates their position.

> That voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world.

I might be off-base here, but I am unsure if you have thought through the ramifications of your statements. What your statement seems to be implicitly saying is that, (a few examples)

  - Surgeons who stitch up gunshot wounds in ERs

  - Doctors & nurse practitioners who deliver care to communities across the US

  - Developers who write the critical code that runs airplanes

  - Scientists & engineers who do nanoscale fabrication

  - Environmental scientists embedded inside local communities, studying long-term environmental changes

e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/climate/climate-change-ma...

  - Embedded anthropologists studying populations & subcultures in Iraq & Afghanistan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Terrain_System

  - Poets and artists living in these communities
 
  - Social scientists who study how rural Americans are used as a cheap workforce

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/mlg/

  - Developers at Google & DDG writing the code that allows billions of people to do work every day

  - Scientists managing the US food supply and researching new ways to protect it,

https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-10-19

  - Devs at companies like Stripe that power significant parts of the US economy

Your text suggests that all of these people (and the millions more who aren't on the list) are less in tune with "reality" by default as compared to a random plumber or electrician. (I assume that you are referring to working class professions when you say "average voter")

The text also says that they don't "go out and do things in the real world."

It would be deeply wrong to assume that a random plumber or electrician is somehow lesser or incorrect by default. But it's also deeply wrong to say that the people who make important contributions that keep the lights of civilization on aren't somehow connected to reality by default.

Those are roughly the categories of people I was thinking of when I commented. You've put together a list of people who, by and large, are insulated from scarcity - people who either aren't going to have to do without, or are sufficiently confident in their position (academics and poets) that they don't think they need to work a conventional job. Frequently extreme specialists in a specific field that doesn't translate well into broad life experience. They don't have to live their lives in line with the resource constraints that the world works under.

I'm an engineer, I know the perspective well. I'm part of the group of people keeping the lights on. And therefore there is nearly nothing out there that poses any sort of threat to my comfort, because society was built by and for people like me. That isn't an experience that matches up well with the typical experience and it would be very hard to spin as being exposed to 'reality'. I have access to disproportionate resources to solve my problems. And so do all the people you're listing.

I'm having some trouble understanding your perspective. Your original comment said:

> That [average] voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world.

Now you're being more specific, saying those people who work outside "the real world," are those who are:

> Frequently extreme specialists in a specific field that doesn't translate well into broad life experience.

Why do you think that a fry cook or janitor has more "broad life experience" than a professor or a doctor? Do you think that there is something more "real" and "authentic" about manual labor, that intellectual labor lacks? Is scarcity the only source of authenticity?

In my experience, most people a born into, and live their entire lives, in a single social stratum. Maybe it's abject poverty, maybe it's menial labor, maybe it's middle-class, or maybe it's educated and professional. The classes live in constant fear and envy of each other, but very few people get to experience more than of them first-hand. There's insulation, as you point out, between the strata, but that doesn't mean that the uneducated and the poor are experiencing more reality, just that they're experiencing it differently.

In this case, what I wanted to say was that politics is deciding what to do next to get the best outcome given a set of constraints. In that context, "real world" to me means the clearest understanding of what the constraints are and what we should do to get the best outcome.

It isn't a question of manual vs. non-manual in my mind. areoform was picking out a list of people who typically aren't exposed to the actual constraints because they are in the top ~10-20% of the social hierarchy, and usually only specialise in one specific area as opposed to understanding the total situation. Someone who has immanent and structural problems putting food on the table or keeping employment will have a much better idea of where the urgent pain points in an economy are than, say, a dev at Stripe.

The people close to the happy tail end of the distribution for comfortable lifestyles aren't going to have a good understanding of the median or hard tail. Some do, most don't. People who live the risk of doing without food have a much better understanding of how bad the current food shortages are than I do, for example. Despite being quite interested in the crisis I have to really go out and look to figure out whether the situation is normal, a little bit worse or immanent threat of large numbers of people who had food last year running out.

Basically, in short, it is easier for someone average to figure out what the experience is for the average person. Which is one of the most important experiences for figuring out whether a policy is working or not. The median voter is quite well connected to the experience of the median voter, much better than people like me who have to use statistics and guess what their experience is.

Thankyou for drawing my attention to the fact that my language was excessively vague.

> You can tell by looking at what the polity does, it is often turns out in hindsight that it is quite an intelligent and practical beast.

Could you provide any specific examples of that?

Compare the Chinese response to COVID to democracies like the US. In the US, the COVID pandemic response is basically history. In China, they are still locking places down and you can find videos of people literally fleeing the authorities [0]. This is the difference between a country where official policy is a bit behind the times vs a public that isn't particularly panicked and (correctly) identifies that the threat is minor and they need to get on with life.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-62547503

I don't need Obamacare, I have already benefits from Affordable Care Act.

