Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"I'd very much like to know what led Mr Obama to change his mind"

He didn't change his mind. He lied to get elected. His team knew exactly what message to hit, riding the wave of anti-Republican / anti-George W. Bush sentiment, to win the election. Obama is a politician above all else, and a scoundrel; but then I repeat myself [hat tip Mr Twain].

Normal people get confused by how a politician's brain works. Typically a person holds a set of beliefs, and attempts to follow those whenever they reasonably can. They have a code of morality, knowingly chosen or absorbed by default, and they try to be good, most of the time. Politicians do not function that way professionally. Work life Obama is not private life Obama. A voter sees what they think is a normal person when they vote; there's nothing normal about the business life of a politician. The really talented ones hold every belief simultaneously, and switch when it's required. With the only restriction being the party ideology; and the only variable within that being the strictness of adherence (it's the same game of ideological flexibility, just played within the party's limits).

In this day and age, to aspire to the Presidency, you're either a psychotic power luster capable of any lies and misdeeds necessary to win the office, or you're an ideologue willing to fall on the sword. The former usually wins.

>>> In this day and age, to aspire to the Presidency, you're either a psychotic power luster capable of any lies and misdeeds necessary to win the office...

Just a little clarification - I am pretty sure you make the same mistake that apparently many people do and confuse 'psychotic' and 'psychopathic'. Those are very different things and what you describe seems to be psychopathic (characterized by psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder - lies, manipulation, lack of remorse etc.) behaviour - this behaviour is not typical for psychotic people.

Psychotic person is someone who suffers from psychosis - for example schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Psychotic people have really difficult life and it is partially because of the social stigma attached to psychoses - we should not make it worse by associating psychoses with morally despicable behaviour typical for psychopaths.

I certainly do understand there are very important differences between, for example: psychotic, psychopathic, schizophrenic, sociopath, and so on. I'm not a doctor, and won't pretend to be one. Even in the mental health industry these definitions are constantly evolving and have been for a long time. I just needed to get the point across, and for that purpose I knew the word psychotic would do the trick. Most people understand in general terms what you mean when you use that term: they think cold blooded, someone without the ability to empathize, cold and calculating, willing to hurt people to reach their objectives, etc.

Sociopathic would have been a better choice: "a personality disorder characterized by amorality and lack of affect; capable of violent acts without guilt feelings"

>>> I knew the word psychotic would do the trick. Most people understand in general terms what you mean when you use that term: they think cold blooded, someone without the ability to empathize, cold and calculating, willing to hurt people to reach their objectives, etc.

No, that's psychopathic, not psychotic. You are right that definitions are constantly evolving... but this is not the case. Psychopathic/psychotic are not even close (except the fact that they sound similarly) - they are totally different things and when you associate that term with characteristics typical for psychopath you are seriously misleading. I understand that you are not a doctor - if you don't know what the term means that's ok, please just don't use it.

To make it hopefully easier to understand why this is so important: imagine that you suffer from severe depression caused by bipolar disorder (which is psychosis, therefore you are psychotic). You might be at the verge of committing suicide and you need help... and than you notice that some people confuse the term psychotic with psychopathic - they think you are a psychopath and they expect inability to empathise, willingness to hurt people etc. - get it?

You don't label cancer patients as psychopaths and you should not do it with other illnesses like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. That's the point - those are illnesses, being a psychopath is not.

Has anyone invented/discovered a system where this can't happen?

There's that famous phrase (Churchill): 'It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried'. But this is more subtle: it's about lying, and ultimately, corruption. Is this a solved problem in hard political science?

I know of various solutions explored in science fiction, notably by Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, Eric Frank Russell, Christopher Anvil, et al. There's game theory, where cooperation 'breeds' more cooperation, in a world of defectors.

But, it seems to me, corruption is now the biggest problem facing humanity. If we can fix that, it'll cascade down through everything else: climate change, energy sources, ecological destruction, sexism, etc...

"Medieval Iceland and the Absence of Government" http://mises.org/daily/1121

Distributed dispute resolution services, a market for justice, as the foundation for a society free from most of the issues that plague the stationary-bandit state characterized by attempted monopolies on violence, law, and coercion. A system that lasted many times longer than the US did as a free society before falling to cartelization.

I like von Mises (to pieces) as much, if not more so than the next guy; but the rest of the world is well past the societal tipping point of a low-population growth inaccessible insular community.

Everybody kept the social peace, because the cost of breaking it was too high: nowhere to go to escape societal retribution, everyone "knew" everyone else or could pick you out as a stranger in the local community if you moved around the island and would get your back-story eventually.

wow, I thought that such form of "government" was book fiction and never attempted IRL. Thank you.

