Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week (2016)
news.ycombinator.com
news.ycombinator.com
It was a success in the sense that we learned a lot. If anyone wants to know about that, a lot of it is in the explanations here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490.
These explanations have become pretty stable by now—stable enough that I repeat myself incessantly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
*Edit: here's where we called it off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251
Edit: Oh, I wonder if it's a spillover effect; the amount of politics doesn't change, so having those threads on topic avoids spill over into other threads
given that HN isn't an analogue for the world at large, one wonders if this lesson learned on HN translates at all to what may happen elsewhere as a result of the ongoing corporate 'de-platforming' campaigns.
Another thing I learned from that experiment is not to try experiments like that. Turns out it's bad to fuck with the firmware.
Stability is really important. HN is a site for intellectually interesting stories and discussion. That includes some political discussion, as I've explained at the links above. This has always been the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
Edit: Oh. Found it. In "Meaning of Life", uttered shortly after this musical number. NSFW and liable to cause religious / political flamewars, but it makes the point, so here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ . You can skip to 6:09 for the line.
I don't think the two cases are comparable really. One was a uniting move while the other turned out to be a dividing move, though we didn't mean it that way. I bet if we appealed to HN to band together against some Redditesque adversary today, it would work just as well as it did back then.
That said, Hacker News is about intellectual curiosity, and people can be intellectually curious about things other than technology. Even politics can clear that bar, although it very rarely does here.
What that tells me is that the forces creating the HN front page don't have much to do with changes in the userbase over time. That's interesting, and I think to most people (me included, and pg probably included) counterintuitive.
My memory is hazy but I probably found out about HN via Slashdot or via Michael Arrington's HN post [0] from Mar. 10, 2008; so I have been reading HN since before Dec. 13, 2008 and still come back because of some really good conversations that can be had here, compared to elsewhere on the Internet.
0: https://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-i...
After all, if you changed HN into a My Little Pony discussion site you'd lose 98% of old users, retaining the 2% who like ponies - and thereafter, 100% of remaining old users would like ponies.
I want to say it was arc because that's what the site is written in, but I can't remember. This would have been like 10 years ago or so.
I triggered the second Erlang day and it made pg mad at me for the one and only time that I'm aware of. That was before I was dang.
Maybe it pops up here because people have at least a modicum of hope that there will be a productive conversation even amongst the various downvote brigades?
I post political comments because even when they get downvoted to -4, they still end up with a long list of replies and sub-tangents in response to them. I think that's a healthy thing.
What people want to do and what should be done are entirely different things.
There's an interesting dynamic to this, btw. If HN manages to stay a degree or two more interesting than internet median [1], it attracts high quality users. That makes it a desirable audience. That makes a lot of people want to target this audience, so they blast it with rhetoric. Rhetoric isn't curious conversation and it thrives on repetition—so it makes HN worse.
In other words, to the degree that HN gets better, it gets worse. There's a cap on how good it can ever get [2].
[1] I'm not saying it's very good at this. But it's all relative, and what matters is outrunning the bear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25725436.
Instead, the decay of social media happens as the platform transitions from a place where one talks with people to a place where one talks at people.
If I reply to your political thoughts by telling you off, I'm probably not trying to convince you to change your mind. Instead, I'm performing for the attention (and upvotes / retweets / kind comments) of like-minded peers.
That's obviously alienating for the person who gets attacked, but this kind of performance is also self-radicalizing. The validating reinforcement preferentially goes to the strongest attacks or defenses, favouring rhetoric (as you noted) rather than substance.
One of the few things that suppresses this cycle is exactly what HN does reasonably well: have the community be about something else, diluting political content such that there's less often a chain-reaction.
There are a few other places you can do this, like the slate star codex culture war comment spinoffs: r/theMotte and https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php
Due to rightwingers often feeling unwelcome elsewhere a lot go to those places, meaning both communities think they need more leftists to balance things out.
Frankly, their election fraud thread - which has hundreds of comments demonstrating both extreme misunderstanding of statistics and the voting process, coupled with a willingness to make or support incredible claims without any substantive evidence or knowledge of the subject matter - says a lot about that community, in my view.
Okay I guess there's some exceptions, some dashboard tool isn't very political, but then again commenting on it is also not very interesting probably for that reason.
- John Stuart Mill
To argue otherwise is basically to say that all sites have to be the same. That can't be right. I think there's a place for a website (at least one?) dedicated to intellectual curiosity. We can't have both that and uninhibited political battle, so if HN is to exist at all, it needs a moderation strategy similar to the one I've outlined at the links above.
