The solution is simple. Continue calling the boat Boaty McBoatface. Ignore all references to the government's preferred name. They can choose what's painted on the side, but the name depends only on what people call it. If enough people call it Boaty McBoatface its name really is Boaty McBoatface. If your job depends on calling it the government's preferred name then subtly alter the timing of your speech to make it clear that it's not the real name while maintaining plausible deniability. Only written communication from coerced people remains a problem, and hopefully that will be far outweighed by people using the real name.
This will probably happen anyway. Research ships are manned by researchers (usually of the non-bureaucratic variety) and in my experience are game for a laugh. Regardless of what it gets officially named, this ship will almost certainly be unofficially referred to as Boaty McBoatface by its crew.
(And as another commenter who is familiar with the project internals pointed out - they already do call it McBoatface)
I don't see much fun in that. The funny thing about getting the ship named Boaty McBoatface is that it would be painted on the ship and would be named as such in official documentation. The ability to casually refer to the ship by that name does exist, obviously, but how often do people refer to specific government ships by name anyway?
The problem with this "joke" is that it's a mildly amusing story at best. Having it painted on the boat is just prolonging something that never really made it to the amusement level of a joke with legs.
I hope the officials hold firm. Long after the easily entertained public has moved on, they can do their job without being reminded of how poor the sense of humor in the general populace actually is.
> I hope the officials hold firm. Long after the easily entertained public has moved on, they can do their job without being reminded of how poor the sense of humor in the general populace actually is.
How is the a bland, inane government-issue name it will no doubt end up with going to be any better?
> The solution is simple. Continue calling the boat Boaty McBoatface. Ignore all references to the government's preferred name.
This is good advice. In Toronto we have a baseball stadium called the Rogers Center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Centre). It was originally called the SkyDome but it was bought by a company called Rogers and renamed.
Everyone still refers to it as the Skydome. Corporate branding be damned:)
Perhaps, but the name Willis is not from the current owners, but simply one of the primary tenants. The previous owners threw in naming rights as part of the rental agreement.
This happens with airports a lot. Some really wonderful and generous old pilot or aviation engineer dies, so the field gets renamed in honor of the person. But aviators still refer to the field by it's traditional name. It's not a slight against the honored dead; rather, it's just out of habit and the fact that it's tremendously easier to remember "$CITY_NAME Airport" than it is "$GUY_WHO_DIED Field".
Speaking of airports, I know of several people who outright refuse to refer to Washington National Airport by its current name, "Ronald Regan Washington National Airport". They will go so far as to correct someone who says "Regan National" and insist, "Washington National."
Some people in DC are still annoyed by the renaming, partly because of the air controller thing, and partly because Congress changed the name against the wishes of the people of DC and then forced DC to pay for changing the signs out of the city's budget.
Definitely. Ever wonder why New Orleans' airport has the symbol MSY, but is named Louis Armstrong airport? MSY stands for Moisant Stock Yards, in honor of early aviator John Moisant.
Im recent years, the city renamed the airport to Louis Armstrong airport, but no one in the city refers to it as that. Everyone still calls it Moisant. Not that we don't like Louis Armstrong, it's always been called Moisant and New Orleans really doesn't like change.
I always wondered why that airport was called MSY.
However, I can think of one counterexample: JFK airport in NYC. It used to be called Idlewild, named after some golf course I think, but was renamed to JFK (with the airport code JFK) back in the 60s. No one knows what "Idlewild" is any more.
Another fun example is the Louisville International Airport which was originally named Standiford Field, thus the airport code SDF and even locals still sometimes refer to it as Standiford, but in this case was renamed to the more obvious choice (Louisville International Airport) to confuse people less.
A further tangent, but the more obvious airport code LOU is still in active use across town at Bowman Field, the city's original air field (definitely not an airport) and these days the oldest remaining continually operating air field in the country.
Random aside but when I was a kid in the early 80s I found a radio in my grandparents basement which could pick up the radio chatter at Bowman. I would listen to that thing every time we visited
If I ran a news organization I'd use the old name on principle but I know what would happen. Companies would start to pay me to use the "proper name." It's the next step after product placement.
I have a counterexample for this one: in Phoenix, there's an outdoor arena/pavilion that used to be called "Desert Sky Pavilion", a nice non-corporate name referring to the local geography. Well it went through that whole corporate branding crap, and while I was there at least, it seemed like people were calling it "Cricket Pavilion" (which was the current name at the time). Here's what Wikipedia says about the naming:
"Ak-Chin Pavilion (formerly known as the Desert Sky Pavilion, Blockbuster Desert Sky Pavilion, Cricket Pavilion, Cricket Wireless Pavilion and Ashley Furniture HomeStore Pavilion) is an amphitheater located in Phoenix, Arizona, which seats 8,000 under a pavilion roof and an additional 12,000 on a hillside behind the main stands."
The Senator's hockey stadium in Ottawa has been through a few names since it was built in 96: Palladium, Corel Centre, Scotiabank Place, Canadian Tire Centre.
In the past few months I have heard all 4 names used for the facility.
It's been nearly a decade since Austin's "Town Lake" was renamed by the city council as "Lady Bird Lake" (in honor of Lady Bird Johnson). To this day, I'm not sure I've ever heard it referred to as anything other than Town Lake. I certainly can never remember to use the new name.
This happens a lot. There's a nightclub in Cambridge called Ballare (since 2003), but it is almost exclusively refered to by students as Cindies. There's another club, and I can't even recall what its "real" name is as "The Place" and "Life" were used interchangeably for it.
The marketing opportunities alone are insane. I am amazed that they are turning down the name. This ship had the opportunity to be as well known as the Titanic (but for better reasons)
Agreed. Especially if they do something funny with the paint, like a giant happy face on the front or something. Maybe some cartoon arms on the side. Suddenly it goes from a soon-to-be-forgotten research vessel into an iconic mascot.
I'd buy a Boaty McBoatface toy and I'm not even British.
Outside of the people who actually work on the ship, how many members of the public are ever going to have any reason to call this ship anything at all after the poll is over?
I mean, it's cute to give the public an opportunity to name something, but half the people who voted in the poll have probably forgotten the ship even exists by now.
<Cough> Working for a contractor heavily involved in this project, all I can say is that internally on our servers as well as in any documentation and conversation the vessel is referred to as 'Boaty McBoatface'.
Amazing. Sounds like a fun team :) sometimes tech work can be dull, so it's good to have people who can have a laugh together on a daily basis. Makes for great working conditions IMO.
This small example shows the true nature of any democratic government: if you vote the way they don't like, they will not submit to it. Voting is useless.
You are projecting your own opinions and representing them as "the will of the people". I personally vastly prefer things in life being amusing and unexpected rather than boring and pompous, and as such I think "Boaty McBoatface" is likely a way better name than whatever will be chosen as its replacement. Wanting life to not be bland is not "internet trolling" nor "mockery".
This seems like bad move on the British government's part. Name the thing Boaty McBoatface and reap great PR for years.
Edit: Or maybe it's all part of the plan. Let us all down by hinting that they're not using the name, then announce a change of heart. The internet would explode.
Yes exactly. If anything, it's a great way to get kids interested initially and tell the story about what it's doing, why, how they do something like that some day, etc.
I'm sure that the crew and people who do research on it, if they have any sense of humor, would get an enormous kick out of it too. How'd it be to tell your mates that you'll be out for 6 weeks at sea on RRS Boaty McBoatface ? I'd personally bust out laughing every time I talked about it.
It's not to say that the work isn't serious or important, just that sometimes it's OK to have a laugh, even in an omgsrsbzns environment. It's not really at the expense of anyone (aside from perhaps the pride of a few) and it's not really disrespectful or non-kid-friendly (actually I'm sure kids would love it) like e.g. RRS Naff Minger or something else that the internet at large might dream up. My point is that it's actually a viable family-friendly name, and I mean...just look at it. Totally looks like a Boat McBoatface to me. It has that Pixar anthropomorphic look to it. It also looks like a big toy version of a real boat. Very cartoony, especially in bright red
The look is just an added bonus; the bow design ensures a much smoother ride in poor weather conditions - rather than riding the wave (and, potentially earning the vessel the nickname 'The Vomit Comet'), it cuts through the wave (reducing vessel heave) and even (drumroll) effectively disperses the waves as they traverse along the hull, reducing drag.
So - better ride, less fuel consumption, cartoonish look. Win-win-win.
I dunno, how would you feel about putting it on your CV? Like calling a business Smelly Bottom Industries would be funny and populist, but people who actually worked there would struggle to take pride in the fact.
