It really seems that way? Many takes on this today: Trump is one of the worst people to ever be president. One reporter realized that he was probably infected by Trump. Another realized Trump put military families at risk and then blamed them for infecting him
“ The sampling error in question is that of public comment, which is measurably unrepresentative of the demographics and views of the area. "The method by which local governments solicit public input on housing policy could charitably be described as a 'convenience sample'." Which is a term I had not heard before. Also, the pictured meme from Parks and Rec is an excellent example of local politics public comments.”
Indeed, public comment has not made sense to me for a long time, other than maintaining a tradition that once made sense when the community could fit into the local church. It seems like a problem stemming from our inability to scale socially past Dunbar’s Number in a meaningful way, using really poor heuristics instead. I have to constantly remind myself and others that discourse on the Internet is always a limited selection of people and should not reflect one’s sense of reality. That said, one can take advantage of this situation…
I really think the answer is to require comments to be in written form it's ridiculous to let the public slow down every proceeding. Legislative bodies don't need to have oral public comment.
Unfortunately that's either easily ignored or easily DDOSed (see: FCC comments). What about a local polling system where either the government can pose questions or citizens can vote on questions to be asked? Could also provide anonymized demographic data over a certain size to make sure the residents of a particular neighborhood haven't ganged up to skew the numbers. Caveat: I know nothing of proper polling.
Written comments have the same problem as oral ones, I'm only scaling back to that because it seems more feasible than saying "we won't take input". Local government doesn't have the resources to thoroughly read/consider the comments anyway.
One interesting way to run government is to select citizens by lottery to just *be* the representatives, like juries.
“ The sampling error in question is that of public comment, which is measurably unrepresentative of the demographics and views of the area. "The method by which local governments solicit public input on housing policy could charitably be described as a 'convenience sample'." Which is a term I had not heard before. Also, the pictured meme from Parks and Rec is an excellent example of local politics public comments.”
Indeed, public comment has not made sense to me for a long time, other than maintaining a tradition that once made sense when the community could fit into the local church. It seems like a problem stemming from our inability to scale socially past Dunbar’s Number in a meaningful way, using really poor heuristics instead. I have to constantly remind myself and others that discourse on the Internet is always a limited selection of people and should not reflect one’s sense of reality. That said, one can take advantage of this situation…
I really think the answer is to require comments to be in written form it's ridiculous to let the public slow down every proceeding. Legislative bodies don't need to have oral public comment.
Unfortunately that's either easily ignored or easily DDOSed (see: FCC comments). What about a local polling system where either the government can pose questions or citizens can vote on questions to be asked? Could also provide anonymized demographic data over a certain size to make sure the residents of a particular neighborhood haven't ganged up to skew the numbers. Caveat: I know nothing of proper polling.
Written comments have the same problem as oral ones, I'm only scaling back to that because it seems more feasible than saying "we won't take input". Local government doesn't have the resources to thoroughly read/consider the comments anyway.
One interesting way to run government is to select citizens by lottery to just *be* the representatives, like juries.