Tag: politics

love & politics & technology

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

Gentle Reader: this is one of those pieces where ya write the title first, and then ya see what comes out the fountain pen. Love, Politics, & Technology … I mean, shoot for the moon, land on the roof, amirite?

Love

What do I know about love? Less than any good 3-minute hit song on the topic, I assure you. I’m not being modest, it is what it is: I definitely can’t do better than a song about love that millions of people love.

But I know what I know about love, and I do think that I’ve learned something recently. I’ve had many decades of failure – generations, in fact – followed by solid success. I’ve learned something that may be helpful to other people, so now I feel like I’m obligated to write it down ….

Ok, now I’ve judo’d myself into feeling like this is a good thing, instead of being embarrassed about trying.

So here goes: for me, the key to love is that when I don’t have the love I need, my coping behavior is to think about it. I’m not saying I always come up with a solution – that is verifiably untrue! I’m saying that obsessive thinking is the brick that remains in my wall of cope, even today.

Over a very long and difficult period of struggle, I’ve eliminated the self-destructive copes I had, and they were a-plenty. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no California hippie, I’m not gonna tell you how to namaste and stuff, not gonna sell you yoni balls. If you know, you know. I just mean that if you have self-destructive copes, you know what I mean already. Nobody and nothing can help you get rid of the self-destructive copes but you, so I don’t know what to tell you about those. I truly wish you luck and hope you conquer your demons.

So for me, thinking is my cope – for reasons that aren’t relevant here. What matters is that people use a “cope” to avoid feelings. Now that I’ve gotten rid of my self-destructive copes: the bridges I burn can light my way, baby! Back in the day, I was setting fires just because. Now I burn the forest to see the trees.

That’s a metaphor, take it easy. I know, it’s not easy being green. Sorry, I love dad jokes 🙂

Anyway, when I don’t have the love I need, I can’t stop thinking about it. But thinking about it doesn’t mean I can do anything about it.

I’m just gonna think about it, and since my self-destructive copes are gone, all she has to be is the person who can accept the things about myself that I cannot change. The things I can’t change are just my own human failures, no biggie. They’re not that hard to accept without the self-destructive copes that used to come with the package.

And on my end, all I have to do is think about the things she cannot change, and understand that these are human parts of the human I love. Easy peasy.

Yeah, I know that’s what’s meant by the advice “Find the lock that fits your key.” I’m a fast thinker, but sometimes a slow learner.

Politics

I ran for California State Senate in 2022, in a district that spans a million people across the west side of Northern California. I loved doing it, and I lost by a lot. After the experience, I realized I could never be a political actor again.

I didn’t mind losing as much as I thought I would, but I vowed: never again. I puzzled about this for a long time, and only recently did I understand that it was all about love.

I love trying to fight for what’s right. I love meeting people and understanding their concerns, and then trying to fix their problems. I don’t love public speaking, but I really enjoy it as performance. I thought that I would love politics, and that I’d keep trying to win a seat through many elections, no matter how many losses I had to pile up first. I was expecting to lose, and thought that I’d try for decades if that’s what it took.

But when I lost, I quit forever, and I couldn’t figure out exactly why.

Now I know. The problem is, I love to share my thoughts for the very specific reason of developing a conversation. Politics, whatever else it is, is a job of directing the conversation. And to me, that’s actually a job of destroying the conversation.

I don’t love that. That’s the opposite of what I love. That’s why I had to quit politics forever. 

I talk with people so that I can think together with them, not to tell them what to think. To me, that’s giving them love, and that feels good. Politics feels very, very bad 😦

Technology

I’ve been working in technology for over 25 years now, so once in a while some bright young tech person asks an old guy like me to speak to some future thinkers who want to hear about what I think the past means for the future. I think I’m too old to understand the present, but I’m young enough to see the future.

Just recently, I thought I gave a really good short presentation about the future of technology. And then afterwards, I tried to record the presentation and realized that it sucked without the audience, no matter how well I delivered the performance or what I said in the recording.