I'd probably put down that I'd been working on an Antarctic research vessel. If I put down whatever generic name they actually do use most employers would probably assume I'd been a deckhand on a cross channel ferry or something
I think whatever this ship ultimately ends up being called, it is going to be forever more informally referred to as Boaty McBoatface by anyone who goes near it, or to who has call to reference it.
The best thing to have come out of this is a headline from satirical online newspaper Waterford Whispers: US Military Introduce Childbomber McChildbombface
The story is more complex than the article says. A Spanish forum (one of the top-40 more visited sites in Spain) voted massively the name "Blas de Lezo" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blas_de_Lezo ) a Spanish admiral who in 1741 defeated a British Army far bigger than his own one.
After gaining the #1 position the organization decided to withdraw the name from the polling, causing more controversy about this digital process.
If you believe it would have been outrageous that this man had his name in a british ship, you'll be surprised by the shitstorm that would happen if his name would be given to a spanish ship.
Among other things, I guess those of us who don't know every piece of trivia about Spanish culture would get an explanation of what exactly is unsavory about this Blas de Lezo person.
You had it in the Wikipedia article linked by the op.
Edit... anyway: De Lezo took part in the Spanish Sucession War. In that war, Catalonia lost some fueros (middle ages common law) because it was against the Borbons (that won) and in the revisionist version of history that we're hearing in very recent years, that's tantamount to genocide.
Thanks, that was the explanation you could have given several posts ago. While skimming the Wikipedia article, I noted that he got a statue in Madrid, then skipped the rest of that paragraph, which was the only one that hinted at this controversy, and even then did not give the reason you give here. Please excuse us for not following the Spanish news so closely, and then downvoting you for your sheer arrogance.
OK, keep downvoting. I couldn't care less. Do you think I'm being too terse? Take a look at the last edit. Or is it something else? I don't care either way.
Certainly one of the funniest stories to pop-up in the interwebs during the last year..
> A band of Spanish net buccaneers has mounted a determined incursion into Her Maj's territorial cyberwaters by demanding that Blighty's forthcoming Royal Research Ship be named the RRS Blas de Lezo, in honour of the man who administered the British a serious military shoeing during the War of Jenkins' Ear.
The author has conflated democracy with voting. Sortition - the selection of Government at random from the citizenry - is a far superior mechanism, and results in a Government that is genuinely of the people.
The reason why nobody has sortition, is because deep down democracy is about being as agreeable as possible to the median citizen. If you have vague feeling that you decided who is prime minister, you are more motivated to pay taxes and fight wars.
The country that gets least tax evasion and most volunteers to army is likely to perform better than anybody else. And so survival of the fittest governments has favored democracy for past three centuries.
> The reason why nobody has sortition, is because deep down democracy is about being as agreeable as possible to the median citizen. If you have vague feeling that you decided who is prime minister, you are more motivated to pay taxes and fight wars.
I doubt this has any explanatory power as to why sortition isn't used much today.
Among other things, the median citizen doesn't care even a little bit about who is prime minister or otherwise in charge.
I think it has a lot of explanatory power. From what I've seen the main reason people don't care about who's in charge is because they think all the candidates are basically the same and none actually represent them.
If you are U.S. citizen, you probably would prefer Obama over Enrique Peña Nieto. Personally as a Finn I like Sipilä and Niinistö over Putin. In a way any Finnish party head would suit me better than Putin. It matters little which of them, but it matters a lot that it's one of them.
In medieval Europe, vassal dukes would bargain who king they would pay taxes to. And you had situations where Britain was ruled by dude who spoke French and lived in Normandy.
> you are more motivated to pay taxes and fight wars
Well, you don't really have a choice in the former, and when there's a draft, you don't in the latter either.
> The country that gets least tax evasion and most volunteers to army is likely to perform better than anybody else
I disagree. You are elevating the state too high. I would counter that the countries with the most economic freedom -- those that have embraced markets and rule of law -- are the ones at the top.
You do have choice to go completely against your government. If some unpopular dictator enacts draft, there is going to be loads of guerrilla fighters around. Because now they have to fight anyhow, why not fight for themselves.
There's a system that, in my opinion, is even better (fairer, less prone to corruption) than sortition, and that's liquid democracy (a.k.a. delegative democracy):
The idea being, you can let people vote on your behalf, or you can vote directly, and you have the freedom to choose between these on an issue by issue basis.
I rather like the concept, but I can see it having some interested and unanticipated side effects if you allow people to select their delegate by category rather than individual bill by individual bill. The person that decides whether people's delegates for voting on (e.g.) an act related to surveillance default to being the delegate they selected for "civil liberties" or the delegate they selected for "national security" actually ends up with rather a large degree of executive power, despite probably having a lower profile than the leader of an executive regular parliamentary or presidential system. Of course, there's a reasonable argument that this is still much more transparent and fair (and reversible) than, for example, coalition bargaining, but it is a system I'd like to see used in practice more in bodies like trade unions before we decide it's the solution to national governance.
> "I rather like the concept, but I can see it having some interested and unanticipated side effects if you allow people to select their delegate by category rather than individual bill by individual bill."
The point is that you can delegate for individual bills, as well as taking back your power to vote on individual bills. You can delegate by category, but you don't need to if it doesn't serve you. The idea is that the people you delegate to have to stick up for your best interests, as their power can be taken away at any point if they do not.
Agree that you can delegate for individual bills, but my point was that most people won't delegate for individual bills most of the time, but probably will choose delegates for "categories" of decision making if the system is set up that way.
Surveillance law is a pretty relevant example, since for most people not on HN it's a relatively low priority, and there's a fairly high likelihood that if they're able to delegate somebody to vote for them on a general area like "civil liberties issues" (for most people, a delegate with a decent libertarian credentials) and "national security" (for most people, a delegate who promises to be robust), the person or committee that decides for whether a particular surveillance bill is considered "civil liberties" or "national security" in effect holds a casting vote any time most of the public doesn't feel strongly enough to make a bill-specific decision. Somebody has to resolve differences between a budget balancing bill popular with the public's preferred delegates for "taxation" issues and a bill with public spending implications popular with the public's preferred delegates for "health issues", "education issues" or "social policy issues" too. Since they're supposed to be administering a process rather than enacting a particular programme of government they were elected on like a de jure executive, they're probably also subject to far less scrutiny.
Of course, the system still has the advantage that the public can step in and overrule their regular representative whenever they feel strongly enough to do so, but not necessarily any more effectively in practice than powers to force a referendum as a form of public veto.
The categorisation issue is a good one to raise, it would be something to iron out. You may be interested in this video, the speaker mentions a couple of solutions to the categorisation issue, as well as a bunch of other implementation issues they're trying to address:
"Government of the people" or not, I've yet to see anything resembling a convincing argument that the average citizen thrust into government is actually better at government than someone who spends their life prior to and in office trying to demonstrate their aptitude at government to the average citizen.
> “The key point is that representatives’ voting behavior was not strongly constrained by their constituents’ views,” Achen and Bartels write. “Elections do not force successful candidates to reflect the policy preferences of the median voter.” The authors claim there’s no hard evidence to suggest that these dynamics would vary in countries with political systems of proportional representation and more parties than in the U.S.
I'm not a fan of grover norquist but I think it is unfair to say our representatives should be free to disregard the pledge they so publicly made when they were campaigning. Yes, we expect our representatives to go against their platform in extreme cases for the greater good but I'd say if that happens, the representative must turn right around and resign immediately from office and not run for office again.
No, it doesn't matter if the cause was an "obstructionist" Congress. It didn't matter with George HW Bush and it won't matter now.
Can you imagine if we had a referendum for independence of Scotland and had Cameron said "nah jk" after the results came in favor of Independence? Or if he started attaching new conditions to the promised he made Scots to vote no? "Oh we will get right to the issue of devolution but we must make sure Scots can't vote in England only legislation" but then who didn't they say that when campaigning?
Imagine a system where there was a yearly pie eating contest to determine the king for a year. Would it be OK for the current winner to abolish the contest and make the position hereditary? Of course not!
I'd say it's fair for candidates to break promises. If voters keep voting for them and their party despite seeing that happen, then it means voters don't mind broken promises. This is what's nice about democracy - you don't have to argue about too many rules, the rules evolve naturally. For some reason it turned out that keeping promises wasn't a natural rule that voters wanted. The same goes for resigning. If they don't resign and are still re-elected or their party is still re-elected then that reflects what their constituents want, not some artificial rules that some unelected rule-maker (who would that be?) decided on.