If anybody has a better idea, I'd love to know what it is, but please make sure you've familiarized yourself with those past explanations first. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already explained many times why it won't work.
There's not many places for that. It happens here because of yalls dedicated work and magic touch. I say you're doing the human race a service, and thank you for it.
If you watch the moderation actions on this site, you'll see people corrected every day for using the site solely for nationalist or political or ideological flamewar. I can't think of many times anybody has ever been called out for problematical linguistics flamewar, or for using the site solely to litigate a particular way of writing SQL queries, or for using the site solely to talk about quantum mechanics.
There is absolutely no other way to express your political opinion.
We have to keep shoving politics down HN readers throats for their own good.
It does not look like there will be any underpinning of all values and morals that a majority of us will accept or understand. So that leaves us the question: how should we disagree? I think the current way is fine, perhaps we could all strive to be less enflamed by views contrary to our own held beliefs, but do not think that the situation couldn't be way, way worse.
The nice thing about HN-history links like this, is newer people get to learn about the community around HN a bit more and people's attitudes toward it, which I think makes people more respectful of the site and rules and fellow users. So I think posting stories like this one and the comments that come with it help solve the problem we're talking about here, which is at least partly an Eternal September kind of thing.
One other thing they might be able to do to improve discussion/post quality is to increase friction for posting and commenting, but that could understandably harm the site, too, and I figure it's been considered.
It seemed to me that in 2016 there were much more political news posts that I'd have said violated the "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" guideline than there were in 2020. Is that difference because of a change in moderation policy? Or is it because a change in user behavior, where users are posting political articles less fervently?
Or is this just selection bias on my part?
One very important factor is COVID, though - a lot of headlines simply focus on everything surrounding it; it steals the spotlight quite well, which would otherwise be on politics.
Or another one issue which is deemed of high importance (terrorism, for example).
- As you said, concern about Covid diluted the vitriol in a lot of political threads
- In 2016, t_d was in ascendancy, and its members would flood other subreddits with their talking points. After that, sub moderators established stronger anti-brigading rules. In 2020, t_d was either banned or made private, I forget which.
- A lot of the highly charged flash points of 2016 were no longer that relevant in 2020: Syrian refugees, trans bathrooms, 'identity politics'
- 2016 also had 2 polarizing candidates. In 2020 only one was still looked at that way.
Does a post on climate change count?
Does a post on city design and public transport count?
On the other hand, the status quo at least is known and not as bad as it could be (e.g. Bronze Age Collapse)...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...
This is passive-aggressive and childish.
In another comment, you were lecturing me on community values. How do you think the above claim, applied to a wide swath of the site's users, fits with those so-called "community values"?
You're pretending to be above politics while engaging in it in a dirty, underhanded fashion.
Politics nowadays is irreversibly different, and an attempt at a detox now would be even worse.
Before or after, you can.
In other words, at the height of political emotion the experiment was bound to fail. That's not necessarily the case at any other point in time.
This is one of the last places on the internet I feel that I can go to be free and have genuine conversations with people, even with people I wildly disagree with. Whatever hell you're going through as a result, I regret, but know it's worth it to the masses that come here.
But it sure does stand out when HN comments are made with the assumption that the fellow HN readership is US. Any time I've tried to highlight how this looks from the outside it's generally met with downvotes, to the point that I self censor comments that I otherwise feel could have enriched this global community.
So, maybe there is the chance in your comments @dang to make a reminder that it serves a global community? It might help soften feelings of any comments that are heavily partisan.
It also becomes apparent when talking about issues such as zoning, and housing. (Every time you hear talk about reassessing houses for taxes I get confused, because in the UK, and Finland, the two countries where I've lived and bought property, we don't have annual taxes that work like that.)
Mostly I bite my tongue and keep quiet, though there have been a few Brexit-related posts over the past few years where I can sometimes be involved.
I hear people talk about "Proposition XXX" restricting "stuff", and I wonder if other Americans from different parts of the country would even know what that was.
While not as polarising as a Jim Jordan or Ted Cruz, people like Christopher Pyne and Paul Keating made Australian politics mildly interesting. We seem to have two very centrist parties right now which is a welcome change.
I’ll get my coat.
You wouldn't have noticed McCormack in charge but for him opening his mouth and spouting some retarded crap (about COVID19) and some very poorly thought out and articulated comments on BLM vs the Capital insurrection. The only person I think mostly has the right of it as far as comparing the two and the police responses was Sam Harris from his last podcast.