No audience, no joy. 

And now I’ve realized that I’m going to quit giving recorded tech presentations.

Yeah, that’s weird, right? I mean it’s obvious that I couldn’t reproduce the joy without the audience, but why does that mean I’m never going to record tech discussions again? I love talking about technology with technologists in public, do I really want to lose that?

No audience, no joy. What exactly does that mean? In my particular case, it meant that most of the presentation was about getting the audience to like me, so that we could have a good conversation. The convo was great, the liking part was necessary for a lot of normal human reasons – but also substantively superfluous to the slide presentation.

There was only one slide of any substantive interest in that whole preso, and here it is:

I think that if you’re the kind of technologist who would enjoy a conversation with me, you already basically know what is meant by this slide.

In any case, if you like me already, for whatever other reason, including liking what you’ve read above or liking what you see in the slide, and you love thinking about technology – then feel free to reach out to me …

Just remember, as a technologist, that if we record the conversation, even if we simply write about it: we will lose information! This isn’t quantum physics, but it’s as sure as Schrödinger that a conversation has indeterminate meaning until it’s observed. Consequently, an observed conversation has a different meaning than an unobserved conversation. This cannot be solved by LLMs.

wishful thinking

~ ginsu ~ 1 Comment

I was wrong about why Warren would win the Presidency, bringing a merciful end to my brief non-career as a political prognosticator. (Though really, if a poor record ended dumb predictions, there would be no pundits at all.) I have a lot of the same thoughts that many other Warren supporters have; I don’t have much to add to these types of reflections on:

Clearly my Warren pick was fueled by wishful thinking, so maybe the best use I can make of this space is to try to understand exactly what I was wishing for – this will help me determine whether it’s reasonable to continue wishing or whether I should adhere to a version of reality that doesn’t include those wishes.

Wish #1. I was wishing for an end to the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama line of power. This isn’t the place to push an excoriating critique of neoliberal economics, nor is this about wanting Boomers to just get out of the way. (Warren, after all, is a Boomer.) I simply believe that a small group of like-minded individuals has dominated our politics for far too long. Most people do not see the through-line from Reagan to Obama, but their donors do. There is a solid core of moneyed interests that naturally funds campaigns that protect their wealth. I think that it is their right to do so, but there is no countervailing collective force that could find a better balance of interests. As a result, elites are engaging in a real tragedy of the commons that appears unstoppable.

Wish #2. I was wishing that the media would break its usual pattern of reporting during this cycle. When I was in college (OMG that was 30 fucking years ago), my intro American Politics professor said that “horse race” election coverage was a critical weakness in our democracy that could lead to our demise as a nation. His thesis was that representative democracy depends on citizens making choices based on information about the candidates’ positions. Horse race coverage makes politics into a game show rather than a process, totally obscuring substantive positions. I took that as received wisdom and thought that surely we’d eventually break that cycle. I thought that the media distortions of 2016 were so pernicious and so obvious that we couldn’t possibly continue down this path. I was not just wrong, but incredibly naive as well.

In retrospect, this wishful thinking was completely nonsensical. I was wishing for a reversal of clear trends that have been flourishing for my entire adult life. It’s ok to believe that change is possible, but it’s stupid to believe that it’s probable when looking at powerful long-term trends. The most likely case is for powerful trends to continue until they collapse from their own weight. In fact, the more perverse a trend seems, the more likely it is to continue because in going against all reasonable desires, the trend must be fueled by something more powerful than any of those desires.

So what does “collapse from their own weight” look like? My wishes were overcome by truths – let’s look at what those truths would turn into as they continue on current trend:

Truth #1: Powerful interests retain their hold on power until they are destroyed by their own overreach.

Truth #2: Media coverage will always push for engagement (views, clicks, outrage) over any other goals, until there is no distinction whatsoever between news and entertainment.

In my previous wishful thinking, what were the hopes underlying the wishes? I was hoping that the election of Trump was kind of an aberration, or rather the last dying gasp of several bad ideas. I was hoping that there were enough people in power that wanted to share the wealth with people out of power. I was hoping that this country wouldn’t become the worst version of itself.

