New Chapters

Seven years ago, way back in 2004, I put up an innocent little blurb.  Basically, I was explaining how indifference was the true winner in the 2004 presidential election, since Bush only got 59 million votes, which was more than Kerry's 55 million, but well less than the roughly 100 million non-votes. It went something like:

Ordinarily, I'm all for voting and the democratic process, but this time I stayed home. Why was that? My vote would not have mattered. I'm in Illinois. Kerry won by 11 points. He probably won Chicago by about 30 points. Chicago completely overshadows the rest of the state. My vote is negated by the huge mass that is Chicago. Does that speak for me? Not at all.


I also sort of explained my voting ethos, and confessed to how it was sort of the opposite of issues-based, informed voting:

How would I have voted has my vote mattered? Probably Bush, mainly because he seems likable and Kerry seems stiff. Probably because I'm used to Bush, and unfamiliar with Kerry. Probably because Bush is entertaining, and Kerry is the opposite of entertaining. 



But what is really interesting to me is what I had to say about the Democrats back in 2004:

But Kerry's party opens up a huge Pandora's Box. The Republicans have a good sense not to go too overboard to the right, lest they offend their slightly right-leaning base. However, the Democrats do not. They know that the majority of people stay in the central, yet their agenda seems overhwelmingly left. And that scares me. There are already enough people who don't share my views speaking for me. 


What intrigues me, is that now, as we look back at the 2010 elections, and look forward to the 2011 elections, is that if you were to do a find-and-replace on that last blurb, only focus on the overwhelming Tea Party movement in the Grand ol' Party, then you see this forced polarization.  A lot of this can be thought about in a Hotelling model, which I discussed back in early 2008, when I explained how Obama was going to hammer McCain.

As I think about the Democratic party, they made a brilliant play back in 2007.  They knew that if they fought the battle from the far-left end of the spectrum, it was going to be a crap-shoot at best.  Facts be damned, the perception of Hillary was that she was well left of center.  On the other hand, Obama was seen as a pragmatist, a more moderate Democrat.  So they put their efforts behind Obama, who was able to bring out independent voters in droves.

The Republicans had two things work against them.  First, they basically got unlucky.  They sent McCain up against him, and despite being relatively similar in terms of where they stood (moderate-left vs. moderate-right), got hammered because of Obama's charisma, speaking ability, and ability to win non-affiliated voters (and to bring out the black vote).  Against Hillary (who would be seen as being much more liberal than she probably was),  McCain would have had a legit fighting chance, because he could have claimed a lot of the space that Obama ended up winning.  Instead, McCain went toe-to-toe against Obama, with predictably poor results.

But the second thing was their own doing.  The Republicans got stupid, or more specifically, fragmented.  Basically, the far right tried to hold the rest of the party hostage.  They said that if they went with McCain (who was seen as too much of a centrist), that they'd hold their breaths until their faces turned blue, and that they wouldn't come out to vote (they then repeated this tactic by making filibuster a normal part of the arsenal, which was replicated by the Wisconsin Democrats who tried to duck votes by leaving the state).  They wanted to push the party forward with their own agenda.  When you have this sort of dissension within your own party, then things are likely to go poorly.

So flash forward.  How in the world did this whole Tea Party thing take off?  Tina Fey's caricature of Sarah Palin becomes a real-life thing, where Sarah Palin and the Tea Party became caricatures of caricatures.  Somehow the need to be a non-insider has devolved into the need to be a non-intellectual.  The Tea Party has taken the populism of a Bill Clinton, and raised the stakes so that the GOP is not represented by the thoughtful conservatism of George Will, but rather the moderate-IQ audaciousness of folks like Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachmann.  Somehow the Republican party has gone from the intellectual establishment, fighting off poorly thought out, radical ideology (think college students with Che Guevara t-shirts, talking about freedom), to being a different version of poorly thought out, radical ideology, lashing out at the intellectual establishment.


Charisma doesn't mean that you have to dumb down the speaker, simply because the audience has a moderate IQ.  The audacity of hope, thinking that, "This guy is a symbol that I can aspire to," should be preferred to thinking, "Hey, I like that dude because his grades were even worse than mine."  I certainly wish that the Republican party would have their own version of a Harvard Law magna cum laude, who was president of the law review as a grad student.  I certainly wish that they would have someone who was well-respected enough to be asked to teach law at University of Chicago.  Instead, the GOP icons are some dude who was a C student at Texas A&M, and some chick who transferred 6 times in 5 years (doing stints at 2 community colleges) before finally getting a communications degree.  All in all, the Republican Party holds it's membership in such low esteem that they trotted out a bunch of C students because they thought that these folks were the only ones that were charismatic enough for the audience. 


