Should We Do Mind Hacking In Defence of Freedom & Democracy?

This 56 minute PBS broadcast, The Wings of Angels, describes in general audience terms what I now believe has always been the fundamental basis of politics for as long as humans have been doing politics. In essence, politics is a struggle or competition for power, wealth and advantage. The struggle plays out between at least two fundamentally different but not always completely separate human mindsets, cooperative-democratic and competitive-authoritarian. The struggle plays out in the human mind mostly (~97% ?) unconsciously, emotional, intuitive, moral and social, not consciously and rational. Because of that, the human mind is easily hackable and governments, businesses and religions have all developed effective ways to hack our minds.

The program poses the question of whether democracies should consciously engage in mind hacking for good, at least in part as defense against the all-out hacking war that some authoritarian governments, most prominently China, now use to subdue their people and quash dissent, all with the unconscious cooperation of the subjugated people. China present a possible model for the ultimate fate of the human species, eternal enslavement and oppression.

Wings of Angels is the third in a series of three called Hacking Your Mind that PBS produced about the workings of the human mind and what modern cognitive and social science now understand the human condition to be. This program is mind blowing. It is akin to the Netflix documentary Social Dilemma. It is another sign that the incredible importance of modern cognitive and social science in understanding the human condition, politics and everything else about humans.

My description of mind hacking 

Mind hacking happens all the time. People engage in behavior that influences the behavior of others. That happens by shaping the reality others see, e.g., by experiencing a person’s (hacker’s) behaviors, including speech, and unconsciously reacting to it. Whether hacking is intended or not, various behaviors affect the observer’s mental state, cognitive processes and/or level of cognitive function. In politics, there usually is (~99% of the time?) intent to manipulate the target audience’s behavior without their knowledge or consent. That said, people mind hack by simply being alive and interacting with other people. That cannot be helped or changed because it is an inherent, fundamental trait of the human mind. For politics, the main question is whether the hacking is for authoritarianism and the dictator’s vision of law and order, or for messy, chaotic democracy.

Key points 

For those who don't want to take the time to watch this, these three points stand out.

Point #1: Whether we like it or want it or not, we are all mind hackers. Simply being alive and interacting with others hacks minds. This blog post hacks minds, but at least the intent is for good, not bad. Wings of Angels poses the question should we hack in a democracy. But the question is moot. We do hack, whether we like or want it or not. Some people argue a slippery slope will lead democracy into tyranny if we do mind hack. That argument is not accompanied by a recognition of two key points. 

First, there may be a worse slippery slope if we do not hack for good because authoritarians hack their people. Mind hacked authoritarianism could come to dominate the entire human species for thousands of years. In my opinion, it is the most plausible means to enslave the human race forever.[1] Wings of Angels makes that point clear in its discussion of how Chinese authoritarians now effectively employ mind hacking to get the Chinese people to willingly but unknowingly support their own tyranny by suppressing dissent and ‘bad citizenship’. The Chinese voluntary opt-in mind hack tactic is brilliant, brutal and effective. 

Second, mind hacking is multidirectional. It can be for good, bad, stupid, entertainment, educating, disinforming, ethnic cleansing, waging war, saving a marriage, picking better musicians for an orchestra, reducing criminal recidivism, selling anything (smart or dumb, useful or useless, e.g., pet rocks) to consumers or just about anything else. 

Chinese people voluntarily opt-in to a social monitoring and 

grading system that monitors and punishes bad citizens and  

rewards good ones -- essentially everything is monitored 24/7/365

(my guess is that most opt in due mostly to a combination of social  

pressure and a predisposing collective culture mindset)   

Point #2: Mind hacking can have amazing subtlety, power and social reach. It is a true social contagion phenomenon. It can reach past degrees of separation and right through to people's minds and behaviors in ways that profoundly affect other minds and behaviors. This happens without one shred of awareness of any of the people involved. The Wings of Angels discusses research on obese people, their friends, friends of their friends and so on. 

