Should Rep. Bachmann Release Her Medical Records?Follow

At the very least, that's putting the cart before the horse. The only way to know if someone meets your standard is to have information about their health, so it always matters.

How is that in any way not binary?

You're giving a false dilemma and again presenting a binary state. It's not a choice between a good sick person and a bad healthy person. How sick a person is matters, because it can reduce them to being a worse choice than the alternative even if you think they'd otherwise be the optimal pick.

Let's have a jumping contest. You normally jump higher than I do by a fair amount. However today you are quite literally weighed down by an illness, reducing your performance. Which of us jumps higher now? Well, it depends on the difference in jumping heights before and the amount of weight on you now. We need to know this information to make a conclusion. It could be only a minor illness weighing you down, which barely matters. OR it could be a major illness weighing you down and thus I outperform you.

How much your first choice candidate differs from your second choice and how significant the illness is for that first choice matters. It may be enough to reduce your first pick below your second pick. You need to know.
[quotee=Almalieque]No, it doesn't, but the bottom line is if the person can perform their job or not. An assassinated president can't perform their job.[/quote]
Job performance isn't binary. If you negotiate a trade agreement with another nation, it's not jsut a matter of did you get the treaty or not. It's a question of degree, how favorable it is to your own country. Getting a U.S. importer to reduce their tariff by 50% seems pretty good, but 60% would be better and 40% would be worse.

It can also be a question of how quickly things get done. The same treaty sooner would be better than later, but if you're in the hospital then it's unlikely you will be able to contribute to the negotiation until you are recovered.

There is no standard of job performance here. It's not like the president needs to make 50 policies a month and if he's over then he's golden and it doesn't matter how little or much he's over, and if he under then he has failed and it doesn't matter whether he made 49 or 0.

Let's take reducing unemployment, assuming the president can directly influence that. It's not merely "he reduced unemployment thus he's good or he increase unemployment thus he's bad." The degree matters. Reducing unemployment by .000001% is essentially the same as increasing it by .000001%.

When you are healthy, you tend to handle tasks better than when you are sick.

Edited, Jul 23rd 2011 12:38am by Allegory

I was never aware of this stigma. I know that women get more headaches in general^[1] (incuding migraines) than men, but I've absolutely never heard anyone say that men handle them better.

[1]http://www.migraines.org/treatment/treather.htm

Just because you were unable to follow, doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. It's very simple, as long as expectations are being met, then it doesn't matter what sickness a person may or may not have. Only in the extreme cases should health ever be an issue.

Not voting in the best candidate because of a given sickness (which haven't prevented him/her from doing their job in the past) based on the belief that s/he MAY not be able to do their job in the future is silly. Leadership is the number one necessary quality to be the president.



Just because you don't agree with me, that doesn't make me "blatantly incorrect".

Edited, Jul 23rd 2011 3:19pm by Almalieque

Daytime court shows... looking for a divorce?

I'm not getting any blood out of this stone.

I don't really care about Bachman or health screenings for presidential candidates. You're asserting a concept is binary when it isn't, that's what irks me. It probably doesn't matter to anyone else here--not even to you beyond the fact that someone is claiming you are wrong--but it bothers me.

Hell, find me any candidate willing to give those kinds of specifics with any real intent to uphold them.

Let's say a promise is made to reduce the budget by 100 billion dollars by April 10, 2014 using entitlement cuts. A president who reduces the budget by 99,999,999,999.99 dollars by April 10, 2014 using entitlement cuts has failed to keep his promise, and one who reduces it by 100 billion and 1 dollars by April 10, 2014 using entitlement cuts has kept it, but the difference here is immaterial. Whereas a president who reduces the budget by 99,999,999,999.99 dollars by April 10, 2014 using entitlement cuts has failed to keep his promise and so has one who increases the budget by 100 billion dollars by April 10, 2014 using entitlement cuts, but they haven't both failed equally.

There is no 'par.' The imaginary line you have separating meeting standards and not meeting standards in your mind is exactly that, imaginary. Presidents are not simply adequate or inadequate; there is a wide span of performance variance.

Furthermore, you have yet to even propose a means by which to differentiate presidents in your binary standard, and I doubt you could do so in any meaningful way. Suggest for me an objective, meaningful method for categorizing which presidents have accomplished their job and which presidents have not accomplished their job such that one could go through a list of past presidents and unquestionably assign them to one category or another. If you can't, then it's not binary.

It's easy to say a man who can't bench press 100 lbs. is weak while one who can bench press 800 lbs. is strong, but the reason you can't objectively and meaningfully draw a line between who is strong and who is weak is because there is a continuous spectrum of strength and because it is not a binary category.

