I'm one of the people quoted in the article and most of the others quoted are my peers. A bunch of us have worked on Capitol Hill as staff; several of us worked for Congress's think tank; others have written books on Congress. I say this only to emphasize my point that what Ringwiss has done is truly remarkable.<p>He has an apparent deep understanding of the rules of procedure that govern the House and the Senate, which are very different from one another, and he can keep them straight. I wouldn't have the patience to watch the floor for hours on end, and while I'm sure I could read through the precedents, it's doubtful that I could retain in active memory more than a fraction. I have read the House and Senate rules cover to cover, more than once -- but that's not the same as being able to operationalize them and recall it at an instant, and it's also not the same as digging through the precedents and understanding what they mean. That comes from a lot of practice.<p>Besides having a particular interest in the topic, my suspicion is Ringwiss has an eidetic memory. He is a remarkable person and I'm glad that he's doing what he does.<p>In my opinion, the House and Senate rules are so complicated that only a few people can understand them. The procedures are used to gather power in the hands of a few, which undermines their original purpose: to facilitate orderly debate and empower all the members equally. I compare them to Roberts Rules of Order, Revised, which are straightforward enough that most people can grasp them with a reading or two.<p>As I said, what he's doing is remarkable, but it's also remarkable that few can do what he's doing.
Awesome to see this kind of use for the internet. People who are really passionate of a subject and can help educate other people on it.
And if you think about it, this is what the internet, reddit, Twitter etc were at the beginning and this is what HN is today (hoping the barbarians don't reach us)
This makes me think of the fun people get with sports, tons of information over a long history with lots of stories. Imagine how many people we can get into politics with a fantasy congress! It would be like fantasy sports but you choose your representatives.
Pedantic nitpick:<p>> Matt Glassman — a congressional scholar at Georgetown who has spent most of his adult life studying the Hill — wanted to know the answer to an obscure procedural question. “When was the last time a ruling of the chair was overturned on appeal in the House?” he asked on X, tagging an anonymous user named @ringwiss.<p>> Less than a minute later, the mysterious account responded with an answer — 1938 — and a decades-old edition of the Congressional Record to prove it.<p>No, a copy of the 1938 Congressional record does not prove that. The question was “When was the last time…?” I don’t doubt that he’s correct, and the error is on the part of the writer, but what he’s <i>proven</i> is that the answer can’t be earlier than 1938.<p>And yes, very much a pedantic nitpick in an otherwise interesting article.
I had this idea to create some sort of gamified RPG battle log format for government procedure. Members of government would be characters in the battle, actions like amendments/comments/votes would be attacks/spells/defensive moves (not respectively). Monsters would be the bills/resolutions/etc.<p>Then you could playback a session of congress/etc as a battle.<p>The purpose would be to mystify the procedure and analogize it to something people are more familiar with.
I’m going to be pedantic but he’s not a college student in the UK, he’s a university student in the UK. College is where UK students study from 16 to 18. He’s 20 studying at Durham University.
For all the downsides to anonymity online the ability to establish aliases and build trust using them is a powerful tool for online community building. This and the case of Beff Jezos really make a strong argument for not mandating everyone's online id be tied to their real world one.
Nothing ironic at all that a uni student immigrant from a former communist country now living in a monarchy should be an expert on parliamentary procedure of the supposed world champion of democracy.
Maybe the bar is just set super low? The guy started following US politics in 2020 and now he’s a savant.<p>And isn’t this just normal twitter use? I know I’ve woken up and entered a debate on Twitter and then misspent a morning researching and going back and forth on Twitter.
This Twitter account, and the DC scene reaction to it, is actually a condemnation of our current state of American national politics and government.<p>People are acting like this guy is some sort of savant. But we're talking about knowledge that a 20 year old UK college student picked up in his spare time by watching TV and reading a few books. It's not rocket science! Congressional procedure is not even remotely as complex as what you need to know to build an average office building, something that is being done all over the U.S. every day to a very high level of competence.<p>The commentary on this Twitter account (including this article) says way more about the people commenting on it. Specifically it reveals how few national politicians, consultants, staffers, reporters, etc. in DC want to do boring-seeming work like reading a procedural manual and some history. All of which is freely available to anyone.
<i>Surdy first began following American politics during the 2020 election, which he said many of his friends and peers in the UK paid close attention to as well.</i><p>An outgrowth of a globally connected information source is the transfer of political interest and influence (beyond pop culture) to other countries in ways that wouldn't have happened in the past. From the Economist in 2022:<p><i>British politics is obsessed with America. mps, wonks and journalists gorge on American history and follow its politics in fine detail. They also ape its language. Local elections, when council voters decide who has the privilege of collecting bins and cutting services to pay for social care, are sometimes called “mid-terms”. Parts of Britain are occasionally labelled “flyover country”, even if 90% of the population lives within a four-hour drive of Northampton."</i><p><a href="https://www.economist.com/britain/2022/05/19/uksa-an-obsession-with-america-pollutes-british-politics" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/britain/2022/05/19/uksa-an-obsessi...</a><p>Then there was the Canadian trucker protests, in which some cited their "First Amendment rights":<p><i>Tamara Lich, the Alberta woman whose GoFundMe campaign raised over $10 million for the convoy, and her husband had their day in court—and Dwayne Lich said he was innocent, because: “Honestly? I thought it was a peaceful protest and based on my First Amendment, I thought that was part of our rights.”<p>The judge then asked, “What do you mean, First Amendment? What’s that?”<p>Because, of course, the First Amendment is part of the U.S. Constitution, not the Canadian Charter.</i><p><a href="https://www.thebulwark.com/no-the-canadian-trucker-protests-are-not-really-comparable-to-jan-6th/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thebulwark.com/no-the-canadian-trucker-protests-...</a><p>(Apparently, there <i>is</i> a first amendment in the Canadian Constitution, but it is the right to recognize Manitoba as a province.)<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manitoba_Act,_1870" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manitoba_Act,_1870</a>
We finally found a category of use cases for LLMs that have strong user acceptance: wading through endless bureaucracy.<p>Even the impact of hallucination is minimal because the humans do that all the time!