In that research, being obese was shown to reach through to a person separated by at least 3 degrees of separation. The data indicated that an obese friend (1st degree) of an obese friend (2nd degree) of an obese person (3rd degree) can influence whether a person tends to be obese merely by association with the 1st degree friend. That happens without the person even knowing the 2nd or 3rd degree persons exist at all. Something is transmitted from the 3rd degree person all the way to the affected person and no one has any idea that it is happening. The same observation is found with alcohol drinking.

1st degree of separation = friend of a mind hacked person

2nd degree = friend of the friend of the mind hacked person

3rd degree = friend of the friend of the friend of the mind hacked person

4th degree = etc.

If there is any at least partly effective vaccine to this social contagion phenomenon, it lies in teaching self-awareness and critical thinking skills.

Point #3: Lastly, pro-environmental mind hacking research shows that appealing to conscious reason fails, but appealing to the unconscious mind can work quite well. This research harks back to observations on the human condition by the eccentric economist-satirist Thorstein Veblen, some of which are described in his strange, brilliant 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. In short, when one keeps up with the Jonses, one has usually been mind hacked. If Jones buys a Buick, you buy a Buick or preferably a Cadillac or BMW. That's a mind hack. In this situation, at least some people are probably aware to some extent that they are keeping up with the Jonses, but they aren't aware they have been mind hacked. 

The research looked for ways to get people to be more energy efficient, e.g., by using less energy and having lower utility bills. Three groups received one of three different appeals to conscious reason, e.g. it will lower your energy bills or your children will be better off if the environment is not so polluted. Once group was mind hacked by appeal to what the Jonses do. The mind hack group was simply shown how much energy their household used compared to their neighbors (the Jonses) and told nothing else.

The result? Only the mind hack group showed a significant energy use drop. The other groups did not change in their energy consumption. Based on that research, appeals to slow, weak conscious reason to help the environment failed, but appeals to the fast powerful unconscious mind succeeded. If that research is replicated and holds up, this observation reflects the core messages that Nobel laureate Daniel Khaneman described in his well-known 2012 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and what psychologist Johnathan Haidt described in his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Questions:

Should our government use mind hacks to better serve the public interest, or is it too dangerous?

Did Obama make a mistake when he opened a federal office dedicated to applying behavioral science to federal policy when possible? 

Footnote: 

1. Most plausible because it is the political “ideology” most based on what the human mind is and how it works according to modern science. Science-based political ideology transcends liberalism, conservatism, Christianity, capitalism, socialism, fascism, racism and all the other significant ideologies in politics that I am aware of in terms of effectiveness. To the best of my knowledge, only pragmatic rationalism (PR) can potentially come close to what the Chinese government has done and is doing (Only potential because it is not a significant political ideology and the hypothesis remains untested). That is because PR is also based on the science of the human mind. PR, like the Chinese counterpart, rational authoritarianism(?), tries to understand and accept humans for what they are, not for what they ought to be according to any ideology that is unduly detached from relevant science. 

The Wings of Angels points out that the short 2009 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, a book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein was highly influential in shaping Chinese government thinking about how to control its people. Thaler's work earned him a Nobel prize in 2015 in behavioral economics for his understanding that humans are not the rational creatures that obey the complex equations that economists falsely believed they obey. The Chinese are dead serious about using cognitive and social science to inform their brilliant mind hacking tactics.

I've posted several times about the growing Chinese authoritarian cognitive mind hack technology and its underlying foundation in advanced, all-encompassing deep surveillance technology. For example, the Chinese government uses it for ethnic cleansing and reinforcing good citizenship as the dictators explicitly define good citizenship and grade people on. The lives of bad citizens are forced into misery, low income and low social status. Who knows, maybe they go extinct.

Storm Clouds Are On The Horizon

No to Biden's appointees

Several signs of long-lasting political dysfunction and even more polarization are coming clear. The New York Times writes on bitter partisanship in the US Senate that indicates the GOP has no interest in how voters voted or in engaging in rampant hypocrisy. The NYT writes:

“WASHINGTON — Senator Bernie Sanders, the progressive Vermont independent, has emerged as a contender for labor secretary in President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration, a prospect that would suit his ambitions of being a warrior for working Americans — and one that makes some Senate Republicans very uneasy.