The US system seems to be doing quite well. The majority of the population doesn't care at all, and their votes don't count. Those are people who either always vote for the same party or don't vote at all. The important decision then comes down to the minority of people who are most interested in the policies - the swing voters. Isn't that quite an efficient division of labor?
Comparing Boaty McBoatface to electing a democratic official for representation is a little disingenuous. One is a popularity contest of suggestions to a concrete answer of a question, the other is marking a preference for someone who you hope will perform executive actions in line with what you want.
Surely it's closer to compare it to a referendum: in which, the public majority agreed on an answer that the establishment didn't like, and will now renege on.
> the other is marking a preference for someone who you hope will perform executive actions
You so wish. It's a popularity contest like any other. Proof: Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Ventura, Berlusconi, Trump, Franken, the Ghandi dynasty, even the last Troudeau. Name recognition alone pretty much trumps (eh) everything else, once you couple it with pre-existing popularity you've basically won, no matter what your message is. You can try to outweigh that with massive doses of continuous higher education, sure, but the natural rest state is that any electoral process is mostly a popularity contest.
What the poll results don't tell you is how much people care about the choice they picked. In a representative democracy, it's not just about what the majority wants, but how much people really care.
If a majority prefers pepperoni pizza but will eat basically anything, don't be surprised when the representative orders vegetarian. The vegetarians care far more about the exact type of pizza that's served and are more likely to change which representative they vote for in order to get what they want.
It may be cultural thing, but in the UK tech scene at least even if people are flexible about pepperoni it's mostly because there is a large and delicious range of meat-based pizzas to split the vote. The representative who orders just vegetarian pizza clearly isn't thinking in terms of re-election.
The rep who orders just vegetarian pizza will have a bloody revolution on their hands. I have pretty much three criteria for pizza selection: No anchovies, no pine apple, and at least one form of meat.
Seconding (thirding?) this. Where I work, any rep who orders a group of mostly meat-eaters vegetarian food because the group has a single or a few vegetarians too, will be seen as making a declaration of war.
I've had people walk out of company dinners (to get "real" food) due to inconsiderate behaviour like this, from supposedly "tolerant" managers. Needless to say, such incidents are seldom repeated.
And I say inconsiderate, because that's what such behaviour constitutes as in my cultural climate.
I really don't get why people are trying to manufacture drama over the name of a boat, seriously.
"tyrannical" because a group that got a boat, asked some people what their thought on the matter was, and then said "no that silly"?
"What happened to disapproving of what you name your boat, but defending to the death your right to name it" and now this is infringing on free speech as well?
I don't agree with a lot of the conclusions of this article. E.g. they propose that voting "probably" works the same way in all other countries as the US. There are plenty of objections to be made against that. E.g. 1) the US being a two party state means that getting representatives which represents the great variety of voter opinions is exceedingly difficult.
2) US elections are so dominated by advertisement, expensive campaigns and donations that there is no way a politician can actually do what they tell voters because at the end of the day they have to satisfy donors otherwise they can't get money to run elections. There has been studies that show American politicians are mainly aligned with the wishes of the rich rather than people who vote on them.
That is just two big points, which makes the US stand out of many other western democracies, and there are multiple others.
My other objection is that Boaty McBoatface, somehow represents the will of the people. No it doesn't. It represent the will of people who bothered to vote on an issue most people likely don't give a dam about. If a choice was demanded of the whole population then Boaty McBoatface would never have won.
Whenever there is an issue most people don't have a vested interest in or think is very important it is likely that whoever wants to stirr up stuff or make some fun are going to win, because nobody else has any incentive.
This is of course a major issue with democracy. When you let people make decisions on things they don't really care about then they will make poor decisions. Democracy shouldn't make everything a choice, but rather be about choosing people you think will make good choices on your behalf.
> My other objection is that Boaty McBoatface, somehow represents the will of the people. No it doesn't. It represent the will of people who bothered to vote on an issue most people likely don't give a dam about. If a choice was demanded of the whole population then Boaty McBoatface would never have won.
The point is that if it does represent the will of the people and the people in power don't like it, the will of the people will still lose out.
The two party system in the US is a problem, but it turns out it's natural consequence of Democracy. There's no law against other parties, it just turns out that with direct voting in a large country, over enough time, we arrive here with two parties.
If you look at the Democratic party, in 1968 an unfavored candidate was nominated based on votes, and so the DNC decided to institute the concept of super-delegates from thereon out. They did this because letting normal democracy run its course didn't work because the people elected someone the party elites didn't think was the best. The super delegates composed of party loyalists and high ranking party members that could ignore DNC votes. This essentially gave the party more control over who would win and removed voting power from normal people.
In the current election, Donald Trump is doing the same thing to upset the Republican party leadership. The Republicans haven't implemented anything as undemocratic as super-delegates yet, but if Trump wins they might be encouraged to (since it's the type of Democracy-giving-poor-results scenario people in power try to avoid).
> There's no law against other parties, it just turns out that with direct voting in a large country, over enough time, we arrive here with two parties.
Wrong.
It turns out that with First-Past-The-Post, we arrive with two parties.
In many other countries, over centuries, even more parties develop, and fail again.
At best a handful of parties, and it only works in small elections. You get to bigger and bigger elections the system always reduces the choice, which means that the bigger the system is, the less effective democracy becomes.
Of course democracy was never meant to be the most efficient or effective system of government. It's simply the most compromising one.
You say "at best a handful" like there isn't a meaningful difference between "2" and "3 or 4". The US is deeply unusual in their persistent two party system. Germany probably has nearly as many voters (given higher registration and turnout rates) as the US, and certainly doesn't operate as a two party system
> but it turns out it's natural consequence of Democracy. There's no law against other parties
It's a natural consequence of the specifics of how the US does elections. The US isn't the only country with democracy and plenty of others have more than 2 significant parties.
Most countries where there are more than two parties are smaller. Just like in the US at lower level elections independents and other party members might win.
For that matter, most countries are smaller than the US, both in size and population. There are only two countries with a larger population. China has one ruling political party, and India has had prime ministers from many different parties.
For a full accounting, look back to the rise of the two party system during the Jacksonian era, or the current system of Democrats and Republicans (replacing the Whig party) started in the 1850s.
An explanation based on population size would have to be able to explain why it is that the current two party system in the US started when it was a much smaller country.
The US population in 1860 was 31,443,321. There are now 42 countries with a population larger than that.
The parties are more varied by state than you'd expect - for example, the GOP in New York State tends to be pro-transit, while the DNC in Wisconsin still loves to build huge highways through minority neighborhoods.
It is represented poorly. But it's not clear that combating parliamentary factions would do better.
It's mystifying how such a diverse and populous country can be represented well at all. And the evidence is stacking up to show that it can't, in USA, Russia, China, and India.
Exactly. It's the same bloody-mindedness that got 'Killing in the Name' - essentially the phrase "---k you I won't do what you tell me" shouted repeatedly - to No 1 at Christmas as a reaction against the X Factor manufactured idol hype. (And almost got 'Ding dong, the witch is dead' to No 1 after Thatcher's death...)
Democracy can take many forms indeed. But let's think opportunistically, for a moment.
In general, I'm inclined to think that in a democracy, the people should have more direct influence to things “closer” to them (by some measure), and less for bigger, nationwide, issues, of which they presumably have less understanding. This is, in fact, how most democratic nations work in practice.
The case of Boaty McBoatface, though, is unusual in that it doesn't actually much matter what the name of a research vessel is. It's just a name. Names are almost always boring. Unless… if the name becomes so popular and widely known that the very name opens up completely new opportunities for raising funds and awareness. Which, I would have thought, was kind of the point of the competition to begin with.
So, why not reap the PR benefits of this name? Why would they start a contest but back out when they hit the jackpot? I do not understand.
It is a difficult line to toe. Obviously if their primary objective is to raise awareness of the (continuing) existence of the boat, BMcBF is a winner, and there are numerous cash-in opportunities such as those you suggest. If done right it might not even look cynical!
If on the other hand giving it a silly name "dilutes their brand" (to use an HN favourite) then they're going to do the stuffy thing. Not entirely sure why folks would be surprised at a Conservative minister taking a conservative approach...
Really seems that SCIENCE does a lot better in the public eye at the moment when it goes populist rather than cloistered, but here we are...
These movements share a message: "the man is screwing us little people". That's a populist message, which it's why they're much more popular than their actual craziness would otherwise grant.
The point of the boat isn't to be a Budgie the Helicopter style cash machine, is it? It has a serious purpose.
Why does it have to appeal to 4 year olds, who have zero understanding of or interest in what it does? Why does it require an infantile name to appeal to kids who are old enough to be interested in what it does?
