Cool Resource

I recently stumbled upon a very cool resource for thinking about innovation and social entrepreneurship, Stanford University's Entrepreneurship Corner. A little bit like TED.com, it features video talks from prominent "thought leaders." I like it as an interface between academia and business leaders.

The Liberal Arts Lie

There is a growing trend to view higher education as a value-adding commodity. You go to school and you expect to come out employable, with marketable skills. Surely, education is an investment in human capital, but an overly commodified view has its drawbacks. If you view education as a value-adding transaction, then you tend towards vocational training, which adds value in concrete, measurable ways.

Liberal arts institutions fight this trend, a worthy fight in my humble opinion. Rather than cranking out employees, liberal arts colleges try to nurture thoughtful citizens, armed not with skills but with critical thinking. And this is the liberal arts pitch: at our institution, you will learn how to think, you will learn how to learn, and that is the most transferable skill possible. You will receive a broad-based, holistic education that will enable you to pursue any profession you desire. At our institution, we take a broader view of "value."

This is all nice and dandy. I enjoy learning and thinking, and my Swarthmore education cultivated my curiosity and, cliche as it might sound, a lifelong love of learning. Things get a bit messy, though, when you transition from an institution that fights against the value-added view of education to the job market. In the vagaries of the marketplace, it is unreasonably difficult to translate thoughtfulness into social contribution. I see so many of my classmates--who are smart, thoughtful, motivated and filled with good intentions--struggle to find employment where they are happy and feel as though they are contributing real value to society, or at least on their way to doing so.

I am unemployed right now, and I am sleeping on the couch of a high school friend who studied Business for his undergraduate degree. He is an investment banker taking in a handsome salary, and he just finished reading a book, titled Damn, It Feels Good to be a Banker. The author of this obnoxious book ends the preface with this sentence: "Dad, thanks for not letting me study liberal arts."

I am not complaining. There are things in my life that I value much more highly than a bank statement. And I think the liberal arts pitch is ultimately true. I am merely commenting on the difficulty of the transition from a liberal arts education to a nonacademic pursuit. And I think that it is something of a shame.

Behavioral Economics

Taleb gets a shout-out here from NYTimes columnist David Brooks.

I wonder about the legitimacy of behavioral economics in Economics departments across the United States though. So far as I know, undergraduate programs pay it lip service at best. I suppose injecting psychology into the study of economics would detract from the discipline's increasingly mathematical orientation and scientific pretension.

I once expressed to a professor of mine an interest to pursue graduate studies in Economic History. He informed me that economic historians carry just about zero clout and hold just about zero sway over economic policy or the way that economics is taught/studied. Sad reality. The idea of studying models or econometric methodology strikes me as so damned ahistorical, though.

And of course: we should not assume. Because if you assume, then you make an "ass" out of "u" and "me." Take that Econ!

A One-in-a-Million Plea

Dear John Doerr,

Obviously this e-mail is a long shot. But, as you said in your TED Talk, quoting Thomas Friedman, "If you don't go, you don't know." I am an avid reader of Friedman's books and columns, and his writings have helped convince me of the need for the United States to adopt a Code Green response to today's environmental and economic crises. I want to contribute to the cause.

I am writing to you in particular because I was moved by the passion and emotion with which you spoke during your TED Talk. From everything that I have read about you, you seem to share Friedman's vision of America as a place distinguished by its innovative vigor and entrepreneurial spirit. In fact, I would argue that you have largely been the author of this vision during your career at KPCB. But more importantly, you seem to believe in America as a place where a guy like you just might respond to an e-mail from a guy like me.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I graduated from Swarthmore College in 2007 with majors in Economics and English Literature, and after teaching high school English for a year in Ecuador, I now live in San Francisco. I decided to move here because, in Michael Lewis' words, "[The United States] is the capital of innovation," and, "Silicon Valley is to the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world." I moved here with the intention of getting involved in greentech innovation, hoping to offer my skills and work ethic towards the cause which I passionately believe in.

Unfortunately, my decision to move to the bay area has coincided with one of the worst periods for the economy in recent memory. In the six weeks that I have been here, I have submitted application materials to over fifty companies and have repeatedly been told, "Sorry, but we are not hiring right now," or some variation of the same sentiment. I have a degree from a presitigious liberal arts college with a strong record of academic achievement, and I am convinced that I have something to offer to greentech innovation, perhaps not in the vein of technical expertise, but at least in the combination of critical thinking, passion and hard work.

