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Change.gov Uses Google Moderator System
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.'"
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.
Overclockers
Wonder why it didn't get picked up? What if it was Palin, or a Republican governor selling a Republican president-elect's senate seat? Think about how many stories we have had about corruption among Republicans...guess the double standard is alive and well.
FBI agents on Tuesday morning arrested Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his Chief of Staff, John Harris, on a variety of corruption charges, including attempting to sell the US Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. The story has dominated the news since breaking yesterday, beginning with live coverage on cable news of the announcement of the indictment by US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and FBI Special Agent in Charge Robert Grant. The allegations against Blagojevich are being reported as astounding, even given the state's history of corruption, and nearly every media outlet included some version of Grant's comment about Illinois, "If it isn't the most corrupt state in the United States, it's certainly one hell of a competitor." Blagojevich also threatened the Chicago Tribune to fire editors and writers who allowed or wrote critical stories. Most reports also note that the indictments in no way suggest Obama is linked to Blagojevich's alleged corrupt schemes. Obama once supported Blagojevich but had distanced himself from the governor in recent years.
This story should have been tagged "Whatcouldpossiblygowrong". I mean, a moderation system that lets useful ideas float to the top and useless ideas to the bottom is based on the rather naive concept that the people voting are educated and unbiased. On behalf of the few educated and unbiased people present, I'd like to add the following comment to this idea: buwhahahahahahahahahaha--!!!
People don't vote their conscience, they vote their prejudices. I thought that would have been clear by now.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
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!
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
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.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The republic be damned. This is true democracy in action: decision-by-mob!
Well, the working definition of a democracy is "the majority rules". But stop and think how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that. Those people are the majority. 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. -_-
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
looks like it needs the /. meta moderation system.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
I voted on a few questions just to see how it worked, I saw at least 10 Blagojevich questions out of the 50 I voted on. If the wingnuts are gonna spam stupid questions they should be deleted when there are real questions out there. There were also five or so birth certificate questions. The Republicans are probably not going to have good luck winning elections anytime soon unless they realize people don't care about this bullshit right now, we care about the war and the economy.
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.
Yeah, Barack Obama using "Change.gov" for the name of the website of his Presidential Transition makes him worse than the Nazis.
Whatever.
The myth of Haliburton's "sweetheart" deals is that they are a logistics company that has had government contracts for some time and under various presidents. Let's see if you're equally as hard on the Obama when he starts hiring his buddies. Wait, he already has. Frankly I'm more disturbed that "change" means hiring old Democrat stallworts than I am Haliburton getting a contract.
What did you expect?
Nah, I bet you expected this. I did too. Obama is a politician first and foremost; don't expect any question to be answered in-depth that isn't pre-screened and approved by Obama. This kind of thing is great for making the gullible think they are involved when they are really not. It's like the youtube questions during the debates where they so obviously cherry pick the most benign and frankly uninteresting questions.
It impresses the generally uninformed or not-tech savvy masses, but I think many can see past the bullshit (at least, I hope so).
I expect that Obama's team will also remove uncomfortable questions themselves, only really keeping ones that address Obama's agenda directly instead of bringing to light issues that aren't discussed so often in the mainstream media, such as, well, the DMCA.
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.
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.
Or the 3255 number is a count of users, not all of whom have submitted questions.
I suppose if you didn't frame your question in the form of an accusation it might stick.
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.
Harassing the President Elect using a debunked accusation is inappropriate behavior.
The public is modding it away. Too bad for the crackpots.
So the President Elect in the short time he has to assemble a staff and plan for transition (among the many things he has to do) must instead get someone to develop and test his own custom Javascript on his own site. Or he can just use off-the-shelf components by one of the larger companies out there that is in the industry--components that many other people use.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I'm not convinced a republic is any better. ...but the republic system produces oligarchy very easily with the resulting party systems. ... Like weeds, the big parties prevent smaller parties from emerging and gaining prominence in the media.
The reason why the two party system inadvertently evolved (the framers certainly didn't design it in on purpose) in the US is the winner-take-all nature of the electoral college. I always thought, if the founders could have changed anything in the constitution, with the benefit of hindsight, they would have changed that. They really didn't like political parties at all.
Unfortunately, political action universally devolves into the ideological shorthand of a party system. I can't think of a modern republic without them.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
"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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Let's hope that those lobbyists use the website as well, makes them easier to point out and potentially ignore. Of course, never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers.
Yes, I am obsessed with ellipses.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
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.
by the same token, think of how smart the average person is, and then realize that half of the population are smarter than that. Those people also make up a majority.
I think there are 3 things you need to consider: 1. Does every smart person vote?
2. Does every dumb person vote?
3. Is there, in fact, a dichotomy between smart and dumb people such that the smart people always vote on the "correct" course of action, that the dumb people always vote on the "incorrect" course of action, and that no smart person becomes dumb, and no dumb person becomes smart. (i.e. a smart person always votes smartly on every vote, a dumb person always votes dumbly on every vote, and no smart person ever becomes a dumb person, or vice versa).