There have been studies like 'Democracy, the God that failed'. The book argues a emperor (or king) looks way beyond the typical 4 year time-span politicians do. A king plans for generations and can not push his population too far as they would revolt. Compared to endless 'Blue team vs Red Team' games filled with fake promises, the thought isn't all that crazy. The book sees Wold War 1 as a battle between emperor-states (like Central Europe and Germany) and democratic states Great Britain, France and the US).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy:_The_God_That_Failed

I think it's a fairly safe conclusion that a benevolent dictatorship can be a near perfect form of government - as long as it's benevolent. Long stretches of prosperous european monarchy supports this. The problem is what happens if the king goes mad - either by obsessing over some military objective or empire or such, or medically mad, with his court scheming to rule in his place. Other, similarly long stretches of european monarchy shows this.

Democracy biggest success, despite its significant imperfections, is the orderly overthrow of government every 4-5 years. Even monarchy doesn't guarantee an orderly transition of power.

The problem is ... it is never the monarch that governs, but the bureaucrats and the networks of power and favour that grow under the protection of a monarchy/dictatorship. After a while, the Peter Principle takes over, and the system becomes sclerotic and corrupt, no matter how benevolent the head of the dictatorship. The "continuous revolution" of a democratic system goes some way to remedying that defect, but it is at best a partial fix. This is a problem that all large organizations suffer from, be they democracies, dictatorships, public organizations or private companies: All types of organization, from armies to zoos are vulnerable to sclerosis, and the larger and more long lived the organization, the more vulnerable it gets.

>This is a problem that all large organizations suffer from, be they democracies, dictatorships, public organizations or private companies: All types of organization, from armies to zoos are vulnerable to sclerosis, and the larger and more long lived the organization, the more vulnerable it gets.

Not only that, the larger it gets, the smaller the proportion of what gets replaced at every election. Even if we get some new Congressmen every two years, we still have all the same spies, SWAT teams, prosecutors, defense contractors, etc. And the things with staying power throw money at perpetuating their own existence, so that the Congressman dedicated to halting the proliferation of SWAT teams or reducing the defense budget doesn't stay a Congressman long enough to attain the committee assignments that would allow him to actually do it.

Yes, true. The biggest problem with this is the short-term planning of everything... Have a look at the map of Germany and Austria-Hungary (I'm European and I didn't know they were so vast). "Vienna was then the capital not of a minor Central European country but the hub of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire that extended over much of Eastern and Southeastern Europe". It made for a good breeding-ground for new idea's (think the time of Freud and others).

Map: http://www.worldology.com/Europe/world_war_1_effect.htm

"long stretches of european monarchy shows this"

I'm struggling to think of many examples from the history of the UK/England/Scotland (and there was a civil war 350 years ago to end absolute power of the monarchy), were there saner royals elsewhere in Europe before everyone switched to keeping their royals as fairly powerless heads of state?

Don't make the mistake of believing current monarchs are powerless...

The Queen of the commonwealth for example and shut down the parliament if she wants to (there is a complex process to do it, but it can be legally done), or buy and sell state stuff freely. Of course, in information age, she knows that if she abuses these powers, people will get upset and overthrow her.

Also in Japan, the monarch legally has no power, but the people obey him anyway, this happened many times in Japan history, and seemly the population like it that way because the monarch become a "failsafe" of sorts, every time some non-monarch leader do major shit, the population can rally behind the emperor again and return his absolute powers (and usually subsequent emperors fix the issues, until someone pull a WWII...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

Sortition has a lot going for it and certainly encourages participation far beyond our current democratic engagement. I'd like to see it start to appear on a small scale, beyond Juries, in modern democratic states.

There's an interesting EconTalk discussing the Ancient Greek economy where Russ Roberts asks his guest: "We certainly romanticize Greece as this great democracy; but it wasn't much like the United States, tell us about it"

But after Josiah Ober describes Athenian democracy it ends up sounding like what we call modern democracy is a very poor imitation.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/08/ober_on_the_anc.htm...

Thank you for this. Just last week I thought of this, but didn't know there was a name for it, or that it had been used before.

I think people are turned off by the idea of some random "crazy" running things, but that's exactly what I think would provide checks and balances to a government (namely, that the "crazies" don't reach a consensus as easily as the corrupt).

And on another level, our laws would have to be understandable! What would that be like? Would I actually know why I am being arrested?