The only reason this is even any kind of issue is because of the way internet works, where all kinds of pointless immature stupidity is given far more time of day than it deserves, because newspaper sites have to fill themselves with something.
Edit: Oh dear. Looks like I hit a nerve with some people. :( ∗sad mcsadface∗
AFAIK there's nothing to stop someone creating a character called Boaty McBoatface that teaches 4 year olds why the ice caps are melting, without having its internet joke name attached to a real life $300 million scientific research vessel.
And exactly what problem does attaching the name to a real boat cause? I think the objection to the name is far more childish than the name itself. "Oh no no no, we can't call it that. This is a serious boat, for serious grown ups."
What? I said objecting to the name is childish. That doesn't mean I think everything should have whimsical names, and I really don't know how you interpreted that from what I said?
My God, this is completely ridiculous, but I'll try one more time.
Do you or do you not believe everything should have a whimsical name?
To save time: If your answer to this is "No, I do not believe everything should have a whimsical name", then what is your non-childish objection to whimsical names in some cases?
Not supporting OP but their question is not at all a dichotomy. The question wasn't should everything have a whimsical name or should nothing have a whimsical name. The question was basically just should everything have a whimsical name. Sounds like your answer is no, because you're ok with things having whimsical names sometimes.
Yes that's how I read it, and it is a false dichotomy, because not thinking something should be the case is not the same as thinking it shouldn't be the case. They're both value judgements of which I make neither.
When you allow the public to chose a name for a research vessel, it's inoffensive, popular and creates more media coverage (arguably the goal of having the vote) then no matter how whimsical you think the name is you should stick with it. If you don't want whimsy, don't ask the British public to name your ship.
No one forced them in to the situation.
FWIW I don't find the name stupid, one person's humour is another's stupidity I guess.
I agree that it's totally stupid to use online voting, that is just asking to be hijacked, and I almost believe that they should have to eat the result as a punishment. Almost.
Hopefully it's a lesson for them not to ask The Internet its opinion again.
Wow, it's extremely irritating to see this (parent) post downvoted by people who may not realize (till after downvoting) that what I replied to was edited - from denying what I said to admitting it, making my reply look redundant.
Yeah, serious new Royal Navy boats need serious names, like its predecessors HMS Speedy, HMS Child's Play, HMS Happy Entrance, HMS Arrogant (later renamed HMS Insolent)...
> Why does it have to appeal to 4 year olds, who have zero understanding of or interest in what it does?
You realise that those 4 year olds grow up right? And that by possibly catching their attention and imagination at an early age it might even make them more interested in the area and maybe, gosh, make them want to become researchers and scientists when they grow up and tackle issues like climate change.
And the very people objecting to it now will be retired, dead or moved onto a more senior position and then care less about it.
The most popular talking vehicle, in the US at least, is named Thomas.
This isn't a particularly convincing argument for a silly name. If kids will accept Thomas, surely they'll accept a more serious name than Boaty McBoatface.
In general, I'm inclined to think that in a democracy, the people should have more direct influence to things “closer” to them (by some measure), and less for bigger, nationwide, issues, of which they presumably have less understanding. This is, in fact, how most democratic nations work in practice.
Problem is, it's easier to develop an understanding of national issues than local or regional issues because national issues get pushed on us by media, while you have to actually seek out information about anything local. Everyone talks about national issues, that's social pressure to become knowledgable about them.
> It's just a name. Names are almost always boring.
Not everyone feels this way. Names can be important and in the arts are particularly relished/valued and interpreted, to the extent that noms-de-plume and other forms of pseudonym are popular.
A formalist account of names sees them as dumb labels, and in computing you can get away with that. But it's not whole story because it doesn't consider the emotional side.
So, why not reap the PR benefits of this name? Why would they start a contest but back out when they hit the jackpot? I do not understand.
This is reminiscent of a contest on EEVBlog that Keysight just sponsored. Participants entered the contest by posting a video on Facebook describing what they would do with an oscilloscope. The person whose video garnered the most votes would win a new 20 GS/s oscilloscope with a bandwidth spec of 6 GHz and a price tag in the neighborhood of US $70,000.
Naturally, the winner turned out to be a kid who made a video about an electric water heater and got a bunch of her schoolmates to flood the voting page. The highest-ranked entry by someone with a legitimate need for a 6 GHz oscilloscope finished in a distant third place.
So Keysight did the only thing that could have avoided a giant online dumpster fire, and gave one of the scopes to each of the top three contestants. It was an expensive lesson in the failings of democracy (and in not using Facebook for anything important).
So yeah, they should just paint the name on the boat and get over it. Keysight salvaged their marketing effort by taking the high road, but you can bet they won't run this contest the same way in the future. They're lucky they didn't have to give away three dozen 6 GHz scopes to random high school kids.
I plead guilty, as that particular name was so hilariously funny, that I voted while I was still laughing. And I'm a Finn, not a Brit, so I wouldn't even expect that my vote would be taken seriously.
> When you let people make decisions on things they don't really care about then they will make poor decisions.
This assumes McBoatface is a poor decision, which is a completely personal (and most likely wrong) assessment.
There are no objective parameters for what a good ship name should be in generic terms. For something with military applications, probably easy spelling and brevity would factor in, but in reality a lot of military ships have long and windy names anyway. Something with a publicity element, like a research ship, could do with something memorable and fun, which Boaty McBoatface undoubtedly is; naming it as some obscure last-century researcher would make it utterly forgettable.
So it looks like there is wisdom in the crowds after all; it's just that often it doesn't match the wisdom of stuffy establishment types.
States could probably change the 2 party system by eliminating the preferential access that the parties have to the ballot.
Imagine if the national conventions were deciding which of the many already balloted candidates to endorse, rather than a media circus driving national attention to a smaller and smaller number of candidates that are then placed on state ballots by the parties months after an independent would have had to finished submitting ballot petitions.
It would still be a circus, but it wouldn't be a circus where the choices are filtered through a few thousand people. I suppose it would be necessary to again make the first loser the Vice President, but that shouldn't really hurt anything.
I don't really agree with the article either, but for different reasons.
Voting is to democracy as is telescopes is to astronomy.
Democracy is about the people being in charge, of the government existing for the benefit of the people (as opposed to a dictator/absolute monarch/aristocracy) on the broadest possible stretches. It's about replacing the people in charge peacefully every few years. It's not about every decision being made at every level of government always being in line with what a majority might vote -- and it's emphatically not about online votes for silly things. It's an abomination to suggest such votes have anything to do with democracy (or, if you're so minded, an elaborate tactic for the power cabal to create the illusion of people being in power, but that theory is rather diminished by the power cabal not following the decision).
Democracy is worst form of government, except for all other others. It's not perfect, and it doesn't hold the seeds of perfection. It's at best a decent way of preventing a strong man and his cronies from grabbing too much power too fast -- it's not even a guarantee against that happening.
However, the unexpected strong performances of Trump and Sanders in the US primaries is for all its weirdness a symptom of the system working, however imperfectly: It's a huge vote of non-confidence in "the system" and the perception that it has been captured by some vaguely defined instance of not-the-people (Sanders: Wall Street; Trump: Who the hell knows? Mexicans?) and that (however crudely) something should be done about it.
> [Boaty McBoatface] represent the will of people who bothered to vote on an issue most people likely don't give a dam[n] about.
Indeed the vote was obviously silly and did in fact achieve its desired goal: publicity for arctic research. The officials are insane if they don't go along with the choice. It's an opportunity for further publicity on arctic research for decades to come!
> My other objection is that Boaty McBoatface, somehow represents the will of the people. No it doesn't. It represent the will of people who bothered to vote on an issue most people likely don't give a dam about. If a choice was demanded of the whole population then Boaty McBoatface would never have won.
This can be said about the election in pretty much all western societies. There have been several occasions where I myself have not voted in the UK elections. Does it make those elections any less valid? Same can be said for the US as well, where even those who voted found that majority rule didn't matter in the end [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...]
Maybe we should follow the Australian way where people are forced to vote or face a $100AU fine. But then democracy right, it should give you the right to not vote.
There is not I'm afraid, you have to mark the ballot paper. So the way round it is to mark the paper outside of the boxes, thus making it an invalid vote.
I think another huge problem with democracy is the voting systems. As far as I'm concerned, if they used a simple plurality (first past the post) voting system, then the results are invalid, and that goes for any election that uses that system. It cannot be said to represent the will of the people.