And perhaps more depressingly, the Republican party has gone from the moral high ground (think about how the GOP tried to hammer Clinton on his morality), into a party that embraces (or at least looks the other way at) a lot of ethically questionable activity.  Even for George W. Bush, for all of his failings, was able to hold a moral high ground, as someone who had shed drinking and immaturity, and embraced his faith.  Instead we get Perry, who fights against transparency, uses his office for personal benefit, and embraces the hiring of political contributors into public office as the frontrunner.


So for the first 33 years of my life, I've always identified myself as a Republican.  Dug Reagan, before I knew anything about anything (I may have gotten confused with the Max Hedroom-esque version in Back to the Future II).  Knew that Jimmy Carter was an awful president, despite only being 3 when he lost in the 1980 election.  I was all for George Herbert Walker Bush, and thought that he got ripped off against Clinton in 1992.  During his presidency, I thought that Clinton was slimy, and I was happy for W to beat Gore in 2000, and was for W's re-election in 2004.  I registered Republican, voted Republican (when I voted), and was generally good with the basic arguments behind conservative thinking.  I read Rush Limbaugh books in high school, and I still buy into the notion of rugged individualism.


But this party has been hijacked by folks that use tactics that are parallel to terrorism.  This party has moved from the intellectual high ground to a party that relies on brinksmanship for all of it's activities.  Ideology has usurped pragmatism, and the party is content to use outright threats and scorched earth sentiment, rather than hammer out effective solutions.  When it's a badge of honor that you would cut off your nose to spite your face (or to accept $1 in tax increases for every $10 in spending cuts), then you have a party that is relying on ideology.  This isn't rugged individualism.  This is a bunch of lemmings following the herd.  And when that ideology is being offered up by a bunch of C students, then at some point, I have to excuse myself from the party.


-Chairman

Spoilers

I'm just happy that the Reds rolled over the Cards, basically ending their playoff hopes. That was sweet. Now, we get 3 more with the Brewers, and 6 more with the Cubs. If we could only end all of their playoff hopes, then that would be awesome. Unfortunately, someone has to win the NL Central. The Reds would have to go 14-2, and get a lot of help. So that's not going to happen. And frankly, I don't know if it matters. Of course, it wouldn't shock me if whoever comes out of the NL Central goes on to win a couple rounds, but let's face it. No one cares. These teams all suck. A strange stat. Since July 1st, the Reds are 8 games over .500. If we had been simply bad, rather than absolutely dreadful, at the start of the season, we'd be in the race. Go figure.

Going back to football, I've been thinking about the stealing of signs. And my basic instinct is, "so what?" Teams intercept other teams' calls all the time, and have been trying to do so forever. I still remember former Pro Bowl strong safety David Fulcher (a Bengals stalwart) talking about how he had read the lips from the 49er's sideline on the last play of the 49er's last drive during Super Bowl back in 1989. Basically, he read the lips of the coach calling in the play, and knew that it was going to be that slant to John Taylor. So, he slid over a few steps to the outside, jumped the route, and picked off the ball, taking it back to the 40, before he slid as time expired and the Bengals won their first, and to date, only Super Bowl.

Wait. No, he didn't. He still had responsibility to cover his spot, to he didn't slide over, to start, and was a step slow, as Taylor caught the touchdown, Joe Montana cemented his status as the best ever, and the 49er's completed their dominance of the 1980's, and the Bengals were sent into a downward spiral that was the 1990's.

Having knowledge assists in placing players in the right spot, but you still have to make the plays. If someone is on to your calls or your plays, change them up. How much game film is available now? How much time do the cameras spend on the sidelines now? The information is all out there. It's one thing to have spies infiltrate closed door meetings. But once you're out there on the field, and the whole world can see? That's not "spying." That's just observation of what's out there for the world to see, basically the same as figuring out the footwork that, say, Marvin Harrison uses on those goal-to-go slants that he and Peyton do so well.

I think that this is just an issue that people are worrying too much about. Shouldn't we be talking about dog fighting, or something?

-Chairman

Project Self: Monkeys Discovering Tools

Yep. It was funny, but the other day, I had one of those "aha!" moments where some insight kicks in. But, not really. Here's the backstory. I'm helping DE move into his new place across town. He had bought a couch and a queen-sized bed from one of the PhD students who was graduating and moving away. So, we got everything packed up and drove over to his place. The couch was a little heavy, but no problem getting it up to the third floor. Ditto for the mattress, since we could bend it around corners in the stairwell. Where I knew that we were going to have problems was with the box-spring. We tried a couple different ways, bending and rotating the box-spring about different orientations. Nothing worked. At one point, we had the thing wedged into the stairwell (which turns back 180 degrees halfway between floors) so well that I was convinced that we wouldn't be able to get it out. So, we joked about just leaving it there for the neighbors.

