jtolds.com - Politics

VP debate

JT Olds — Fri, 3 Oct 2008 03:53:00 +0000

The best moment of the VP debate was the amazing irony captured below:

"I like being able to answer these tough questions without the filter, even, of the mainstream media kind of telling viewers what they've just heard."

Note the literal filter of what a survey group in Ohio is thinking, projected on to CNN's coverage, literally suggesting to viewers something about what they've just heard. Ha. I laughed so hard when she said that. I was bothered the entire time by CNN telling me what to be feeling.

News aggregation and economics

JT Olds — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:58:06 +0000

Currently, news websites and newspapers have news for people at the granularity of a day. Headlines are day-specific, and there is no way to decrease your granularity. Say you've been out of touch for a week or a month. I want to just read the major headlines over that week or month. As it is, however, I can only read the last few headlines for the last few days if I want to catch up, and hope that enough information is there to explain what's going on.

Really, what would be nice is, given a timescale (a week, 2 weeks, 13 days, a month, or something), a news service would feed back the most important headlines or news stories sorted by topic that happened over that timescale such that it would be easy to get up to speed on what happened. Even better (but harder): summaries of each issue.

By the way, the above service is totally on my list of things I think would make for a successful startup. If someone gets involved making the above thing, I want to be involved. It shouldn't be that spectacularly hard. I can't imagine it would be much different than the technology that runs the Techmeme family of news websites (Techmeme, memeorandum, Ballbug, and WeSmirch). Seems like a perfect Google App Engine application once they roll out automated job support.

Occasionally news services do this manually for stories when really big stuff happens. I link to ~~two~~ three of those that seem relatively important right now.

Re: An open letter to "the religious right"

JT Olds — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 20:06:02 +0000

Update: more discussion by a friend here.

Joe Carter writes Being on God's Side: An open letter to "the religious right". I'm replying to his point #10.

Disclaimer: according to his definition of "religious right" at the beginning of the article, evidently I fall into that category, though I'm starting to doubt I would ever define myself that way, as I'm finding I'm not incredibly politically conservative.

At the end of the article, Joe says that "because the Bible says so" is not a reasonably persuasive argument to put forward in a political discourse. Instead, he posits that the religious right should make efforts to find arguments that support their beliefs, and use those as reasoning for political motivation.

I think this is inherently, and in some senses, disastrously, backwards. Arguments should not be found to support beliefs, though I'd say the common occurrence of this is unfortunately part of the human condition (Update: A related quote: "The difficulty lies, not in new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds." -John Maynard Keynes). Instead, beliefs should be founded on arguments.

Let me explain. Belief is an indication that someone says they know something. A belief is actually knowledge if the belief is true (describing this distinction between belief and knowledge is what the whole field of epistemology is all about). In other words, the human action of belief is, in some sense, the manifestation of attempting to understand the world by forming an hypothesis about what is true.

I am a firm believer (haha, believer) that there is an external truth that is true regardless of anyone's beliefs about it. I don't think truth is subjective. I think it's quite seriously objective. So, the question is, does a belief matter if it's untrue? My answer? No.

Now, bringing this back to Joe Carter's article, I am not attacking anyone in "the religious right"'s beliefs in any way. Evidently, if I was, I would be guilty of attacking myself. What I am saying is that those beliefs should be based on reason, and not the other way around. There are reasons for having the beliefs the religious right have, but if those reasons were to vaporize, we should not try to construct new reasons to support our existing beliefs; instead, we should endeavor to make sure our beliefs are solidified by existing reasons. If the belief is true (and therefore matters), then there is a reason. No need to make any up. And while I doubt Joe Carter would ever suggest that making up reasons is a good idea, I think his inverted order of priorities in effecting political discourse is prone to incite this sort of thing.

Retrospect

JT Olds — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 03:46:30 +0000

In retrospect, I think this joke is even more funny.

I wish Slashdot allowed replies to old comments.

Lessig on the Economy of Influence

JT Olds — Mon, 4 Aug 2008 17:13:51 +0000

I was talking to some friends this weekend about this Lessig essay, and I realized that I thought it was important enough that I should share it.

This goes along with my previous admonitions of things being more important that who the next president is.

If you have a minute, read Lessig's essay.

Change Congress!

JT Olds — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:23:48 +0000

It's hard to sell someone on a process instead of a person, but I assure you this is a much bigger deal than who the next president is, even though I hope this information sways your opinion there, too (see the bottom).

If you have time, please watch this video:

If you don't, please look at this website: http://change-congress.org/about/.

Update: I hope I have convinced you that lobbying is bad. Now watch this, then watch this. Ahhhhhh!

Draft Lessig

JT Olds — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:08:49 +0000

If you have a minute, please visit http://lessig08.org/.
If you have 10 minutes, please watch the prominent video displayed on the front of the page.