@fellshard How do you mean that last comment? I think @cschep is talking about things getting done that violate a large number of people's preferences. (With preference meant as in preference utilitarism. You could also say “violate a large number of people's rights”, or “worsen a large number of peoples lives”.) I like your suggestion to ask people why they voted for Trump, since we need to understand the conditions better that led to this outcome. This is what I already said above. Bear in mind that people often don't answer (and don't know) their actual reasons.

That attitude is what has us where we are now. Don't assume people vote for no particular reason. There's a clip being tossed around recently, and I believe he answers the question of, 'Why don't people answer honestly?'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLG9g7BcjKs

Loud, crass language-wise, pretty informal, but his point is solid.

By the last comment - violating preferences is better than making a giant leap.

Preference does not always align with what is beneficial. Isn't that what progressivism stands on?

For further reference to popular vote vs electoral college - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXnjGD7j2B0

^ The electoral college is most like a distributed system, allowing autonomy of individual components (states) while still creating a consensus. If you can't stand how a state operates its elections, then you have the option to move somewhere where your vote may take greater consideration. The goal is to prevent tyranny of the majority, who may not represent the best interests of the most people. It's intended to generate a compromise. In this election in particular, there was no majority either candidate could satisfy, so even that was removed.

In a more sane election, at least one candidate will at least be tolerable for a quorum of people, not just a majority.

> Don't assume people vote for no particular reason. Oh, I didn't mean it like that. I just wanted to caution against something we as software engineers often encounter: if you ask users what they don't like about your software, they will tell you that they don't like the blue background and that it's hard to find the menu for changing text size, but these are not necessarily the most important things that caused them to unsubscribe. In other words, it's important to take peoples' reasons seriously and to talk to them, but we have to dig deeper than what their initial answers are.

Good video! Might be selection bias, but I've been saying something similar to that guy: Don't complain, but do something.

> Preference does not always align with what is beneficial. If you ignore preferences, then how do you find out what is beneficial? Maybe this is just a confusion between terminal and instrumental goals. In order to reach a preferred terminal goal (the beneficial thing), you might have to do some things that are not so much preferred (the preference violation). For example, I guess you prefer not to suffer harsh consequences of global warming in the future, so you can decide to reduce your intake of high-carbon-equivalent-emission-requiring food and to fly less (or offset the emissions by paying money). You'd prefer to eat the meat and off-season tomatoes, or hold on to the money, but hey, you're doing it for your preferred terminal goal.

If you want to learn more about utilitarianism, check out this: http://raikoth.net/consequentialism.html It reminds me of Nathan Marz' tweet https://twitter.com/nathanmarz/status/793464628495941632. You start out with the defining constraints: I want a “system which both satisfies our moral intuition that morality should make a difference to the real world, and that we should care about other people”. Then you go on to discover what system satisfies these constraints. Later in the article he also gives a justification for deontological rules like “you should not steal”, interpreting them as heuristics that prevent us from thinking up self-serving justifications. (Our brains are very good at thinking up self-serving justifications, even when we know that our brains are very good at thinking up self-serving justifications.)

The key there being this: What sets that moral foundation?

That, I believe, is the real core behind populism vs. federalism

Is man inherently moral, and if not, where is the external foundation for morality?