I didn't participate in this election (I'm not a UKian) and didn't see exactly how it was done, but I'll bet (esp. given the statements made about the results, and how the winner got 3x the number of votes of the runner-up) they had a big list of names, and then people had the chance to vote for exactly one of those names. "Boaty McBoatface" therefore was probably not the choice of the majority of the voters, but only a small minority, with all the other votes spread across a bunch of other names.
If the name was not chosen by a clear majority of people, then it's not the "choice of the people".
If this had been done by some other voting system, then we would have seen very different results most likely. Approval voting might have worked well here; whichever name got the most votes of approval, if more then 50% of the voters approved it, can rightfully be said to be "the choice of the people".
This is the problem with "democracy": the voting system itself is inherently rigged and unfair, and then we're told to believe in its results. How many elections actually use a voting system besides plurality? Not many.
> getting representatives which represents the great variety of voter opinions
The parties in the US don't control the opinions and seats of their elected members, which means you get a greater variety of political positions under the same label than you do in a lot of parliamentary systems. Republicans in California can easily be left of Democrats in Georgia.[0]
There are opinions held by small interest groups that are not reflected in the democratic process, to be sure.
On the other hand, performing artists have their own line in the tax code, so sometimes these groups do get their way.
> US elections are so dominated by advertisement, expensive campaigns and donations that there is no way a politician can actually do what they tell voters because at the end of the day they have to satisfy donors
A lot of studies have debunked the influence of money on campaigns.[1]
Jeb's massive war chest didn't keep him in the race.
Here are the richest individuals to ever launch a bid for the presidency[2]:
1) Ross Perot
2) Steve Forbes
3) John Kerry
4) Mitt Romney
5) Al Gore
The Clintons are next, but most of their money was made after Bill's Presidency.
Giuliani, Edwards, and Huntsman round out the list (before this election, I'm not sure if anyone really knows how much Trump is worth).
A lot of losers on that list for a system so influenced by money.
First off, this is nothing like how elections work. People are still run by representatives in democratic countries.
Second, everyone, including the government is making it sound as if this is a "terrible name", just because it's out of the framework they imagined it to be. But I think this is a great name and has brought nothing but popularity to the project being done on that boat.
>First off, this is nothing like how elections work. People are still run by representatives in democratic countries.
It's partially true this isn't how elections work, but I think what the article was trying to get by or at least what I got out of it is that the process was democratic and in similar ways democracy fails. Now this is somewhat subjective and entirely dependent on what you call democracy. It's funny I read this now as I had just started reading a new book I got titled Our Republican Constitution by Randy E. Barnett (great read by the way.) The writer is talking about the American constitution.
Once when Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government the framers had devised he answered famously "a republic, if you can keep it." This was in contrast to a democracy which the writer says they didn't wholly disagree with, but having an excess of democracy had created problems.
The author states two conflicting paradigms a Democratic Constitution and a Republican Constitution. He states these are not reflections of what we see as the democratic and republican parties that the USA has today as both parties have believers of both viewpoints. His main distinction that I perceived from reading was that the Democratic Constitution perceived what was constitutional or law by the "majority". Well the alternative to that doesn't seem like it would be anything good it's quite the contrary. The alternative as he states is The Republican Constitution (what he states was the founders paradigm) which has the basis of constitutionality on whether each "individual" had there basic rights. In some cases throughout american history majority rule hasn't favored the individual e.g. racial segregation. In cases where majority rule opposes the inalienable rights of the individual I feel democracy fails and as I stated before that's the one part that I could agree with the journalist that democracy isn't always the best solution to a problem.
Why is it undemocratic to not respect the outcome of an online poll? First of all, online polls are never democratic (They are directed to subset of the population - which is pretty obvious when they are hijacked.).
Second - even proper referendums are usually advisory, i.e. the outcome isn't bindnig for legislators. I don't see a democratic problem with that either unless legislators would go against a strong public opinion, repeatedly.
Crowdsourcing of a name is not about democracy. It doesn't appear to me that the public was widely informed that they had to make a democratic decision, instead sounds like a bunch of kids trolling. I think the article is conflating two unrelated entities here.
As a sideline, what is democracy even? Democracy via elections would be oligarchy to ancient Athenians, who prefered democracy by lot anyway.
And of course Athenian democracy would be oligarchy to modern democrats, who think that more than 10% of the population should be enfranchised...
Agree with your point that it doesn't really help the discussion to treat obscure and easily manipulated online polls on trivia as actual mass expressions of public will. I mean, it's about as valid as the poll Redditors brigaded to try to prove that nearly every American would vote for Sanders.
The vote was well covered in the British press, and the people I know who voted were neither kids not anything other than completely serious about the name.
This article is good food for thought in a year dominated by two strong "outsider vs the Establishment" candidates in the US, populist rise in all the European elections, and the entire Brexit issue. We are confronting a lot of areas where the "will of the people" differs from "the will of the people who know what the fuck they're talking about." this raises a lot of questions about "democratic-ness."
executive powers originally designed for extenuating circumstances are being used on one side and the other: to select delegates in an election, to get around a stonewall Congress in Washington, to name a boat in England. Where they aren't used, there is pressure to use them: to avoid a Brexit disaster, to stand up for a comedian's right to free speech in Germany, to respond to terrorist threats in France and Belgium.
I have to wonder if this is the Internet doing to Democracy what it is doing to Capitalism : breaking fundamental assumptions of how the world works. Information and opinions work very differently, now. We are part of much larger social herds, governed by different forces, with much faster (and more selective) information transfer. Populism is a different beast today than when Berlusconi ran in the 90s. Maybe it's time you disrupt democracy.
And what's wrong exactly if the name appeals to every 5 years old in the country? I think /that/ is inspirational -- how better to get kids interested in the science than having them following that boat adventures over the oceans?
I think refusing that name would be not just be 'anti democratic' -- it's just be very un-british, because as a foreigner, that's /exactly/ what I'd expect the british to come up with as a name, just for a smirk, and that's something I like about them!
Seriously! I can't believe that the boat probably won't be named Boaty McBoatface!
My nephew would have wanted to learn about it, it would have been something I could keep up to date a bit on what it's doing and he'd love to hear about it.
Hell I can't believe the people on the project didn't go 100% for it right away, giving the boat a fun paint-job and maybe even doing something like working with a children's book author to write some stories about what the boat is doing that are geared toward children.
It would have been an amazing way to get kids involved and interested in the whole thing.
Hear hear. I'm going to pass on your suggestion to NERC and my children's schools if you don't mind. I think using Boaty as a focus for school science projects is a great idea.
And you're absolutely right, it's bloody un-British to refuse to name it Boaty. I mean, we won't do anything about it but there'll be a lot of tutting I'll be bound.
I'm also a bit sore that they removed the Spanish admiral as an entry. Not exactly fair play. Rather disappointing actually.
Direct democracy and representative democracy are different. But let's not fool ourselves into thinking the Internet suggestion box for ship names was direct democracy.
“The new royal research ship will be sailing into the world’s iciest waters to address global challenges that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, including global warming, the melting of polar ice, and rising sea levels,”
"Imagine Boaty McBoatface sailing into the world's iciest waters with the wide-eyed fascination of a child. Observing global challenges that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, Boaty McBoatface absorbs new facts and ideas without the jaundiced and prejudiced views of older research vessels while providing fresh perspectives and iron-clad observations of data regarding global warming, the melting of polar ice and rising sea levels."
267 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] thread(And as another commenter who is familiar with the project internals pointed out - they already do call it McBoatface)
Except for the captain.
I hope the officials hold firm. Long after the easily entertained public has moved on, they can do their job without being reminded of how poor the sense of humor in the general populace actually is.
How is the a bland, inane government-issue name it will no doubt end up with going to be any better?
This is good advice. In Toronto we have a baseball stadium called the Rogers Center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Centre). It was originally called the SkyDome but it was bought by a company called Rogers and renamed.
Everyone still refers to it as the Skydome. Corporate branding be damned:)
Also, most people in DC just call it National. Probably because the other airport also has a one word name (Dulles).
Which airport, "Reagan", "Dulles" or "BWI" ?
They don't say "Marshall" for BWI, though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marionberry
Im recent years, the city renamed the airport to Louis Armstrong airport, but no one in the city refers to it as that. Everyone still calls it Moisant. Not that we don't like Louis Armstrong, it's always been called Moisant and New Orleans really doesn't like change.
However, I can think of one counterexample: JFK airport in NYC. It used to be called Idlewild, named after some golf course I think, but was renamed to JFK (with the airport code JFK) back in the 60s. No one knows what "Idlewild" is any more.
