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Slamming political rivals may be the most effective way to go viral

cam.ac.uk

111–120 of 123 posts

Re: Slamming political rivals may be the most effective way to go viral

#111
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason for this. The reason for it is that you don't win elections by convincing the other side that they are wrong, and they should vote for you. You win elections by convincing your side to show up. And the best way to do it is by telling your side that giving the victory to your opponent is voting for a Trump.

> The reason for it is that you don't win elections by convincing the other side that they are wrong, and they should vote for you. > You win elections by convincing your side to show up. And the other side not to, either voluntarily or by targeted voter suppression and disenfranchisement. At least, that’s all true in the US, but its mostly artifacts of a strongly-structurally-reinforced two-party system. In multipar…

We see the same patterns in multiparty democracy. It could simply be behavior drawn from US influence, but I doubt it. What the article did not mention (but maybe the study did?) is that under brain scanners, few things trigger pleasure as much as imagining justified violence. It is also very addictive in term of neurochemistry.

In multiparty democracies, the one thing that can however temporary reduce the problem is the consequences of minority government. If enough parties refuses to talk to each other, and always vote against the others, you end up with a situation where the majority will votes no to everything. This does not work, so people then start to prioritize cooperation for a while.

Re: Slamming political rivals may be the most effective way to go viral

#112

Well yes, because all political reporting is basically TMZ for boring, ugly people. It molds politics into some fantasy world of rap battles and gang fights rather than a productive discussion about making good policy. And if your first impulse is to think well yeah because the other side blah blah , you're part of the problem too.

us good, them bad

Re: Slamming political rivals may be the most effective way to go viral

#113
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, let's try this in Google: "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slams": About 73,300 results "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez eats": About 109 results "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sleeps": 1 result "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez debates": About 173 results "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposes": About 5,880 results "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discusses": About 1,150 results Damn, you were right! Also surprised that AOC never sleeps.

Unless you paged thru these and manually counted yourself, do not trust Google’s number of returned results. It’s effectively a random number generator. Source: I’ve worked for Google.

Of course it is not very rigorous but those results seem to indicate a pattern to the contrary.

Re: Slamming political rivals may be the most effective way to go viral

#114

People just regurgitate their sides last night narrative presented to them on their favourite news network. the commitment to truth has been lost. Its all about framing now.

> People just regurgitate their sides last night narrative In my experience, this is one of those tropes. Yes, people will harmonize on their explanations and positions on certain debates. That's human nature. Watch a family describe one of its members and you'll see the same phenomenon. If you go out and talk to voters about what matters to them, however, one tends to find a diversity of topics.

It's hard to believe that the voters I talk to face-to-face are the same human being, the same society and community, posting online.

We perhaps need to bring offline behavior norms into the online world.

Re: Slamming political rivals may be the most effective way to go viral

#115
post #53

This story is so meta. Most of the comments here are slamming the press and social media users for slamming politicians for slamming eachother. Slam slam slam. And here I am, slamming the lot of you. Serious question though. Is this merely a neologism used to describe a phenomenon that was old before Cicero lost his head?

You haven't noticed some changes in politics in the West in the last 10 years? The rise of polarization and conspiracy theories is very well documented.

Re: Slamming political rivals may be the most effective way to go viral

#116
post #93
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RCV can have unexpected surprises, but STAR voting resolves all such issues with RCV.

There is no 'best' voting system, only different trade-offs.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

Arrow's impossibility theorem does not apply to STAR voting. STAR voting is strictly more expressive than Ordinal Voting systems (i.e. RCV), while simultaneously being simpler to implement (and explain/understand). STAR voting also provides other benefits over RCV, such as being district summarizable.

Re: Slamming political rivals may be the most effective way to go viral

#117
post #85
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps we need to change our democracy to stop enforcing a duopoly. I firmly believe that widely implementing STAR Voting ( https://www.starvoting.us/ ) would fix a large swath of problems in politics and public policy.