Being young, I am eager to learn and to contribute. But I have not yet been able to find the structure required for me to develop what potential I do possess. When I learned of the Greentech Innovation Network and your leadership role in it, I said to myself, "I want to be involved in that." Obama and McCain both speak of the dignity that comes with earning an honest living. As a young American, I seek the dignity that comes with working towards what one believes in. I worry for our country and for the world when young people with profiles similar to mine struggle so mightily to find meaningful employment. So I am writing to ask you how I might get involved in what you are doing with respect to greentech. Perhaps I can assist in research and analysis, conduct literature reviews, or support administratively. I want to be involved in some capacity such that I can be a part of the bottom-up innovation required to reach some solution to the problems that we face. Any guidance that you could offer would be much appreciated.

I humbly ask that you take the time to read my e-mail and I hope to hear back from you sometime. In any case, I admire the work that you have done on your daughter's behalf.

Sincerely,
Brian Chen

Where am I?

Earlier this year in July, I was sitting at the international airport in Quito waiting to board my flight to Buenos Aires. Having just cleared security, and with only a backpack and a duffel bag, my first thought after settling into my seat was, "What the hell am I doing going to Argentina?"

No itinerary. No plans. No friends to visit. Not even reservations for a hostel.

Perhaps there was some vague romantic notion of what it means to be a traveler, on the road...

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Since coming to San Francisco, I've been shuttling between San Francisco and Stanford pretty regularly. A lot of times, I drive along I-280 late at night on my own, and my car is the only one in sight. Outside the driver's window, I can see the lower third of the night sky. On clear nights, the stars and the moon give the hills that surround the freeway a faint outline. On cloudy nights, it's the orange city glow that emanates from San Francisco. Ahead of me, I see only what my headlights illuminate, lines of reflectors extending miles and miles ahead.

At some moments on these drives, I see in my mind's eye a Google satellite map of the road where I am driving. And the map keeps on zooming out and zooming out until it truly is a satellite view, one oblong circle of light moving slowly through surrounding darkness. Myself separated from my parents by the Pacific Ocean and from my two older sisters by hundreds of miles.

In these moments, I think, "How the hell did I get here?"

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A job interview, at least of the behavioral variety, often turns out to be a lot like storytelling. The interviewer asks you questions about your resume, various decisions that you've made, why you are interested in his/her particular company. And in response to these questions, you are expected to believe one hundred percent in the narrative fallacy. You package yourself, you tell a story about where you have been and why you are where you are at that particular moment. Causality in the stories that you tell about yourself is made out to be simple, fairly straightforward, rational and thought-out. The purpose is to convey passion for where you are going and that you know what you want.

But during the "What the hell?" moments that I am describing, all your defenses collapse. All the energy required to believe in your self-narrative dissipates, reasons evaporate into the air.

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Rational Choice Theory? Fuck that. Causality can only be assigned retrospectively. Randomness (what we do not know and cannot explain) overwhelms.

TED

TED.com is one of the coolest sites and one of the coolest ideas I've seen. Something to get excited about.

Also: I am currently reading The New New Thing by Michael Lewis. It profiles Jim Clark and the Silicon Valley boom of the late 90's. And my mind is energized by all the talk of innovation.

Ms. McDowell

I read The Last Lecture today, the book that is based on the last lecture given by the Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, who passed away just a couple of months ago from pancreatic cancer.

It is a sentimental book, full of feel-good optimism and, many would say, full of cliches. But I don't think anyone can doubt its sincerity or that it touches a chord in....well, all of us. At some point in our lives, we feel the need to distance ourselves from cliches, from the overly sentimental and what we might call the cheesy. But here are a few words on cliches:

"After all, even on cliched phrases, you could hoist true emotion." (The Inheritance of Loss [Desai] 232)

"So I have gone all the way around Robin Hood's barn to arrive at the old platitudes, which I guess is the process of growing up." (The Caine Mutiny [Wouk] 505)

These quotes, obviously stripped of their context, might not resonate for you the way they do for me. But I like these quotes. What does it matter if something is cliche or cheesy if it is sincere and true?

