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The FBI tried to ambush my source

theintercept.com

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Re: The FBI tried to ambush my source

#141

Post by GiorgioG »

brnaftr361 wrote: post #127
GiorgioG wrote: post #4

I hope stories like this open the eyes of folks who are die-hard Democrats or die-hard Republicans. They are not on your side. They are on their own side. I don't doubt that most folks at these agencies are hard-working Americans who believe they're doing what's best for our country. Having said that, this kind of unchecked power is dangerous.

If we knockout the nationalism, what's left? States, counties, for some - districts. Thirty years and I've met one representative. America wasn't designed to operate at the current scale and it's causing considerable strife internally and externally. We're effectively the de facto world sovereign, and at the same time we the people and the collective will is so contrived as to be totally incomprehensible, largely, I…

Nationalism isn't the problem. The problem is political tribalism. Both parties have become extreme in their own right and now people don't feel they have much in common with one another because of this extreme rhetoric coming from both sides.

Re: The FBI tried to ambush my source

#142

Post by robonerd »

anonporridge wrote: post #83
robonerd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally slightly prefer approval voting (e.g. select all candidates you like, no ranking, most votes wins). Yes, I like this one a lot more. > There are municipalities and states that have implemented both. I think for low-stake elections that most people don't vote in anyway, experimentation is relatively safe. But I wouldn't want to try anything new with fiery federal elections, particularly not the presiden…

> Yes, but they tolerate it for the most part. Arguable after the 2020 election.

For the most part. Tens of millions of people voted, a few hundred (maybe a few thousand) people rioted, and the rest are mostly just complaining. All in all, I'd say the current system is working pretty well.

Re: The FBI tried to ambush my source

#143

Post by robonerd »

rosnd wrote: post #102
robonerd wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think ranked choice voting is too nerdy for much of the general public to understand; not the principle of it but the actual practice of how to tally votes and calculate the winner. Given the choice between a voting system the public demonstrably tolerates even though it isn't mathematically fair, and a voting system that is mathematically fair but is likely to cause confusion and distrust in elections, I prefer th…

Do you think that Americans are unusually stupid? Other countries manage this without any issues.

> Do you think that Americans are unusually stupid?

A large minority of them are, yes. There's millions of people in this country that flunked their way through 12 years of math class and never retained anything more than basic arithmetic. 4% of Americans are classified as "functionally illiterate", that's 13 million people who effectively can't even read.

The point of democracy is to placate everybody, not just the smarter portion of society, so the mechanisms of democracy should be simple enough for somebody with a simple mind to understand. "Count votes and pick who got the most" is generally such a system.

Re: The FBI tried to ambush my source

#144

Post by naniwaduni »

JTbane wrote: post #106
toma_caliente wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This statement seems to be in conflict with everything I've read about ranked choice voting. If I can put my preferred independent candidate as rank 1 and a safe choice at rank 2 then this is objectively better than just voting for the safe choice out of fear of stealing votes away and giving it to the opposition. What systems would you prefer?

Just wanted to chime in that all ranked voting systems can be gamed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

Good thing approval voting isn't a ranked voting system!

Re: The FBI tried to ambush my source

#145

Post by ineedasername »

TLDR: the FBI was trying to catch some in the act of commiting a crime. This seems fine.

A separate issue mentioned, but was a completely separate event, was the DOJ trying to force the journalist into revealing a different source in a different leak. This does not seem fine, but it also failed

Re: The FBI tried to ambush my source

#146

Post by dragonwriter »

naniwaduni wrote: post #144
JTbane wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to chime in that all ranked voting systems can be gamed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

Good thing approval voting isn't a ranked voting system!

Approval voting is an unforced preference (i.e., allows ties) ranked voting system with only two ranks just like bullet voting systems (plurality and majority-runoff), differing in that it allows ties in both ranks and not just the second.

Arrow’s Theorem applies to unforced preference ranked voting systems (with or without limited numbers of preference ranks) the same way as it does to forced preference ranked systems.

