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Comment by prawks | Hacker News Reader

Articles like this always renew my distaste for discussing politics. There are clear problems with the US's legislative process and elected officials, but there seems to be no way to effectively induce change in them, especially as an individual. Not just riding the science bandwagon here either; partisanship in general, etc. are all incredibly frustrating to discuss, and I'll almost always just stay out of discussions on politics as a result.

I'd love to help change these kinds of things, but I don't feel I could give up my job to start some sort of organization against it, nor do I feel such an organization would gain much traction anyhow. Maybe I'm just an a-typical slacktivist.

Any suggestions on stifling my feelings of futility? It seems the only way to affect change in this country is to get enough upvotes on reddit (see: SOPA). So I'm upvoting this.

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I think the best thing is to cultivate some perspective, and not hold the political system to unrealistically high standards.

We live in a 236 year old democracy of 310 million people. Let that sink in. We have more people than there are lines of code in an entire Linux distribution. Think of the complexity of a human being, over a human being's lifetime, versus a line of code. We're an incredibly heterogeneous, diverse country that has never agreed on anything, not even on our founding documents.* We are, by virtue of our post-WWII status, the de-facto political and military leader of the world. We're the world's largest economy. We're the world's reserve currency. We have all of the responsibility that comes with that status.

We do not blink twice when we hear of a company like Yahoo (14,000 employees) or Nortel (86,000 employees at peak) becoming unmanageable basket cases. Yet we rail on the President for not getting more done than he does! We forgive Windows for being layers upon tangled layers of bug-for-bug compatible code, but complain endlessly about the complexity of a tax code designed to regulate 300m people acting together in a $15 trillion economy.

I am of the opinion that too many people, especially engineers who maybe have a particular love of simplicity, simply expect too much of the country they live in, and as a result become disillusioned with the whole system.

It is my opinion that these expectations are unreasonable and counter productive. The fact of the matter is that the US government is a paragon of virtue and efficiency compared to most others. Some of the western European countries may have better governments, but they also have far simpler and more homogenous societies to govern. We certainly have a better government than most any country in Asia. China, which has no particular love of anything American, has spent the last couple of decades trying to model their legal system after America's. Think about that: something that most Americans consider to be a broken part of our society, is a model for a country looking to cement it's place among the world's great societies.

So if you're frustrated by the system, take a step back and appreciate the fact that it probably doesn't get any better than it is now. As I've gotten older and this realization has sunk in, I have found politics far more enjoyable.

*) The more you learn about the Constitution, the more you realize it's ridiculous to ask "what does the Constitution mean?" The 40 signatories to the Constitution had 40 different opinions about the meaning of the document they were signing!

The more you learn about the Constitution, the more you realize it's ridiculous to ask "what does the Constitution mean?" The 40 signatories to the Constitution had 40 different opinions about the meaning of the document they were signing!

And yet, it is the oldest working constitution that still grants rights to its citizens rarely found elsewhere. It has provided for our prosperity for over two centuries. Whatever it means, it means well.

Absolutely. Scandinavia is often held up as an example of a set of ideal democratic states. After a friend moved there, I start poking around for details and the first thing I found was a mild warning that they were xenophobic. Visiting Sweden was the first time I had ever felt visible because of my race. It's not that they're racist (they're not); it's just that they're more homogenous so differences become quickly obvious.

> appreciate the fact that it probably doesn't get any better than it is now

I can't agree with this line, but mainly because you're talking about the future. I agree that it probably couldn't be better than it is now, but we can certainly improve it.

> The more you learn about the Constitution, the more you realize it's ridiculous to ask "what does the Constitution mean?" The 40 signatories to the Constitution had 40 different opinions about the meaning of the document they were signing!

There's an entire branch of government dedicated to answering that question on a daily basis, too. Established by the very thing they're interpreting. How's that for meta?

> I can't agree with this line, but mainly because you're talking about the future. I agree that it probably couldn't be better than it is now, but we can certainly improve it.

Oh, I'm not saying you can't improve it, even in the present. What I mean is "better" in a fundamentally different way. E.g. within the constraints of our existing society, you're always going to have partisanship, etc.

