Slashdot Log In
Change.gov Uses Google Moderator System
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Dec 11, 2008 12:28 PM
from the they-should-call-it-pigg dept.
from the they-should-call-it-pigg dept.
GMonkeyLouie writes "The website for President-elect Obama's transition team, Change.gov, has unveiled a section called Open for Questions, which lets users submit questions and vote them up or down, in an effort to let the collaborative mind produce the questions that are the most important to the American populace (or at least the web-savvy portion). The page is powered by Google Moderator. It was unveiled yesterday, and CNet reports that when they went to post last night, '159,890 had voted on 1,986 questions from 3,255 people.'"
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Ahh, true democracy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
The republic be damned. This is true democracy in action: decision-by-mob!
Asking the mob any questions about Democratic Governor Blagojevich is a quick way to get modded into oblivion.
Which reflects why decision-by-mob doesn't always make for the most informed discussion.
Parent
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Harassing the President Elect using a debunked accusation is inappropriate behavior.
The public is modding it away. Too bad for the crackpots.
Parent
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
They should take a Greek political history course or something.
Like perhaps read the federalist papers or the major philosphical works of the political scientists of the time the Constitution was written? This is madness!
Parent
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:5, Funny)
Madness? This is SPARTAAAA!
Parent
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:5, Informative)
They should take a Greek political history course or something.
They don't even have to go back that far. They can simply read The Federalist Papers, specifically Number 10. The founders were nice enough, not only to give us a pretty swell constitution, but also a well thought out defense of the principals it rests upon.
But you really only need study the actual text of the constitution to find out what they thought about direct democracy: senators chosen by state legislators, the electoral college, and the conspicuous absence of a national vote on anything but amendments (and even then, only sometimes).
Parent
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:5, Interesting)
The structural mechanisms described were put in place for 2 reasons. First, because many viewed the federal government as a creation of the states (not from we the people). Second, it protects state sovereignty against federal encroachment. Thus the states could reign in a national government that some were afraid would be less representative of the people.
That's why the Bill of Rights does not, by a strict textual analysis, apply to the states. See Barron v. Mayor of Baltimore (a seminal John Marshall caase). At the time, no one suspected that the states would, in time, become the main oppressors of freedom.
But that's why Federalist 46 is interesting. Madison argues that the power of all governments, both state and national, originate from the people, and if in the future the people should choose to place their confidence in one or another, they should be empowered to do so.
So contrary to the popular "wisdom," the founding fathers were not as hostile to democracy as people like to claim. The Federalists (Adams) were afraid, but the Democrats (Jefferson) were all for it.
Parent
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:4, Interesting)
If you look at the documents by which the states ratified the Constitution, and the vote counts for them, you can see the suspicion that Americans had at the time against the Constitution. Several prominent Founders, including Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine, argued against the Constitution, and others such as William Randolph of Virginia saw it only as better than nothing, as "Union or no Union."
Madison & Co. argued in the Federalist Papers (around #41) that the Anti-Federalist faction was being paranoid for predicting that such clauses as "general welfare" and "interstate commerce" would be perverted into general-purpose powers for the feds to do absolutely anything. As you note, the Bill of Rights was added specifically to make it clear that there are limits on federal power, and that the federal government would have no powers but those specifically granted to it. Several states in their ratifying documents echoed that statement and even added that they reserved the right to secede! Still, the idea that the Founders supported absolute democracy is not quite accurate, because of their decision to limit what the new government could do. If they had really trusted "the people" not to elect representatives who would violate their rights, then there would've been no need for any limits on government power. Eg. Jefferson: "It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power."
Later, the 14th Amendment did impose some explicit restrictions on the states such as due process. But that only happened after several states tried to exercise their right of secession and the central government demonstrated that the union was no longer a voluntary one.
Parent
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
While it may be technically feasible to do a true democracy. It probably isn't a good idea.
1. Public opinion can change on a whim. There is no way we can be fully knowledgeable on all laws that are going on, even keeping track of all the summary of the laws while keeping a full time job. So all we need is some activist group to play a commercial with scary music, and a guy with a deep ominous voice. Showing children being effected can change majority of public opinion, without having to give any good evidence.
2. Protection of the minority. In some way were are all a minority in one area or an other. Lets say for example there was a some populous unpopular actions happening on slashdot, with some Evil Music commercials convinces the majority of the population that we as a group are all bad. Thus create laws against all slashdot users.
