Tldr: Write an effortpost on the subject of human intuition by February 10th, we will pick the winner by poll, I will donate $200 dollars to a charity mutually agreed upon with the winner
I've been thinking a lot about the subject of intuition lately, due to some life events. What do we know without knowing we know it, what can we communicate without knowing we communicate it. When I'm thinking a lot about something what do I want to do? Read a bunch of Mottizens thinking about it too! So, on a whim while thinking about the fact that great works like the Oresteia, Frankenstein, and Rousseau's best work were the result of competitions; I've decided to launch my own little essay competition and see if anyone bites.
The basic rules are thus:
-- Write an effortpost on the topic of Intuition. Standalone or in the CW or side threads; only rule is effort. Intuition can be as broadly or as narrowly defined as you like. Effortpost we define informally, but I'd say it must be at minimum 2000-4000 characters that is substantially your own original work. No ripping off another post, of your own or someone else's. An original summary/condensation or retelling of someone else's thesis is fine. How will we be able to tell? I'm kinda counting on the crowd here, especially if we get a little competitive fire going. I wouldn't count on slipping anything by the peanut gallery here.
-- On February 12th, as long as we have at least three entries, I will publish a poll, and we will select a winner. If anyone has a suggestion for a better method of picking a winner, I'm open to it. I'm thinking a poll would be better than just raw upvotes, but I'm open to other possibilities.
-- Once a winner is selected, I will work with the winner to select a charity, and I will donate $200 to that charity. I say I will work with the winner, I'm not donating $200 to NAMBLA or Mermaids UK or the StormFront Charity Fund just because somebody wins a poll. I will do my best to be reasonable, but there are some lines I'm not gonna cross here, and IDK there might be legal issues in some countries. I will post some kind of digital receipt in all likelihood, unless it's something like give the $200 in cash into the collection bin at church or to a homeless man or something. I'm sure for most here, the bigger thing will be winning, and being acknowledged as the winner.
So why? The mood just sort of struck me. And how do you know it will really happen? You don't, except that I spend way too much time hanging around here so you can figure I'll probably stick to my word. And anyway, you'll get even more motte street cred for being the guy who got welched on than you would for being the guy who got $200 donated to mosquito nets or whatever.
I'm curious to see what a bit of direction and effort could bring out, or maybe we need chaos. We'll see if we get three.
Please bring up any questions, or rules I haven't considered.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm putting up a poll to determine the winner, but if I were the one selecting it this would have had it in a laugher. Michael Lewis and Robert Caro are two of my favorite authors, Baseball was my favorite sport as a child, and the question of why was Barack Obama a wildly ineffective president (relative to expectations) is basically the second formative political question of my life (the first being Iraq War II).
Intuition is an interesting place to pin the difference between LBJ and Obama in terms of effectiveness. Say what you like about Lyndon and his legacy, he passed a ton of very important legislation, stuff that changed the face of the country on a permanent basis. Obama, for the most part, did not. Obamacare was an abortion of a piece of legislation, trying to fit a queen size sheet on a king size bed and call it coverage. Foreign policy barely changed from the Bush years. Etc.
I always thought that the difference could be placed in terms of a fundamental laziness on the part of Barack Obama, a "big speech" disease that caused him to constantly chase the big event, the big announcement, the big omnibus bill, the new direction new paradigm moment; while ignoring the little things, the relationships, that actually grind tough bills through Congress.
Listening to The Years of Lyndon Johnson literally right now, I'm struck by how (in Caro's inimitable verbosity) down and dirty it gets on what gathering political power actually meant. LBJ spent decades forming relationships, learning who to talk to and talking to them, shaking hands, doing favors. He accumulated positions in moribund organizations and then made those organizations powerful from his college frat to the DCCC. Most of those don't pay off, a few do pay off big, and he worked his way up. At every step it was a grind, it was putting in the work, going door to door, making phone calls, sending letters, sucking up and kissing ass where necessary, whipping subordinates into line. By the time LBJ became president, he had learned the value of hard political labor to get anything done.