I'm right with you on your slactivism. I like the idea of being very involved in politics, but I just cannot stand (a) listening to politicians, or (b) talking about politics.

I just don't have the heart for the current discourse in the country. Every once in awhile, I'll try to go the good citizen route, look into the current issues, and then draw my own conclusion.. but what was all that effort for? I've tried my best to present logical rebuttals to people's points. I try to source only relevant, publicly available government data when possible, but it means nothing. The response I usually get? "Yeah, but.. still.." and then they go back to making their talking point.

"But still.." is not a rebuttal, people.

I spent several hours investigating the energy policy of the candidates. I pulled a bunch of charts from the EPA, compiled them all into an email, and then gave my armchair analysis of the policy given the available data. I was told that "I'm missing the important issue."

So... fuck it. I'll just go back to studying.

IME the role of logic in decision-making has been greatly overemphasized. People need to first be convinced in an emotional/intuitive way, then given logical arguments to support what they are experiencing.

The idea that a person -- anyone, not just "dumb people" -- think first about a matter rationally and then act in a matter consistent with logic, is failing to address a huge component of human behavior: people only behave in their rational best interests if/when they are not emotionally invested in the outcome.

Well, an obvious way to address this would be to become emotionally invested in acting rationally. It's a pity that so many people aren't.

I'd be writing from the Moon right now if obvious-to-state were the same thing as obvious-to-achieve. Even if we accept your unwarranted assumption that strict rationality is unilaterally superior to experiential and intuitive modes of being, which is not at all a given: how do you propose we induce a widespread emotional investment in living life like a Vulcan, something that runs counter to the instincts of many/most people?

Edit: sorry that came out quite jerk-like. Point is, why is rational always better than intuitive, and how could anyone hope to create such a massive emotional investment in an intellectual concept.

The current US government is mostly atrocious, but I'm convinced that the American people have the government they, or we, collectively deserve. Congress hasn't become horribly dysfunctional and stupid because they've somehow become disconnected from the people. Rather, the electorate has become horribly dysfunctional and stupid, and Congress simply follows along.

I think the main problem is that our system is set up so that fringe elements have much more power. Voting happens in the middle of the week and is not an official holiday. Who turns out to vote, then? The people who care most passionately will inevitably show up in much greater numbers than people who are less enthusiastic. Passion is great, all else being equal, but I believe that passion correlates strongly with craziness in the political arena. Primary elections are even worse in this respect, since most people don't care about them, and the result is that you end up with two major ballot choices, both of whom are nuts, because the primaries got decided by the fringes.

A lack of term limits means that members of Congress get deeply entrenched, with a result that turnover is not all that high. Why bother voting when the winner is a given anyway? Why bother voting even when the winner isn't a given if it's pretty much a given that the overall structure of power at the national level won't change? And even if that might happen, why bother voting when the other party will just filibuster the shit out of everything anyway?

Finally, the Electoral College means that the decision for the top man in government gets decided by, what, maybe 10% of the total population of the country? Presidential candidates concentrate on swing states because they're the only ones that actually count, and that makes the whole business even more fringe.

In short, it seems like the whole system is rigged to discourage moderate, sane people from wanting to participate in any meaningful way.

I know it works on me. I vote in Presidential elections and midterms, but not enthusiastically. I would never dream of joining a political party, let alone volunteering for one. I hang up on surveys, ignore campaign flyers, and never, ever donate. I haven't even written a letter to my representative in years, after realizing that all it does is generate a mail-merged form response.

I'm sympathetic to much of your comment.

But I'm pretty skeptical that the solution to problems in American federal government is to make our federal government more similar to California's state government by adding term limits. That simply shifts power from individual legislators to unelected party apparatchiks.

This whole business of dividing everybody up into political parties is pretty bad too, and I'd be for banning them if I thought it was even remotely practical.

Otherwise, maybe no term limits, but go for proportional representation instead of a bunch of plurality races?

I find it hard to fathom how in one sentence, you speak against political parties, and then in the next, you propose proportional representation as a solution.