3. Group intellect usually favors the strongest voices not the correct idea. The more people you put in to make decisions the more often the chance that good ideas will be left out. People are not natural leaders, it is something that needs to be worked on. If given up to nature most people will assume the person with the strongest voice is correct and their idea must be wrong because he sounds so sure about it.
4. Corruption: People will tend to vote for what is best for them, not what is best for the country.
While our system isn't perfect it really is an attempt to balance these problems.
Parent
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Representative government suffers from all those problems. Why do you think putting an imperfect human in between the people and their authority will mitigate instead of exacerbate those problems?
1) Our representatives don't even read the legislation they vote on. I don't see how the public could be much worse.
2) Same thing happens with representative government. See the War on Drugs for instance. In fact, representatives make this problem worse, they have incentive to seize on issues like this for political points.
3) Representatives also favor the loudest voices (i.e. lobbyists).
4) Corruption is an even bigger problem in representative government, since fewer people make the decisions, each of them has more power to abuse and more to gain by doing so.
Parent
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
But stop and think how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that.
I'm not sure which is worse: the stupid people who are completely ignorant, or the smart people who think they know it all and act, unknowingly, half-cocked at best.
Parent
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not convinced a republic is any better. We sit starry-eyed at the fact that the hoi polloi don't get to bludgeon us with whatever bigotry is currently fashionable, but the republic system produces oligarchy very easily with the resulting party systems. Rising up in the party requires in-party connections and orthodoxy and without it you can't succeed. Like weeds, the big parties prevent smaller parties from emerging and gaining prominence in the media.
We do not live in a true democracy, so we can fault it as much as possible, while we live in a republic and tend to be more tolerant of its flaws. I say neither works. And, nothing works. I think we're screwed no matter what we do, and I don't recommend ANYTHING (or nothing)...
Parent
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm quite glad we live in a republic, where the stupid elect those who have demonstrated they at least have machiavellian intelligence. It's fortunate for all of us that one breed of intelligence usually includes others as well. -_-
Does it really? This report begs to differ. Elected officials are actually dumber than the general public, at least when it comes to civic literacy: Elected Officials Score Lower than the General Public In Civic Literacy Test [americanci...teracy.org]
Parent
Re:Ahh, true democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
They are undermining nothing.
The structure of the Executive Branch is spelled out in the Constitution. Nowhere does it say how the Executive Branch will interface with the people, other than the minimum rate of State of the Union addresses.
If this Executive Branch wants to use a website to poll opinions out in the open, then the dynamics of that are perfectly acceptable to our system of government.
Do you imagine that any previous administration has not given undue weight to the shouting of lobbyists and cronies?
This is massively superior to that.
Parent
Transparently Inconvenient (Score:5, Interesting)
The website allows for greater transparency... or greater ability to bury unwanted/uncomfortable questions while seeming more transparent.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1208/Blagojevich_questions_censored_on_Transition_site.html?showall [politico.com]
more like abuses google moderator system (Score:4, Interesting)
President-elect Barack Obama's Transition today launched "Open for Questions," a Digg-style feature allowing citizens to submit questions, and to vote on one another's questions, bringing favored inquiries to the top of the list.
It was suggested when it launched that the tool would bring uncomfortable questions to the fore, but the results so far are the opposite: Obama's supporters appear to be using -- and abusing -- a tool allowing them to "flag" questions as "inappropriate" to remove all questions mentioning Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich from the main pages of Obama's website.
The Blagojevich questions -- many of them polite and reasonable -- can be found only by searching words in them, like "Blagojevich," which produces 35 questions missing from the main page of the site.
"Given the current corruption charges involving Blagojevich, will 'serious' campaign finance reform that takes money completely out of politics through publicly funded elections be a priority in the first term?" asked Metteyya of Santa Cruz, California.
"This submission was removed because people believe it is inappropriate," reads the text underneath it.
Also removed as "inappropriate":
"In light of the recent corruption scandals (Blagojevich, Rangel, Jefferson, Stevens, etc) that have dominated the political scene,is there any ethics legislation being crafted to actually curb corruption and prevent another wave of nixonian cynicism?", a question from "lupercal," of Gainesville.
And: "Is Barack Obama aware of any communications in the last six weeks between Rod Blagojevich or anyone representing Rod Blagojevich and any of Obama's top aides?", a question from Phil from Pennsylvania.
Declaring a question "inappropriate" is different from merely voting it down; it's calling foul on a question, not just disapproving of it.