A further tangent, but the more obvious airport code LOU is still in active use across town at Bowman Field, the city's original air field (definitely not an airport) and these days the oldest remaining continually operating air field in the country.
Coca Cola Starplex (original) > Smirnoff Music Center > Superpages.com Center > Gexa Energy Pavilion
Not one of the brandings has resulted in any noteworthy facility improvements, interestingly enough /s
"Ak-Chin Pavilion (formerly known as the Desert Sky Pavilion, Blockbuster Desert Sky Pavilion, Cricket Pavilion, Cricket Wireless Pavilion and Ashley Furniture HomeStore Pavilion) is an amphitheater located in Phoenix, Arizona, which seats 8,000 under a pavilion roof and an additional 12,000 on a hillside behind the main stands."
That much renaming is really ridiculous IMO.
Then I wondered why there are so many telco/media stadiums/pavilions/etc., and not more furniture stores in the mix.
Nobody calls it anything but Science World.
In the past few months I have heard all 4 names used for the facility.
It's been nearly a decade since Austin's "Town Lake" was renamed by the city council as "Lady Bird Lake" (in honor of Lady Bird Johnson). To this day, I'm not sure I've ever heard it referred to as anything other than Town Lake. I certainly can never remember to use the new name.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_St_Mary_Axe
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/122_Leadenhall_Street
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_Fenchurch_Street
I'd buy a Boaty McBoatface toy and I'm not even British.
I mean, it's cute to give the public an opportunity to name something, but half the people who voted in the poll have probably forgotten the ship even exists by now.
And regardless I doubt anyone will call it "Boaty McBoatface". It'll be abbreviated into something anyway. BMBM or Boaty or something.
And it will demonstrate that resistance is futile!
Edit: Or maybe it's all part of the plan. Let us all down by hinting that they're not using the name, then announce a change of heart. The internet would explode.
Next thing you know they'll want to be doing science themselves. Where will it end?
It's not to say that the work isn't serious or important, just that sometimes it's OK to have a laugh, even in an omgsrsbzns environment. It's not really at the expense of anyone (aside from perhaps the pride of a few) and it's not really disrespectful or non-kid-friendly (actually I'm sure kids would love it) like e.g. RRS Naff Minger or something else that the internet at large might dream up. My point is that it's actually a viable family-friendly name, and I mean...just look at it. Totally looks like a Boat McBoatface to me. It has that Pixar anthropomorphic look to it. It also looks like a big toy version of a real boat. Very cartoony, especially in bright red
Boaty McBoatface it is, then.
So - better ride, less fuel consumption, cartoonish look. Win-win-win.
Really, people take this stuff waaay too seriously.
I understand that calling it "CuntBrick 5000" would be offensive and we shouldn't do that, but "Boaty McBoatface" is just whimsical...
http://waterfordwhispersnews.com/2016/04/18/us-military-intr...
After gaining the #1 position the organization decided to withdraw the name from the polling, causing more controversy about this digital process.
Edit... anyway: De Lezo took part in the Spanish Sucession War. In that war, Catalonia lost some fueros (middle ages common law) because it was against the Borbons (that won) and in the revisionist version of history that we're hearing in very recent years, that's tantamount to genocide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81lvaro_de_Baz%C3%A1n-clas...
> A band of Spanish net buccaneers has mounted a determined incursion into Her Maj's territorial cyberwaters by demanding that Blighty's forthcoming Royal Research Ship be named the RRS Blas de Lezo, in honour of the man who administered the British a serious military shoeing during the War of Jenkins' Ear.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/29/boaty_mcboatface_spa...
It was going to win, so they had to shut down the candidacy. Not even the brits can handle the power of roto2...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
The country that gets least tax evasion and most volunteers to army is likely to perform better than anybody else. And so survival of the fittest governments has favored democracy for past three centuries.
I doubt this has any explanatory power as to why sortition isn't used much today.
Among other things, the median citizen doesn't care even a little bit about who is prime minister or otherwise in charge.
If you are U.S. citizen, you probably would prefer Obama over Enrique Peña Nieto. Personally as a Finn I like Sipilä and Niinistö over Putin. In a way any Finnish party head would suit me better than Putin. It matters little which of them, but it matters a lot that it's one of them.
In medieval Europe, vassal dukes would bargain who king they would pay taxes to. And you had situations where Britain was ruled by dude who spoke French and lived in Normandy.
Well, you don't really have a choice in the former, and when there's a draft, you don't in the latter either.
> The country that gets least tax evasion and most volunteers to army is likely to perform better than anybody else
I disagree. You are elevating the state too high. I would counter that the countries with the most economic freedom -- those that have embraced markets and rule of law -- are the ones at the top.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg0_Vhldz-8
The idea being, you can let people vote on your behalf, or you can vote directly, and you have the freedom to choose between these on an issue by issue basis.
The point is that you can delegate for individual bills, as well as taking back your power to vote on individual bills. You can delegate by category, but you don't need to if it doesn't serve you. The idea is that the people you delegate to have to stick up for your best interests, as their power can be taken away at any point if they do not.
Surveillance law is a pretty relevant example, since for most people not on HN it's a relatively low priority, and there's a fairly high likelihood that if they're able to delegate somebody to vote for them on a general area like "civil liberties issues" (for most people, a delegate with a decent libertarian credentials) and "national security" (for most people, a delegate who promises to be robust), the person or committee that decides for whether a particular surveillance bill is considered "civil liberties" or "national security" in effect holds a casting vote any time most of the public doesn't feel strongly enough to make a bill-specific decision. Somebody has to resolve differences between a budget balancing bill popular with the public's preferred delegates for "taxation" issues and a bill with public spending implications popular with the public's preferred delegates for "health issues", "education issues" or "social policy issues" too. Since they're supposed to be administering a process rather than enacting a particular programme of government they were elected on like a de jure executive, they're probably also subject to far less scrutiny.
Of course, the system still has the advantage that the public can step in and overrule their regular representative whenever they feel strongly enough to do so, but not necessarily any more effectively in practice than powers to force a referendum as a form of public veto.
http://youtu.be/cMc0Piwx8SU
I'm not a fan of grover norquist but I think it is unfair to say our representatives should be free to disregard the pledge they so publicly made when they were campaigning. Yes, we expect our representatives to go against their platform in extreme cases for the greater good but I'd say if that happens, the representative must turn right around and resign immediately from office and not run for office again.
No, it doesn't matter if the cause was an "obstructionist" Congress. It didn't matter with George HW Bush and it won't matter now.
Can you imagine if we had a referendum for independence of Scotland and had Cameron said "nah jk" after the results came in favor of Independence? Or if he started attaching new conditions to the promised he made Scots to vote no? "Oh we will get right to the issue of devolution but we must make sure Scots can't vote in England only legislation" but then who didn't they say that when campaigning?
Imagine a system where there was a yearly pie eating contest to determine the king for a year. Would it be OK for the current winner to abolish the contest and make the position hereditary? Of course not!
The US system seems to be doing quite well. The majority of the population doesn't care at all, and their votes don't count. Those are people who either always vote for the same party or don't vote at all. The important decision then comes down to the minority of people who are most interested in the policies - the swing voters. Isn't that quite an efficient division of labor?
Surely it's closer to compare it to a referendum: in which, the public majority agreed on an answer that the establishment didn't like, and will now renege on.
You so wish. It's a popularity contest like any other. Proof: Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Ventura, Berlusconi, Trump, Franken, the Ghandi dynasty, even the last Troudeau. Name recognition alone pretty much trumps (eh) everything else, once you couple it with pre-existing popularity you've basically won, no matter what your message is. You can try to outweigh that with massive doses of continuous higher education, sure, but the natural rest state is that any electoral process is mostly a popularity contest.
If a majority prefers pepperoni pizza but will eat basically anything, don't be surprised when the representative orders vegetarian. The vegetarians care far more about the exact type of pizza that's served and are more likely to change which representative they vote for in order to get what they want.
I've had people walk out of company dinners (to get "real" food) due to inconsiderate behaviour like this, from supposedly "tolerant" managers. Needless to say, such incidents are seldom repeated.
And I say inconsiderate, because that's what such behaviour constitutes as in my cultural climate.
"tyrannical" because a group that got a boat, asked some people what their thought on the matter was, and then said "no that silly"?
"What happened to disapproving of what you name your boat, but defending to the death your right to name it" and now this is infringing on free speech as well?
2) US elections are so dominated by advertisement, expensive campaigns and donations that there is no way a politician can actually do what they tell voters because at the end of the day they have to satisfy donors otherwise they can't get money to run elections. There has been studies that show American politicians are mainly aligned with the wishes of the rich rather than people who vote on them.
