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 -
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.
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