[FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[glen∉ℂ]

Hm. I want to confirm that this post is commentary and you're not expecting a response. But maybe it's push-back for me to be *more* explicit about the problem? Just in case, I'll throw more words/gestures at it.

The problem is that we expect our representation to be, somehow, faithful/accurate. We can see this in microcosm with the false equivalence between household budgets and national economies (or in comparing the USPS to a corporation, or in approval rates for our representative vs Congress as a whole, or in thousands of other individual vs collective contexts). As I've tried to exhibit re: guns, I am unabashedly two-faced. Personally, I think anyone ought to be able to destroy the world. Politically, socially, that's madness and we ought to ban handguns entirely. As the Carter paper on Collective (Telic) Virtue Epistemology tries to tease out, fidelity/accuracy in representation is a huge problem, one exhibited across all scales and domains (tech included). Clinton famously demonstrated *she* understands the difference when she expressed that she has different private vs public positions about Wall Street. Of course! We all should have individual vs. social distinctions. The problem is the map (or lack thereof) between them.

We can even use the virus and the fact that personal psyches have trouble with large numbers, exponential growth and statistics. E.g. that everyone was surprised by how "wrong" the polls were about Clinton being X% likely to win.

Any tool designed to accurately hone in on that tiny little wiggle in the popular vote will continue this false equivalence between individual and collective, increasing the us-vs-them tribalism that produced Trump's win.

Voting and polling are simply symptoms. I'd welcome tools that target the disease rather than making it worse. In the meantime, I'm with Nick. Transparency means paper ballots and some human connection to the tabulation and aggregation process. If Jon thinks that position helps him understand how Republicans win elections, then it's useful to go into a little more detail about the actual problem like I'm trying to do, here.



On 8/21/20 8:20 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> Glen -
> 
> I know you tried to be explicit about what the core problems are, and I
> am aligned with what you have gestured at and I don't expect you to have
> been complete or detailed in this type of forum on such a huge subject.
> Huge in depth, breadth, and perhaps more critical, import.  I am glad
> you are carrying that torch to keep the playing/working field
> illuminated well.
> 
> On the other hand, I *do* think the mechanisms involved in maintaining
> coherence, etc.  must be considered and acted upon as possible/necessary
> as well.  In the idiom of the moment, it isn't enough to declare that
> the Postal Service is sacred and must be allowed/supported to be robust,
> etc... but the staffing policies, the maintenance of physical mailboxes
> and delivery trucks and sorting machines must also be attended to to
> achieve the former.  To the extent that the latter is where the former
> are encoded, I am sympathetic with those who are eager to "get to work"
> on the specific mechanisms which *can* be worked on while the
> abstractions of the moment feel hard/impossible to address.
> 
> I think this is an example of one of our ongoing threads of conversation
> here... not just about the *spectrum* of concrete<->abstract, but the
> need to keep the distinction in our awareness and to evaluate the
> tensions between them and work them against (or more to the point, with)
> one another.
> 
> My experience with systems analysis, engineering, development seem
> relevant and mirrors what I suspect many here also use as their lens.
> Networked Digital Computing is our hammer, so the aspects of our
> Democracy which has purchase for a hammer becomes our nail.
> 
> I suspect that your own steeping in working on modeling biological
> systems and using bio-inspired idioms for modeling non biological
> systems gives you a better perspective on this tension than some of us
> might have.   My own limited understanding of such things suggests that
> this tension between mechanism/goal and intrinsic/extrinsic is key, and
> I am hoping that the tension between Jon's focus (at this moment) on
> mechanism/intrinsic (to the voting system) and your more big-picture
> awareness of the constraints/goals of human endeavor is precisely the
> kind of tension that allows our whole system to pivot from something
> that might have worked (barely, sortof, for many/some of us) in the past
> to something which can continue to meet the whole level of needs in some
> as-yet-unspecified new-Maslowian hierarchy or complex.