Re 1a. This is why I'm constantly discouraged by the lack of useful political discourse here on HN. If a well-payed anf well-educated group can't manage it, then who will?
Not really. The revolutionary class is fairly bourgeois. You basically need time, money, power and education to revolt. An oppressed underclass is already under the heel and just gets crushed when it steps mildly out line. Historically the most likely group to revolt has existing status/power/wealth and is in fear of losing it due to some type political/demographic change. You find professionals like lawyers leading revolutionary movements, not farm hands.
Students are classic bourgeoisie - often from well off families and tend to be pretty comfortable and not preoccupied by their next meal. Most student uprisings are derided for being so privileged but such is always the way. They say the 1968 French student movement was diffused because they left Paris to spend national holidays at their parent's holiday homes :)
They are also indicative of two other key predictive factors: elite over production and a demographic youth bulge.
Their lack of success is perhaps the power issue. If they waited a few years to become army officers, administrators, judiciary and such they could be much more successful than doing another sit-in!
The two notable rebellions in the US were by land / slave owners. Students are limited to basically SDS / The Weather Underground that didn't go very far.
Useful political discourse is hard. It really is; now more than ever. There's just so much to it. It's hard enough just to wrap your head around how fucked politics is.
Money insulates you from the worst effects of regressive policy, and warps your incentives toward assholeness.
Education isn't producing many savvy, media literate critical thinkers. My class rocked a D average in Civics, and it was pretty basic stuff. We didn't have any media study. We never looked at how ads work, or where money really comes from, or where it's concentrated.
'STEM' and 'politically savvy' almost seem poles apart; no offense y'all. I don't agree that things ought to be this way, but can you deny it?
Anyway, I suspect media literate critical thinkers without much money do exist on HN - but they're elusive.
If you want useful political discourse, try Scandinavia. Might learn Norwegian myself.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
Why use an LLM as middle-man? If we’re all connected to the network just switch over to real-time direct democracy enabled by your brain implant ala sci-fi.
You don't need a brain implant or even a vote if everyone's influence is limited to such extend that they cant look beyond their self interest - voting is not required.
Direct democracy might be to much of a leap but we may take note of what people think and what ideas and proposals are out there.
You have ideas, you could write them down properly with sources and everything. Who is going to read it? What if you have 20 ideas? What would be the point in doing that? If it is pointless you should stop having ideas. There are countless fun, useful and interesting things to do that all have a point.
Say we all start writing down our poorly thought out ideas. Share our collective political ignorance with the void. If that could be aggregated and combined into something perhaps agreeable or just refutable, then we could at least debunk it and at best consider it.
Everyone can come up with a list of pro's and cons for any topic but if many do we can have the full list and may address the [perceived] misconceptions.
Not use LLM as a middle man (that would put it in charge) but as an aggregator. To construct the questions and answers for a poll for example.
If it works it will become worth having ideas, perhaps even good ideas, perhaps the feedback loop has to run for a while for the good ideas to happen.
Anything is better than pretending to know what the public wants while the public doesn't bother to want anything.
There is also the way we blame the representative for doing the wrong thing. They cant take positions on anything without offending some of their voters. We pretend everything is their idea.
I might be hallucinating, either way it is quite an enjoyable thought.
Of course I know no one will go along with anything until civilization implodes again.