That is just two big points, which makes the US stand out of many other western democracies, and there are multiple others.
My other objection is that Boaty McBoatface, somehow represents the will of the people. No it doesn't. It represent the will of people who bothered to vote on an issue most people likely don't give a dam about. If a choice was demanded of the whole population then Boaty McBoatface would never have won.
Whenever there is an issue most people don't have a vested interest in or think is very important it is likely that whoever wants to stirr up stuff or make some fun are going to win, because nobody else has any incentive.
This is of course a major issue with democracy. When you let people make decisions on things they don't really care about then they will make poor decisions. Democracy shouldn't make everything a choice, but rather be about choosing people you think will make good choices on your behalf.
The point is that if it does represent the will of the people and the people in power don't like it, the will of the people will still lose out.
The two party system in the US is a problem, but it turns out it's natural consequence of Democracy. There's no law against other parties, it just turns out that with direct voting in a large country, over enough time, we arrive here with two parties.
If you look at the Democratic party, in 1968 an unfavored candidate was nominated based on votes, and so the DNC decided to institute the concept of super-delegates from thereon out. They did this because letting normal democracy run its course didn't work because the people elected someone the party elites didn't think was the best. The super delegates composed of party loyalists and high ranking party members that could ignore DNC votes. This essentially gave the party more control over who would win and removed voting power from normal people.
In the current election, Donald Trump is doing the same thing to upset the Republican party leadership. The Republicans haven't implemented anything as undemocratic as super-delegates yet, but if Trump wins they might be encouraged to (since it's the type of Democracy-giving-poor-results scenario people in power try to avoid).
Wrong.
It turns out that with First-Past-The-Post, we arrive with two parties.
In many other countries, over centuries, even more parties develop, and fail again.
Of course democracy was never meant to be the most efficient or effective system of government. It's simply the most compromising one.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_I...
It's a natural consequence of the specifics of how the US does elections. The US isn't the only country with democracy and plenty of others have more than 2 significant parties.
Most countries where there are more than two parties are smaller. Just like in the US at lower level elections independents and other party members might win.
For a full accounting, look back to the rise of the two party system during the Jacksonian era, or the current system of Democrats and Republicans (replacing the Whig party) started in the 1850s.
An explanation based on population size would have to be able to explain why it is that the current two party system in the US started when it was a much smaller country.
The US population in 1860 was 31,443,321. There are now 42 countries with a population larger than that.
It's mystifying how such a diverse and populous country can be represented well at all. And the evidence is stacking up to show that it can't, in USA, Russia, China, and India.
If you force British people to vote then Boaty McBoatface would probably win, because british people can be surprisingly bloody minded.
And boaty mcboatface is the polite version, you'd have a number of people writing Cunty McCuntyCunt on the form.
In general, I'm inclined to think that in a democracy, the people should have more direct influence to things “closer” to them (by some measure), and less for bigger, nationwide, issues, of which they presumably have less understanding. This is, in fact, how most democratic nations work in practice.
The case of Boaty McBoatface, though, is unusual in that it doesn't actually much matter what the name of a research vessel is. It's just a name. Names are almost always boring. Unless… if the name becomes so popular and widely known that the very name opens up completely new opportunities for raising funds and awareness. Which, I would have thought, was kind of the point of the competition to begin with.
So, why not reap the PR benefits of this name? Why would they start a contest but back out when they hit the jackpot? I do not understand.
You could do merchandise, books, characters, You could have Boaty McBoatface sale up to the ice caps to look at why they are melting.
It's not like this is unusual we had a Childrens TV series here that was massively popular about talking trains and talking helicopters.
I think they squandered a massive opportunity because they don't understand how the internet works.
If on the other hand giving it a silly name "dilutes their brand" (to use an HN favourite) then they're going to do the stuffy thing. Not entirely sure why folks would be surprised at a Conservative minister taking a conservative approach...
Really seems that SCIENCE does a lot better in the public eye at the moment when it goes populist rather than cloistered, but here we are...
Except vaccines. And chemtrails. And moon landings. And and and...
I'm a populist by nature but let's not get carried away here.
These movements share a message: "the man is screwing us little people". That's a populist message, which it's why they're much more popular than their actual craziness would otherwise grant.
Why does it have to appeal to 4 year olds, who have zero understanding of or interest in what it does? Why does it require an infantile name to appeal to kids who are old enough to be interested in what it does?
The only reason this is even any kind of issue is because of the way internet works, where all kinds of pointless immature stupidity is given far more time of day than it deserves, because newspaper sites have to fill themselves with something.
Edit: Oh dear. Looks like I hit a nerve with some people. :( ∗sad mcsadface∗
And you don't have to be a child to appreciate the name, just not quite as allergic to whimsy as you seem to be.
He was talking about free merchandise, books, characters then?
> You could have Boaty McBoatface sale up to the ice caps to look at why they are melting.
An example of how it could be used to deliver important messages.
And merchandise can be part of the message anyway.
(I should however note that I just edited my comment to include the word "simply".)
And exactly what problem does attaching the name to a real boat cause? I think the objection to the name is far more childish than the name itself. "Oh no no no, we can't call it that. This is a serious boat, for serious grown ups."
So what's your presumably non-childish objection to other things being given "whimsical" names?
I don't object to that either?
Do you or do you not believe everything should have a whimsical name?
To save time: If your answer to this is "No, I do not believe everything should have a whimsical name", then what is your non-childish objection to whimsical names in some cases?
(Except in the sense that variety is preferable, but I don't think that's what you're getting at.)
If not, you'd be an excellent committee member. You'd be a total hit at committees.
No one forced them in to the situation.
FWIW I don't find the name stupid, one person's humour is another's stupidity I guess.
Hopefully it's a lesson for them not to ask The Internet its opinion again.
British public life is nothing but whimsy. Consider that "wheelie bin" is the actual normal name of a thing, not a cutesy nickname.
A little non-whimsy is frankly refreshing.
There are words in all dialects that sound whimsical to outsiders, but internally they're so normalised that no one considers them whimsical at all.
You realise that those 4 year olds grow up right? And that by possibly catching their attention and imagination at an early age it might even make them more interested in the area and maybe, gosh, make them want to become researchers and scientists when they grow up and tackle issues like climate change.
And the very people objecting to it now will be retired, dead or moved onto a more senior position and then care less about it.
No, I didn't realize that 4 year olds grow up. Thank you for clearing that up.
This isn't a particularly convincing argument for a silly name. If kids will accept Thomas, surely they'll accept a more serious name than Boaty McBoatface.
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=thomas%20the%20tank%...
Problem is, it's easier to develop an understanding of national issues than local or regional issues because national issues get pushed on us by media, while you have to actually seek out information about anything local. Everyone talks about national issues, that's social pressure to become knowledgable about them.
Not everyone feels this way. Names can be important and in the arts are particularly relished/valued and interpreted, to the extent that noms-de-plume and other forms of pseudonym are popular.
A formalist account of names sees them as dumb labels, and in computing you can get away with that. But it's not whole story because it doesn't consider the emotional side.
This is reminiscent of a contest on EEVBlog that Keysight just sponsored. Participants entered the contest by posting a video on Facebook describing what they would do with an oscilloscope. The person whose video garnered the most votes would win a new 20 GS/s oscilloscope with a bandwidth spec of 6 GHz and a price tag in the neighborhood of US $70,000.
Naturally, the winner turned out to be a kid who made a video about an electric water heater and got a bunch of her schoolmates to flood the voting page. The highest-ranked entry by someone with a legitimate need for a 6 GHz oscilloscope finished in a distant third place.
So Keysight did the only thing that could have avoided a giant online dumpster fire, and gave one of the scopes to each of the top three contestants. It was an expensive lesson in the failings of democracy (and in not using Facebook for anything important).
So yeah, they should just paint the name on the boat and get over it. Keysight salvaged their marketing effort by taking the high road, but you can bet they won't run this contest the same way in the future. They're lucky they didn't have to give away three dozen 6 GHz scopes to random high school kids.
Realistically it's the will of 4chan and Reddit, which is nowhere near as noble-sounding as "the will of the people".
This assumes McBoatface is a poor decision, which is a completely personal (and most likely wrong) assessment.
There are no objective parameters for what a good ship name should be in generic terms. For something with military applications, probably easy spelling and brevity would factor in, but in reality a lot of military ships have long and windy names anyway. Something with a publicity element, like a research ship, could do with something memorable and fun, which Boaty McBoatface undoubtedly is; naming it as some obscure last-century researcher would make it utterly forgettable.