All in all Aus put in a solid performance with this pandemic - one of the best, I reckon, and markedly better than that of Japan, where I currently reside.
I'm in Qld and the response/outcome so far has been better than New Zealand's (with comparable population size).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Juice_Media#Honest_Governm...
There's more international political battle on HN than you'd expect. There have been a lot of flamewars about Indian politics, pursued mostly by users in India or of Indian descent. And don't get me started on the internecine warfare of the Swedes [3].
It's true that a lot of misunderstandings on HN, often bitter ones, happen because readers assume other users are American when they're not. The site is a lot more international than people assume; only about half in the U.S., and a lot of those users are immigrants or expats.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
To state the obvious, I don't think anyone spends as much time on HN as the moderation team, in the sense of reading comments widely. At least... I'd hope none of us dedicate that much time. (Btw, always thanks!)
> The problem is the statelessness of the internet.
I fully understand your frustration. I always thought forums are much better since Twitter is a worse offender - you have to repeat what you've just said 10 minutes ago after a new person has joined the conversation - but for someone who moderates forums daily, I guess it's basically the same experience.
In another comment, you said that HN isn't siloed[1]. I think otherwise, there's definitely a certain vibe of groupthink going on, which changes ever so slightly depending on the time of day, but mostly has strong common undercurrents of what are acceptable lines of thoughts and what are not in the greater HN community. And then within a given timezone, there are thought-cliques that share common counter-positions.
I would say, HN is siloed, it just has a few silos.
This seems to be true. I noticed on my comments I get pretty consistent waves of upvotes or downvotes depending on the time of the day. My comments are usually pretty politicized and polarizing, so my guess must be that the US wave likes my content less and the European wave likes it more.
I think the only "risk" of moving away from upvote/downvote (or at least publishing some type of suggestions for how they ought to be used) is that you'll start seeing more diverse opinions rise to the top of threads; and folks with majority opinions will have to engage instead of the drive-by-downvote. The positive feedback cycle of compounding diversity should be easy to imagine; and the chilling effect of downvoting as it exists today is a well documented bug in our reality.
As for the costs, even if all you could bring yourself to do is to separate downvote into "disagree" and "this is low-quality content", but scored them both just as you score downvotes today, you'd be providing better feedback to commenters as well as raising the quality of the discussion. Today the downvote (here and in so many other similar communities) is a huge contributor to the groupthink driven division-without-discussion that's poisoning our society.
To lower the cost to essentially zero, just turn off downvoting for a while and see what changes. If you're willing to experiment with cutting off entire topics, why not experiment with the structure of discussion?
I think there is even a strong case that HN's current policies are inconsistent. From the HN guidelines:
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
But isn't that the essential function of the downvote? I'd much rather have someone say, "This isn't interesting to me" than just get the downvotes.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
OK ... but why is there nothing saying "consider a thoughtful, constructive critique instead of a downvote; use downvotes only for _________". What actually is the purpose of the downvote? Why is it a feature of this discussion tool? Was it included thoughtfully, or just because HN is a Reddit clone? Ironic that PG launched HN to be a "better" Reddit, but then you have in the guidelines:
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
HN suffers from one critical weakness that Reddit pioneered - the downvote. I'll end the comparison there; HN isn't turning into Reddit; but it has an opportunity to pioneer this type of threaded discussion and really differentiate itself from Reddit; if you're sensitive to the comparison, eliminating or improving upon voting is how you'll free yourself from that complaint.
It's the same as if you complained that we're all writing in English, and you'd prefer that we didn't. Porque todos los articulos y comentarios estan en ingles?!? Debemos tener mas contenido en español! Es un comunidad global, no?! La gente aqui asuma que todos los lectores son anglos? Es un barbaridad!
Oh, wait. No it isn't. HN is an American website hosted on American servers catering to Americans and there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. You're insinuating there is and requesting the mods act accordingly. I disagree.
Seriously, I don't speak for the mods, but I don't recall it being stated anywhere that HN "serves the global community". In fact I just double checked the FAQ. It doesn't. HN has mostly been a site meant to cater to Silicon Valley tech startups for as long as I've been using it.
Let me know when ycombinator.com.au is up and running and we'll join you there and not talk about American laws. Until then...
And incidentally, the FAQ don't mention the United States, either.
But what's really obvious on this site is that many Americans cannot discuss other choices.
I theorize it is because America is so big and powerful and there isn't a visible friendly society with different cultural views in the neighborhood that matters. Large societies that matter are far away, and rivals at best, enemies at worst.