Obama, by contrast, parachuted into national politics with his 2004 keynote speech, and was running for POTUS in earnest by late 2006 early 2007. He didn't have time to learn where the proverbial bathrooms were in the Senate before becoming president. He might have been an extraordinarily intelligent man, but he never learned the value of grinding away. Obama became president on the power of a few great speeches, and some great statistical environments for his run in the Post-Bush oncoming-Recession timeframe. He never spent time grinding away at any political project, and when he was president he never did that too much either. He constantly tried to give one big speech, and the media cooperated, that was going to change the whole direction. He never spent time whipping votes and trading favors, maybe he couldn't do it anyway.
And maybe that ties back to your Malcolm Gladwell 10k hours bit. LBJ put in the work in the trenches, from practically childhood with his father. Obama learned that wasn't necessary. LBJ needed that time to learn how to do what he was able to do, to get the Civil Rights Act passed. Obama's lack of that skill stalled the public option in healthcare.
Another lesson could be that intuition is useful at the top, but difficult to hire out. You can have an intuitive manager in the dugout, and the numbers crunchers back at HQ can feed him data; you can't have a numbers cruncher in the dugout and an intuitive guy back at HQ feeding him hunches. LBJ could hire numbers guys, Obama couldn't hire empaths.
PS: This product works beautifully for setting up bluetooth in all my old cars. Honestly I like it better than using the built in bluetooth on a lot of cars, which can be rather clunky. Just plugs into a cigarette lighter, and broadcasts FM signal to the radio. I really only couldn't find a station when I was driving through DC, once, and I didn't look all that hard.
lol, curious as to how far you are through the LBJ books.
Have you gotten to the point of Kennedy winning the 1960 Democratic nomination? I'm going trust that I don't need to give spoiler warnings for a historical event that happened 60 years ago.
An interesting take away, is that even by 1960, LBJ might have been someone who's gifts were past their time. At least in terms rising to the Presidency.
LBJ thought he could stay out of the primaries, and that all his backroom senate connections would get him the nomination at the convention. He thought Kennedy was a political lightweight who hadn't done anything of any real note during his time in the Senate.
But Kennedy was already the beneficiary of TV and 'big speeches', by then he was a staple of the Sunday morning political shows, for all LBJs Senate accomplishments, Kennedy was better known to the voters.
The comparison between Kennedy and Obama is an interesting one. I suspect you're right. By the time he arrived in Washington, he was already a possible Presidential nominee, 2 years later, he was literally running for the nomination. He never had time to build political alliances as anything other than a possible President.
One area I was trying to go in my post (not sure I got there, I was running out of steam by the end), is that might just be an odd product of our time. We don't reward that sort of political intuition, so we don't get leaders who have it.
To start with, its almost a dirty word to have been a DC politician for any stretch of time. Before Biden, between Bill Clinton, W, Obama, and Trump, we had 28 years of presidents with a total of 4 years of inside the beltway political experience before becoming President. Hillary had some line about "the most qualified candidate ever", but for the most part, deep Washington connections is almost never a selling point for Presidental candidate.
If anything, its almost the opposite.
You can market change, can you market the opposite?
Beyond that, I'm not sure we believe in that sort of intuition at all.
I singled out Lewis, but there's a large bookshelf of books about how our intuition sucks and we shouldn't trust it. I would put the Freakonomics, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, Cass Sustein's Nudge (who Obama worked with at U of Chicago and hired into the White House), most of the Less Wrong universe of stuff including SSC, all fit into that category.
I think that shelf has a lot of good insights, and its useful to sort of be careful about the limits of intuition, and where it can lead us astray.
I also think its somewhat antithetical to LBJs sort of intuition. The sort of leaders we aspire to be, and choose, after reading that stuff. Can't do the things that LBJ did.
Or at least that's 1 theory of the universe.
Thanks for the car adapter tip, not sure why it hadn't occurred to me that there might be a solution to my setup, but that's seems like something I should own. Purchased.
They used to be really shitty, I had one growing up that could pick 4 frequencies and never worked well. I think the newer ones are just much more powerful and so do a much better job.
I'm currently in the first book, he's about to lose his first senate campaign to Pappy.
I think your observation of how Johnson was a product of his time is a good one. We don't reward politicians for that kind of work anymore. We're constantly on the lookout for the next big thing, and ignore the steady workmanlike stuff. Even Biden, though he's the ultimate insider/swamp creature, wasn't elected on a record of effectiveness merely one of continued existence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link