Politics

Madness From The Measure

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’m posting this before the 2024 election and everyone is talking about polls. Movements of a tenth of a point garner news stories. Questionable polls flood the zone. Everyone is looking at a few numbers and asking “what does it mean?”

So we know what that means here, I get to talk about the Unaccountability Machine again! If you’re new here, it’s a book on why organizations go stark raving bonkers, which seems pretty relevant now.

One of the many bits of wisdom in the Unaccountability Machine is focus on a limited metric makes an organization go insane. The author is usually talking about shareholder value, which is easily maximized by doing things that don’t actually involve doing useful things. A business can completely undermine itself, especially if it has enough money, and end up propped up by investors while not doing anything. At least until things fall apart.

Going mad from focusing on one number? Sounds a lot like polls doesn’t it?

We’re obsessed with polls, wanting to see the future, to know. Of course these are snapshots in time, and snapshots weighed and changed and tweaked to try to make them accurate. In the end someone asks a few people and then tries to model what their responses mean for the population as a whole. If that sounds vaguely crazy, congratulations, you’re starting to get it.

Trying to get the number right will make you mad, as we’ve seen quite a few times. And you know who I mean.

But also we follow the polls. We want to know what it means, and when you have a margin of error of 2% or more that often becomes meaningless. But boy as we look at those numbers, we all start to go a little crazy one way or another. We’re trying to see the future made by people either lying or trying, but not by those who know.

Watching the number will make you insane as will knowing it may be completely made up.

Finally, yes, there are manipulated polls. It’s been fairly obvious that happens for awhile, but any idiot can call themselves a pollster, and some pollsters are already a few bricks shy of a moral or mental load. So there may also be lots of B.S., making everyone else further crazy.

And then how many of the liars or propagandists are already slamming the kool-aid, believing what they lie about – or knowing they’re lying but not being sure of anything.

I’m really getting all the “nose to the grindstone, get out the vote people” this year. You just ignore the polls unless there are useful extremes and work hard. And boy in 2024, it seems like there’s a lot of weird things where margins of error tell us how much we can do or don’t know so we might as well get to work.

But the magic number tells us nothing, though it will make us and a lot of other people crazy.

What is finally crazy-making is maybe we could actually try to do stuff that works for people in politics. That maybe we need to discuss our poll obsession, or what works. But horseraces make for exciting news and endless amounts of fundraising letters. The news media makes bank on all this, but we keep talking numbers not people.

Which makes it all more crazy.

Steven Savage

Broken At The Top

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

This is another one of those columns where I have to say “if you think you know what/who inspired it, you’re wrong.” So, you’re wrong, or at least not 100% right about how this column came about. Well except, yes, some of this still comes from The Unaccountability Machine, but hey that’s gonna be playing on my mind for a few more months.

So I was wondering why do so many “leaders” seem absolutely broken as people? How do they make these poor decisions, hurt people, get arrested for hideous crimes, and so on? How do you rise to the top and be so messed up? I mean I sort of get some greed and megalomania, but come on.

Worse, these people put us in danger. How much power is in the hands of people who are so greedy, biases, narcissistic, and worse? We’re facing a lot of crises right now and too many leaders are dangerous to our survival – they are the crisis.

Then I realized as this played with idea, that’s not actually the thing to contemplate at this moment in history.

The question right now is not why too many of our leaders are broken people. The question is what do we do about it because now’s not the time to play therapist.

Right now we’ve got problems to solve, and there are a lot of them. Climate change, microplastics, financial capture, and more all are bearing down on us. We need to take as much power as much as possible, and ensure the leaders and experts we have are actually on the side of humanity.

This is necessary not just to fix problems but also to make sure we stop just letting our “leaders” hande it. We’ve seen a bunch of them are broken, from weird billionaires to royal families somehow still treating us as peasants. We need to fix crap now and firewall against any a-hole coming alone to screw up a better or at least less terrible world.

Even if some leaders are just firewalls against some actual psycho taking over, its better than, well, the psycho.

A thing I learned from looking back on the old disciplines of cybernetics (Hello, Unaccountabiliy Machine) is that sometimes you just stop asking why something happens and ask what goes into a system and what comes out. There are times to just check your inputs and outputs because the system is too complex or you don’t have time (or you don’t care).

Besides, any analysis of our culture problems and leadership pathologies could take time. Sure we could analyze historical comparisons, but how well do they map across time and culture? We could do psychology but the key thing is we have a-holes now so except how to identify, isolate, or change them we’re not quite as concerned. Whatever is in the Broken Leadership Box, it’s going to take time we don’t have to sort it out.

I find this attitude liberating. I don’t have to play therapist to whatever politician, priest, pundit, or plutocrat is out there except to make sure they can’t hurt people. We can analyze them at our leisure or when we have time.

Sometimes the machine puts jerks in charge. You tweak the inputs to get less jerks before you crack the case to look inside.

Steven Savage

Waiting to Be Stolen

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’d like to discuss politics. I am going to take painful efforts to be nonpartisan, but let me say the issue I am going to discuss can happen to anyone, but is much more common in certain areas. I make no promises of sounding entirely neutral, but it is important I do so.

We all wonder “how can anyone believe this bullshit?” or “why do people follow someone obvious lying to them?” We’ve perhaps wondered it about ourselves at times. But how can it be in modern times, with all our knowledge of history and education, with the internet and all else, do we believe obvious lies?

Well there are many reasons, and this isn’t a discourse on propaganda. There are other experts for that. But one factor I think that’s missed is we’re more primed to be taken advantage of than we realize.

There’s an old Taoist saying I’ve heard in a few forms, but basically “You can lock your treasures in a chest until a thief strong enough to lift the chest comes by.” What you use for control can be taken from you.

Now think about the first time you saw people believe obvious lies. You wondered how they can believe such falsehoods. Consider that they may have been primed to believe by other people, who then got their marks snatched from them. Someone locked them in a chest of ideas and the right podcaster or politician just happened to pick it up

A lot of us are gathered together waiting to be stolen.

We’re primed to believe marketing. We’re awash in advertising, demographic targeting, and old fashioned techniques perfected by modern technology. People don’t just push your buttons, they’ve installed new ones. The right product or company can snatch you away if you’re not careful, and steal a swath of customers who think it was their idea.

We’re primed to believe politicians – at least our politicians, you know, the proper ones. We’ve got plenty of news organizations that are propaganda, intentionally or because it’s marketable, or both. Someone else who learns the right game can steal an electorate right out from under someone.

To add to all of this, we’re also in a time where everyone can be a propagandist and are encouraged to be. Reach out for your church! Get more hits to your blog! Get that meme circulating for likes! You, yes you might even get famous on social media and start a career as a grifting a-hole!

All of this is enabled by technologies we’ve never fully assessed – and I don’t just mean the internet. Have we really asked about what commercial television means for us? How we have to prepare for increasing information choices in the internet age? Just how disorienting is streaming?

We’re not just locked in treasure chests, we’re taught how to steal others using tools we had dropped in our laps. It also is so normal. We’ve become used to being marketed to, propagandaized, lied to, etc. that we accept it, miss it, and participate in it.

So no, it’s not surprising that someone you know or even you got deceived into following some awful person or cause. We’ve been primed by a lot of our culture and economy to be locked up, stolen away, and even help others steal the minds of others.

There, I managed to stay non-partisan enough. I hope enough not just to make you think, but maybe doubt yourself a little bit.

Steven Savage