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Ms. McDowell, my tenth grade English teacher, has been one of the biggest influences in my life. Like Randy Pausch, however, she got cancer at a young age and passed away some years ago. As a teacher, she imparted to her students a passion for literature, beauty and critical thinking...things that I can't seem to shake from the way that I view life.

After reading The Last Lecture, I tried to remember just a couple of the aphorisms/pieces of advice that she shared with us. For me, these McDowellisms contain infinite wisdom and are guideposts that I have come back to continually in my life. Here are a couple off the top of my head. If you are reading this post, and by any chance had Ms. McDowell, perhaps you can help me grow my collection. Or perhaps you have a collection from a teacher of your own.

1. If she ever sensed that her students were particularly stressed, she would say, "Don't worry. You will live just as long and just as happily."

2. The idealism of a few can change the world.

3. You have to be consciously aware to be a fully-functioning human being.

4. Learn a recipe from your mom, so that you can cook your favorite dish when you are away from home.

5. Write postcards to the people that you care about.

6. Boredom is the shriek of unused capacities.

Discussion, Not Debate

If I had to distill my $40k-a-year college education into one lesson, it would be this: the difference between a discussion and a debate. And I will be proud if in my life I approach every problem and every question from the perspective of a discussion and not a debate.

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I just finished reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a book that I highly recommend. Taleb describes himself as an academic libertarian, a term that he defines as "someone who considers that knowledge is subjected to strict rules but not institutional authority, as the interest of organized knowledge is self-perpetuation, not necessarily truth" (307). I am very much taken by this idea of academic libertarianism. It seems very apparent to me that the categories created to describe different academic departments are arbitrarily drawn. And while I am sure that there are benefits to having lines drawn between different disciplines, I am also sure that the lines are often taken too seriously and thereby inhibit cross-pollination between disciplines. Taleb criticizes the insularity of Economics departments in particular.

Let me cite at length Taleb's discussion of the confirmation bias, which is a related idea and which I find to be super interesting:

The first experiment I know of concerning [the confirmation bias] was done by the psychologist P.C. Wason. He presented subjects with the three-number sequence 2, 4, 6, and asked them to try to guess the rule generating it. Their method of guessing was to produce other three-number sequences, to which the experimenter would respond "yes" or "no" depending on whether the new sequences were consistent with the rule. Once confident with answers, the subjects would formulate the rule...The correct rule was "numbers in ascending order," nothing more. Very few subjects discovered it because in order to do so they had to offer a series in descending order (that the experimenter would say "no" to). Wason noticed that the subjects had a rule in mind, but gave him examples aimed at confirming it instead of trying to supply series that were inconsistent with their hypothesis. Subjects tenaciously kept trying to confirm the rules that they had made up. (58)

I find this idea about confirmation bias interesting because it addresses the single most important question about people and knowledge, namely, how people become certain about their knowledge.

If we try to avoid the confirmation bias, then it makes sense to try at every point to disprove our hypotheses rather than seek to prove them. This has everything to do with the company that we keep, the conversations that we choose to hold and what we choose to read. If I hold liberal opinions on politics, I should make an effort to associate with conservatives so that I can challenge my ideas and see if they might be disproved in a way. (Obviously, opinions can't be disproved, but they can be undermined.) I should try to understand the thoughts of those who hold beliefs opposite to my own.

Unfortunately, I can't say that I have been particularly successful in avoiding the confirmation bias in this respect.

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I grew up in a household that was not particularly politically aware/active, at least not in the realm of US domestic politics. So when I arrived at Swarthmore, I had a vague idea of what it meant to be liberal or conservative, but by no means a deep understanding. But I happened upon a campus that was overwhelmingly liberal and populated by passionate liberals. So from every direction, I was the recipient of liberal ideology, a situation from which it is most difficult to think independently.

Now that I think back on it, the political environment of Swarthmore lent itself to the confirmation bias. Swarthmore students did not seek to disprove their liberal ideas; instead, they surrounded themselves with others who would only confirm their ideas. Presidential debates and State of the Union speeches were the most telling scenes of the confirmation bias. On a Swarthmore TV screen, it was impossible for President Bush to say anything of merit. Over the "boos" and the mockery, I imagine it would have been nearly impossible to hear the words of Sarah Palin or John McCain during the most recent debates.