All of those wishes seem childish now. What they really all amount to is a wish for peace. Peace between different ways of life. Peace between different kinds of people. Peace between different levels of advantage and disadvantage.

If you believe, as I do, that this country has never been at peace – that there has always been the violence of oppression, bigotry, and inequality – then it is wishful thinking to believe that there ever will be peace. The trends that have led to our current situation have always been there, and they seem much likelier to intensify than dissipate naturally.

Peace by definition disappears with violence. We are not at peace now, because the violence has occurred and is ongoing. The suppression of differing people, ideologies, and backgrounds has been accomplished by long histories of varied violence, whether physical, political, or economic. Once peace has been disturbed by violence, it rarely returns without violence. I wish this weren’t true, but wishful thinking doesn’t do anything but hide the ugly truths.

In short: Things are bad, and they aren’t getting better. They only way they will get better is by getting a lot worse, which isn’t something I’d wish on anyone. But my wishes are irrelevant.

what we talk about when we talk about electability

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

What does it mean for one candidate to be more “electable” than another? Some people object to even posing this question, arguing that “electability” is just a cover for maintaining the status quo, generally favoring dominant class, race, and gender patterns. In other words, by “electability” many people just mean that they want a candidate that most resembles prior successful candidates, and since the vast majority of prior successful candidates were older, white, male, and centrist – to be electable often just means to be an old white man from the political center.

But when we talk about electability, we’re not just talking about the qualities of the current candidates. We’re really talking about what happened in the last election. We want someone that’s not prone to the same dynamics that lost the last election. That’s really challenging today, because over three years after the last Presidential election, there isn’t broad agreement about what happened. The three prevailing theories are:

  1. Bigotry. This theory says that Trump supporters are fundamentally motivated by racism and sexism.
  2. Economic despair. This theory says that the hollowing out of the middle class has led to sentiment against immigration, free trade and rapid modernization.
  3. Media dysfunction. This theory says that both intended (by Russia) and unintended (by BigTech) consequences of modern media distorted the election results.

The easiest opinion to hold is “It’s a combination of all of the above!” But most people who claim to hold this opinion secretly believe that only one of the three is the truly critical reason for the result of the last election. Often this is a secret even to themselves, but the truth is revealed by your opinion on who is really the most electable candidate.

If you think Biden is the most electable candidate, then you think that bigotry was the critical factor in the last election. Biden is the old white man from the center, and despite his high approval among black voters, he also was a main proponent of harsh criminal laws that disproportionately harmed black people, so he looks safe enough to many bigots. This is the right profile to sway bigoted swing voters. You tell yourself, “He’ll win if he can just avoid shooting himself in the foot.”

If you think Bernie is the most electable, then you think that economic despair was the critical factor last time. All those poor hollowed out voters they keep interviewing in diners should love the economic message that Bernie has been consistently espousing for decades. Doesn’t hurt that Bernie is old, white, and male – but if you thought that does the trick, then you would go with Biden. You go with Bernie instead because he’s got the loudest, clearest message about fundamental economic change. You say, “He’ll win if he can just avoid being tagged as a socialist.”

If you think Warren is the most electable, then you think that media dysfunction is what really drove the last election. She’s the smartest, the most accomplished in both pre-politics career and national legislation, and a member of the largest identity group (women). This time around, the Russians will still be a factor, but if we can only police the mainstream media enough to get them to concentrate on substantive policy positions, then Warren’s policy and legislative record should win the day. “She’ll win if only she’s portrayed fairly.”