I am very much in favour of electoral reform, but the most common suggestion is always proportional representation which I cannot support. Under proportional representation, I am no longer voting for my personal representative to government, I am forced to vote explicitly for a party. I lose having anyone directly responsible to me (or my district, anyway), and it becomes impossible for an independent to be elected.

So what are the answers to ensure minority representation? I don't know, but here are some ideas that I think are worth exploring:

1. cutting the number of electoral districts in half, but giving seats to the two top vote getters in each district.

2. preferential voting. It opens the door for third parties. I can give my first preference to a fringe party while still ranking my favoured major party ahead of the alternative. People always say that it is too hard to count, but Australia has managed for nearly a century.

3. Any candidate (within some area) that gets more than 100000 votes (or some appropriate threshold) is elected. This is sort of like #1, but with larger areas and more candidates.

4. Additional direct democracy; technology should open up new possibilities in this area.

These are simply suggestions to think about and should not be considered mutually exclusive.

I'd get rid of political parties if I could, but I also think it's basically impossible, so the question then becomes how you deal with them. The best way to deal with them may not be at all how things would look if you could get rid of them. That's how I go from wanting to ban them to proposing proportional representation.

Fair enough. I prefer to think about what can be done to reduce their influence. I wouldn't actually ban them even if I could, freedom of association and all that, but it would be nicer if they didn't matter so much.

I'm an advocate of a hybrid between your #4 and #2. People can vote on most issues directly, with the ability to delegate particular issues or categories of issue to a number of representatives, ideally experts in their respective fields. The delegated authority can be issued or revoked by each voter at will, as many times as they want.

Unfortunately, this wouldn't solve the problem of media controlling public opinion by what they report and advertise.

Government may be broken in many ways, but when I hear political discourse, I'm amazed public policy isn't worse.

What about the notion that switching from Electoral College to popular vote just changes the focus of power from a few key states to another few key states, specifically the states with the highest populations and/or voter turnout?

It's a silly complaint because putting most of the power in the most populated states is exactly how you'd expect it to work. California, with a huge population, should be vastly more influential than Montana. How much more influential? Well, I'd say about 38 times more.

Montana won't get much attention, but Montanans should get just as much attention per person as the rest of us, in that case.

I disagree, and so did the founders when they made two houses, one based on population and one based on states. I don't think the current electoral college is the right answer, but I don't think a pure populist vote is right, either.

I'm well aware that I disagree with the founders on this question. After all, it's hardly the only thing I disagree with. Other items include whether women should be allowed to vote and whether people should be able to own other people.

I think the federal government's original setup makes a great deal of sense when you're trying to tie together a loose collection of independent states, but no longer makes much sense today, now that the states have almost completely been subordinated to the federal government.

What do you mean, "the founders"? The two house system was a compromise.

It's a compromise that has worked fairly well, balancing population versus the independent needs of states. Throwing out that balance could fundamentally unsettle the US, because many states would quickly become tired of New York and California telling them how to live their lives.

...as opposed to people in California and New York, states which create disproportionately large amounts of the national wealth, being told what to do by people in small states which don't have to manage the issues California and New York have to in order to keep the national economy moving.

When you're in a small state with disproportional voting power you end up with more money coming back to your state than it contributes in federal taxes, so you can afford to act out and pretend we can all live in a screw the government utopia - the big states you're sticking your thumb in the eye of have to pay the tab.

Considering that there has only been three elections where the winner of the electoral vote did not win the popular vote, per Wikipedia, it stands to reason that California and New York have roughly the same amount of influence either way. Therefore it is silly for them to complain over the system in place because it more than likely would still be what would be in place if the Presidential election was decided by popular vote.

Personally, I think this issue comes from a confusion of how the electoral college works and how Congress works. The things you say that bother California and New York are not determined by the electoral college, which is used to elect the President, it is in fact how Congress itself works. If those two states are bothered by smaller states telling them what to do then the problem lies with Congress, not how the President is elected.

