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Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave

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Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave

#51

Post by wnoise »

jrgoff wrote: post #49
wnoise wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although FPTP is bad, it's not at all clear that IRV (the election method that most mean when they say the ballot-marking method of RCV) actually leads to less extremism. It's a chaos monkey in any race that approaches competitive, and changes that one might expect to help A (such as more A > B > C votes) can actually hurt A. That is, its bad results show up precisely when it might produce a different outcome than FP…

Would you mind explaining more about what you mean regarding the recent Alaska election? The information I have found about it made it seem fairly reasonable and straightforward to me, but perhaps I am missing something.

Here's a decent commentary:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/x9oupk/2022_alaska...

> Two popular suspicions are now confirmed. Nick Begich was the Condorcet winner. Sarah Palin was a spoiler candidate - her presence caused Mary Peltola to be elected, by prematurely eliminating Nick Begich.

Here's another, that got down-voted to hell, because of the audience.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ForwardPartyUSA/comments/xb119e/its...

> If 2913 voters who supported Palin first and Begich second flipped their first and second preferences, they’d have gotten a more preferred result.

(i.e. they would have gotten Begich instead of Peltola, by having Palin eliminated first)

> Even worse, if instead 5825 of those same types of voters just decided not to vote, they’d have also gotten a better result. So merely participating in the election hurt them.

While I do prefer the winner it selected, it's not a great election method. Better than FPTP is a terribly low bar.

Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave

#52

Post by toiletfuneral »

DanHulton wrote: post #36
superduper2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it was in 1993, when my grad school professor Ilya Prizel pushed back against all the End of History BS and said Russia would eventually assert itself in the middle of Europe, if desperately. He was dead right. I don’t know, it seems like great powers are prolonging the war in Ukraine’s favor right now. > less institutional capacity IR always bankrupts itself on trying to find gold in shithole countries.

"prolonging the war in Ukraine’s favor" is a phrase that sounds _very_ loaded, politically. Would love to hear you explain a bit more what you mean by that.

No post body was provided.

Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave

#53

Post by jrgoff »

wnoise wrote: post #51
jrgoff wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind explaining more about what you mean regarding the recent Alaska election? The information I have found about it made it seem fairly reasonable and straightforward to me, but perhaps I am missing something.

Here's a decent commentary: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/x9oupk/2022_alaska... > Two popular suspicions are now confirmed. Nick Begich was the Condorcet winner. Sarah Palin was a spoiler candidate - her presence caused Mary Peltola to be elected, by prematurely eliminating Nick Begich. Here's another, that got down-voted to hell, because of the audience. https://www.reddit.com/r/ForwardPartyUSA/comments/…

I see, that was helpful - thank you!

Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave

#54

Post by paganel »

> What’s more, this spring in Germany, fears of energy blackouts were deemed to be a far-right conspiracy theory,

Not only in Germany, unfortunately. Radio Free Europe (a US-government supported media institution) was saying just that on its Romanian website [1], together with accusations of fake news, around a year ago.

[1] https://romania.europalibera.org/a/pana-de-curent-fake/31543...

Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave

#55

Post by foverzar »

labster wrote: post #50
int_19h wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it was inevitable for Russia to end up so firmly in the anti-West camp. Back in 1993 - and, really, all the way until the end of 90s - it was very much at the crossroads. The mistake is claiming that the path it ended up choosing, it chose because of something the West did or didn't do. It was all about choices that people made - and back then, elections in Russia still meant something - in response to…

Nothing in history is truly inevitable, but it’s hard for me to see Russia — and particularly Muscovites — to abandon empire and corrupt oligarchy. Yeltsin let oligarchs emerge to help him consolidate power, but then was trapped in the system. He chose Putin as his successor so that he could retire safely. To keep stability, Russia plays to the idea of themselves as a great empire, despite the reality that many citiz…

> despite the reality that many citizens of the “republics” have never seen indoor plumbing.

Oh please, where do you even find these kind of myths? I've been living and traveling Russia for years - I just can't wrap my head where people get these kinds of idiotic narratives.

I mean srsly "never seen indoor plumbing" - do you actually really believe this? Where did you even get an image like that?

I'm just really puzzled how people seem to be so "expertly" sure of something, which is verifiably untrue - I've visited so many wilder parts of Russia, including visiting relatives in national republics and I'm super puzzled - like where did you even find this plumbing problem?

I mean, I'm sure someone somewhere might have some specific case, but I am pretty sure I would have noticed at least one habitable house without plumbing if that was really a kind of a substantial massive problem you describe it to be.

> Muscovites

...on the other hand, I seem to suspect what kind of bubble had formed your outlook...

Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave

#56

Post by foverzar »

billiam wrote: post #16

It never ceases to amaze me how experts at something can't resist trying to be experts at everything. His examples from political science are just so off, but I have to concentrate on his example of Mearsheimer. Far from being one step or two ahead of the crowd, Mearsheimer's problem has been that he's still standing back in the 1980s. His realpolitik approach was refreshing and appealing for the time whensomewhat ph…

> that Russia has never truly acted like a modern state but remains an internal empire

What does "modern state" mean in this context?

Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave

#57

Post by Animats »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #44

The way that the author is describing the Overton window as it relates to investing and finding alpha is very similar to a theme that has been talked about for a couple decades now by Jeremy Grantham, which he dubs "career risk". That is, if you are an exec or money manager, being wrong when the rest of the crowd is wrong isn't that bad career-wise. But being even temporarily wrong when the rest of the crowd is makin…

The problem is market timing. You can often see that a crash is coming, but it's really hard to predict when. "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave

#58

Post by ithkuil »

foverzar wrote: post #55
labster wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing in history is truly inevitable, but it’s hard for me to see Russia — and particularly Muscovites — to abandon empire and corrupt oligarchy. Yeltsin let oligarchs emerge to help him consolidate power, but then was trapped in the system. He chose Putin as his successor so that he could retire safely. To keep stability, Russia plays to the idea of themselves as a great empire, despite the reality that many citiz…

> despite the reality that many citizens of the “republics” have never seen indoor plumbing. Oh please, where do you even find these kind of myths? I've been living and traveling Russia for years - I just can't wrap my head where people get these kinds of idiotic narratives. I mean srsly "never seen indoor plumbing" - do you actually really believe this? Where did you even get an image like that? I'm just really puzz…

Yeah, it's sad how people intentionally misrepresent and mistranslate things because they want to believe in something.

The real Rosstat statistic speak of "centralized sewage" not indoor plumbing.

I live in Italy less than 10km outside a provincial capital and I also don't have access to centralized sewage. I assume the situation in rural Russia is no different.

How is it in rural America?

Low density areas often don't build that infrastructure and leave each house to build waste water management system. Old systems are basically just a hole in the ground but modern systems (like the one I had to install, because the Italian law mandates it) are active filters of various kinds.

Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave

#59

Post by hmm0101 »

foverzar wrote: post #55
labster wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing in history is truly inevitable, but it’s hard for me to see Russia — and particularly Muscovites — to abandon empire and corrupt oligarchy. Yeltsin let oligarchs emerge to help him consolidate power, but then was trapped in the system. He chose Putin as his successor so that he could retire safely. To keep stability, Russia plays to the idea of themselves as a great empire, despite the reality that many citiz…

> despite the reality that many citizens of the “republics” have never seen indoor plumbing. Oh please, where do you even find these kind of myths? I've been living and traveling Russia for years - I just can't wrap my head where people get these kinds of idiotic narratives. I mean srsly "never seen indoor plumbing" - do you actually really believe this? Where did you even get an image like that? I'm just really puzz…

Hmm...you can get these facts just by reading the news:

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/02/indoor-plumbing-st...

Even pro-Kremlin sources:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221004222830/https://www.rt.co...

Funny that you have mention a bubble...

Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave

#60

Post by pydry »

int_19h wrote: post #37
billiam wrote: post #16

It never ceases to amaze me how experts at something can't resist trying to be experts at everything. His examples from political science are just so off, but I have to concentrate on his example of Mearsheimer. Far from being one step or two ahead of the crowd, Mearsheimer's problem has been that he's still standing back in the 1980s. His realpolitik approach was refreshing and appealing for the time whensomewhat ph…

I don't think it was inevitable for Russia to end up so firmly in the anti-West camp. Back in 1993 - and, really, all the way until the end of 90s - it was very much at the crossroads. The mistake is claiming that the path it ended up choosing, it chose because of something the West did or didn't do. It was all about choices that people made - and back then, elections in Russia still meant something - in response to…

>The mistake is claiming that the path it ended up choosing, it chose because of something the West did or didn't do.

This isn't a mistake either. Putin was open towards pursuing a deeper partnership with the west in the early 2000s.

He asked to join NATO (as equals) and rather than leaping on the opportunity NATO told him to join the back of the queue.

In subsequent years we launched an unprovoked invasion of Iraq and "upgraded" a UN resolution from protecting civilians to planting a bayonet in Khafaffi's rectum. It was a little hard not to view us as a dangerous and unpredictable threat, and a little hard not to take what happened to Khadaffi personally.

This was all made worse by the actions of the National Endowment for "Democracy" who essentially prosecute a more effective mirror image of the type of election meddling Putin attempted in America, albeit along Russia's border (& once in Kaliningrad in the 90s). This has continued unabated since the 90s - fomenting and fostering ethnic/cultural divisions everywhere it can along Russia's exposed borders that mirror the one we see in America today.

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