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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
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!
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.
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.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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!"
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!