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Comment by DANK_YACHT | Hacker News Reader

The entire point of electing someone to represent you is that they should take care of things for you without bothering you too much. Imaging you hire a lawyer to represent you in court and you constantly need to petition your lawyer for changes to your legal strategy, or you hire a doctor and you constantly need to correct their course of treatment. In such cases, would you say you've hired a good doctor or lawyer? Why is it the responsibility of the masses to petition their representatives? Why isn't it the responsibility of the representative to understand an issue and reach out to possibly effected constituents for a wholistic view of an issue?

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The comparison to a lawyer or doctor doesn't work.

Your doctor may have many patients, but they are not making the same decision for all of them. Same with any lawyer you retain.

Your elected rep has to represent people with diametrically opposed desires. Also, you don't pay them directly and you have no principal-agent relationship.

The comparison does work.

In the analogy, the doctor's patient or the lawyer's client represents the electorate as a whole.

An elected official isn’t just your official. They represent everyone in your district. Even the people you disagree with on something. This is a big difference from your analogy.

They are going to listen to the squeaky wheel in their base.

On the other hand you should by no means let your doctor decide everything, you need to be your own advocate for your own health and weigh in on making decisions regarding risk and benefits of treatments.

Yes definitely. No analogy is perfect.

This one is still pretty close though.

You need to be able to trust that your doctors guidance is genuinely what they feel is best based on their training and experience rather than a sponsored treatment they have been paid to prescribe.

I'm colored by just having heard https://www.numberphile.com/podcast/hannah-fry-orchid-cancer which was a podcast episode about cancer treatment and choices - and it says, there's more to it than this. Doctors may not value your life quality as high as you do etc.

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