But, alas, that was not an option. So we kicked, pulled, and otherwise cajoled the box-spring out of the stairwell, and brought it back outside. Now, having felt how sturdy the box-spring was, I figured that we'd have to take it apart. Now, I didn't know how a box-spring was put together. After all, who really knows how this stuff works, until you have a good reason to? So, we got at it. We tore off the fabric on the bottom of the box-spring, seeing if it gave any structure to the box-spring. Nope. So, then we tried tearing off the fabric on top of the box-spring. Still no additional bend (though we did try to see if the springs would give enough in certain spots to let us turn the corner in the stairwell - no go). So, I look at what we had - a wooden frame that had a number of horizontal pieces where the spring attached, and then four cross-supports that ran the length of the bed. I decided that we would need to knock out the cross-supports, so then everything could just bend around the corners. I was hoping that we could get away with just 2 of the supports, the that wasn't happening.

Anyway, I'm outside of the apartment, hammering away at the wooden frame for a good 15 minutes. And of course, the neighbors have to come out to see what the story is, since it was like 7:30 in the evening. Normally, it would be cool to meet the neighbors. Only this time, they were an elderly couple. And, I kid you not, the husband was blind. See you later? Nevermind. Anyway, they were nice after we charmed them a bit. And we finally are able to get the box spring up to the third floor, albeit in one large piece, and 4 separate cross-supports. So, we lay the cross-supports on the bed frame, and then just put the remainder of the box spring on top. Slap on a bedskirt, put on the mattress, and no one is the wiser. Amazing.

The point of the story was to bring up an interesting point. Now, most problem solving researchers would assert that you can't solve a new problem until you have that serendipitous, "aha!" moment that is often called restructuring, where you see the problem in a new way, perhaps by relaxing problem constraints or just hitting a moment of insight. These folks would likely say that you can't ever learn to restructure, and that it just happens. But, for me this time, it was a little different. I've moved big objects around corners of stairwells before. And I had a general idea of how a box-spring worked. But, I had never tried to move a queen-sized box-spring into tight spaces before. So, it would seem to fit the story that I had my restructuring, and had a moment where I relaxed some problem constraints.

My moment was a little different. I didn't know how, but I had my engineering training tell me that if you take it back far enough, you can get to something more manageable. I had no idea what it was going to entail. And, really, it was a bit of a process. I just started taking stuff apart, deciding whether something that came off was needed or not, and repeated the process until it got to the point where we could get everything essential upstairs. Now, I had never done this before. I didn't know what a box-spring was made of. But I had a few things going for me. 1) I was confident that we were going to get this to work. 2) I knew that we could reverse-engineer, if needed, so breaking down to core components was okay. 3) We were only looking for functionality, not aesthetics.

Examining this problem, it seems that we had very few problem constraints, other than DE needed a bed to sleep on. I think that confidence in problem solving has to be beneficial (assuming that you have the ability to solve a problem - confidence w/out ability would seem to have disastrous consequences). And I think that the idea of breaking things down into core components (structural knowledge, is the term) is a powerful one. How much of physics at the macro level is described by a few core laws (i.e. first principles)? I think that if you can see what the first principles of a problem, then you are able to manipulate that problem much more easily.

So what does this have to do with anything? I don't think that society takes a first principles approach nearly enough. I think that a lot of people today live at a very surface level, dealing with immediate surroundings, using conveniently available measures, and otherwise not addressing truly core issues. I had a conversation with a friend last weekend about race. I'm not big on race. She was. Of course, she was white, and she was wanting to better understand the world around her, which is to be applauded. However, it's my position that race is surface knowledge (as opposed to structural knowledge). I don't think that it tells you much about an individual, once you get past the color of someone's skin. I think that it helps you find common ground or topics of conversation. But no more so than any number of things. I try to remind myself of what MLK had to say... not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. If I have to talk about race, I would prefer to have a conversation with someone about what their ethnicity means to them and how it has affected them (i.e. understanding their view of the construct, rather using a construct to define them).

Of course, this posting isn't about race. I think that the same critique applies to those who would simply try to justify a belief with a simply a quote from the Bible with no context (or even less valid grounds). The question of what is at the core of a belief system is a crucial one. Much more so than that is on the surface of that belief system. I have a hard time taking people seriously who have deeply ingrained beliefs on anything that are grounded on surface knowledge. And what's bothersome is that I've seen it from all sorts of people on all sorts of issues, including homosexuality, abortion, the Middle East, social justice, and wealth distribution. And this comes from all sorts of people with different backgrounds, careers, etc. I have a suspicion that many folks have discovered that it's easier (and often safer) to take something that you heard somewhere and just regurgitate it, whether or not it's insightful.

At the core of it, we're all just figuring out what it is that we want to do when we grow up. But I'm more interested about why we want to do what it is that we want to do and how we're going to do it.

-Chairman