“I think that is somebody who we know is an ideologue and, well, it would be very unlikely he would be confirmed in a Republican-held Senate,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, one of multiple Republicans who said Mr. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, would be unlikely to win the chamber’s approval.

It is a testament to the deterioration of the Senate confirmation process that a longtime colleague — even one they vehemently oppose on policy — would face such a Republican roadblock. In the not-too-distant past, fellow senators got considerable leeway from the opposing party if they were selected to join the executive branch.

“The truth is, to the best of my knowledge, there has been a courtesy within the Senate that when a president nominates senators, they have been approved,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. 

The growing senatorial resistance to Mr. Sanders even before any formal action by the new administration reflects the formidable task Mr. Biden faces. Should Republicans hold on to their Senate majority next year, Mr. Biden would be the first president since George Bush in 1989 to enter office without his party controlling the chamber and managing the confirmation process. And that process has grown much more toxic, to the point where senators routinely engage in near-blanket opposition to the picks of a president from the opposite party — if they allow consideration at all.”

For a hard core, uncompromising radical right ideologue like Cornyn to complain about ideologues is about as hypocritical as hypocrisy can get. Cornyn did not oppose the raging authoritarian ideologues that Trump nominated for his administration. That fact does not faze him or probably most or all other radical right GOP senators in the slightest. Hypocrisy isn’t illegal, so why not be a radical right hypocrite? It is fun and easy to be hypocritical and obstructionist. Just say no.

How bad can this get? Very bad. McConnell can block every single executive branch and judicial nominee if he wants to. Given his proud self-description as the Grim Reaper of whatever displeases him, he just might choose to do total obstructionism or something fairly close to it. This could be a new norm for the GOP. Time will tell.

No to bipartisan economic cooperation

Equally toxic is the intentional sabotaging of the transition to Biden. Here, the Trump and his GOP enablers are intentionally sabotaging economic and public health policy to make life harder for Biden once he is in office. Presumably, the vengeful Trump and his purely partisan GOP enablers will sabotage whatever they think will hurt Biden. In the sabotaging process, some or many Americans can expect to experience serious economic pain and even death. The NYT writes about unwarranted economic sabotage:

“Imagine a divorced couple that simply can’t get along. They share custody of the children, but have completely different visions of how to raise them.

It is not an ideal situation, but this couple realizes that, despite mutual resentments, raising healthy, happy children is a shared goal. Each parent may get annoyed at the other now and again, but they know they need to maintain some continuity in how the children are raised and not let disputes ruin their lives. 

That, in recent decades, has been how economic policy has worked in the United States. Republicans and Democrats might have had different agendas and philosophies, but both fundamentally wanted a vibrant United States economy and, when the time came for one party to hand over control to the other, both ensured a smooth transition of economic policy.

This week, there are clear signs that tradition is breaking down — that the outgoing Trump administration is seeking to deprive President-elect Joe Biden of crucial tools to sustain and revitalize the economy. It suggests a future in which there is less continuity in economic policy and more abrupt risk of crisis or downturn every time party control changes.

The most startling example was a decision on Thursday by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin not to extend beyond the end of the year several joint Treasury-Federal Reserve lending programs that started in the early weeks of the Covid pandemic. The decision to end them went against Fed officials’ wishes, and he asked the Fed to return to the Treasury funds already provided for those programs.  

One problem with the more partisan economic policy transition underway now is that it tends to fuel tit-for-tat reciprocity. If President Biden is handing over power to a Republican in the winter of 2025 or 2029, will his team seek the same partisan advantage by salting the earth on the way out? If this is the new normal, is it possible to go back to the old normal?”

So, in the process of serving party over country and people politics, the radical right GOP engages in practices that will lead to needless deaths of innocent Americans and needless economic pain. The full blossom and effect of GOP poison on the American government and people is becoming clear. Trump’s behaviors, e.g., inciting violence against perceived opponents, reasonably earns him the label of domestic terrorist, along with some other labels, e.g., chronic liar, crook, traitor, incompetent, etc.

Increasingly, the GOP is earning, or has earned, some or all of the same labels. In view of its economic and political sabotage, it is fair and reasonable to apply the label “domestic terrorist organization” to the GOP. Or, is that still over the top and not reasonably defensible?

