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To be honest, the decline of American culture and democracy. That these are the best minds we can produce to run the country should be deeply troubling. At best we’re looking at a clown show, two candidates who think in sound bites and have no actual ideas. At least neo-reactionaries have ideas. I’m not fully on board, but they can generally tell you what kinds of things they want to do, why, and why this would work. That coming from someone who isn’t a neo-reactionary, but is more or less interested in fixing problems. I’m anti-pothole is not a plan. But we have two people who think in sound bites trying to convince an audience of uneducated dolts to clap along.
Why would you try to infer anything about how either Harris or Trump think based on how they present in public? They're actively trying to say the things that will win them the election rather than what they actually think. And if sound bites play well with their constituencies, well...obviously that's what they're incentivized to optimize? Being responsive to what your voters want is a feature, not a bug. If you want politicians that behave better in public, convince a large enough fraction of the population to punish their candidate for vapid sound bites or idiotic name calling.
So do rationalists. So why do neither group win elections, particularly given that the latter is supposed to be 'systematized winning?'
Honestly, because of the education system in the USA, where most schools don’t teach anything like epistemology (critical thinking as taught in American schools means memorizing a list of fallacies and learning to notice them in a piece of writing), reading and math are both pretty bad. And our science education is so bad that people don’t understand germ theory.
The second thing is that the media covers elections as horse racing. There’s much more emphasis on covering how the debates moved the polls or who won the debate than anything the candidates actually said (except for the zingers and insults, of course). We aren’t talking about what to do about any problems we actually face. There’s no talk about reducing street crime, drugs, fix the roads, schools, mental health, cost of living, and lots of other very serious issues. Instead, it’s coconut tree memes and “those guys are weird”.
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