By the way, if you think Buttigieg is the most electable … keep thinking. Maybe he’s the candidate for those who really do think the last election was the outcome of a perfect balance of the three reasons. You think that bigotry won’t hurt him too much, since he’s white and male, and even though he’s gay you think the country’s sentiment has changed enough so that it’s a non-factor for bigots. You think he can navigate the discussion of economic despair by simply smooth-talking the issues without troubling his biggest donors. You think the media loves him, and will continue to treat him with kid gloves. These are delusional thoughts. The reality is that Buttigieg is vulnerable for all three of the reasons in the prior election: Bigots really are bigoted, including against gay people. Buttigieg is clearly a proponent of the economic status quo, anyone in economic despair will see right through him. And the media will turn against Buttigieg, in part because that’s just want they do, but ultimately it’s because there’s no there there. He was the mayor of a small city, with zero national exposure. That’s even less qualification for national office than a reality television star. Trump would destroy Buttigieg in a landslide.

As a reward for reading this post, let me remind you of what we talk about when we talk about love. It’s a good read, somehow both hopeful and disheartening, and strangely resonant to peruse after pondering our current politics.

why warren

~ ginsu ~ 1 Comment

I’m absurdly proud of having predicted Trump as President, more than two months before the Republican convention, and six months before the general election. I know of only two earlier public predictions, by a professional pollster two months before me and a cartoonist extraordinaire more than eight months before me. Ah, but pride goeth before a fall, so let me jump off that cliff now, by making my prediction eighteen months before Election Day: Elizabeth Warren will win in a landslide. (btw, if you’re going to comment now or later on why I’m wrong, do me a favor and include the link where you called the results of the 2016 election beforehand. Oh, you have no public record of that? Then shush, you.)

The Democratic nomination will come down to Sanders or Warren. But first, let me give the two-sentence dismissal of all the other nominees:

  1. Biden: He’s the last bastion of the Democratic establishment. But the machine is crumbling, and he has too much history to overcome.
  2. Buttigieg: He’s the flavor du jour, but lacks substance. Personality can win against substance, as we’ve seen time and time again, but his personality isn’t actually strong enough.
  3. Booker: America isn’t ready for its second black President. And if it were, Booker’s “love” campaign isn’t the right tenor this cycle.
  4. Harris: A black woman president is two bridges too far for most of this country. And she’s hindered by her record as a prosecutor.
  5. O’Rourke: Beto has already flamed out. If you’re running the Kennedy playbook, you need to actually be a Kennedy.
  6. Castro, Delaney, Gabbard, Gillibrand, Hickenlooper, Inslee, Klobuchar, Messam, Moulton, Ryan, Swalwell, Williamson, Yang: No. Too far behind, nothing distinctive enough for them to catch up.

Let me be clear: I don’t want any of the above to be true. I’m just saying I think it is true, and mere wishes otherwise aren’t going to win this horserace.

Sanders and Warren might seem similar. They’re both old, white, and progressive. But they have one starkly obvious difference – no, not that one is a man and the other is a woman – one is a socialist and the other is a capitalist.

Sanders is a democratic socialist, and proud of that label – and deserving of both the label and the pride. A lot of the country has come around to positions that he has been espousing for his entire professional life. Warren wouldn’t label herself this way, but she’s a democratic capitalist – she believes in market mechanisms to address many social problems, but believes the market must be firmly guided by the best interests of a democracy.

At the end of the day, as much recent fervor as there’s been for socialist policies, this country isn’t going to elect an avowed socialist as president, at least not yet. Warren’s policies and her effectiveness in getting them into the discussion will win both the media and the electorate to her side. She won’t be hindered like Hillary was by either her past or by forces she doesn’t control. The distortions of the prior Presidential election can be summarized as: sexism and Russia. Both will continue to have an effect, but that effect will be much smaller than the prior election, due to countervailing forces that have arisen in the meantime.

Once Warren wins the Democratic nomination, she’ll crush Trump in a landslide. I’ll go over the rationale for this … in about eleven months. By Super Tuesday, if this post has any legs, it’ll be worth writing the follow up. And if it’s wrong, well, pride is a sin anyway; I shall repent.

WWGD?

~ ginsu ~ 1 Comment

Six months ago, I said that Trump would win the election in part because the rise of new media destroyed the historic function of the media as our Fourth Estate. I was upset that product managers at our most important Internet companies seem to refuse to own the problem that is so clearly theirs.