There is a strong sense of "the American way is obviously the best, and everybody who disagrees or has been socialized on different norms is an idiot and must be destroyed".
Every "by the way, in X we don't have Y, we do Z" on this site is a recipe for confrontation.
It's a minority of posters, I'm sure, but they downvote and flag just about everything that isn't "America's way or the highway".
Nobody asks them to declare the Finnish, German or Japanese way to be better. But they simply cannot accept that other societies might be happy with other choices.
And those threads are really garbage.
In which our multi-national law enforcement and legal protagonists grapple with translating their own expectation into their crime's country's actual laws.
> But what's really obvious on this site is that many Americans cannot discuss other choices.
Many of us certainly can, however, America is often whalloped over the head for not being like other countries. In some threads this is made out peacefully, like here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25766884
In others, America is widdled down to very reductionist arguments that Americans already debate endlessly. Things like, "This is a very uniquely American point of view" as if to eschew our problems like they don't still deserve debate because we should be just like everyone else. An example is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486350 Of course, this can be pretty frustrating because America isn't all the same, though I know it can be easy to perceive it that way. States in America are more like countries in the EU with respect to their homogeneity, or lack thereof. In some ways we have some overtones that are the same, but we're all different. As dang pointed out, HN represents a lot of people from outside Silicon Valley too.
You seem to allude to this here:
> Every "by the way, in X we don't have Y, we do Z" on this site is a recipe for confrontation.
and I agree. Maybe this is people learning they actually are part of a more global community and how to respect one another while also fostering thoughtful, curious debate. I can tell you that I often wake up in the morning to read my threads from the night prior because I want to know what the global community, outside of America, has had to say. As I'm doing right now in fact. That's to say, hearing your voice matters at least to me.
I'll try to pay attention to what gets downvoted, and if that's happening you'll get my upvote.
That's not accurate. HN is an American website hosted on American servers catering to everybody. The only prerequisite is intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Intellectual curiosity exists everywhere, HN's userbase is 50% outside the US, and at least 90% outside of Silicon Valley. That's important for people to understand.
Meanwhile, I've tried to see if this bit of info can be added to the HN repo maintained by Max Wolf.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...
I think some of us are acutely interested because what's happening now is historically significant and could have very interesting(?) downstream effects.
The US outputs a massive amount of media, news, and culture. But how much does it actually influence other countries, at the personal level?
I'd assume, in order of impact: (1) visa / immigration, (2) free trade deals, (3) sanctions, ?
Is there any truth to the "US sets world tone on climate change, etc"? It seems like even the smallest countries are more than happy to make their own choices (in their own best interests!) when the US isn't trying to compel a position.
At the moment there's a xenophobia/refugee crisis in Europe, refugees that are escaping conflicts in e.g. Syria or Afghanistan. Arguably Syria isn't the fault of USA (although ISIS grew from the chaos of the Iraqi occupation), and the xenophobia has a bit to do with austerity politics of Merkel.
And then someone started bombing Yemen and now there's another proxy regional war there..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_Civil_War_(2014%E2%80%9...
Definitely looking less and less like the US sets the tone for much at all, but Australia and the USA have an important military alliance and we're part of the Five Eyes.
I'm the odd-duck for having lived in Seattle for 5 years. But I eventually moved back of course - because if I'm being honest with myself: Even I don't understand the mindset of anyone who lives anywhere other than here or why they would live somewhere else.
I'm laughing at the naivete of this. Don't quit your day jobs, y'all.
If you mean something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786476, or "everything is political", or "not to have to deal with politics is just privilege", or "being apolitical is just being political in favor of the status quo", we knew all of that already. But of course there are degrees of experience.
I'm sorry, I don't care enough about your community values not to laugh at that.
Besides, this idea of the value of civility in the face of much worse issues is the worst kind of enlightened centrism. You're quite right that "not to have to deal with politics is just privilege," but it's clearly a lesson you haven't learned.
> Rather than being snarky, why don't you share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn? I mean that quite sincerely.
If you could explain how you reconcile everything you quoted about politics with the ban on politics, I could perhaps help you understand. I can't really grasp what it is you don't understand.
Reading political discussion alone gives me a heavy heart; I can't imagine moderating it.