Edited, Jul 23rd 2011 8:08pm by Allegory

Exactly my point. You've previously said the situation was binary, but now you're pointing out how it isn't. In a binary situation there are only two states. Either you're late to work or you aren't. There is no degree of lateness in a binary situation. 1 minute late is still late, 1 second late is still late, and 1 hour late is still late. That is, unless of course the situation is not binary and instead there is a continuous spectrum where being 1 second late is pretty much like being on time, being a minute late isn't too bad, and being 1 hour late is really pushing it.


Then every past president has been a failure and likely every future president will be a failure, because many promises are made during campaigns are usually at least one is not kept.

You might point out that failing to keep only one promise isn't a big deal, but that again is an admission that the situation isn't binary. What percentage of promises must then be kept to say that a president has done what he has said he will done.

You need to have meaningful and objective criteria.




There error you're making is a very common one. People treat many situations as binary because it is much simpler and often more practical. It's easier to think of Steve as being either a good employee or a bad employee than it is to rate his performance on a scale of 1 to 100. It's easier to think of movies as being bad movies or good movies, even though there is a whole spectrum to how much we enjoy a particular movie. Binary thoughts are simple, and so they can be extremely practical and useful. That does not mean they accurately describe the situation though. Useful is not the same as correct.

Edited, Jul 23rd 2011 9:34pm by Allegory

Nothing to see here, just Alma being an idiot as usual, arguing just to be arguing.

Which would be correct, but not meaningful.

You can define any activity in binaries, but much of the time nonsensical. If I'm throwing a charity fundraiser, then I can set a goal and choose to define my success as meeting it or not, but it'd be entirely arbitrary and meaningless. Raising more money for starving orphans is better than raising less money regardless of what sort of par I try to set for myself.

Edited, Jul 23rd 2011 10:31pm by Allegory

You keep saying it's binary, but you keep describing a spectrum.

If it is truly a binary situation of success or failure, then people would react as such. Failing by 1 dollar is the same as failing by a billion dollars. If there are different degrees of success and failure in any way, it is not binary. People would react as such, and there'd be equal outrage regardless of how much the budget was missed by. But we know that isn't true. People do care about the degrees.

You're also stating you would personally be equally fine with a president failing to meet his goal by a dollar or by a billion dollars.

Edited, Jul 23rd 2011 10:36pm by Allegory

That leaves me enough for a night with Alma's mom.

Allegory,

Since you keep harping on failure, let's talk about success. Let's assume that a president made every goal set and every goal was within the expectations of the people. Do you believe that anyone can logically and objectively label that person as a failure?



Way to not pay attention. You allowed Allegory to hop to so many different sub-topics, that you got confused. I argued that one's health doesn't matter as long as s/he gets the job done. He argued that there wasn't a objective way of defining success or failure for any given task. My counter was that there do exist objective ways of determining success for any given task. My intent was to NOT define the overall success of a president. I even stated that there is no one-size fits all check sheet of success. It all varies based on the time of the president. However, that doesn't change the fact that you can objectively say that the president failed or succeeded at a task.




Which is why I keep saying that the people's expectation plays a part. Even though technically you failed, as long as you are within the expectations of the people, which comes from YOUR goal, people will accept it.



It's not meaningless, because if you're realistic, then you know the likelihood of how much money will be raised. Of course more money is better, but you aren't going to raise $1 trillion dollars doing car washes. You realistically look at the probable results and set a realistic goal.

Not raising any money to cover more than the expenses, is an objective and logically way of determining failure, even if it's only one penny. It's not meaningless, because in that case, failure means that you didn't raise any money for the fundraiser.



No, I keep presenting something binary, but you keep insisting it's a spectrum just because you don't want to be considered wrong. I stated that you can objectively determine the success or failure of a task in a binary sense. You said that it couldn't be done, now you're saying it can, but it's meaningless. If you're so meticulous to the point where $1 makes a difference in a budget, then you must accept the fact that whether or not it's "meaningless" doesn't change the fact that it's binary.



This is a pathetic cop out. How people react has nothing to do with the success or failure of the person. Most people are biased towards their political party. How often do you see a party bad mouth a president of their party and speak highly of a president that isn't in their party? Republicans will always act like at least "most" of all Republicans is what's best for the nation, likewise with Democrats.

The varying degrees of the population has nothing to do with the passing/failing of the president. Just because a parent doesn't ground their child for failing a test, but instead gives him/her words of encouragement, doesn't change the fact that s/he still failed.

I'm not denying any subjectivity, I even stated as such, but there does exist objective ways of determining success.




Nope, because as I said, there's at least two parts of the equation, what the president states as a goal and the people's expectations. Your expectation arises from whatever the president says. You, as a rational, reasonable being that realizes that no human on earth is perfect, will create your own expectations based off those promises. From there, you will either accept or deny the president's performance even if s/he does EXACTLY what s/he said s/he'll do. You can still claim that the president failed exceeding his goal by a billion dollars. That doesn't change the fact that the president succeeded in his/her goal.