Now that the chickens have come home to roost in a big orange nest of hair, others are saying that the election was, in a sense, rigged by Facebook. They say fake news has defeated Facebook. Facebook denies responsibility, while people are literally begging them to address the problem.

Product managers at Facebook are surely listening now. If any happen to be listening here, let me say: I’m sorry I called you cowards. I realize that today’s state was hard to foresee, and that the connection to your product even still seems tenuous. I am awed at the great product you’ve built, and I understand that no one knows the data better than you do, and that it is tough to take criticism that comes from sources completely ignorant of your key metrics. It’s not easy to regard something so successful as having deep flaws that are hurting many people. I think it is a very human choice to ignore the criticism, and continue to develop the product on the same principles that you have in the past, with the same goals.

I have faith that you are taking at least some of the criticism to heart. I imagine that you know that you can apply machine learning to identify more truthful content. I am sure that you will experiment with labels that identify fact-checked content, as Google News is doing. Once you reliably separate facts from fiction, I’m sure you’ll do great things with it.

I’m still concerned that facts aren’t enough. I think we’re in a post-fact politics, where people no longer (if they ever did) make their political choices based on facts. I have read many analyses of the election results, many theories about why people voted as they did. There are many fingers pointing blame at the DNC and the Electoral College; at racism, sexism, bigotry; at high finance, globalism, neoliberalism; at wealth inequality, the hollowing out of the middle class, the desperation that comes with loss of privilege. I am not convinced that giving people more correct facts actually will address any of this.

The most incisive theory that I’ve seen about today’s voters says that the divide in our country isn’t about racism or class alone, but about a more comprehensive tribalism, for which facts are irrelevant:

There is definitely some misinformation, some misunderstandings. But we all do that thing of encountering information and interpreting it in a way that supports our own predispositions. Recent studies in political science have shown that it’s actually those of us who think of ourselves as the most politically sophisticated, the most educated, who do it more than others.

So I really resist this characterization of Trump supporters as ignorant.

There’s just more and more of a recognition that politics for people is not — and this is going to sound awful, but — it’s not about facts and policies. It’s so much about identities, people forming ideas about the kind of person they are and the kind of people others are. Who am I for, and who am I against?

Policy is part of that, but policy is not the driver of these judgments. There are assessments of, is this someone like me? Is this someone who gets someone like me?

Under this theory, what is needed isn’t more facts, but more empathy. I have no doubt that Facebook can spread more facts, but I don’t think it will help. The great question for Facebook product managers is, Can this product spread more empathy?

The rest of this might be a little abstruse, but here I’m speaking directly to product managers of Facebook News Feed, who know exactly what I mean. You have an amazing opportunity to apply deep learning to this question. There is a problem that the feedback loop is long, so it will be difficult to retrain the production model to identify the best models for empathetic behavior, but I think you can still try to do something. There is some interesting academic research about short-term empathy training that can provide some food for thought.

I am convinced that you, and only you, have the data to tackle this problem. It is beyond certainty that there are Facebook users that have become more empathetic during the last five years. It is likely that you can develop a model of these users, and from there you can recreate the signals that they experienced, and see if those signals foster empathy in other users. I don’t think I need to lay it out for you, but the process looks something like this:

  1. Interview 1000 5-year Facebook users to identify which ones have gained in empathy over the last five years, which have reduced their empathy, and which are unchanged.
  2. Provide those three user cohorts to your machine learning system to develop three models of user behavior, Empathy Gaining, Empathy Losing, Empathy Neutral.
  3. Use each of those 3 models to identify 1000 more users in each of those categories. Interview those 3000 people, feed their profiles back into the system as training data.
  4. See if the models have improved by again using them to identify 1000 more users in each category.

At this point (or maybe a few more cycles), you will know whether Facebook has a model of Empathy Gaining user behavior. If it turns out that you do have a successful model, of course the next thing to do would be to expose Empathy Losing and Empathy Neutral users to the common elements in the Empathy Gaining cohort that were not in the other two cohorts.