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So this is my main point: if we too readily call ourselves "liberal" or "conservative," we take the first step towards engaging in a debate rather than a discussion. In a discussion, you are not trying to convince, you are trying to understand. A discussion in many ways is similar to a debate, but it is importantly seasoned with humility and the earnest desire to understand the other perspective. A debate usually implies an unbending allegiance to one's own beliefs, and the desire to persuade another lends itself to the confirmation bias (you will pull only from evidence that support your argument). A hallmark of intellectual integrity ought to be the willingness to be disproved, and the willingness to change one's opinions.

Ironically, the one lesson that I probably cherish the most from the classrooms of Swarthmore was very seldomly practiced outside the classroom (at least in large public gatherings; behind closed doors, things were a bit better).

The Problem with Humility

I studied English Literature in college, and part of the reason I studied English Literature is because every time that I read a novel, a short story or a poem, I feel humbled. Total mastery of a text is impossible. There are always different things that a reader can bring to a text, always different things to be seen, always different insights to be made.

But reading with humility flattens the array of possible interpretations by in a way granting legitimacy to all readings.

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A lot of my parents' friends in the United States, being Taiwanese or Taiwanese-American and being staunch supporters of Taiwanese independence, vote Republican. Why? Because Republicans and neoconservatives usually hold a harder line against the Communists on the other side of the Taiwan Strait. They back up their "globalization" or "democratization" project with force, and that bodes favorably for the fledgling democracy in Taiwan.

This makes me ask, On what basis should voters make their decisions? Let us say, for simplicity's sake, that Republican foreign policy is better for the future of Taiwan, but let us say that I like the more liberal domestic policies of the Democrats. Do I base my decision as a voter on the single issue of foreign policy towards Taiwan? Do I vote with my personal interest in mind or with national interest in mind?

If I vote according to personal interest, then I can hope that the aggregation of all self-interested votes will result in the best mixture of policies for the nation, much in the same vein as Adam Smith's idea of the Invisible Hand. Plus, if a voting bloc can be organized around the single issue that I care most about, then that single issue will gain political momentum.

On the other hand, if I vote according to national interest, I run the risk that my personal interest will be sacrificed for what I deem to be the greater good, and that the single issue I care most about will lose political steam. So it isn't immediately clear to me: Do I vote for what is immediately best for me? Or what I think is best for the country?

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If you practice humility in your life, it becomes much more difficult to hold strong opinions. After all, in how many subjects are you an authority? Along the same lines of logic, practicing humility often paralyzes, handicapping action. Let us say that you want to help in the fight against global warming, and that you think about buying a hybrid as your personal contribution. But then you read an article that the additional carbon emissions from the production of the hybrid far offsets the benefits from switching cars. What do you do? How do you determine the net benefit or cost of your ultimate decision?

I've always struggled with the idea of decision-making under the conditions of uncertainty. Surely, there is a way to reconcile humility and decision-making; otherwise, there really is no way forward.

Sir Charles Barkley

A couple of nights ago, Sir Charles Barkley made an appearance on The Larry King Live Show. Barkley, who supports Obama in this election, describes himself as an independent. According to him, the United States is tragically divided--not along partisan lines, not along racial lines, but along socioeconomic lines. For Barkley, it is the rich against the poor, the haves against the have-nots. The poor are losing and have been losing for at least the last eight years, and that is why Sir Charles Barkley supports the Obama-Biden ticket.

But when asked about the economy and the respective merits of the economic policy proposals put forth by McCain and Obama, Sir Charles Barkley declined to comment and instead deferred to the opinion of his fellow guest on the show, Ben Stein, an economist.

Joe the Plummer, in an interview he gave for a news channel, recently called Obama's tax policies socialist. Why should Americans be penalized for financial success? Why would we want to "spread the wealth"? In reality, Obama is merely calling for returning to the Clinton-era tax rate of 39% for households earning more than a quarter million. Was the US a socialist country under the Clinton administration?

What Barkley and Joe show is that the Economics IQ of the general American population is somewhat lacking. Economics is a tough subject, and, in matters of the economy, most of us defer to "the experts." When political commentators tout the economy as the deciding factor in this election, general public ignorance about the mechanisms of the economy troubles me. How is one expected to vote as an informed voter?

As evidenced by last night's discussion of Joe the Plummer, both candidates claim to champion the needs of the middle class. How many voters in this country can give coherent arguments about why their candidate is right and the other candidate wrong?