It is only in the Senate where a smaller state gets the same amount of influence as every other state since they all get an equal number of votes. The electoral college electors and House of Representative members are determined by population count. The problem with a possible mismatch between popular vote and the electoral college is that states tend to be winner takes all, which they can change anytime they want since a state determines how its electors are chosen.

It's true that the electoral college gives small states a slight boost in representation in the presidential election. This is due to the fact that the number of electors is a function of the number of congresspeople and small states have, relative to their population, more congresspeople because of the existence of the senate and rounding error when determining number of representatives.

With regard to whether getting rid of that advantage in electors in order to modernize the system would unfairly shift the balance of power, read the above paragraph again. The small states already have an advantage in representation in Congress. That doesn't go away if we make the election of the president rely on a popular vote.

> California, with a huge population, should be vastly more influential than Montana.

Justify this, please.

Sure. One person, one vote.

If you need justification for that, well, that gets thornier. But I don't know what level of justification you're after, so let's start with this.

No, go ahead. I'd love to see how you justify mob rule.

Can't see any reason to continue the conversation after that dickish reply.

Agreed the grandparent's reply was a smarmy way of saying it, but, avoidance of majority rule is indeed why we use it. And to look at it another way: to keep one state (or a tiny few) from deciding the direction the rest of the states in the union must go.

I don't think it's a stretch to say we've become a more singular nation state, so that second part may not be as obvious, but, it's definitely still a factor. Imagine the general mentality in a state whose populace you have a low opinion of can now dictate things formerly decided in your state.

In a few words? That really sucks.

The system doesn't seem to work to prevent a tiny few states from deciding the direction the rest must go, it just shuffles them around. Instead of states like California, Texas, and New York having the biggest say, we have states like Ohio, Virginia, and Florida doing it. I don't see how that's an improvement, and it actually looks substantially worse to me.

States like CA, TX, and NY still have their say, AND states like OH, VA, and FL. It only takes 11 states to win the electoral college (CA, TX, NY, FL, IL, PA, OH, MI, GA, NJ, NC), but those never agree, and likely won't, that's when other states come into play.

With a popular vote, instead of candidates trying to vie for states by visiting regions in them, would hit a few hundred cities that they would already hit in the Electoral College process, but then stop there. It would effectively leave entire states out of the campaign process. That will only be magnified as we switch to the Internet for our media, so I think it's still worthwhile to get candidates out there hustling for votes, in front of hundreds of local media outlets while they exist. I genuinely think it helps vet them, as it gives the more opportunities to say things, including "the wrong things", and things that will change peoples mind's.

I fear when we start cutting back on physical appearances, we'll get to the point where the Internet is all that's left. Then they'll control the message completely. Imagine candidates who not only don't answer question, but seemingly don't get asked them. At least we currently have people who throw metaphorical wrenches at the seemingly monolithic candidates, hoping to snag them.

Because implying that someone who needs a justification for "One person, one vote" is below you is not dickish at all. I saw my post as doing you a favor: giving you my return argument so that you could write up a proper rebuttal ahead of time.

But hey. You can poison the well all you like. The burden of proof is not on me.

Your curt replies would hardly give mikeash sufficient context to understand either your intentions or what your return argument was going to be. I presume he thought you were simply going to twist his words ("one person, one vote" -> "mob rule") and was irked.

Your reply to ktizo was much more informative and appreciable.

> I presume he thought you were simply going to twist his words ("one person, one vote" -> "mob rule")

No, that's what I did. "Mob rule" is a proxy for the entire notion that direct democracy cannot work; the only other responses are that people don't want it or people can't do it. It's a blatantly obvious response from anyone who did not already buy into whatever mikeash is selling. The fact that he was framing his next response to be a sophisticated, high-fallutin, knock-your-socks-off thesis of epic proportions was disgusting and offensive. I'm not surprised that a taste of his own medicine cornered him into name-calling and running away.

> Your reply to ktizo was much more informative and appreciable.

Because ktizo was asking for information. If someone asks a question, I answer it earnestly. If someone is clearly ignorant, I try to explain what they're missing. If someone claims to have a solution to a well-known problem like "ZOMG!SHEEPLE", I expect them to actually have the damn solution ready at hand and not dangle it like a fucking carrot.