Re: The FBI tried to ambush my source

#147

Post by rendaw »

lapcat wrote: post #105
nullc wrote: post #104

I doubt the source existed, the lawyer sounds like a fantasist and both the reporter and FBI fell for his stories. It pretty much says right there in the story that the lawyer was usually full of shit-- "I have concluded that the American lawyer loved to play games with everyone ... The lawyer told Ridd that he frequently lied to me and my colleagues at the Times ... 'I lie my ass off every day'". From personal exper…

> I doubt the source existed, the lawyer sounds like a fantasist and both the reporter and FBI fell for his stories. Except that Risen said he already met the source. The ambush was for their follow-up meeting.

The question isn't whether the human exists, but whether the human had any information. Even if the source wasn't in on it, he could have been lead on by the lawyer.

Re: The FBI tried to ambush my source

#148

Post by asimpleusecase »

The story reads like a diversion tactic. What proof is there that there was an FBI team waiting around? A compromised source (the unnamed lawyer) introduces a juicy lead just a the peek of other litigation in the reporters life. But the juicy lead comes of nothing. Don’t have any way to know if there was anything real behind it. A confusing hall of mirrors emerged where the reporter was going to a meeting arranged by a source compromised by the FBI and then canceled in effect by the same person. Reads like diversion and playing psyops on the reporter.

Re: The FBI tried to ambush my source

#149

Post by Beldin »

anonporridge wrote: post #15
GiorgioG wrote: post #4

I hope stories like this open the eyes of folks who are die-hard Democrats or die-hard Republicans. They are not on your side. They are on their own side. I don't doubt that most folks at these agencies are hard-working Americans who believe they're doing what's best for our country. Having said that, this kind of unchecked power is dangerous.

Why else do you think career politicians from across the spectrum, from liberal Gavin Newsom to conservative Ron DeSantis, have worked hard to explicitly block ranked choice voting reforms? Not just voice their opinions against it, but proactively halt and override legislative reforms when they happen. The duopoly doesn't benefit from making a more fair and inclusive system that allows for a greater diversity of poli…

District-based elections, where each district had one winner, tend to lead to two-party systems. The counting mechanism doesn't meaningfully impact this. If you want to change this, you can expand current districts to cover multiple seats. That way, second-placed, third-placed, and so on, candidates also get seats. Depending on the #seats of the district. Parties could run multiple candidates, since there are multiple seats.

For the US, districts with e.g. 5 seats would be very interesting. The effect would be two-fold: first, more distinctiveness between candidates of the same party. Extreme example: a prolife Democrat, a gun-regulation Republican running alongside more traditional candidates. Secondly, at least some candidates outside the 2 major parties will get a seat. This probably means no more majority in House/Senate, but a need to form a coalition. That means talking with each other and reaching agreement would no longer be the newsworthy exception it is today, but would be part of the very fabric of the House/Senate.

I don't see how a different counting mechanism could lead to the same effects.

Re: The FBI tried to ambush my source

#150

Post by naniwaduni »

dragonwriter wrote: post #146
naniwaduni wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing approval voting isn't a ranked voting system!

Approval voting is an unforced preference (i.e., allows ties) ranked voting system with only two ranks just like bullet voting systems (plurality and majority-runoff), differing in that it allows ties in both ranks and not just the second. Arrow’s Theorem applies to unforced preference ranked voting systems (with or without limited numbers of preference ranks) the same way as it does to forced preference ranked syste…

Perhaps surprisingly, no, approval voting is actually a score voting system, which provides more information than a strict preference ranking.

This isn't necessarily intuitive, and our immediate impulse might be to object that 2^n-1 is less than n!, but as a quick informal illustration, note that the voting system where each voter assigns each candidate a score in [0,1] and selects the candidate who earns the highest sum from all voters fairly straightforwardly violates Arrow's theorem. Now, consider an approval vote where each voter rolls a single random number in the range [0,1) and vote for each candidate whose score exceeds their random number, and we get asymptotically the same result (but with some error bars). It turns out that scoring, even on a 2-point scale, is just a better primitive operation than ranking!

(Also, it helps that 2^n-1>n! for n=2,3, which covers a surprisingly large proportion of interesting elections.)

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