But now at this point you are in a place where the regression cycle is very long. Is it too long? Only you will know. How amazing would it be to find out that there’s a model of short-term empathy training that is only a week or two long? People use Facebook for hours a day, way more than they would ever attend empathy training classes. This seems to me to be an amazing opportunity. Why wouldn’t you try to find out whether there’s something to this theory?

One reason might be a risk to revenue models. Here I’d encourage you too see what Matt Cutts said to Tim O’Reilly about Google’s decision to reduce the prominence of content farms in search results, even though that meant losing revenue:

Google took a big enough revenue hit via some partners that Google actually needed to disclose Panda as a material impact on an earnings call. But I believe it was the right decision to launch Panda, both for the long-term trust of our users and for a better ecosystem for publishers.

I understand this mindset personally because I was there too. At the same time Matt was dealing with Google’s organic search results, I was dealing with bad actors in Google’s ads systems. So I was even more directly in the business of losing revenue – every time we found bad ads, Google lost money. Nevertheless, we had the support of the entire organization in reducing bad ads, because we knew that allowing our system to be a toxic cesspool was bad for business in the long run, even if there were short-term benefits. In fact, we knew that killing bad ads would be great for business in the longer run.

News Feed product managers, I’m not writing this from a position of blaming you. I was in a situation very much like yours and I know it’s hard. I can also tell you, it feels really really good to solve this type of problem. I am convinced that an empathy-fostering Facebook would create enormous business opportunities far exceeding your current path. It is also entirely consistent with the company mission of making the world more open and connected. You can make a great product, advance your company’s mission, and do great good in the world all at the same time. You are so fortunate to be in the position you’re in, and I hope you make the best of it.

trump card

~ ginsu ~ 5 Comments

Donald Trump is going to be the next President of the United States. And technology is to blame. If you disagree with either of those statements, you just haven’t been paying attention.

Why is Trump about to win the Republican nomination? Do you blame ignorance, stupidity, racism, sheer anger? Do you blame the cynicism and greed of the Republican party over the last 30 years? All of these answers are rooted in an ungenerous assumption about the many millions of voters who have voted for Trump and will continue to do so. You would be saying that these people are fools, ignoramuses, racists. I think that is wrong substantively, but I know for sure that is wrong for you as a person. Always choose to be generous and empathetic in your assumptions about people, so long as that serves you just as well as your lesser instincts toward mean-spirited judgment.

The generous and empathetic view here accepts that the political system of this country is incontrovertibly broken for the majority of people. And since this country is ostensibly a democracy, that majority is understandably willing to vote for the person that most loudly claims that they will revolutionize the existing system. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, taken together, represent the vast majority of this country’s voters.

Trump won his party’s nomination (and Bernie will not) because Trump received billions and billions of dollars worth of free advertising. In a democracy, getting the message out to the people is the fundamental lubricant of the polity, which is why for nearly all of our nation’s history, the media have been regarded as the Fourth Estate, an equal peer to our functioning government alongside the executive, legislative and judicial branches.

But in the last twenty years, intensified in the last decade, the media have undergone a tremendous upheaval, all wrought by technology. And here is where we, all of us in technology, have been so proud of how we shaped the future, so unbearably, insufferably proud. We were proud to destroy Old Media, to disintermediate the gatekeepers, to revel in the creative destruction. Pride goeth before the fall.

What we didn’t realize, didn’t take seriously, is the real value of media as an institution in a properly functioning democracy, the Fourth Estate that keeps the others honest. We destroyed the gatekeepers without any foresight that we were replacing them with monsters much more insidious: the tyranny of the click, the plutocracy of the pageview, merciless metrics. Technology has become a dominant force in our culture over the last twenty years, and we as technologists were wholly unprepared for the responsibility.