In an age where people defer to "the experts" on most issues, how is one to remain independently-minded?

In a slideshow presentation that Richard Dawkins once gave at Swarthmore College, he put up a slide of two kids standing side by side. Underneath one kid was the caption, "Keynesian," and under the other kid, the caption, "Monetarist." Dawkins was poking fun at the idea that kids could subscribe to religious belief systems at such a young age.

What shocks me in this election is how readily people, especially my peers, are to proclaim themselves "liberal" or "conservative." Obviously, we can't all be experts on all issues, but it seems a more rigorous examination of one's beliefs is called for.

The Q That Counts

How probabilistically employed am I?

Guess this question puts things into perspective.

Ergodicity

I have only recently been introduced to the idea of probabilistic thinking, and I like what I see. Probabilistic thinking refers to a way of seeing the world through the lens of statistics and probability theory. My introduction to this has come from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness and Michael Lewis' Moneyball. I suppose the ideas of probabilistic thinking are not new to me. I studied statistics and econometrics while in college, but Taleb and Lewis have made the implications and importance of probabilistic thinking much more clear to me.

What appeals to me about probabilistic thinking is that it devalues actual outcomes in favor of expected outcomes. Actual outcomes are very often deceptive and probabilistic thinking alerts us to this fact and cautions us against drawing conclusions from individual events. It seems like a simple and very obvious insight, but I wonder how many people actually practice probabilistic thinking because it is so inherently abstract.

We are trained to treat results as being important. It doesn't matter if a team has a 0.6 probability of winning a game. What matters is if the team manages to notch a tally in the win column. We are trained to judge things by results rather than by processes. A lot of people and a lot of companies will tell you that they are "results-oriented." But when was the last time that you heard someone tell you that he/she is "process-oriented?" Part of the problem is that processes are much harder to observe.

In a recent job interview, I was asked the question, "What has been one of the biggest decisions you have made in your life? How did you arrive at your decision?" My instinct (and I think the instinct of most people) is to go through an inventory of decisions I've had to make in my life and think about which has been most important, and then to think about the process through which I arrived at the decision.

But you see how that is sequenced? Precedence is given to the decision...you think about the decision first, and then you think about the process. The instinct is to think about our lives as a series of big and small, but all discrete, decisions.

And this, finally, is where my discussion comes to the idea of ergodicity. As I understand from Taleb, ergodicity is the idea that a very long sample path will show its long-term properties. I am sure that there is a more technically and mathematically rigorous definition, but I like the elegance of the idea. Despite short-term volatility, things eventually settle according to their long-term properties. A very Aristotelian idea, I suppose. Like telos.

But if we take ergodicity seriously, then how important are individual decisions at all? How big of a decision was it for me to move to San Francisco as opposed to Philadelphia or New York City? The generator of this decision as well as of past and future decisions remains the same. Eventually, my life will settle into its long-term properties. So the difficult but important thing is to examine those long-term properties.

What started me on this train of thought was a passage from Philip Zimbardo's book, The Time Paradox:

Compared to people from other cultures, Americans today seem more obsessed with personal happiness and have been criticized for having become a feel-good rather than a do-good culture. We are obsessed with looking good, with having a great tan, tight buns, and blemish-free skin. Yet what is important in life is more than skin-deep. It is a spiritual inner happiness that does not diminish over time. (256-257)

Thought about in this way, and viewed through probabilistic thinking, personal happiness over a short time horizon is not all that important. The important question to ask, strangely enough, ought to be: How probabilistically happy are you?

Expected outcome over actual outcome. A long, long time horizon over a short time horizon.

Words of Wisdom (Empty Words)

McCain is a sage. Take a look at his words on Social Security and Medicare:

"Look -- look, it's not that hard to fix Social Security, Tom. It's just tough decisions. Social Security is not that tough. We know what the problems are, my friends, and we know what the fixes are. We've got to sit down together across the table. It's been done before.

I saw it done with our -- our wonderful Ronald Reagan, a conservative from California, and the liberal Democrat Tip O'Neill from Massachusetts. That's what we need more of, and that's what I've done in Washington.

Sen. Obama has never taken on his party leaders on a single major issue. I've taken them on. I'm not too popular sometimes with my own party, much less his.

So Medicare, it's going to be a little tougher. It's going to be a little tougher because we're talking about very complex and difficult issues.