The Saturday Debate: Are pandemic lockdowns causing more harm than good?

 As the global COVID-19 pandemic worsens, talk of increased lockdowns are in the news daily. Dr. Matt Strauss, a professor at Queen’s University’s medical school, writes “the cold, hard fact is that lockdowns do not seem to achieve what one might hope” and he therefore calls for a more focused protection plan.

Dr. Lawrence Loh, Peel Region’s medical officer of health says restrictions, when properly done, are a useful tool. “At the appropriate moment, imposing broad closures immediately decreases interactions and interrupts transmission, which saves lives and protects the health care system in the short run.”

YES

Dr. Matt Strauss

Queen’s University

Every medical treatment plan comes with potential side effects. Every physician needs to consider whether the treatments they propose could cause more harm than good. In clinical medicine, a treatment generally only becomes widely accepted when high quality clinical trials are published in trustworthy journals to prove that its benefits outweigh its potential harms.

The benefits of lockdowns to prevent deaths from COVID-19 are far from proven. The very best paper evaluating whether lockdowns save lives was performed by researchers at the University of Toronto, Drs. Chaudry and Riazi, and published by the Lancet. They took data from 50 countries reporting COVID-19 mortality and performed statistical analyses to see whether those that enacted strict lockdowns had fewer COVID-19 deaths. They did not.

A similar analysis, by a Dr. Leffler and colleagues, used data from 200 countries and was published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. It likewise found no effect of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality.

These papers can be criticized, and perhaps better data will one day supersede them. But for now, the cold, hard fact is that lockdowns do not seem to achieve what one might hope.

This might seem counterintuitive. Surely, if we all stay home, we cannot transmit the virus to each other, and if the virus doesn’t transmit, it cannot kill, right? Well, no, it’s more complicated than that.

For one thing, we will never have a perfect lockdown in which absolutely everyone stays home for all the time. More importantly, COVID-19 is not an equal opportunity killer. While the overall mortality is low (a recent World Health Organization bulletin estimated a less than 0.3 per cent mortality rate), it is up to 1,000 times more likely to kill someone over 70 than someone under 30. Therefore, the total number of deaths in a COVID-19 pandemic will not depend so much on how many cases there are but rather in whom those cases occur.

It’s easy to imagine situations in which a general lockdown could inadvertently expose vulnerable people to COVID-19: if universities shut down and students are sent home to their older parents, if working people can no longer afford their rent and enter multi-family living arrangements, if daycares are closed so health care workers have to involve grandparents for child care etc.

This is why I favour a focused protection plan in which we pour resources into protecting society’s most vulnerable, rather than subsidizing less vulnerable people to make unnecessary sacrifices.

And such resources we had to pour! The federal government has gone $350 billion in debt this year to pursue misguided lockdowns. For reference, $350 billion, adjusted for inflation, is more than we spent fighting the Second World War over six years.

That $350 billion could have built two new hospitals in every city and town in Canada! If we purport to care about our elders, we must stop and imagine what $350 billion could have done to ameliorate the chronic understaffing and sometimes squalid physical conditions of our long-term care homes.

How many lives could that strategy have saved? We need to ask such questions before we shoot ourselves in the other foot with a second lockdown.

So much for the supposed benefits, what about the harms? Evidence thereof is mounting. Three times as many Canadians were contemplating suicide this summer compared to last. In British Columbia, overdose deaths nearly tripled. I do not expect such trends to improve during a cold, dark winter of lockdowns with no Christmas.

The Globe and Mail reported a spike in violence against women back in May and a slew of missed cancer diagnoses up to October. In my own medical practice, I met only seven patients with COVID-19 over nine months, but I was admitting folks to hospital with lockdown-related illness almost every day.

One woman in her 80s, living in a retirement home, relied on family members to come feed her meals. When they were disallowed from the premises, she stopped eating. She was eventually sent to hospital for symptoms of confusion and weakness where she was found to have biochemical evidence of starvation. In Canada. In 2020. The sheer inhumanity of that scene will stick with me for a long time. I could describe many others.

