Hacker News Reader

Comment by twofornone | Hacker News Reader

>My view on the problem with politics today is that people have started to view it as sport

The average person is simply unable to evaluate competence, especially from news clips and "debates". The median voter is not a highly competitive white collar knowledge worker with a background in STEM necessary to evaluate complex topics with objectivity. Instead its the fry cook, the retail worker, the warehouse stocker, blue collar tradesman, liberal arts graduate, etc.

What really happened was that the pool of politically active citizens expanded, and now because of the shape of the normal distribution we are dealing with a sort of political endless summer - which media in particular are all too eager to take advantage of for political power.

View on HN

> The median voter is not a highly competitive white collar knowledge worker with a background in STEM necessary to evaluate complex topics with objectivity

I'm more scared about highly competitive knowledge people with STEM degrees making political decisions. They might be naive enough to think they can engineer society to fit their whims with no unintended consequences.

Isn't that exactly what we have now, only people with less education? I don't think being a Lawyer, CEO, or Activist is any different when it comes to unintended consequences. I just look around and have to shake my head because the US Government is not comprised of the best people we have. They're all wealthy actors and most if not all get little to nothing accomplished except lining their own pockets.

It’s really not about STEM vs cook. Voters are stuck compressing a huge range of choices into a single vote which creates horrific incentives for politicians. You can piss off huge swaths of the population as long as you can just squeeze through enough voters it doesn’t matter. Toss in a little inequality in how much each vote counts and things get much much worse.

Consider what would happen if rather than voting for your favorite you subtracted points from the candidate you dislike the most. It’s not better but suddenly everyone wants to be an inoffensive centrist. Which just shows how much incentives influence the system.

> Consider what would happen if rather than voting for your favorite you subtracted points from the candidate you disliked the most.

Would that work? If there are only two candidates, then it’s equivalent to casting the inverse votes for. If there’s three candidates, and one is literally horrid, then would people give all of their negative votes to the horrid candidate in fear of destruction and leave very few votes to differentiate the top two? Or, would voters cast all negative votes for one of the top two and hope enough _other people_ downvote the horrible candidate?

Sorry, I know your comment wasn’t meant to be serious, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.

> The average person is simply unable to evaluate competence, especially from news clips and "debates". The median voter is not a highly competitive white collar knowledge worker with a background in STEM necessary to evaluate complex topics with objectivity. Instead its the fry cook, the retail worker, the warehouse stocker, blue collar tradesman, liberal arts graduate, etc.

This reads like parody.

The tradesmen likely know more about the logistical structure of a functioning society than most STEM employees, who too often live in ivory towers.

The restaurant staff often know more about human nature and behavior than the Psychiatrist who’s been trained to see all our flaws as chemical imbalances to be fixed.

Comments like yours are increasing the divide in this country, and are deeply problematic.

I agree with your point, but disagree with your point about psychiatrists. The ones I know are the first to tell you that the field of psychiatry is young, what we know about psychiatry is miniscule compared to what we don't know, and that reduction of behavior or disease to "chemical imbalances" is the result of simplistic marketing campaigns by drug manufacturers.

The issue is that people come to psychiatrists seeking help and, at the moment, the majority of tools in their toolbox to help their patients are the drugs derived from our study of the role of neurotransmitters in the brain. Giving medication that changes the levels of those chemicals to patients who are suffering is all that modern medicine can offer them outside of therapy and electromagnetic stimulation of the brain or nerves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com