If you think Hillary Clinton is going to win the general election, you have an optimism that is wholly unsupported by the slow-motion train wreck that has unfolded before our eyes these last few months. What could possibly support that optimism? Would you deny the obvious truth that this is a representative democracy, and that the majority of voters have stated their preference for overthrowing the current system? Hillary is a creature of the system, she cannot win over those voters.

The only hope is that the will of the majority will become disengaged from this election. They will not do so in the face of the billions and billions and more billions of free advertising that the media will continue to lavish upon Trump because they are no longer gatekeeping bastions of the Fourth Estate, but slaves to the clicks and advertising dollars that the technology revolution have left to them as the only form of viability that they have left. Believing that Hillary Clinton will win the presidency is like believing the New York Times is still The Paper of Record.

Bury your head in the sand if you must. I’m making plans for 2020.

modern politics

~ ginsu ~ 5 Comments

If you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re not conservative when you’re old, you have no brains.

This cleverly constructed insult is very hard to refute from personal knowledge: if you’re young, you only have half the knowledge required to speak from experience; if you’re old, disagreement is evidence of stupidity. There does actually seem to be some correlation between age and political philosophy, but fitting statistics over politics is an exercise in explaining music with numbers – it explains everything except what it actually feels like to hear a song, which is only everything that matters about music.

On the few occasions that I pay attention to politics, I feel like the crabby old man railing about what the kids are listening to these days – it sounds like so much noise, and each election seems to bring only a dismaying choice between two unpalatable options. I wish that elections weren’t about making the “least worst” choice. But I don’t pine for the days of big band music, bebop or classic rock – to the contrary, what bothers me is that no choice ever seems to offer anything that aligns with my sense of a modern world.

The essay “Why I left the GOP” is a journey from one pre-modern society to another. The author explains his privileged background, mainstream education and birthright belief in competition and free markets – but then war, Katrina, and actual contact with honest-to-goodness poor people opened his eyes. He had no choice but to flee the GOP for the liberal heart of the Democratic party. I’ve seen this article triumphantly distributed by my left-leaning friends, but it’s sad how his story is all about what he’s fleeing from – there’s nothing at all about what he’s fleeing to. I like everything about the article but its ending – it’s the story of a man who ran out of a burning building only to sprint blindly towards a cliff.

Most of my “intelligent” friends lean Democratic, in no small part because of the anti-intellectualism of today’s Republican party. The irony here is that the intelligent citizen recognizes that the conservative values of community, decency, humanity and individual strength require that we extend these benefits to everyone in our society. But there is stunning intellectual inconsistency in the failure to acknowledge the evidence of governmental incompetence in providing the most basic services. Is there anyone who would sing the praises of their most recent interaction with the DMV, IRS, Post Office, or community planning board? Is there any large governmental agency that provides the daily benefit of America’s largest corporations? Oh sure, you can rail against Exxon or Bank of America, but can you remember the last time you couldn’t put gas in your tank or find a working ATM? Who brought you more joy yesterday, the federal or state government, or Apple or Google or Amazon?

Rich people who don’t want want to pay taxes because they don’t want to help poor people are just being assholes. But rich people who don’t want to pay taxes because they have no faith that government can help poor people are just being rational, they are just responding to the daily evidence before their eyes. Why isn’t there a third party that can satisfy both the liberal heart and conservative brain? The largest third party in the U.S. is the Libertarian party, which has succeeded only in being more heartless than conservatives and more senseless than liberals. Can’t we do better than that?

I am waiting and hoping for the day when technology will transform politics. So far, the incredible rise of the Internet, social media, mobile devices, and electronic payment have only been used in politics for the same old purposes: raising money for existing political parties. Someday these modern advances will come together to form a new political party that is committed to direct change in our society without relying on the fundamentally outdated infrastructure of the old political system. We will see a political party formed on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, organized on Facebook and Twitter and Google+, funded through Paypal and Amazon and Square – and it will improve people’s lives through Donors Choose and other direct means of helping society without the inefficiency of governmental oversight. We need political leaders who recognize that this is not just the future, this is the unevenly distributed present, and government needs to be reconstructed to enable this transformation.