Underlying each of those statistics, and all of the clinical vignettes I could share, is an ocean of individual suffering and family grieving that is not captured in the rising COVID-19 case counts featured in daily media reports.

COVID-19 is a devil of a problem, but we must be mindful not to employ unproven strategies with the potential of making the problem worse. I am very hopeful that by focusing our attention and effort where it matters most, we could see our way through this in better shape overall.

NO

Dr. Lawrence Loh

Peel medical officer of health

Throughout history, the arrival of contagious pestilences saw broad community efforts keep people apart and reduce spread. This was reflected in our lexicon with phrases like “avoiding someone like the plague” and the concept of quarantine, which was derived from Venice’s 40-day at sea quarantena during the same era. Humanity has always understood that a disease that spreads from person to person cannot spread if people are not meeting.

Without intervention, novel illnesses (i.e. for which humans do not have innate immunity) threaten communities in various ways. Rapid spread drives up infections, which can threaten lives and hospital capacity. Immune systems might overreact to a new intruder.

Finally, uncertainty drives fear and a loss of consumer confidence. With widespread contagion, it’s impossible to know exactly who is ill, which in the end still impacts how people come together.

Thus, closures or restrictions can serve as useful and powerful tools in the right circumstances. At the appropriate moment, imposing broad closures immediately decreases interactions and interrupts transmission, which saves lives and protects the health care system in the short run.

If kept to the shortest time required, with supports provided, the intervention can also help mitigate the indirect impacts of the pandemic on the community. In the long run, preserving life and health for more people also means a more robust economic recovery.

It’s important to remember that not all closures are created equally. When instituting measures in a pandemic, communities are ultimately threading a needle through two extremes: mitigating the harms of uncontrolled viral spread against those of the mitigation measures adopted.

Closures that are particularly severe can disrupt communities, isolate people, and cause economic stress in a manner similar to widespread viral circulation.

That’s why most public health specialists favour an adaptive approach, with reopening along with testing and tracing where case counts are low, and a return to closures where growing cases and hospitalizations begin to threaten.

This also reinforces why it’s so important to provide broad financial and social assistance to help the community through any closure. It protects people and businesses disproportionately impacted by the closures, tilting the scales towards the benefits reaped by controlling the virus.

Opponents of closures point to the negative effects on the community, especially among our most vulnerable: the elderly, essential and front-line workers, small businesses, and those experiencing poverty, homelessness, or mental illness.

What they miss in this line of focus is that uncontrolled viral spread also negatively impacts those same populations, as people fall sick and fear for their lives — with the added spectre of deaths and long-term disability to boot.

Around the world, we have seen what happens if a closure doesn’t arrive in time: community after community ravaged, along with the devastating consequences imposed on patients and front-line workers.

Certainly, closures themselves can impact health care services too, but uncontrolled viral spread almost always sees hospitals overwhelmed, with patients turned away, surgeries and treatments cancelled, and health care workers traumatized. When the trajectory points toward this happening, one must act.

Closures are one tool in the pandemic tool box, intended to be deployed in specific circumstances, over a limited period, with appropriate supports. Done well, closures are a useful tool to addressing the immediate threat of viral propagation. The negative effects are understood but can be mitigated.

It’s also worth noting that such impacts are also ultimately short term and would equally be visited if the virus ran loose.

As cases and hospitalizations continue to rise in Peel Region, I welcome discussions around additional closures to bring COVID-19 under control in the immediate term. Reducing person-to-person interactions would bring short-term relief, buying us time to address the underlying disparities and inequities that drive transmission in our community.

Proponents of a balanced approach sometimes forget that when the balance tips towards controlling COVID-19, you must act decisively to turn down viral spread so the community can stay open with confidence.