Community reporting systems like this are often vulnerable to abuse from committed partisans -- YouTube has wrestled with a parallel problem -- and the only solution is conscious efforts to remedy it.
So far, Obama's team does not seem to have stepped in to allow uncomfortable questions to rise to the top, and instead is allowing his supporters to sanitize the site.
link [politico.com]
Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Informative)
Some people care just like there are some people who insist the Earth is flat. The vast majority don't care about these questions because they see these people as crackpot, rightly or wrongly.
For example the questions about his birth certificate are vast and intricate. However simple facts have proven them wrong, yet with every bit of proof, the doubters come up with another assertion that proves false. But they keep trying not because there is a conspiracy to keep Obama's birth a secret, but these people will never accept that he was elected President no matter the proof.
Parent
Re:more like abuses google moderator system (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the moderator system per se that causes such abuses, but the abuse of it by people who are given power to mod. It doesn't take many abusive people to break most systems, and as slashdot has found out over the years, people generally prefer to mod down when they disagree, no matter how valid the response, more often than they like to mod up.
Similarly, the "flag as inappropriate" tends to be abused due to an overblown sense of justice and being too powerful of a tool, with no penalty to use it. People generally want to censor those with different views, but they know it's generally wrong (IMHO) ... yet they can do it here anonymously. There isn't a good way to avoid abuses by such people, without allowing other abuses to happen (the purpose of the flag as inappropriate tool).
Something that might make it better is to implement a penalty when clicking that "flag as inappropriate" link. It should harm the person's votes, or be somehow detrimental (e.g. could only be done once a day and would also remove all your other votes). People will still self-sacrifice to remove something that's grossly inappropriate such as racial comments.
Parent
Re:more like abuses google moderator system (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, it's stuff like this that reminds me that 9 time out of 10, the Slashdot moderation system actually gets it right. We all know it isn't perfect (and often it is the 1 time out of 10 that is the most important) but it ussually does reward people that are trying to add to the conversation. Meta-Moderation weeds out at least some who would abuse the system. And most importantly, it doesn't actually censor (as in romove) things that are not valued by the community at large.
I think the key is that mod points are relatively rare (at least compared to most other sites). That way, when you get mod points you are more interested in bring good comments forward than you are in moving poor comments to the back. I've never understood why other sites don't use a similar system.
Parent
Obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand our past presidents have been old... But really. Was there no person in their cabinets close enough/savvy enough to make it clear that a platform by which to hear from their populace was good and useful?
Giving the appearance of being interested in the ideas/concerns of the populace garners support. Even if they don't pay any attention to it, people will feel like they have a platform to communicate their ideas.
Lots of Negativity (Score:5, Interesting)
Sort of a 'Hey, on your own website people are asking questions about stem cell research. What is your answer? Don't pretend you don't see it's the number three question.'
the first step towards virtual democracy (Score:4, Interesting)
in some superior future, google moderator itself is our government
what i mean by that is, the citizens govern themselves via internet technology that groups, edits, and resolves the important issues and what to do about them, no representational system needed
Re:the first step towards virtual democracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
People don't understand our government (Score:4, Insightful)
Kind-of off-topic, but I'm really stunned at how this shows that people just don't understand our government. I'm seeing so many questions that assume that the president has control over state and local government issues, should be doing things that should be handled by local governments, or assume that the president has legislative or judicial powers. Seriously.
Re:People don't understand our government (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not an Obama-specific problem. All Presidential candidates these days boast about how when they're elected, they'll create new spending programs and fund this and that, as though Congress weren't involved. It's also standard practice to use executive orders as stealth legislation. Did you know, for instance, that the US has been in a continuous state of national emergency [whitehouse.gov] since 1979 due to the Iran Hostage Crisis?
By the way, as little as I like Obama, I don't see any problem with him using the Net to solicit opinions. At worst it'll be like the UK petition site where the Queen's subjects protest and get ignored.
Parent
Finally, Hope (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I've got a question? (Score:5, Informative)
1,986 questions from 3,255 people
Either a couple thousand people asked the exact same question or some questions are being "lost".
I skimmed through and saw _many_ duplicate questions, most involving the executive powers that have been abused.
Parent
Re:I've got a question? (Score:4, Funny)
You might want to rethink your usage of a question mark though?
