Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Another commmenter hit this, but it deserves underlining.

You can't ask the question of whether certain statements, to the people giving them, are matters of fact or political opinion, and then have "correct" answers which are provided by others. If you have correct answers, you already know that certain opinions are based on error. The only thing you can do with such an experiment is measure how well people can guess what the judges think to be true. As it turns out, they did fairly well.

I could care less about this example, but let's take the WMD question. Old WMD was found in Iraq. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destru...

A partisan wouldn't argue the facts. He'd simply point out that, depending on how you phrase the question, the answer could be interpreted either way. The questioner has to rephrase "After the second Gulf War, were WMD found that were created in between the two wars?"

This easily goes to extremes, and questions end up being extremely detailed in order to resolve matters of "fact" This is why the role of fact-checker is a waste of time. Most all of the time, politicians aren't lying, they're simply phrasing things in enough ambiguity to create the desired impression. (This actually works for me as "bullshit", but it's not lying, and it's not giving out factual errors)

I find this line of argument very unconvincing. Would you apply it to the question of whether inflation and/or unemployment went down during Regan's term? Do you really think this has anything to do with the precise definition of those quantities?

I think you picked a poor example, because inflation is hard to measure and hard to define.

I know lots of people who argue with our current definition of inflation using reasonable-sounding arguments.

Inflation is only hard to define for those who want there to be something called "inflation" that predicts recessions and is caused by the government. Naturally it's hard to find anything to nail down within those parameters.

In the rest of the world inflation equals price increases and there are standard metrics that have been used for decades. Most economists would probably agree that those metrics have several well-known flaws. But we can agree that inflation according to the definitions and metrics that 99% of the world uses did or did not change by X or Y in a given time period.

The fact that the existing metrics are flawed mean that it's perfectly reasonable for a person to both:

(a) Believe one thing (b) Understand that the "accepted fact" contradicts their belief

If no money is on the line, this reasonable person will state their belief. If money is on the line, they are more likely to state whatever they think the "accepted fact" is, regardless of their true belief.

In politics, there are many things for which minor differences in interpretation can cause a "fact" to change between true, false, and unknown. Inflation is certainly one of those things.

The question "did X go up during Reagan's term?" is probably correctly answered "yes," at the same time "did X go down during Reagan's term" is correctly answered "yes." Because some things move both up and down, and the question isn't explicit that it is asking about the overall trend.

EDIT: said the opposite of what I meant to say

Thus far, I'm agreeing with you. Facts have nothing to do with the rhetoric being spewed. It's all just tribalism.

As a progressive, I had believed that we could all reach some kind of agreement, if only we could talk it out. Not understanding why that wasn't working, I started researching (Don't Think of an Elephant, What's Wrong with Kansas, etc) and experimenting (practicing talking points on right wing family and friends).

It's been illuminating.

One of my brothers was advocating higher effective tax rates, deficit reduction, and so forth. So I said "So you'd support returning to Clinton era policies?"

The answer surprised me.

He said no. I asked why not. After some musing, he told me Clinton era economic growth was a "false economy". Um, okay. If he had something about bubbles, I'd totally agree. But all he had was "false economy". Probably something he heard on the radio.

I've had similar discussions about healthcare. Every single value, position, complaint, etc would suggest the belligerent would support universal coverage with a single payer. But dare suggest it and there's a strong reaction. Hell no, that's socialism. Or whatever.

I've decided there's no profit in attempting persuasion.

The only successful strategy is to organize better than your opponents. The purpose of rhetoric (messaging, persuasion) is to motivate one's supporters or neutralize opposition.

To really get at this, you need to get people to make predictions about the future, not just about what some panel of judges thinks "correct" (even if I'd be more inclined to agree with the judges on any particular issue).

I don't think your argument hold. I think this more about whether person has his/her own skin in the game.

Lets take example, of a person working for company X and there is a claim Y which is related to company X. Lets imagine that the company is Google and the claim is "Google App Engine is one of the best cloud services".

So when that person is on Hacker News, then he/she will agree with that statement. However, if that person start preparing a new company he/she will be neutral about statement "Google App Engine is one of the best cloud services" and will evaluate other services. Why? Because he/she has her own skin the game.

If I may attempt some supplemental notes to your reply:

What I took out of the puff piece (it's really a book advertisement, which if you need a quick heuristic, features a herd of sheep on its cover - something I instantly view as at best landing it in "pop science / economics / sociology done badly") is that they offered an incentive to game the system. The author is attempting to make a 'free market' tragedy of the commons argument to suggest that voters should be given incentives to vote.

The problem is two fold:

#1 Voters already have these incentives, but are informed by others (who certainly don't have altruistic goals) that these do not exist[1]

#2 Democracy, in America (arguably everywhere), is already driven by this mechanism, just not at the level that the author is addressing. It is called Lobbying. To use a quick metaphor, you pay to set the questions people get to vote on - this shouldn't be news to anyone with a moderate or above political understanding.

As for the WMD claims, beyond the simplistic level of common media, the question of Iraq's ownership of chemical weapons was never in doubt (the USA, France and so on sold them to Saddam / provided the engineering expertise to build them), it was whether or not Saddam was a) building more, b) reducing stockpiles and c) willing to use them ever again. Hans Blix was on record[2] as stating that Saddam was obviously not attempting a and c, and was attempting b[2].Thus, again, the people setting the question didn't like this conclusion, so re-framed the question as widely as possible to be proven correct.

A much more interesting question over all of this is how to separate beliefs from politics, or at the very least maximize the scientific basis for informed participation in society.

And that's not going to be solved by a book with a picture of sheep on the cover.

[1]It's called "living in a society", fire, police, health services etc which I realize will not be popular with a Libertarian readership. [2]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/70... - this is a right-wing source

Voters have no incentive to vote correctly. The probability of your vote affecting the outcome is so fantastically small (read: too small to be represented by a double precision floating point) as to be irrelevant.

From where I sit, voters have precisely one concrete incentive beyond vague feel-goodery: bragging rights. (Granted, people can and do bullshit about how/if they voted, but that's a minority case.)

In my jurisdiction, there's a mandatory manual recount triggered by a close result every single general election.

If you think your vote doesn't matter, you haven't been paying attention.

I should have clarified that what I said holds for national or state elections.

While I agree with the spirit of your post, doubles can represent numbers far, far smaller than that. They can represent the probability of two people randomly choosing four atoms out of the entire universe, and each picking the same four atoms.

Crunch the numbers with some reasonable estimates - you'll find that the probability of two people picking the same atoms is considerably more than the probability of one vote mattering.

This is probably true at the National level; however on individual State / local government levels this isn't true at all.

You can argue that the original tripartite division of US government doesn't scale to modern population levels, but your argument is otherwise extremely weak.

> And that's not going to be solved by a book with a picture of sheep on the cover.

Attacking a book by its cover?

Are you unaware of the "WAKE UP SHEEPLE" meme?

Suggesting that voters (or "the masses", or "the proletariat") are a flock of dumb animals that need herding / shepherding is as old as the hills.

Either you're unaware of this, or don't find it problematic. I find the latter to be less edifying than the former.

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