He could have called me on my tone and then answered the question. But I suspect he has no answer. All he has is an intuitive appeal to fairness completely unsupported by thousands of years of world history.

> Because implying that someone who needs a justification for "One person, one vote" is below you is not dickish at all.

I don't know what the hell you think you read, but you need to go back and try again. I never implied anything of the sort. I didn't know what level of justification you were after, so I started off with the most obvious rationale and left the door open to further discussion.

I have no idea how you could interpret that as "implying that someone... is below you". Maybe jerks think everyone is jerks, I don't know.

How would giving equal weight to all votes in elections, compared to giving diferent weights according to geographic location, be any more or less 'mob-rule'?

The purpose of the electoral college is to acknowledge the states as mostly-sovereign entities in their own right. This used to be quite important; it remains an issue, though largely a proxy war, today. I don't know whether or not I support the electoral college. I actually quite like liquid democracy, but I'm not yet sold on the system; I have a friend currently working on implementing it and it's interesting to watch him work through its issues. It's one of those things that wouldn't have been feasible in 1800 but is far more feasible today.

Digression aside, the acknowledgement of the states is a neutralization of pure people power. It is the same reason that the Supreme Court is not elected, and executive appointees are not elected. These are things that are intended to be a check against the people. This is also why the tax-exempt status of churches is supposed to depend on the fact that they are to be politically neutral, and why Kennedy's Catholicism was such a hot issue when he ran for office. This is why charities frequently remain neutral in political discourse, why HN was divided on whether a business should be allowed to take sides on a political issue. This is why you're not allowed to discuss who you're voting for, or campaign for a candidate or issue, within a certain radius of a polling station.

Because "one person, one vote" never is. In any group of people larger than approximately 25 and definitely larger than 150, you will never actually get "one person, one vote". You will get political parties, who give you flyers saying "Vote for these 5 dudes, vote yes on A, B, and D, vote no on C and E," and those flyers will be followed to the letter.

It is probably possible to maintain the argument for "one person, one vote" despite all of these reasons not to, of course. I'd like to see the argument made that can account for the problem of demagoguery, the problem of charisma, especially enhanced as it's been by the advent of television. I haven't seen it yet.

Montana doesn't seem to get much attention now, including most other states. Only swing states get attention.

But the complaint you have doesn't make sense because what you speak of is problems the states would have with how Congress works. The electoral college has nothing to do with law, only how the President is elected. Well, Vice President too, supposedly, but the choice of who to vote for is determined for us. To say that California doesn't have enough influence in federal laws because of the electoral college seems misdirected. California already has more influence over Montana right now because both the electoral college electors and House of Representatives are based on population count while the Senate is not. The only place that a small state has the same level of influence on the federal level is in the Senate. Therefore California's complaint about smaller states is partly caused by themselves and the other more populous states.

Why does the Senate exist? To actually give the small states a chance in deciding things on a federal level. If everything was decided by popular vote then small states might as well not bother. Notice that the Senate has more powers than the House, which is as designed because each state has equal voting power. If treaties, for example, were ratified in the House then small states would most often have to follow the lead of the most populous states. That would open the possibility of our country being led by mob rule, which the Founders were fearful of and you call a dick comment.

The only people who seriously push for everything being decided by popular vote tend to have an agenda to push that can only be done by mob rule, to the detriment of the minority for the advantage of the majority.

Also note that most often the winner of the electoral college also wins the popular vote, it is rare for the reverse to happen. So it seems that whether we use electoral college or popular vote for electing the President it would rarely make a difference, other than the focus of campaigning.

Want to have some real fun? Force the states to stop using winner takes all in determining electors. But even then it still probably wouldn't make much of a difference.

Term limits simply put even more power in the hands of unelected legislative aides, because they become the only people with the tenure to understand the issues involved, let alone the particular wording of the bills.