Hence, as one of many tools in my tool kit, I would not hesitate to call for broader closures should it be warranted in the community that I serve; doubly so if appropriate supports are provided to help the most vulnerable members of our community through the difficult moments.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/the-saturday-debate/2020/11/21/the-saturday-debate-are-pandemic-lockdowns-causing-more-harm-than-good.html

A Brief Description of Church-State Separation

The wall of separation is under attack

A commenter here, TokyoJones, gave a short description of separation of church and state. It is very worthwhile to understand this. I saw the church-state separation issue in terms of conflicting religious rights with other constitutional rights. TJ pointed out that framing of the issue was not right. He wrote:

As it was understood by its writers, there can be no conflict of rights to religious liberty and other more secular rights, because religion is not to enter into the public sphere. It is a private pursuit, or one shared among fellow believers, but religious exercises can no more impede secular law than secular law impede religious practice. When religionists start demanding special rights in order to deny others their rights, we know the 1A has been abrogated, and we know who these would-be tyrants are.

Improvement One for the USA: Ranked Choice Voting

 By Best in Moderation

A while back I posted a list of ten possible improvements, and there was a large amount of requests to take them on one at a time. So I will be doing that in a series here, including any discussions up to now and hopefully promoting more discussions as we focus on each one.

To begin, let’s look at Ranked Choice Voting

The Concept:

Currently we elect candidates for office with a whomever gets a plurality of votes, or in simpler terms, whoever gets more than any other candidate. But there are issues with this approach:

1. Voters are usually forced to choose to vote for the most popular candidates or have little impact and risk a person winning they truly dislike.
2. Candidates can win with a very small base of support, so long as it is more than any other candidate.
3. It is very difficult for third parties to gain advancement

To fix up these issues, Ranked Choice Voting is suggested, where you indicate your order of preference of the possible candidates. It would work as follows:

You have five candidates, A, B, C, D, and E.
A and B are the most popular candidates from the major parties.
However, you are now free to rank your choices of all the candidates, so let’s say you vote for C first, then E, then B, then D and finally A.

If any candidate gets 50% of the vote, they win. If not, the candidate receiving the lowest amount drops out and the 2nd choice of those voters is used and added to that candidate. This goes on until there is a majority candidate (over 50%)

The Practice:

The election results come in, and they are as follows:
A has 26% of the vote
B has 31% of the vote
C has 15% of the vote
D has 13% of the vote
E has 14% of the vote

Now normally B would win with a plurality, but since we’ve changed the rules to needing a majority, D gets dropped and all of D‘s support go to the second choice for D. Let’s say that’s 6% to A and 7% to C. The new rankings are as follows:
A has 32% of the vote
B has 31% of the vote
C has 21% of the vote
E has 14% of the vote

Now normally A would win with a plurality, but again, no one is at 50%, so we drop the lowest, with all 14% of E‘s having chosen C as their 2nd choice. The new rankings are thus:
A has 32% of the vote
B has 31% of the vote
C has 35% of the vote

Now C would win a plurality! But no one has a clear majority, so B gets dropped and here’s where things get complicated (see below). For now, let’s say only the remaining candidates count, and all B‘s voters preferred C over A. Thus:
A has 32% of the vote
C has 66% of the vote

C wins the election!

The Problems Explored: Who gets the support and when?

As noted above, a question that needs answering is at what point are preferences counted? If one party was dropped but later turns out to be the 2nd most preferred for a large party that dropped, should that party get the votes or should only the currently remaining parties divide the votes based on ranking? There are arguments to be made for both, but it does present a mathematical issue. Let’s say that all of B‘s supporters choose E as their 2nd choice. That would mean E actually has 14% primary support and 31% secondary support, which would put it over C‘s then-35%! So let’s do process differently.

Let’s say instead you count first the primary support, and then you add half of the secondary support to each candidate. For our scenario:
The second choice for A voters was 50% D and 50% C
The second choice for B voters was 70% E and 30% C
The second choice for C voters was 40% E, 30% B, 20% D and 10% A
The second choice for D voters was 55% C and 45% A
The second choice for E was 70% C and 30% B

Using this math, we get the following rankings:
A has 26% + (((0.10*15)+(0.45*13)))/2, or 29.68%
B has 31% + (((0.30*15)+(0.30*14))/2), or 35.35%
C has 15% + (((0.50*26)+(0.30*31)+(0.55*13)+(0.70*14))/2), or 34.63%
D has 13% + (((0.50*26)+(0.20*15))/2), or 21%
E has 14% + (((0.70*31)+(0.40*15))/2), or 27.85%

