PyramidHead
Contributor
I'm listening to the latest Citations Needed podcast, which goes into Nate Silver's rise from a poker and baseball prediction junkie to a political commentator, following his impressive prediction of the 2008 electoral college result. I suggest everybody subscribe to them, they are awesome and shed a much needed light on media forces in politics.
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/
Anyway, the gist of the introduction to this episode is that political commitments have undergone a shift in America with the rise of people like Silver. There was a time when political pundits, and opinionated voters in general, were committed to advancing an actual political agenda. That is, the purpose of political discourse and commentary was to push a view about what would be best for the majority of people, according to the beliefs of whoever is pushing it. Today, a new paradigm has emerged: instead of actually having a perspective on what's best for the country and its citizens, the most respected and widely disseminated commentary is made by people who claim to be disinterestedly reporting empirical trends, such as poll numbers, and simply drawing non-ideological conclusions from the data. The focus has moved away from aggressively promoting a policy or a vision for political change to being factually correct about the preferences of voters.
If this sounds familiar, it's because it basically borrows from the math-ification of sports in the last decade or so, and of gambling since time immemorial. The enterprise of politics has become a reductionist process that sets a goal--our team wins--and dedicates all its energy to the attempt at predicting the probabilistically optimal way to do that, based on the cards already on the table, so to speak. It places little to no importance on the content of our team's platform, and certainly wastes no time trying to convince people of its merits. The pundit brain is solely concerned with what combination of variables will score the most points for the team, and uses numerical representations of human preferences to divine the best path forward.
It would be bad enough if the predictions were just wrong most of the time, which they are (despite some notable exceptions). However, the real tragedy is that this practice has replaced actual political activism. The idea that voters should start with an opinion or a set of values, and then proceed to advocate them and rally behind candidates who commit to upholding them, is nowadays regarded as out-of-touch; the only activity worth doing is to become a statistics wonk and just accept whatever values our team has chosen for us. With this change has come the rise of "electability" as a central goal and the myth of appealing to the "moderates", and allowing the definition of both to be fully determined by whatever the status quo happens to be. As such, the underlying function of the non-ideological pundit who just follows the data is to reinforce and perpetuate the ideology that currently prevails, and to shut down threats to it by accusing anyone who criticizes the ideology itself of derailing the train to victory.
Unfortunately, I'm fairly certain that most people reading this are firmly in the grip of pundit brain, based on my interactions on this forum over the past year. Since nothing could in principle be more important than beating Donald Trump, there is simply no time to engage in the naive, childish behavior of organizing a political movement around a moral or civic obligation and critically supporting its closest representative. That's for pie-in-the-sky dreamers. Actual politics is about passively absorbing the speeches of whatever candidates are amplified most by the media, and choosing the one most likely to appeal to my idea of the average voter, which is of course a totally neutral decision I make based on science and reason. After all, it's impossible for anyone on our team to be somehow WORSE than Trump, and we all know that winning an election against someone bad means defeating bad politicians FOREVER. Really, all we have to do is get ourselves back to exactly where we were immediately before being defeated by the person we're trying to defeat.
I submit we should be doing the opposite. Stop asking yourself if Elizabeth Warren's Native American DNA will be a sticking point in some debate--what do YOU think about her behavior in that situation? What do YOU think about Biden's positions, APART from how you think it will float with everybody else? Do YOU support the ambitions of someone like Sanders, or are you only interested in what Republicans will say about it? Reset your brains from pundit mode to "caring about politics as the means of affecting change in society for the better" mode, and actually figure out what YOU think is how to do that. Then, if you're serious about the views you hold, look at the polls as a reflection of underlying tendencies you have the power to influence through finding like-minded citizens and organizing on behalf of those views. Stop framing everything that happens in terms of how a faceless horde of unpredictable independents will react, and start practicing actual independence of your own, by staking a position in the very real ideological split that determines the future well-being of millions of people, if not the whole world.
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/
Anyway, the gist of the introduction to this episode is that political commitments have undergone a shift in America with the rise of people like Silver. There was a time when political pundits, and opinionated voters in general, were committed to advancing an actual political agenda. That is, the purpose of political discourse and commentary was to push a view about what would be best for the majority of people, according to the beliefs of whoever is pushing it. Today, a new paradigm has emerged: instead of actually having a perspective on what's best for the country and its citizens, the most respected and widely disseminated commentary is made by people who claim to be disinterestedly reporting empirical trends, such as poll numbers, and simply drawing non-ideological conclusions from the data. The focus has moved away from aggressively promoting a policy or a vision for political change to being factually correct about the preferences of voters.
If this sounds familiar, it's because it basically borrows from the math-ification of sports in the last decade or so, and of gambling since time immemorial. The enterprise of politics has become a reductionist process that sets a goal--our team wins--and dedicates all its energy to the attempt at predicting the probabilistically optimal way to do that, based on the cards already on the table, so to speak. It places little to no importance on the content of our team's platform, and certainly wastes no time trying to convince people of its merits. The pundit brain is solely concerned with what combination of variables will score the most points for the team, and uses numerical representations of human preferences to divine the best path forward.
It would be bad enough if the predictions were just wrong most of the time, which they are (despite some notable exceptions). However, the real tragedy is that this practice has replaced actual political activism. The idea that voters should start with an opinion or a set of values, and then proceed to advocate them and rally behind candidates who commit to upholding them, is nowadays regarded as out-of-touch; the only activity worth doing is to become a statistics wonk and just accept whatever values our team has chosen for us. With this change has come the rise of "electability" as a central goal and the myth of appealing to the "moderates", and allowing the definition of both to be fully determined by whatever the status quo happens to be. As such, the underlying function of the non-ideological pundit who just follows the data is to reinforce and perpetuate the ideology that currently prevails, and to shut down threats to it by accusing anyone who criticizes the ideology itself of derailing the train to victory.
Unfortunately, I'm fairly certain that most people reading this are firmly in the grip of pundit brain, based on my interactions on this forum over the past year. Since nothing could in principle be more important than beating Donald Trump, there is simply no time to engage in the naive, childish behavior of organizing a political movement around a moral or civic obligation and critically supporting its closest representative. That's for pie-in-the-sky dreamers. Actual politics is about passively absorbing the speeches of whatever candidates are amplified most by the media, and choosing the one most likely to appeal to my idea of the average voter, which is of course a totally neutral decision I make based on science and reason. After all, it's impossible for anyone on our team to be somehow WORSE than Trump, and we all know that winning an election against someone bad means defeating bad politicians FOREVER. Really, all we have to do is get ourselves back to exactly where we were immediately before being defeated by the person we're trying to defeat.
I submit we should be doing the opposite. Stop asking yourself if Elizabeth Warren's Native American DNA will be a sticking point in some debate--what do YOU think about her behavior in that situation? What do YOU think about Biden's positions, APART from how you think it will float with everybody else? Do YOU support the ambitions of someone like Sanders, or are you only interested in what Republicans will say about it? Reset your brains from pundit mode to "caring about politics as the means of affecting change in society for the better" mode, and actually figure out what YOU think is how to do that. Then, if you're serious about the views you hold, look at the polls as a reflection of underlying tendencies you have the power to influence through finding like-minded citizens and organizing on behalf of those views. Stop framing everything that happens in terms of how a faceless horde of unpredictable independents will react, and start practicing actual independence of your own, by staking a position in the very real ideological split that determines the future well-being of millions of people, if not the whole world.
