I remember the last Thiel thread was a holy war filled with people who thought outspoken Trump supporters should lose their careers on grounds of bigotry and hate speech propagation (citing https://xkcd.com/1357/ among other things).
Revisiting that thread with the knowledge that Trump would win and that Trump supporters were not some vocal minority is sobering.
Look at the numbers; they're still a vocal minority, they're just ones who vote as a bloc and have the geographic advantage. Trump got less than Romney after all.
The real story is that with more than half of the country sitting out the voting process, the winner is always going to be decided by a "vocal minority".
> The real story is that with more than half of the country sitting out the voting process
Are you surprised by that? Properly voting costs a lot of money. I spent hours researching my options and another hour just walking to and from the voting dropoff location. When you add up all the time it takes to research an election and vote, multiply that by your personal time value of money, multiply that by the probability that it will change the election and then multiply it by the benefit of having 1 candidate over the other on your personal economic outlook, the individual voters cost/benefit is abysmal.
"multiply that by the probability that it will change the election and then multiply it by the benefit of having 1 candidate over the other on your personal economic outlook"
No you can't just loop that in there. The cost of walking to and from the polling location, fine, but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy. I waited in line for over an hour before work. If I extrapolate my salary out, I paid probably $10 worth of my time to vote. Considering that is once every 4 years, that's not much to live in a democracy where we get to vote to choose our representatives.
That would be a good response, except you can still live in a democracy without voting. You're just accepting that generally a plurality of the voting population will make a reasonable decision rather than saying you need to take part in that yourself every time.
I'm not sure how this is related to the cost/benefit of voting? Yes you can not vote and still live here. And? (I'm not trying to be argumentative, just don't understand).
I think it's a reply to your description of voting as one of "the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy". You don't, strictly, have to pay that cost.
> but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy
Not really, we could randomly choose a few thousand people to vote and it would be practically just as effective without all the costs of having everyone vote. Better yet, you would probably get a better sample of the population too since it would not be biased towards people who normally vote.
You'd need perfect security... I mean perfect, or that would be a trivially easy system to control. The irony that the government subject to such a process would be needed to ensure the sanctity of that process should not be lost on you.
Can you expand on having to walk an hour to the 'voting dropoff location'? Firstly, do you mean where you actually vote and secondly is this an urban location?
I'm interested as having lived in two countries with different electoral systems (UK and Australia) and in urban and rural locations I never had to walk more than a few hundred yards to a polling booth (urban) or I could park pretty close (rural).
I also noticed that news coverage of the election was showing very long lines, is this a typical experience for voters in US?
You forget that the GOP fractured and there was a neocon candidate whose vote would have gone to Trump otherwise.
A couple hundred thousand votes difference is a tie. It's bad weather in Texas or California turning off a quarter million voters and ending up with the same result.
As it should be, if you're not passionate enough to get to the polls and stand in line for a few minutes then you shouldn't have a voice in the election.
I'm not sure that being ruled by the most passionate is actually that effective. It seems to me that passion and a lack of intelligence seem strongly correlated. It's easy to work someone who can't see the broader picture, up into a frenzy than it is to convince people with complicated and diverse views into that same frenzy. It is frankly, why the Republican party could toe the same line for decades, echo that on radio stations and TV chat shows, and consistently whip their base into a frenzy over a predictable handful of issues. By contrast Democrats had to appeal to a fundamentally more diverse base with a similarly diverse set of issues, less open to sloganeering.
There is an essential asymmetry when you value passion over knowledge of the issues, intelligence, and education.
> the winner is always going to be decided by a "vocal minority".
I hope, this is taken note. The job of a representative democracy is to get a representative. We could just use the concept of sortition - randomly sampled voters.
And if you think ~half of the country is so horribly racist or sexist they should lose their jobs on grounds of bigotry and hate speech you've got bigger problems than the ability to do math. People just want change and Trump's offering more than just discrimination, he did well amongst white women and beat Romney's numbers with many non-white demographic groups.
He might not be my first choice, but I won't discredit all of his supporters over it.
lol I never said that. I said people who work in computer science who say that <50% is a majority have a serious problem with math and should look for work elsewhere given the nature of our field.
The balkanization of the united states would to lead foreign powers interfering and another civil war. It will never happen, same reasons the texit never happened.
Well, they're not "Wallstreet's dollars", it is international capital and it is happy to invest anywhere so long as it believes it will get a return. Possibly even happier to invest in an independent California if the government is likely to be beholden to its needs.
>...Silicon Valley ceases to be part of the United States.