Still no one has over 50%, so we take the third choice and we add 1/3 to each candidate:
The third choice for A voters was 50% C and 50% D
The third choice for B voters was 70% C and 30% E
The third choice for C voters was 40% B, 30% E, 20% D and 10% A
The third choice for D voters was 45% C and 55% A
The third choice for E voters was 30% B and 70% C

Using this math, we get:
A with 32.56%
B with 38.75%
C with 51.41%
D with 26.33%
E with 32.45%

Which does make a difference only for the ones who didn’t win, since B remains in second place and E is remarkedly close to A.

So this problem seems not to be too large, only for statistical purposes on total support (or in a parliamentary system) would this be needed. C still wins.

The Problems Explored: That’s too complicated!

One of the big issues with Ranked Choice is how complex it is to calculate and how complex it is to vote. Asking for a second choice is fine; most people have that. Ranking all of them is a bit much for most people, who may not really have an opinion on the others. I may drive down voter participation.

So to model it out, let’s just pick two, a first and second choice. If by the first there is no clear winner, the second choice amounts are added to each and we see if there is a clear 50% winner there. We start with the party with the most votes first, because they did win the most primary votes and should therefore take precedence (this argument could be seen as another problem, but I think we would all agree that the first choice is more “valuable” than the second).

In review, this means that:
A has 26% of the vote
B has 31% of the vote
C has 15% of the vote
D has 13% of the vote
E has 14% of the vote

And
B has 31% of the vote + 4.5% from C and 4.2% from E for a total of 39.7%
A has 26% of the vote + 5.85% from D and 1.5% from C for a total of 33.35%
C has 15% of the voter + 13% from A, 9.3% from B, 7.15% from D and 9.8% from E for a total of 54.25%

And we have a winner! C it is again (had E or D gotten more votes than C over 50%, then you could argue they should win, but again the primacy of the first choice should be determinative).

The Problems Explored: Not my choice!

If your third choice was selected, you may not actually feel much in support of the government, despite you having selected that as an option. As such, I do not think it is a good idea to ask for a third choice because the entire point is to give people a better feeling of support for their government and that their choices matter.

TLDR:

Ranked Choice voting seems like a good option to both give people a better sense that their vote matters and that they can vote for whom they support even if afraid someone else will win.
It encourages a departure from a two party model and it will produce a winner with the most direct and secondary support, in each model.
The best model IMO is two choices with a single addition of the secondary choices. If that fails to get anyone over 50%, a revote or runoff should be held.

What do you think? Any other problems you can think of? How would you get this implemented?

Trump-friendly Newsmax a sudden competitor to Fox News

 NEW YORK — Now that his largely invisible network has suddenly been flooded by fans of President Donald Trump, Newsmax television personality Grant Stinchfield is puffing out his chest.

“They don’t know what to do with all of us,” Stinchfield said on the air Monday night. “We’re killing it here on Newsmax with a tactic they’ve never tried. It’s called the truth, the stone-cold truth, and once you get a taste of it, you will never tolerate being lied to again.”

In many cases, the opposite is true. Newsmax, the television arm of a conservative website, has reported falsely that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president-elect because of largely non-existent voter fraud. Its viewers are fed a diet of conspiracy theories to salve the wounds of an election loss — a tactic that’s misleading at best and damaging to democracy at worst.

Yet Newsmax’s burst, whether or not it lasts, has been astonishingly swift and could foreshadow the first serious threat to Fox News Channel’s dominance with conservative viewers in two decades.

“We’ve really cornered Fox from the right,” said Chris Ruddy, Newsmax founder and friend of Trump. “They’ve never had that.”

From the beginning of July to the week before Election Day, Newsmax averaged 58,000 viewers from 7 to 10 p.m. on weekdays. That jumped to 568,000 the week after the election, the Nielsen company said. In the same period, daytime viewership increased from 46,000 to 450,000.

For the same dates, Fox News averaged 3.6 million viewers in the evening, Nielsen said. Fox’s prime-time viewership during the two weeks after the election was up 50 per cent over last year.