Repeal Obamacare.

> You can pretty reliably do something like, over a controversial tax hike that affected 2% of the population, get 30% of respondents to claim it made their taxes go up, if there was a heavy media push about how it'd make everyone's taxes go up, and that's for something they should have direct experience with

I don't think this is necessarily because those voters are stupid. It could be that they oppose the tax, and they will give whatever answer best signals "I oppose this tax", regardless of whether their answer is literally true. This is a reasonable strategy and it makes sense why they'd do it.

> Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit

That is certainly true, but they have a lot of trouble making these kinds of decisions correctly. Much of the time there is an objective fact of the matter regarding the causality between policy and outcome, but discerning it is very hard. In particular, for economic policy the time lag between cause and effect is commonly measured in months or years, and that can be very hard to unwind.

> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it.

"Stupid" is probably the wrong word here. "Gullible" is probably more apt, considering they keep falling for these.

> It's a bitter pill to swallow that I not only have to give these people my money to do this work, but they're wasting time trying to ascribe credit or blame for it.

I agree, it is a bitter pill. The alternative is to live in a society where leaders don't need the goodwill of the people in order to rule, and therefore have no interest in proclaiming their accomplishments. Fortunately, there are lots of dictatorships for you to choose from.

> Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit,

Voters certainly decide, but I see little evidence that they decide accurately. It's not that they're stupid, it's just that (a) they don't understand how the government or the economy work and (b) have no collective memory. So, they decide, if there is inflation under the Biden administration, it must be Biden's fault, QED.

> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea.

I don't think that voters are necessarily stupid. They just happen to act stupidly because they treat politics as entertainment rather than their civic duty. If people dedicated their time trying to learn about policy instead of browse memes and articles that affirm their beliefs, we'd be much better off.

Well, unfortunately I do think that voters are stupid. For every smart people you know there is someone on the other side of the IQ distribution and you are just quite likely to be surrounded with a smarter bunch, biasing you towards thinking that the “average” is better than it actually is.

Not the US, but I have read several reports of “vote counters” in Hungary and the amount of people that had to ask which of the options is (surprise) the right-wind, populist Orban is astonishing. And while illiteracy for example may well be worth in Hungary, the general idea is true of every country.

Sure, the average person could be smarter, but there's nothing you can really do about that. The more concerning thing I'm noticing is that some of my peers who are highly rational when it comes to work but are completely irrational when it comes to politics (e.g. treat a heavily editorialized headline as an objective fact).

George Carlin summarized it best: “Think of your Average American. Now, realize that half of them are dumber than that guy!”

I think that George Carlin produced a large volume of the most insightful political commentary in modern US history.

I re-watch this one at least every couple of months: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrSAxtIYM08

I take it you've never seen the 'joke' political surveys that ask the following:

"Do you want to repeal suffrage?"

And naturally, most have no clue that has to do with women's voting rights, and asking to repeal them.

Voters are very stupid. And when a group gets smarter, gerrymandering comes in to 'lower the average'.

> "Do you want to repeal suffrage?"

> And naturally, most have no clue that has to do with women's voting rights, and asking to repeal them.

“Women’s suffrage” is the right of women to vote. “Suffrage” itself is simply who gets the right to vote. “Repeal women’s suffrage” has a very clear meaning, “repeal suffrage” is vague and unclear what is being repealed. Women’s suffrage? Universal male suffrage? (Once upon a time, most men couldn’t vote, since they didn’t meet the property qualifications.) Abolish elections altogether? (Use sortition? Introduce a dictatorship?)

People aren’t stupid to be confused by a confusing question.

> “Suffrage” itself is simply who gets the right to vote.

No, suffrage is the right to vote. Not who. So 'repeal suffrage' simply means repealing the right to vote. It is not confusing, just absurd.

Is abolishing elections and replacing them by sortition (legislative juries) “absurd”? A very radical proposal, but doesn’t seem inherently “absurd” to me. And of course, under such a system, nobody has suffrage (unless one means the suffrage of jurors on a jury.)

To be fair, most people have a hard time understanding the word "hypothetical" or realizing something different from the status quo.

I like sortition myself, but yes it is absurd.

Why?

Voters are vulnerable to trick questions, is basically what I'm reading in this thread, and by this.. we are to judge that they must be _very_ stupid. Yet.. no one offers any evidence that their elected representatives do a better job at passing these same tests.

How anyone puts this down to anything other than a failing of school systems and the mass media in general is somewhat beyond me. It's easier to poke fun of people than dig into the problems in many spheres, I'm sure, but in this one.. I think you're just enabling a specific class of people to slickly pervert the will of the citizenry while still claiming a moral high ground for having done so.

Still not convinced this is anything other than an elitist trick.

> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea

The wisdom of crowds is fickle. Especially today where people have few social relationships and mass communications are so cheap.

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