It's already the case that effective members of Congress are the ones who attract the best legislative aides.[1] Those who don't have high-quality aides rarely impact any legislation. If we enact term limits, our legislators will have even less room to impact the laws themselves -- either they'll hand over the whole way their office is run to great legislative aides, or they'll be irrelevant back benchers whose only role is to vote yea or nay on laws other people wrote. Whichever route they choose, the power of the legislators -- the people actually accountable to voters -- will be decreased.

[1] Put the arrows of causation wherever you'd like in that sentence.

Don't forget that Civics isn't a required course in school anymore.

I think it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. There are billions of problems with the American system, but if you take a step back you see that, as a whole, it works pretty well -- especially in comparison to the rest of the world.

Consider science funding, for instance. Despite the neanderthals on the house committee, US funding is still comparatively extremely generous on a per-capita basis:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...

Hands down the best way to affect change in politics is to get involved locally. (e.g. School board, voluntary emergency response services, local PACs etc...)

The only thing more powerful than the lobby is true grass roots (not astroturf). And I don't mean voting in gerrymandered districts, I mean true political activism.

Partisanship is not the problem, anti-science is the problem. A major political party should not be anti-science and until people who respect science stop voting GOP, this won't get solved.

Have you considered voting with your feet?

This is Hacker News. Most of us are either entrepreneurs or understand the fundamental thinking behind being entrepreneurial. Surely we can do better than upvoting.

If you can't do anything effective as an individual, stop being just an individual. My path has been to develop an idea of what I want government to look like, and then start convincing other people, getting feedback to tweak my vision, and convincing more people. I won't recommend my path, since it's slow and probably will take longer than my lifetime; I have friends who are bootstrapping legislative bodies and know other people who are working on creating better cross-partisan dialogue and so on and so on.

Figure out what you want, figure out what it would take, and start climbing. This is a lot like entrepreneurship. Don't sit in your cube and imagine how much better it'd be to be your own boss; get an idea, get a prototype, get a notion of the market, get going.

Well Jesus, you can't say something like this and then not share your vision! Not an effective strategy.

/me snickers. I have my whole lifetime to finish writing it out and you want it now? Geez. Such a hurry.

Here's what I can give you. You'll see no lasting systemic change until people start growing up understanding the ins and outs of democracy by the age of 15. This does not even happen in the most affluent neighborhoods today. Education focuses on producing workers for the job market, rather than producing citizens for a democratic society. That's what needs to change. An adult graduating from high school needs to be capable of the highest offices of government immediately, even if they don't meet the age qualification. That capability gives them the tools to intelligently engage with their representatives and public servants as equals: as co-governors. Lobbying cannot be the job of an elite minority; it has to be that thing we all do from 4-6pm, after working from 8-4 and before enjoying dinner and leisure from 6-10.

Because the capacity to govern is properly distributed, you should see the end of the career politician. Instead, occupying offices should have a higher churn rate as more people run and more people qualify and more people have jobs to return to after their stint in office; the actual electoral result approaches random, negating any effective campaign strategy and thus any influence of money. Instead of campaigning for office, office-holders become facilitators for citizen discussion of policy. Their job is primarily to gather and synthesize, to properly weight authority, and to transparently explain how they determined which policy to adopt. The vote becomes a formality, rather than a nail-biting contest aired on national television.

That's what I have right now. It's not much, and it's pretty flimsy, but it's a skeleton to hang my coat on.

Enjoy.

I like it! There is certainly a big hole in our school systems - two big holes, actually. The first is, as you say, no real treatment of being a citizen. "How a bill becomes a law" is a (bad) joke. Children need to learn about politics sooner, rather than later. The second hole is the total lack of any personal economic or financial training - how to budget, plan, save, invest, when to get credit, etc. People are thrust into the world with no idea what they are getting into with loans, and the banks get fat from fees and interest, or, when things get really bad, from bailouts.

I agree w/ this too, there needs to be more emphasis on "growing-up sooner". Right now, we are getting/producing more of an extended adolescence. That's why no emphasis on these skills: practical politics/economics. Rather than using education to foister rapid maturity. We are (socially) using the education institution for a hybrid: learning/babystitting. It is like if we arm students with practical skills they might become a problem, WTF?

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