“We love competition. We have always thrived on competition,” Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch said on an Election Day earnings call.

Ruddy traced much of Newsmax’s increase to Trump supporters angered by Fox’s election night call that Democrat Joe Biden had won Arizona — ahead of any other news organization. While that call proved correct, for the president’s backers it was an ill-timed sign of insufficient loyalty from their favourite network.

Trump, who criticized Fox throughout the campaign, has driven the point home with repeated tweets suggesting his followers check out Newsmax or a smaller rival that also presses a conservative viewpoint, One America News Network.

“There’s a large part of the country that wants to have a voice, the same people who gave birth to what turned into a very robust Fox News,” said Michael Clemente, Newsmax’s CEO until last April and a former Fox News executive. “Now, more than ever, they want to be heard, and have influence equal to their peers on the coasts. Their loyalty is to that voice and not to any place or another.”

Unlike Fox, Newsmax’s news operation is largely non-existent. Most of the company’s reporters are attached to a website, which at midday Wednesday led with stories about Trump’s press secretary calling restrictions on Thanksgiving gatherings “Orwellian,” and the president’s latest false tweet claiming an election victory.

The television network is running a clever ad telling conservative viewers not to be “out-foxed,” but it was telling on Monday that both Newsmax and OANN spent considerable time discussing an interview that was conducted on Fox, where a Trump lawyer predicted her client would win by millions of votes.

Programming generally consists of news talk shows, and it’s not difficult to see where the loyalty lies.

“Donald Trump is the most powerful person in the world,” said Greg Kelly, a former personality at Fox’s New York affiliate who is Newsmax’s most polished broadcaster. “Not because he’s president, but because he’s loved by so many people.”

When Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo slipped and asked a question about Biden during an interview Monday with Trump aide Peter Navarro, he was quickly brushed off.

“As far as I’m concerned, President Trump is going to have a second term,” Navarro said.

Newsmax hasn’t declared Biden the president-elect, unlike other news organizations, including Fox. Its personalities spend considerable time echoing theories about voter irregularities that have either been disproven or unaccompanied by evidence.

Even though Ruddy concedes in an interview that Trump has an extremely narrow chance of overturning the results, he said it’s up to the states, not media organizations, to declare a winner.

But if the chances are really that small, why should a discussion about them dominate Newsmax’s airtime?

“I think that people that are not pro-Trump or don’t like him think we should get past it or they are tired of it,” he said. “But conservatives are quite anxious to hear about developments.”

He said he differs from Trump in believing the administration should be co-operating in a transition, even if the president holds out hope that the results could somehow be overturned.

“I would tell him if I speak to him that I think they should engage in a transition,” he said.

The spotlight on smaller rivals comes at an extraordinarily tumultuous time at Fox. There’s always been a tension between the news and opinion sides of the network, but this time it’s reflected in the ultimate “unspinnable” story of election results, said Nicole Hemmer, a Columbia University professor and author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.”

In some respects, the surge in Newsmax’s viewership represents a temper tantrum by some Fox viewers, she said.

For Newsmax, a big question is whether its programming is compelling enough to hold viewers who are clearly sampling. Besides Kelly, former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer is Newsmax’s best-known personality. Both their shows are aired twice a night; Ruddy said a new prime-time show will start next month and another is in the works.

“It’s going to be a challenge for (Newsmax) to grow their numbers in the way that Fox did because of the lack of a news operation,” Hemmer said.

The Wall Street Journal reported last weekend that Trump allies in Hicks Equity Partners had discussed acquiring and investing in Newsmax TV. Ruddy said it never materialized into anything. He said he’s not looking to sell, but will listen if an investor approaches with an open checkbook.

For conservative media, the overshadowing mystery is what Trump decides to do when he leaves office, whether he decides to start a media organization of his own or join an existing one.

Ruddy professes no insider knowledge, but said he doubts Trump would want to start his own company because it would cut him off from access to other media.

He doesn’t think Trump would be interested in doing a daily show. Perhaps weekly, he said, and Newsmax would be interested in having him.

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2020/11/18/trump-friendly-newsmax-a-sudden-competitor-to-fox-news/