

White House Receives Flood Of Applications After Its Disrupt Announcement - Madness64
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/25/white-house-receives-flood-of-innovation-fellow-applications-after-its-disrupt-announcement/

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jisaacstone
What I want from the government:

\- more transparency

\- more data

From the article these don't actually seem to be the _focus_ of the
initiative, but it seems that they will be marginally improved as a result.

hooray

~~~
nknight
The problem I have with this attitude is that transparency only helps if
people are paying attention.

Americans aren't paying attention.

~~~
roc
Most Americans simply don't have the time or expertise to puzzle out educated
positions on various specialized topics. [1]

The vast majority must inevitably defer to trusted intermediaries to
summarize, weigh arguments and state positions. Historically, these would be
the press and popular community and national public figures.

The problem today is that those intermediaries are busy leveraging that trust
for personal financial gain, feeling no obligation to perform the actual duty
being entrusted to them. [2]

To remotely "pay attention" to the breadth of political discourse absent
trustworthy filters and intermediaries is beyond a full time job.

Not to mention that it's generally a first-class ticket to becoming
disaffected, as one discovers that the issues worth talking about are largely
ignored and in many cases there are simply no alternative positions being
offered by our political parties.

[1] A person with no training in economics simply cannot make an educated
position on any but trivial economic policy short of actually studying
economics. And Dunning-Kruger doesn't paint an optimistic picture of anyones
ability to fairly weight the various arguments while they're still coming up
to speed on these topics in a highly polarized, highly politicized
environment.

And to 'pay attention' one must not only do this with economics, but criminal
justice, property rights, the health care industry, international politics,
business operation, lobbying rules and restrictions, etc.

~~~
telcodud
I see what you did there. Your second footnote is missing.

~~~
roc
Whoops.

I forget what exactly I was going to insert there. Likely a brief condemnation
of what has become overwhelming and universal tabloid journalism, not to
mention the almost comically partisan books being pushed by news organizations
to justify the media 'personalities' they populate talking-head shows with.

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warmfuzzykitten
600 out of the 12.5 million unemployed people in the US who haven't given up
looking for a job doesn't seem like a flood. It seems like a failure to get
the word out. Ping me when they reach google levels of applicants.