What I would love to see is a "flag political" option so if more than a few people flag it it gets a label.
on a side note, would love to see an option to suppress my karma numbers
The inspiration is this simple quote: "The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control." (Epictetus)
I held this resolution for about 5 months and it was profoundly glorious. It's not hard. Treat current events like Game of Thrones spoilers. Focus on what you have control over. Be frank with others that you are taking a break from the news cycle. If your results are anything like mine you will find yourself calmer and able to concentrate on what matters. Your mind wont wander to externalities you don't have control over.
At the end of it, you can go read Wikipedia for 30 minutes and be just as caught up as anyone else because you know the end result of the news cycle instead of suffering through it as it happened.
I know it’s extreme but it’s the reality. For someone who is impacting by politics (say lost their jobs due to COVID), you can’t just stay on the sideline and ignore it.
You just have the great privilege of letting other people take care of that dirty work.
Is taking a news diet good? Absolutely. Lots of crap out there and a mental break is needed once in a while. But ignoring the suffering of people around you is just bad.
For the most part, it's non-actionable info. You bring up "relatives being deported or shot by the police", but the number of people on HN that describes is going to be tiny. The average HN user is less likely than most to have been burned by COVID due to the remote-friendliness of tech jobs.
For me, the calculus works out like this:
1. Is it possible for me to do anything substantial about it? (Throwing a few bucks at a charity or "raising awareness" about the large social problem everyone already knows about does not count as "substantial")
2. If it is possible, do I have the ability? (Financially, mentally, physically, temporally)
3. If the answer to both of these questions is "no", then it is non-actionable and not worth expending my own limited energy on.
The vast majority of things you hear from the news media fail both of these tests. They are intended to provoke you or scare you about something that is mostly out of your sphere of influence.
Your sphere of concern and your sphere of influence are two different things at the end of the day. If you've decided some social problem is within your sphere of influence, then by all means, take whatever helpful action you can - just do not pretend that this encompasses all problems, or for that matter that the number of problems is not infinite.
Down that path lay depression and burnout.
I don't pretend there aren't infinite problems, or ones difficult to access, but I strongly caution against treating political problems as something that are immovable.
As someone who spent time in both volunteer groups and activist groups, I can assure you that well intentioned people can easily make things worse, not better. It's why I got out of such groups.
The first method you cite: "Changing the way people think about something" is a common example of this. It's very easy (in fact, I would say it is the norm) that people's beliefs are strengthened the more they feel besieged, and that often happens by others trying to make them think about something differently (or about something they don't want to). Easily 80-90% of such interactions have this outcome, and definitely over 50% even here on HN. I noticed this earlier in life, and it was confirmed when I started studying communications and influence (almost all books will mirror what I have said).
That's not to say you can't change people's minds. You do need to have the skills to do so, and the ability not to make things worse in trying to do so.
It's great if you want to change things, and I don't aim to discourage you. It is, however, your responsibility to be able to gauge how effective you are, and know whether you are causing damage or not. Do it poorly, and you will merely make it harder for those who do have the skills.
Giving money is the safest way to help without doing harm - provided you have the ability to identify which organization to give the money to.
In that sense, I have no problem with folks who tune out. They could make things much worse by trying to help.
And yet, every post about H1B visa rule changes will have hundreds of comments bemoaning the selling out of the American IT worker. There will also be much hand-wringing about the on-shoring of foreign jobs and anecdotes about how terrible it is working with Indian consultancy firms.
HN commenters want to vent as much as anyone else. They just do it on political posts that they feel affect them personally, even if it's not something they can change directly.
And who are the "people around you"? With the internet that could be half the damn world. It sure is a privilege for you not to have to worry about injustices in the Middle East.
I'm not saying people should be selfish, but I don't see how what you're suggesting is productive either. Even the most well meaning person on this planet cannot possibly have an impact on all these different issues. Pick some areas you know you can contribute to and focus on that.
The question is really how to optimize awareness & participation with personal wellbeing. There's a big difference between getting psychologically clobbered by the outrage engines of social media or TV news, and being able to take in and understand current events in a way that encourages contemplation of how to best participate.
One way is to focus our attention and efforts on the things we can control as OP mentions. Another is to shift sources from fast/reactive news to more infrequent and considered sources. Another still is to participate locally and learn things firsthand.
If I were to go around, attaching my real name or face to my opinions as some form of "participation" in society, I would be quite fucked. I don't call that a privilege by any means.
One may also act on those views believing they are helping society, while consensus in society views those actions as detrimental. A recent example of this is the rioters and insurrectionists at the Capitol believed they were doing something to help society, whereas society judged their actions otherwise.
