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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Movie dialogue is scored on being interesting but there are a lot of interesting responses to Congressional inquiry, including interesting and true responses, which pessimize for your tactical or strategic goals.

They also plausibly pessimize for Congress' goals. If you wanted to learn when Zuckerberg learned of a topic, you could send him a letter, and he would check his notes and send you a letter, and then you would know a thing you don't care about in the least. The point of grilling Zuckerberg in person about it is not to ascertain the truth, it is to grill Zuckerberg on television.

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Congressional inquiries haven't been about finding truth since TV was invented. They are a platform for the parties involved to signal their positions. MZ is talking to his investors, AOC to her constituents.

My point is: there is no conversation going on. Just people talking.

This is very true -- there are also echoes of how politicians prepare talking points in response to journalists' questions these days. The person being quizzed isn't actually prepared to answer questions, they come prepared with a set of themes to talk about and will seek to massage their answer to almost any question to one of those prepared themes.

The other interesting thing specifically about televised Congressional hearings is that Congresspeople have very little time -- AOC had 5 minutes, if I recollect correctly. This gives the person being grilled an advantage -- by simply taking his time with his answers he can run down the clock and be done with AOC's questions.

The whole "grilling" format is just publicity for politicians. If they were really interested in answers, they would send an email and get a response back, and if they didn't they'd send a subpoena or start court proceedings.

And if they really wanted to do something, they would pass legislation. But of course, you can't do that and get paid by lobbyists and/or get favors from businesses at the same time. This grilling format solves all interests. Politicians get to look like they're doing something, many gullible voters think the politicians are doing something, and the businesses being looked into get to look like there is something being done about them.

Just enough time to accuse someone of having ties to white supremacy but not enough to hear an answer.

It's not symmetric, though. The congresspeople are there to stir trouble, and the CEO is there to dodge it. For all of Zuck's misdeeds (or those of anyone dragged in), at a congressional hearing, the participant is a victim of a punishment, not an agent of their agenda.

Public meetings are performance art. Town halls, hearings, Q&As, etc. Good ones are scripted, controlled.

All the discovery, negotiation happens beforehand. The testimony and whatever votes occur are kabuki.

As a citizen with a little bit of experience, I now enthusiastically support how the game works. How else could it work? I've seen what happens when yahoos or saboteurs are allowed to take the dialog off script.

As an activist, I was once allowed to speak unscripted. The body suspended the rules to allow my testimony. What harm could be done? I revealed evidence that spiked the appropriation under consideration. (Vendor receiving the contract was actually out of business.) Whoops! Made the local news.

Neither side made that mistake again.

I now have a much greater appreciation for lobbying, engaging sympathetic representatives (or more likely, their staff) face-to-face, long before any decisions are made.

I'm by no means an expert in these things. So don't base your actions on my experiences.

FWIW, A similar exchange, Feynman's revelation about the O-rings failing leading to the lose of the Challenger and it's crew, is related in Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr Feynman.

"pessimize"?

The opposite of "optimize", e.g. "the writer pessimized for understandability while optimizing for sounding smart".

Is that really a thing in (American) English? I wasn't able to dig up anything (I am not a native speaker).

It's rarely used, I'm not aware of a specific definition for it. This question defines it somewhat:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/312003/what-is-the-most-...

It's still kind of tongue-in-cheek because it hasn't caught on enough. I think it's used more widely in ML but I may be way off the mark on this.

Edward Tufte, one of the people who coined the word, explains: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

Even better, both "pessimal" and "pessimum" are legitimate. They are the opposites of optimize, optimal and optimum.

Perhaps you'll politely permit a pedantic impossibly pessimal lexical parallel, animal parable?

Ostrich and Possum have no awesome options for optimal animal posture, a literal posthumous aspect or optical pessimum.

That's brilliant! If that's original, do I have your permission to quote it to a bunch of my friends? I'll credit you of course!

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