sports talk

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

James Fallows notes that Bill Clinton’s speeches succeed because he treats his listeners as if they are smart, while most political speeches appeal to emotion more than fact. Fallows makes an interesting comparison:

The main other place you hear discussion based on the same assumption that people of any background, education level, or funny-sounding accent can understand sophisticated back-and-forth of argument and counter-claim is sports-talk radio. (“I understand the concern about Strasburg’s arm. But … “) You hear insults and disagreements and put-downs on sports-talk discussions. You rarely hear the kind of deliberate condescension, the unconcealable effort as if talking to slow learners, of many political “authorities” addressing the unwashed.

I’ve noticed this for years. I can hardly stand to listen to political news entertainment shows, whether Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann. Every one of them treats listeners as frothing idiots, and the callers they support on their airwaves only reinforce the image with loony claims and outrageous statements. One of Fallows’ readers echoes my sentiments exactly:

I’ve begun listening to sports talk radio on my way to work because I cannot bear to listen to the news–even NPR cannot escape the false equivalence trap and I find it depressing.  I am not at all interested in sports–as I was so obsessively when I was a boy.  But I enjoy the calls, the laughs, the passion of everybody on 98.5, The Sports Hub. […]  Nobody talks down–in fact, the hosts and callers pile on detail after detail, especially here in Massachusetts about the loved/hated/damned poor Red Sox and all their troubles.

The most successful sports talk radio hosts are highly intelligent and utterly ruthless in insisting that callers contribute information that is useful and fact-based. The culture and language of these shows can be crude, but their passion and devotion to truth is refreshing in a way that barely exists in other public discourse. Why is sports talk so intelligent while political talk is so dumb? Noam Chomsky believes that people invest their intelligence in sports because they are disenfranchised from more valuable pursuits:

Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can’t get involved in them in a very serious way — so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports.

You’re trained to be obedient; you don’t have an interesting job; there’s no work around for you that’s creative; in the cultural environment you’re a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they’re in the hands of the rich folks. So what’s left? Well, one thing that’s left is sports — so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that.

This fits into Chomsky’s theories of society, but on reflection it makes no sense. People can’t really contribute meaningfully to sport, and they know it – you can have pride in your team and buy a ticket, buy a jersey or hat, but you’ll never be on the sporting field. The separation between the sports fan and the elite athlete is even greater than that between the citizen and the politician.

What separates sport from politics, in terms of the intelligence people will bring to the discourse, is that sports has rules and measurable outcomes, and passive participation can be rewarded by being right about the outcome (rewarded by pride, or in the case of sports gambling, by money). Politics lacks easily definable rules and outcomes that are clearly connected to actions on the field.

Is there something that the Internet can do about this, is there some kind of startup that could make politics more like sports, and therefore more attractive for intelligent public discourse? A company called HubDub tried something like this, making a prediction market for politics, sports, entertainment and other topics. Unfortunately, trying to pin down public predictions turned out to be challenging. They ended up shutting down their general prediction market to focus on the most popular topic with a steady revenue model: sports, of course. FanDuel seems like great fun, but it’s also another demonstration that most people will apply their intelligence, time and money to sports in a way that they just won’t to politics.

mistakes were made

~ ginsu ~ 3 Comments

Compare and contrast –

In the startup world, failure is a badge of honor.  An honest postmortem of mistakes made along the way is greatly appreciated by the community.  For example:

The comments on each of those posts are overwhelmingly sympathetic, admiring and supportive.  Celebrating failure in context is a distinguishing aspect of our business culture versus many other countries.

In contrast, when the President of the US admits mistakes, the national and international coverage seems to imply that the admission itself its newsworthy and perhaps unwise.  Comments are largely vitriolic and incoherent.

Now, I think that failure can be overrated as an indicator of future success.  But I firmly believe that the openness to failure in business is one of the things that makes this country truly great.  It’s ironic and sad that this cultural gem does not extend into our political arena.

UPDATE 4 Oct 2010: Here’s a great list of the 25 best startup postmortems.