How Reddit Got Obama

The abuse of Reddit AMA for boring, dull, traditional PR purposes takes one of its more interesting contributions to the internet and makes it just another venue for the Same Old Thing.

If a politician wants to be careful, let them go to the old careful outlets.

He speaks in public forums all the time. He speaks for himself just fine there, why would an internet forum be any different?

This statement exists in a Universe I don't inhabit, but would like to visit sometime.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/167253-the-fourth-turning-sh...

> Among quants there is a saying that goes “don’t torture the data until it talks”, which is another way of saying don’t over-fit the data. While Howe & Strauss’ analysis is very intriguing, I find many disturbing signs of data fitting that make me uncomfortable.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/William_Strauss_and_Neil_Howe

> William Strauss and Neil Howe think society turns on a repeating set of four 20-year cycles and try to predict the future based on this.

[snip]

> According to the authors (writing in 1997), the U.S. was in an "unraveling" in the 1990s and due for another crisis in the 2000s-2010s, which will be followed once the crisis is resolved by a new "high" of economic liberalism and social conservatism a-la the 1950s.

It's interesting how all these cycle-meisters (a subset of woo-meisters or just plain frauds) always say that the crisis is near. Always. Their magical cycle theories never predict a distant crisis.

Onwards:

> The generations themselves are arbitrary constructs. They have an age range of about 20 years each, but what gives somebody born in 1965 (a Generation Xer) more in common with a Generation Xer born in 1980 rather than a Baby Boomer born in 1961?

It's crap. It's one of many cycle theories that gets promoted every so often, and it's based on torturing the data that isn't ignored entirely with huge amounts of retrospective predictions (predicting the past, so much easier than predicting the future), just like the others.

Altruism. It exists.

Run for the hills!

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/95493792/The-End-Game

It also was the formation of the New Deal, the Allied victory, the GI Bill of Rights (free higher education for vets), the rise of the US as a global superpower.

Further, it was followed by the "First Turning", from 1945-1965, which was the post-war boom.

A crisis can lead to a lot of good.

I'm not quite sure what this has to do with trusting the government - I think you may be reading far too much into Strauss-Howe to coincide with your own political beliefs. The US is not a totalitarian state, nor is Europe (though disclaimer, I'm in Canada). One of my parents did live in a totalitarian state - it was not like this, by any stretch.

We do exist in a time of crisis, financially, and in terms of global political leadership. In the US, the Republicans have become radicals, not conservatives, while the Democrats can't seem to be focused or unified on anything. In Europe, the leaders can't seem to accept the Euro will destroy their economies if they don't either fix their central bank or move to a more unified fiscal arrangement. In China, the government artificially keeps their currency low to foster growth that hides the fragility of the kleptocracy at the state and local levels of government. I could go on.

These are crises, but they are also opportunities to fix problems that seem intractable today. I do not think anyone can foresee the outcomes, I suspect it will be not hewing to any particular ideology, but rather a mix of pragmatic approaches that "just work".

edit: formatting

Average voters actually use the internet and understand it. There's porn and stuff "out there", but most people don't run into it when they're visiting facebook, yahoo, espn.com, and other mainstream sites. The average voter isn't going to question the judgment of someone who "uses the internet" because it doesn't seem seedy to them.

The average voter doesn't know what reddit is, and wouldn't "get" it from the homepage. On the homepage right now, there's Obama's AMA and a couple of other serious political stories -- sandwiched between half a dozen memes, a picture of a canker sore shaped like a penis, and several instances of the word "fuck". You don't have to go looking in the unsavory corners of reddit to find stuff that would make my mom question the judgment of people who use the site.

Well, if its good enough for TED, why not Reddit?

http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/2012/03/best-of-ted-20...

Hands down, the best [TED] talk this year was from Bryan Stevenson on injustice in the US criminal legal system. For example, the number of prisoners in the last 40 years has grown from 300,000 to 2.3 million (primarily, I believe, due to non-violent drug infractions). One third of young African American men are in prison, on probation or on parole. Ours is the only country in the world that gives life sentences to 13 year olds. As for the death penalty, one out of nine defendants sentenced to death have been exonerated. in California a billion dollars will be spent defending and executing the death penalty in the next 5 years, although a referendum is on its way to re-direct those funds to police enforcement budgets.

What made the talk great was Stevenson's ability to weave in his personal stories, recounting memories of what it was like to grow up among activists like Rosa Parks. There was so much enthusiasm for Stevenson and his cause that TED Curator Chris Andersen jumped on the occasion to solicit donations for Stevenson's private foundation. Right there many of us stood up and, in aggregate, pledged close to a million dollars!

Wonderful way to be lazy while pretending to take a moral stand: Claim they're all crooks, that you can't see any difference between them, and that you refuse to participate.

It's laziness mixed with condescension and moral outrage. Perfect!