Greetings, all -- The Pauline Kael Syndrome affects all of us to a greater or lesser extent, I suppose (you may recall that Ms. Kael, film critic for "The New Yorker", famously commented in 1972, "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."). I am a bit of a cross-kenner, perhaps, in that as a finance guy who's a social progressive, I have sympathies on both sides -- as do most voters, I'd say. At the end of the day, however, I'm more confident in the kind of society a Democrat can offer than any other party. It's also worth noting that third-parties have never been successful in part because we in the US like clear winners - no "grand coalitions". The Perot '92 voters are McCain '08 voters, for the most part, and the Nader '00 voters are mostly Obama '08.
Maybe the distribution really is along the lines that Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes -- there's the narrative fallacy (believing in your ability to recognize patterns where none exists) and confirmation bias (paying attention only to information that strengthens your argument). Our deplorable lack of awareness of the world around us may be a feature, not a bug. We live in such relative peace and prosperity that politics doesn't really affect us day in and day out. Indeed, there are many economists who argue that there's no need to vote, since your single vote is unlikely to affect the outcome of an election. Of course, we in the sparsely poplulated West know better, and besides, there's a greater civic duty/social contract idea behind being a responsible citizen. That's the message of all the ads on MTV to get out the youth vote, and maybe it will work this time, but it's hard to force people. Citizens in South Africa and Iraq and Gaza have much more to gain, it seems, from participating in elections than we do. That neglects, however, the hard-won right to vote that our ancestors vouchsafed for us. We owe it to them as much as ourselves to make our voices heard. Like Owen and Doug, I'd like voters to be more intelligent, but I'll settle for their being less ignorant. - Claiborne - -----Original Message----- From: Douglas Roberts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 1:35 pm Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Election: Why So Close I can't resist: On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 1:30 PM, Tom Carter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...] Democrats tend to have at least a little trouble flat out lying . . .? Well, that would depend on what the definition of the word "is" is, wouldn't it? ;-} One of the more blatant Democratic lies ever uttered.? Its echos are still reverberating. -- Doug Roberts, RTI International [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