Corruption is a huge problem, but I think apathy/indifference is a bigger problem. Most people just don't care about anything, anyone other than themselves, and may be their loved ones. Until this changes, no amount of open gov, transparency, education etc will help - in fact, many times, highly educated people are more indifferent than less educated/less bright ones. If enough people cared, most problems wouldn't exist in the first place.

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

Moldbug comments that people who use this quote rarely give serious consideration to any of the others. Universal democracies are a very new form of government, and to ignore their problems requires willful ignorance.

Yes, the corruption is the ultimate problem for all societies. It is innate, it is adaptable, it faces only limited counter-corruption defense systems, and it usually has the freedom to choose its own time and place (avoiding this way most of the traps). Also, if that wouldn't be enough, like vijayr said in the sibling comment - "Most people just don't care about anything, anyone other than themselves, and may be their loved ones." I would conclude that we have not found so far the most efficient and effective strategy to prevent and counter corruption. Our organizations specialized in fighting corruption are weak and more importantly - are by themselves exposed to be corrupted in a way or another. My solution? Offer incentives at the individual level to fight corruption and create in this way the most extended system against it.

Yes, maybe China - take about 20 minutes and listen to this talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_s...

At least - a system without elections doesn't breed people, whose primary ability is to get elected.

The truth about Obama's views has always been right there in his Senate voting record. When he bothered to attend, he consistently voted to do things like extend the Patriot Act.

That's nice fiction, but it's entirely unfalsifiable, making it a completely ineffective as a theory.

The theory that it should be falsifiable in order to be valid, is not falsifiable.

What your call "theory that it should be falsifiable" is in fact the very base of science. And this principle (among others) served us quite well for the last few hundred years, leading to progress, understanding, knowledge, inventions and innovations.

Of course you can apply lower standards, such as "having some good-sounding arguments is all you nedd", but then the results become quickly worse.

Just because you are told that something is the "base of science", doesn't make it the base of science.

Also, read Newton's Rules of reasoning for a better example of a philosophy that's successfully been at the base of science.

I was referring to Richard Feyman (not Newton, but still a great influential physicist). Unfortunately, I can't reproduce his exact words from my mind.

It's not a theory, it's part of the successfully utilized scientific method.

If you'd like the credentials for the scientific method as used over the past 150+ years, let me know. Might even be a fun article to write.

Perhaps it's not a theory. Perhaps it's an axiom.

I'd say it's a paradigm. For whatever that's worth ;)

The discussion of validity when replying to someone referring to effectiveness is deceptive.

Theories are concerned with truth. That true theories are also effective is a side-effect.

I.e., you are a very confused person.

The comment that you were replying to was about effectiveness. You replied with an intentional equivocation between effectiveness and validity.

i.e. neither of us are confused, but you are being dishonest.

As I just pointed out, whether a theory is effective or not is irrelevant, the question is whether it is true or not. So I reinterpreted the original point so it actually made sense, and rightly so.

You are not only confused about that, but you're also incredibly arrogant (in that you think you discern dishonest motives with such sparse evidence).

A scientific theory can never be true. It can only stand as "not disproven".

Nonsense. Barring semantic games played by fools, we know the Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around. We know that matter is composed of atoms. Etc.

Those would not be theories, those would be observations.

Theories attempt to explain why things happen as they do, observations are statements that something has or has not happened.

Gravity is an observation. Let go of an object, it travels towards the surface of the planet (usually). Gravitational theory attempts to explain why gravity happens.

Evolution is an observation. Over time, random variance occurs in living things, and when these variances are beneficial to the life of the living thing, the variance tends to spread through the species over time (give or take). Evolutionary theory is an attempt at explaining how and why this occurs.

Obama has changed his position on issues X, Y, and Z. are observations. That he has done this because he's an evil, blood-sucking politician who says anything to get approval is an attempt at explaining why Obama has changed his positions over time.

"Those would not be theories, those would be observations.

Theories attempt to explain why things happen as they do, observations are statements that something has or has not happened."

You are very confused. The observation is that it appears as if the Sun is moving across the sky. The theory is that that's because the Earth is rotating.

You should be able to work out the rest for yourself.

It's either a theory and we don't know it, or it's an observation and we do know it. You can't, definitionally, have your cake and eat it as well.

You can never know a theory to be true. A "true" theory does not exist.

You are not the arbiter of what constitutes a "theory." And it's a good thing, too...

You're mistaken if you think I'm saying I am. I'm telling you what other people hear when you say 'theory'.

Feel free to think whatever you'd like, but this is what people will be thinking of when you say 'theory'.

You should do more study on the varied senses of "theory."

Please stop.

This is more your anger speaking than any real direct experience, unless you've worked Obama or other Presidents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com