So it looks like there is wisdom in the crowds after all; it's just that often it doesn't match the wisdom of stuffy establishment types.
Imagine if the national conventions were deciding which of the many already balloted candidates to endorse, rather than a media circus driving national attention to a smaller and smaller number of candidates that are then placed on state ballots by the parties months after an independent would have had to finished submitting ballot petitions.
It would still be a circus, but it wouldn't be a circus where the choices are filtered through a few thousand people. I suppose it would be necessary to again make the first loser the Vice President, but that shouldn't really hurt anything.
(In many places ballot initiatives could be used to work around insider resistance to such a change)
By outspending his opponent over 2:1 and still losing by a large margin, Bernie Sanders has proved that money can't buy an election.
Voting is to democracy as is telescopes is to astronomy.
Democracy is about the people being in charge, of the government existing for the benefit of the people (as opposed to a dictator/absolute monarch/aristocracy) on the broadest possible stretches. It's about replacing the people in charge peacefully every few years. It's not about every decision being made at every level of government always being in line with what a majority might vote -- and it's emphatically not about online votes for silly things. It's an abomination to suggest such votes have anything to do with democracy (or, if you're so minded, an elaborate tactic for the power cabal to create the illusion of people being in power, but that theory is rather diminished by the power cabal not following the decision).
Democracy is worst form of government, except for all other others. It's not perfect, and it doesn't hold the seeds of perfection. It's at best a decent way of preventing a strong man and his cronies from grabbing too much power too fast -- it's not even a guarantee against that happening.
However, the unexpected strong performances of Trump and Sanders in the US primaries is for all its weirdness a symptom of the system working, however imperfectly: It's a huge vote of non-confidence in "the system" and the perception that it has been captured by some vaguely defined instance of not-the-people (Sanders: Wall Street; Trump: Who the hell knows? Mexicans?) and that (however crudely) something should be done about it.
most technically we call ourselves a Federal Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_republic
"It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election." (Aristotle)
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
http://i.imgur.com/e3jOsWR.jpg
Indeed the vote was obviously silly and did in fact achieve its desired goal: publicity for arctic research. The officials are insane if they don't go along with the choice. It's an opportunity for further publicity on arctic research for decades to come!
This can be said about the election in pretty much all western societies. There have been several occasions where I myself have not voted in the UK elections. Does it make those elections any less valid? Same can be said for the US as well, where even those who voted found that majority rule didn't matter in the end [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...]
Maybe we should follow the Australian way where people are forced to vote or face a $100AU fine. But then democracy right, it should give you the right to not vote.
I didn't participate in this election (I'm not a UKian) and didn't see exactly how it was done, but I'll bet (esp. given the statements made about the results, and how the winner got 3x the number of votes of the runner-up) they had a big list of names, and then people had the chance to vote for exactly one of those names. "Boaty McBoatface" therefore was probably not the choice of the majority of the voters, but only a small minority, with all the other votes spread across a bunch of other names.
If the name was not chosen by a clear majority of people, then it's not the "choice of the people".
If this had been done by some other voting system, then we would have seen very different results most likely. Approval voting might have worked well here; whichever name got the most votes of approval, if more then 50% of the voters approved it, can rightfully be said to be "the choice of the people".
This is the problem with "democracy": the voting system itself is inherently rigged and unfair, and then we're told to believe in its results. How many elections actually use a voting system besides plurality? Not many.
The parties in the US don't control the opinions and seats of their elected members, which means you get a greater variety of political positions under the same label than you do in a lot of parliamentary systems. Republicans in California can easily be left of Democrats in Georgia.[0]
There are opinions held by small interest groups that are not reflected in the democratic process, to be sure.
On the other hand, performing artists have their own line in the tax code, so sometimes these groups do get their way.
> US elections are so dominated by advertisement, expensive campaigns and donations that there is no way a politician can actually do what they tell voters because at the end of the day they have to satisfy donors
A lot of studies have debunked the influence of money on campaigns.[1]
Jeb's massive war chest didn't keep him in the race.
Here are the richest individuals to ever launch a bid for the presidency[2]:
1) Ross Perot
2) Steve Forbes
3) John Kerry
4) Mitt Romney
5) Al Gore
The Clintons are next, but most of their money was made after Bill's Presidency.
Giuliani, Edwards, and Huntsman round out the list (before this election, I'm not sure if anyone really knows how much Trump is worth).
A lot of losers on that list for a system so influenced by money.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zell_Miller
[1] http://freakonomics.com/2012/01/17/how-much-does-campaign-sp...
[2] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ross-perot-tops-lis...
Second, everyone, including the government is making it sound as if this is a "terrible name", just because it's out of the framework they imagined it to be. But I think this is a great name and has brought nothing but popularity to the project being done on that boat.
It's partially true this isn't how elections work, but I think what the article was trying to get by or at least what I got out of it is that the process was democratic and in similar ways democracy fails. Now this is somewhat subjective and entirely dependent on what you call democracy. It's funny I read this now as I had just started reading a new book I got titled Our Republican Constitution by Randy E. Barnett (great read by the way.) The writer is talking about the American constitution.
Once when Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government the framers had devised he answered famously "a republic, if you can keep it." This was in contrast to a democracy which the writer says they didn't wholly disagree with, but having an excess of democracy had created problems.
The author states two conflicting paradigms a Democratic Constitution and a Republican Constitution. He states these are not reflections of what we see as the democratic and republican parties that the USA has today as both parties have believers of both viewpoints. His main distinction that I perceived from reading was that the Democratic Constitution perceived what was constitutional or law by the "majority". Well the alternative to that doesn't seem like it would be anything good it's quite the contrary. The alternative as he states is The Republican Constitution (what he states was the founders paradigm) which has the basis of constitutionality on whether each "individual" had there basic rights. In some cases throughout american history majority rule hasn't favored the individual e.g. racial segregation. In cases where majority rule opposes the inalienable rights of the individual I feel democracy fails and as I stated before that's the one part that I could agree with the journalist that democracy isn't always the best solution to a problem.
Second - even proper referendums are usually advisory, i.e. the outcome isn't bindnig for legislators. I don't see a democratic problem with that either unless legislators would go against a strong public opinion, repeatedly.
Just imagine being the parents and losing to McBoatface. Have it named after the kid with Mcboatface be the nickname.
As a sideline, what is democracy even? Democracy via elections would be oligarchy to ancient Athenians, who prefered democracy by lot anyway.
Agree with your point that it doesn't really help the discussion to treat obscure and easily manipulated online polls on trivia as actual mass expressions of public will. I mean, it's about as valid as the poll Redditors brigaded to try to prove that nearly every American would vote for Sanders.
executive powers originally designed for extenuating circumstances are being used on one side and the other: to select delegates in an election, to get around a stonewall Congress in Washington, to name a boat in England. Where they aren't used, there is pressure to use them: to avoid a Brexit disaster, to stand up for a comedian's right to free speech in Germany, to respond to terrorist threats in France and Belgium.
I have to wonder if this is the Internet doing to Democracy what it is doing to Capitalism : breaking fundamental assumptions of how the world works. Information and opinions work very differently, now. We are part of much larger social herds, governed by different forces, with much faster (and more selective) information transfer. Populism is a different beast today than when Berlusconi ran in the 90s. Maybe it's time you disrupt democracy.
I think refusing that name would be not just be 'anti democratic' -- it's just be very un-british, because as a foreigner, that's /exactly/ what I'd expect the british to come up with as a name, just for a smirk, and that's something I like about them!
My nephew would have wanted to learn about it, it would have been something I could keep up to date a bit on what it's doing and he'd love to hear about it.
Hell I can't believe the people on the project didn't go 100% for it right away, giving the boat a fun paint-job and maybe even doing something like working with a children's book author to write some stories about what the boat is doing that are geared toward children.
It would have been an amazing way to get kids involved and interested in the whole thing.
And you're absolutely right, it's bloody un-British to refuse to name it Boaty. I mean, we won't do anything about it but there'll be a lot of tutting I'll be bound.
I'm also a bit sore that they removed the Spanish admiral as an entry. Not exactly fair play. Rather disappointing actually.
I know it is silly and childish, but that would be so awesome. That joke would never get old.
"Imagine Boaty McBoatface sailing into the world's iciest waters with the wide-eyed fascination of a child. Observing global challenges that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, Boaty McBoatface absorbs new facts and ideas without the jaundiced and prejudiced views of older research vessels while providing fresh perspectives and iron-clad observations of data regarding global warming, the melting of polar ice and rising sea levels."
I think it works!