Parent
Re:I've got a question? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:My name is Barack Hussein Obama... (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad the censor all CHANGE.GOV suggestions related to a re-opened examination of the 9/11 Commission report
That's because 9/11 wasn't an inside job, and Obama's staff don't want to lower themselves to wading in the world of truther nutjobs.
Parent
Re:My name is Barack Hussein Obama... (Score:5, Funny)
I know you're not really a truther because you spelled "they're" correctly.
Parent
Re:My name is Barack Hussein Obama... (Score:5, Insightful)
People always need a conspiracy, it makes life more interesting. Sadly these people have much more faith in our government (and human nature) than I do.
NIST has changed its story on how WTC 7 fell 3 times now.
Thats how things work. You have a hypothesis, new data comes about, you change your hypothesis. Your on /., you should know this. The collapse of a building is a hugely complicated thing, with massive amounts of force and interactions, expecting any group of investigators to come up with one "story" is absurd.
Actually the process of diagnosing any failure is like this. When you have a cataclysmic software bug do you settle on your first explanation, or do you make a quick hypothesis, check it, reject it, then come up with another as facts dictate?
My problem with the "Truth" movement is I fail to see motive, nor how a government as incompetent as ours could pull of a huge conspiracy, and maintain full secrecy at all levels, with no leaks or whistle blowers. Also with an event so heinous, I really doubt that everyone involved would have absolutely no moral qualms with it, it doesn't gibe with human nature.
Parent
Re:My name is Barack Hussein Obama... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Of course their proof was done only as a computer simulation...."
Rather than, say, setting fire to a real 40-story skyscraper? Wow, those scientists and engineers sure are underachievers.
Also, it takes a considerable amount of scientific illiteracy to look at new experimental findings and declare that scientists are "changing their story." Truly, 9/11 truthers are the creationists of the 21st century.
Parent
Re:My name is Barack Hussein Obama... (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically, creationists are the creationists of the 21st century, and that's sad.
But truthers are cut from the same cloth. Ignore facts and evidence that don't support your hypothesis, and hyper-scrutinize those that seem to. They've already decided what to believe, and the evidence must either support that, or be made to support that.
In other words, "You're doing it wrong!"
Parent
Re:My name is Barack Hussein Obama... (Score:5, Informative)
Of course they don't:
Here [change.gov]. Also [change.gov]:
Now the cranks can see for themselves just how irrelevant they are.
Parent
Re:My name is Barack Hussein Obama... (Score:4, Insightful)
What's wrong with asking to reform the debt-based economy? The US stopped using the Bretton Woods gold standard in 1971 just because it abused it and it was not possible to continue using it without devaluating dolar's value, not because it was a bad idea. Since then, the government and the FED has clearly abused of the system and created too many problems. Trying to fix it doesn't seem stupid to me.
The US may not want to fix it because it'd mean admitting that the dollar is way too overvalued. But there's no reason why countries that can get their goods by exchanging them for other goods instead loaning them should agree with the US.
Parent
Re:My name is Barack Hussein Obama... (Score:4, Informative)
Don't forget that they censored questions [politico.com] about Gov. Blagojevich.
Obama was of course caught lying about him ever meeting with Blagojevich.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hbJzaVo_Vcuv1HtB1U1eZDQOrQuQD94VL6S03 [google.com]
In that story Obama states that "I had no contact with the governor or his office, and so I was not aware of what was happening."
This story, which is only a month old and yet could only be found in the cache of yahoo says otherwise.
http://66.218.69.11/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=Director+of+Illinois+Dept.+of+Veterans'+Affairs+visits+Quincy&fr=yscpb&u=www.khqa.com/news/story.aspx%3Fid%3D219212&w=director+direct+illinois+il+dept+department+veterans+veteran's+affairs+affair+visits+visit+visiting+quincy&d=Ph3CN0fiR5wF&icp=1&.intl=us [66.218.69.11]
From November 8.
"Obama met with Governor Rod Blagojevich earlier this week to discuss it." (refering to the open Senate seat).
Parent
Re:My name is Barack Hussein Obama... (Score:5, Informative)
That story you linked to says that people logging in to the site flagged the questions as inappropriate. The questions are still visible [change.gov] on the site.
Parent
Re:My name is Barack Hussein Obama... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:My name is Barack Hussein Obama... (Score:4)
From your own link KHQA said that they were reporting on a planned meeting, yet the story refers to the meeting in the past tense.
Essentially you are relying on trusting that KHQA changed their story on facts and not because it has become inconvenient for the President-elect. The timing is more than suspect.