With what army? Without the might of the United States military, the Mexican drug cartel would quickly take over California. After a few years under cartel rule, Californians will be seen crossing the border illegally back into United States.
These kinds of people don't ever think about the implications and consequences of their actions.
It's two days after the election and the NYT is proclaiming that Thiel's bet has paid off. It's way too early to say this. For whatever political pull Theil has gained, I believe he has (at least potentially) lost a lot of respect in other areas. Does that matter? maybe, maybe not. But my point is, it's a bit too early to tell in either case.
This is a true example of don't count your chickens before they're hatched.
"I think what most passers-by to Thiel’s Trump endorsement have wrong, is that they think this is some kind of fluke like a random personality quirk or even a midlife crisis. Hence the whole affair may be dismissed as the ramblings of a strange mad billionaire.
If you watch Thiel’s presentations going back over a decade, you’ll see something different. These are all public but it takes about a hundred hours or more so most people have jumped around, looking for the gist of what is going on, such as all these journalists attempting to psychoanalyze Thiel, with the obvious motives that first: something weird needs to be explained (100 journalists at the recent press conference!) and less honorably second: he has to be vilified as a prominent opposing political entity external to their tribe.
This is unfortunate because the truth is far more interesting albeit very difficult to explain in a way that would impart an understanding..."
45 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 96.4 ms ] threadRevisiting that thread with the knowledge that Trump would win and that Trump supporters were not some vocal minority is sobering.
The real story is that with more than half of the country sitting out the voting process, the winner is always going to be decided by a "vocal minority".
Are you surprised by that? Properly voting costs a lot of money. I spent hours researching my options and another hour just walking to and from the voting dropoff location. When you add up all the time it takes to research an election and vote, multiply that by your personal time value of money, multiply that by the probability that it will change the election and then multiply it by the benefit of having 1 candidate over the other on your personal economic outlook, the individual voters cost/benefit is abysmal.
I'm amazed so many people actually do vote.
No you can't just loop that in there. The cost of walking to and from the polling location, fine, but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy. I waited in line for over an hour before work. If I extrapolate my salary out, I paid probably $10 worth of my time to vote. Considering that is once every 4 years, that's not much to live in a democracy where we get to vote to choose our representatives.
Not really, we could randomly choose a few thousand people to vote and it would be practically just as effective without all the costs of having everyone vote. Better yet, you would probably get a better sample of the population too since it would not be biased towards people who normally vote.
They both have problems and I'm not saying one is totally better than the other.
I'm interested as having lived in two countries with different electoral systems (UK and Australia) and in urban and rural locations I never had to walk more than a few hundred yards to a polling booth (urban) or I could park pretty close (rural).
I also noticed that news coverage of the election was showing very long lines, is this a typical experience for voters in US?
A couple hundred thousand votes difference is a tie. It's bad weather in Texas or California turning off a quarter million voters and ending up with the same result.
There is an essential asymmetry when you value passion over knowledge of the issues, intelligence, and education.
This is actually categorically false, see the book Peak by Anders Ericsson for more information on this: https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise/dp...
people who are passionate are MUCH more intelligent and knowledgeable about issues and it's been proven.
I hope, this is taken note. The job of a representative democracy is to get a representative. We could just use the concept of sortition - randomly sampled voters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
If you can't do basic arithmetic, you should lose your career in this field, imo.
He might not be my first choice, but I won't discredit all of his supporters over it.
59,938,290 < 59,704,886 + 4,072,835 + 1,218,065 + 804,228
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all.
It would be something if the end result of Thiel backing Trump is that Silicon Valley ceases to be part of the United States.
With what army? Without the might of the United States military, the Mexican drug cartel would quickly take over California. After a few years under cartel rule, Californians will be seen crossing the border illegally back into United States.
These kinds of people don't ever think about the implications and consequences of their actions.
This is a true example of don't count your chickens before they're hatched.
https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de....
And here is the original comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413
Here is a teaser:
"I think what most passers-by to Thiel’s Trump endorsement have wrong, is that they think this is some kind of fluke like a random personality quirk or even a midlife crisis. Hence the whole affair may be dismissed as the ramblings of a strange mad billionaire.
If you watch Thiel’s presentations going back over a decade, you’ll see something different. These are all public but it takes about a hundred hours or more so most people have jumped around, looking for the gist of what is going on, such as all these journalists attempting to psychoanalyze Thiel, with the obvious motives that first: something weird needs to be explained (100 journalists at the recent press conference!) and less honorably second: he has to be vilified as a prominent opposing political entity external to their tribe.
This is unfortunate because the truth is far more interesting albeit very difficult to explain in a way that would impart an understanding..."