My friends, what we have to do with Medicare is have a commission, have the smartest people in America come together, come up with recommendations, and then, like the base-closing commission idea we had, then we should have Congress vote up or down.

Let's not let them fool with it anymore. There's too much special interests and too many lobbyists working there. So let's have -- and let's have the American people say, "Fix it for us.""

Substance? When McCain says that he knows what the fixes are for Social Security, surely a hundred million pairs of ears prick up in anticipation only to be disappointed. What does that last sentence even mean? "Fix it for us." Sounds like a huge deflection of responsibility from all parties involved.

More of the Same

I don't claim to be an authority on anything, and I certainly don't claim to be an astute political observer. But, like most other twenty-somethings, when election time rolls around, I try to keep up with political developments, I try to educate myself on the issues, and I try to make a decision as an independent, critical thinker.

Here are my initial thoughts about tonight's debate:

1) More of the same: Even for someone like myself, for someone who is not a political junkie, these two presidential candidates sound like broken records. Both candidates made the same attacks on each other, the same arguments about the same issues in the same words. I bet that if you took the transcript from the first presidential debate and simply jumbled the words around, you'd end up with something very similar to what we heard in the second debate. Value added: zero.

2) "Speak softly and carry a big stick": So McCain cites Teddy Roosevelt as a role model and uses this quote to say that Obama is dangerous because he is all talk and no walk. Then, in response to a question about Russia, McCain says something like: "I looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and I saw three letters: K-G-B." Jeez. Tell me: is it diplomatically okay for someone vying to be the President of the United States of America to say something like that? That doesn't sound very diplomatic or tactful to me. A lot like: "I looked George W. Bush in the face and I saw one thing: well, okay, that's a lie, I couldn't discern a single thought."

3) I don't want to hear about voting records or even about the details of policy proposals anymore. It's too much "he said, she said" business, and it requires too much effort to figure out who to believe on what. Obama says that he wants to cut taxes for the middle class, McCain says that Obama will raise taxes for the middle class. Obama says that McCain wants to give all sorts of tax breaks to oil companies, but McCain says that Obama voted in favor of legislation filled with pork for oil companies. Back and forth, back and forth, who could possibly know what to believe?

Instead, I would rather hear about values and what principles will guide decision-making. That's why I think the question about whether health care is a right, a privilege or a responsibility was such a good question. If you look at the candidates' answers to that question, then you can begin to understand what the fundamental differences are between the two platforms.

4) The economy. Both candidates claim their respective policy proposals will create jobs and move the economy forward. How does one know who to believe or whose policy would be effective?

And, on the economy, I am confused. Both candidates talk about reigning in government deficit. McCain goes so far as to recommend a spending freeze on certain governmental programs. But it is precisely when an economy is in recession that a government should be deficit spending. Isn't that standard Keynesian economics? The US got out of the Great Depression riding the tide of FDR's New Deal, which was deficit spending. The important thing to consider is the composition of the deficit spending, whether or not the spending is productive and will yield returns in the future. Money spent on nation-building in Iraq should be diverted to nation-building projects at home. The usual suspects: infrastructure, education, green technology. But the point is to change the composition of government spending and not necessarily to cut back. Right? Or is my understanding of economics horribly askew?

5) Strategy vs. Tactics. What is the goddamn difference? McCain, who claims superior knowledge on this, seems to use the words "strategic" and "tactical" rather loosely. I understand the difference between strategy and tactics to be very similar to the difference between ends and means. Strategy belongs in the realm of politics whereas tactics belong in the military. Understood in this way, the surge in Iraq was a military tactic designed to fulfill the strategic objective of establishing a sustainable democracy in Iraq.

So the strategic difference between Obama and McCain is drastic. Obama wants the strategic objective of the War on Terror to be the elimination of bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Meanwhile, McCain's strategic objective focuses on installing a friendly democracy in the Middle East. If the candidates could talk about strategy more coherently, I think the American public would benefit.

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Well, I think the debate tonight was a big disappointment. As a viewer, I want to see the two candidates engage each other in a serious way. I don't want to hear the same campaign trail slogans being rehashed over and over again. In these debates, the questions asked seem irrelevant. Instead, each candidate seems to have answers before questions are asked.

The questions are made to fit the answers (already preprepared) rather than the other way around.