Just as the timing on Blag's arrest was more than suspect. It came a day after he spoke out against Bank of America and said they would not do business with them until they restored a credit line to a company that needed it to pay for their employees. They had been watching Blag for well over a month. Judicial Watch has been looking into him since 2006. I highly doubt that this was the first time they had evidence of corruption.
Don't worry, you didn't burst my bubble. It just proves that it is more than likely that KHQA has no guts. Either way, Obama and Blag have plenty of connections to each other. Obama served as an advisor to him. Both are well connected to scumbag Tony Rezko. It is hard to believe that a sitting Senator and Governor of the same state and party wouldn't know each other fairly well.
Parent
Re:My name is Barack Hussein Obama... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, so, the fact that Obama met with Blagojevich right around the election definitely means that he knows all about and is likely involved in the governor trying to sell the seat over the past few weeks. That's definitely the logical conclusion.
Don't be dense just because it helps your agenda. Obama wasn't trying to claim that he's never spoken to Blagojevich. He's claiming that neither he nor his team was involved in or had any knowledge of the crimes that Blagojevich is now accused of.
Parent
Re:My name is Barack Hussein Obama... (Score:4, Interesting)
I modded a few 'inappropriate' for asking questions that were posted on a board devoted to politics that demonstrated racial bias or some kind of juvenile focus on sex. I found myself modding down questions that:
(1)assumed facts not in evidence
(2)were thinly disguised debating points, rather than actual questions
(3)asked for a federal response to what was a state oriented question, and/or
(4)were unduly personal for a board designed to surface policy issues important to the country.
In the course of modding, I ran across a fair number of questions about Ill.'s govenor, so censorship is not happening. I found myself modding almost all of them down for one of the four reasons I listed above.
I think what you percieve as 'censorship' is actually the result of the majority of voters coming to conclusions similar to mine, and perhaps even for similar reasons. That the questions drop to the end of the list is not surprsing. Perhaps you will find the questions you are interested in if you start at the bottom of the list where all the unpopular questions reside.
Parent
Re:way to bring your party into power. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:way to bring your party into power. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:like democracy works? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhhh, I get what you're trying to say, but in this context, my response is something along the lines of "So what?"
Obama isn't asking for policy decisions and then promising to enact the ones that get the most votes. They're asking for questions, and having people rank the questions. While I'd certainly be more careful about taking advice from someone less educated, I don't see what's bad about encouraging them to ask questions.
Will certain politically charged questions get strongly upvoted? Most certainly. Does that make this exercise worthless or somehow harmful? Hardly.
People as a whole aren't as stupid as you think. Don't be so biased against uneducated individuals. They have as much a right to address the government with their grievances as you do.
Parent
you are about as wrong as you can get (Score:4, Insightful)
"On behalf of the few educated and unbiased people present"
this instantly tells me you are extremely biased. as for "educated", unless you are talking about the hard sciences, this word means "indoctrinated into the clique"
everyone is biased. the intelligent person is always on the guard for the bias they have, and admit and accept they have some unidentified bias. in such a way, they form opinions that are about as unbiased as possible, by constantly being on guard against it
meanwhile, someone who is convinced they are magically incapabable of bias, for whatever idiotic reason, is leading forth with their biases on full display for everyone, utterly blind to how biased they are
that's you
the problem with saying that everyone is prejudiced and this is a bad thing is that it requires some sort of magical, omnipotent adjudicator of bias and prejudice somewhere. no such person or magical machine exists. as such, yes, we are prejudiced and baised in small and large ways, and this is just the way it is, and the way it will always be, and no one can ever do anything about that, so you just accept it as a fact of life, and it is not a problem to fix, but simply a fact of life to get used to
and, here's the real powe rof democracy: everyone's biases and prejudices balance out
meawhile, this sort of aristocratic opinion that there is an "us" few who are unbiased and fit for rule and a "them" who are hopelessly prejudiced and unfit for democracy is about as UNDEMOCRATIC and fascist an attitude as possible
you should try living in some place like china, where they know the common man is unfit, and only a speicla class of technocrats is fit for rule
Parent
Re:Google for President? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why?
Why shouldn't the government use tools that work?
They government also uses tools that are build by, among others, IBM, Dell, and Apple. Their buildings use wires and pipes made by companies. The paper is made by companies. The clothes they make are made by companies.
What do you expect, the government to make /everything/ they use in-house?
I'm not sure you understand what you're trying to imply.
Parent