I think you'll find that the answers are no, no, and no. In a democracy, I suspect you'll find that given a question that has a right or wrong answer, the people will usually vote correctly, and that given a question with no right or wrong answer, the majority (or at least a plurality) of the people will choose the action that most people want necessarily, so how does it hurt anything that wouldnt' have been hurt otherwise?
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.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
"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.
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!"
Yes but ALL of the citizens have the right to vote, not just the ones that you decide are "smart".
The Federalist Papers were, objectively speaking, propaganda pieces written to persuade the states to adopt the Constitution. This is not to disparage them, but it's just a reminder that they were not neutral analytical pieces, they were persuasive works.
Very true, and not often enough said. But I would gladly trade that caliber of propaganda for what passes for political discourse today. That politicians of that time could think and write at that depth, and be persuasive, me wonder where we, today, have gone so wrong.
So contrary to the popular "wisdom," the founding fathers were not as hostile to democracy as people like to claim.
I don't think they were hostile to democracy, only tyranny. Democracy protects us from the tyranny of the minority. Limits on democracy protect us from the tyranny of the majority. They were trying to craft a system which wouldn't tear itself apart at the first sign of trouble.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
Well for me the simplest argument against democracy (rule by 50% +1) is the thought that it ignores the rights of the minorities. They have the same right to free speech as the majority does, but the majority could use its democratic power to crush & silence the minority voice.
This is why the United States and each individual State consist of a Republic (rule by laws). The Law can not be trumped with a simple vote. The Law is much harder to overturn, and slower, which helps protect the minority and the individual.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Perhaps on a small scale, this could be useful. But I certainly don't want it to become a system of government. The last thing I want to see is something like the Bill of Rights being "flagged as inappropriate".
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
I think the problem is that much of what passes for normal in politics falls under what we call Troll or Flamebait.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
What do you expect, the government to make /everything/ they use in-house?
Why do you misinterpret, misunderstand, and not answer the question? "Why does your government web site link to and use JavaScript hosted on a corporate site, googleapis.com?"
Why aren't FBI files hosted on google docs?
Why isn't gmail used for government business?
It may be a minor matter that for instance google can correlate your IP address with your use of or posts on change.gov, but so is downloading the MIT-licensed source for the javascript and hosting it locally so there are no dependencies on other commercial sites.
I'm not sure you understand what you're trying to imply.
I'm not sure you understand what that sentence even means.
The beauty is that you don't have to maintain secrecy. Our willingness to believe that all is right with the world and to have faith in our leaders leads people to selectively filter out truths which don't gibe with that world view.
Generally true, but not universal. Even when we were ramping up for invading Iraq, there were dissenters, and generally critical individuals and groups. I actually won $50 from a classmate, since I bet that there were no WMDs. Its an single self-serving example, but thats all we need to show that critical thought is possible.
If it isn't a secret, and true, then it would have been exposed long ago. And even with the groupthink of the time, it would have exploded sometime in the last 3 years, with our confidence and agreement with the government at an all time low.
Are you kidding? We've just left a century which saw the Armenian massacre, Stalin's purges, the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's killing fields, the carpet bombing of Vietnam, the Rwandan genocide, Central American death squads and many more than I can remember. We are currently seeing Robert Mugabe slowly starve his people to death.
The difference here is that these events, we perpetrated by dehumanizing the victims, the perpetrators of these actions saw their victims as less than human, as aliens. They weren't killing people, they were killing "vermin". This process wouldn't be possible with 9/11, since we would have been killing people who we accord humanity to.
I'm not saying that there is no chance of there being a conspiracy, but that there isn't enough evidence to prove that there was one. I generally don't believe in anything that doesn't have proof. Right now the burden of proof is on the "Truth" crowd (a rather heavy one at that), and they have failed to meet it. Bring me the smoking gun, and I will happily believe and be convinced.
The conspiracy crowd, though, keeps having their points disproven, then they change their standard. They operate as if it MUST be true, and no amount of evidence to the contrary will change the fact it happened. This discredits it.
To me one of the biggest things invalidating the hypothesis of the "Truth" movement is that WE SAW IT COMING. We knew (or at least some people smarter than those our administration listens to) that there was a plot, we knew it involved planes, we knew who planned it, etc... The coincidence is too much for me, that an alien organization was plotting to do the exact same thing as the US government was plotting to do to itself, at the exact same times, with the same MO, etc...
Yes, we can disregard US intelligence to this ends for the sake of paranoia, but we also have foreign intelligence. To accept that the US controls all intelligence is a leap that I can't take without a HUGE burden of proof.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
How is this +5 Insightful? It's obvious to me that funneling the decisions into the hands of a much smaller group of Representatives is the correct mode of action.
The fault lies in how these Representatives are selected. Logic would dictate they need to be resistant to 1) popular opinion 2) discrimination 3) group-think 4) corruption.
Now here is where the average citizen laughs off the idea of a politician meeting such criteria. Instead, we should be asking how best to select such people.