Canada does not have a duopoly[1], and yet, ABC (Anything But Conservative) has been a rallying cry behind a few elections. The US will probably get better outcomes with a multi-party system, but moving to one will not change the tone of political conversation. (Which is what this thread is about.) [1] Although it suffers from all the typical FPTP nonsense, where the party that gets 30% of the vote gets 100% of the p…

> The US will probably get better outcomes with a multi-party system, but moving to one will not change the tone of political conversation. (Which is what this thread is about.)

I believe it could and would. There will always be extremists, but the current outsized focus on them is driven, in part, by their effectiveness in our two-party Plurality Voting system. In a system where the best compromise candidate is regularly elected, I believe the public discourse would differ.

Re: Slamming political rivals may be the most effective way to go viral

#118
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no 'best' voting system, only different trade-offs.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

Arrow's impossibility theorem does not apply to STAR voting. STAR voting is strictly more expressive than Ordinal Voting systems (i.e. RCV), while simultaneously being simpler to implement (and explain/understand). STAR voting also provides other benefits over RCV, such as being district summarizable.

STAR is not easier to implement than ordinal voting methods in general, it may be easier to implement than IRV [0] in particular. Likewise, while IRV is not district summarizable, some ordinal methods are.

And outside of specialized circumstances that don’t apply to usual candidate elections, the additional information on STAR ballots compared to unforced preference ordinal ballots is noise of no consistent meaning.

Also, Arrows impossibility theorem applies to any balloting system that expresses ranked preferences and produces a ranked result, whether or not it provides additional information or compresses the available rankings for either the inputs or the result (typically, it applies to single winner election results which compress the results the same way FPTP ballots compress ballots—one first place and everyone else tied for not-first-place.)

[0] “RCV” is a name used by advocates to conflate IRV with ordinal methods generally, and accepted by some opponents of ordinal methods to conceal that their arguments apply only to IRV and not the broader class.

Re: Slamming political rivals may be the most effective way to go viral

#119
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no 'best' voting system, only different trade-offs.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

Arrow's impossibility theorem does not apply to STAR voting. STAR voting is strictly more expressive than Ordinal Voting systems (i.e. RCV), while simultaneously being simpler to implement (and explain/understand). STAR voting also provides other benefits over RCV, such as being district summarizable.

I don’t have to know how STAR voting works to know that Gibbard’s 1978 theorem applies.

The only game-forms which are straightforward (meaning, one’s best strategy in what option to choose not depending on how one expects others to choose, or on others’ preferences) are the probability mixtures of “do whatever voter X said to”, “between option A and option B, determine how many voters expressed a preference for A over B and how many for B over A, and if the proportion preferring A is more than p%, pick A, otherwise B”, and “pick outcome C”, with the mixes being any mix of those over any combinations of A,B,C, and X.

(So for example, you could flip a coin, and if heads, select a random pair of candidates, and the winner is whichever of the two got more pair wise votes, if tails, select a random voter and go with who they said was their top pick, and if the coin lands on its edge pick Neil deGras Tyson. This would count as “straightforward” because in choosing how you want to vote, it doesn’t matter at all how anyone else is voting.)

(Another example is if there are just 2 candidates period. This is also “straightforward”)

Outside of such probability mixtures, there can always be situations where your estimate of how other people will vote would influence the most effective way for you to vote in order to best improve your expected outcomes according to your preferences.

Outside of such “straightforward” game-forms, there can’t be a function from (your preferences (like, vNM utility, not just a ranking) between the different outcomes) to (a dominant strategy for you).

Whatever STAR is, it doesn’t change this fact.

Re: Slamming political rivals may be the most effective way to go viral

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kinda also the reverse as well. AOC ran a well-ran campaign to win her place at the table in congress. Republicans slamming her day-in and day-out made her a household name. Like, AOC should be, (with no disrespect) basically a nobody in politics, she is a 1.2 term representative. But republicans wanted a villain and boy did they make one. Beyond that, I kinda also think a critical bit in this is to understand…

/r/murderedbyAOC is a subreddit with seemingly limitless content. I for one believe that slamming people is her shtick. She is blue team Trump

I've said this a few times, cause I find it interesting.

That subreddit is literally filled with one person's posts. It feels like a blatant pr/propaganda/the positive version of the former two campaign that constantly worms its way to the top of reddit.

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