A possible solution to this conundrum is to focus one's participation on areas that are broadly agreed upon to be beneficial to society, so as to avoid accidentally becoming part of the problem, or simply minimize blowback from a disapproving environment.
This is a solution that is intentionally sidestepping any particular ethical framework, which may guide one's actions toward different tradeoffs.
Another thing worth considering is not all participation in society need be political at all, nor attached to your real name, nor known to your employer. Those are conditions you've attached to your response that were not part of mine.
Perhaps there is a moral obligation for people with privilege to engage; but it's clearly not a practical necessity for change to happen. Given the lack of progress in Black civil rights ever since the 60's; as this discourse around "we all must participate!" has strengthened, it is far from clear that it is helpful.
I propose that the other way is best. Live your life, respond with genuine outrage when injustice crosses your path, and don't feel like media consumption fixes anything.
I fully agree media consumption doesn't fix a whole lot, and certainly not in today's media environment, I merely advocate for staying informed and engaged enough to discover a useful way to make impact. I want to live in a world where we mostly just live our lives as we please, but society's state right now is such that I don't think it will let us off that easy.
That in itself is an irresponsible view. Nobody has the power to change society. The power we have is to make arguments and present ideas and then sometimes society changes of its own accord. Nobody is powerless to make persuasive and compelling arguments.
I don't know what you mean when you say privilege. It is a very broad word. The powerful being privileged is something of a tautology, but the privileged are not necessarily powerful.
What I said before didn't imply people without power do not also have responsibilities, just that those with power have more, because of their position in society. Part (perhaps much) of that responsibility is to work towards a better society; I used 'fixing' as shorthand for this. In the US that is 'a more perfect union' but there are other concepts enshrined in other countries. I don't think this is a particularly controversial position to take.
Similarly the concept of 'with power comes responsibility' reappears throughout human history and I don't think is controversial.
Maybe we're in agreement on this, I can't tell from the way you're picking things apart. Anyway, I'm going to politely bow out.
My grandparents paid attention to politics, as did many in the United States at the time. TV news was watched, no Internet, lot of newspaper reading.
They were sent to Tule Lake and interned for being Japanese-American all the same; their possessions stolen by a government who doesn't care if its citizens "care" about politics.
The average person has no control over "politics." Caring about it didn't save my grandparents, nor the protests of all of their friends.
No one took care of that dirty work. That's the great delusion.
Are you willing to die for what you believe in? And, before one answers this hastily, think about it.
I have come to realize most are quite selfish in various way, myself included.
Your point is well taken. Certainly there are issues and problems that gravely trouble people of integrity and good conscience.
However, while sometimes there are things we can do within our own lives to address those issues and problems, often there isn't any way to have a measurable impact.
That's not to say we should just give up. On the contrary, I think it's important to try to improve the lives of those around us within the scope of our focus, abilities and resources.
When I was a young man (in my twenties), I would often wonder if the work I was doing (tech) was really making the world a better place in a serious way. That really bothered me for a while.
But I came to realize that while we can't all have a measurable, global positive impact on the world, we most certainly can have a local positive impact on the people and world around us.
Do I create better working conditions for people in Bangladesh? No. Can I genetically engineer a more effective SARS-CoV2 vaccine? No.
But I can treat those around me with respect, act with integrity and support my community. I can do constructive work within my chosen profession. And I can speak out when I see injustice, intolerance and hate.
Will that end the pandemic or halt the war in Syria or end world hunger and poverty? No.
But if I can do my part to lift up those near me, act with honesty and integrity and create constructive solutions for the projects I contribute to, I can be satisfied that I'm having a positive impact on the world around me.
None of that requires that I be willing to die for that, but that doesn't mean I'm not having a measurable, positive impact on the world.
So, really, what you're asking is whether people are willing to, once they start acting in a way which risks their life, continue acting in that same way. And it turns out that the vast majority of people killed by this reasoning are killed by genocide or as collateral damage of war; they're swept away by hate and violence which they did not invite.
The question really should be, then, rather one is willing to risk their life for the specific action of interrupting those who are trying to kill others in this way. And such interruptions often turn out to not be very risky, unless the interruption is happening very late in the process, at the moment of violence. It was not risky to yell at street fascists in 2017, before they were creating so many street fights, because they were not yet strong enough to simply fight, but instead had to justify their hate before a largely non-violent crowd. Now in 2021, though, yelling at street fascists is dangerous, but referring them to the FBI is relatively safe. What was acceptable praxis has changed.
From this POV, we must recontextualize your original message. Who is pushing and shoving? Fascists. Who are they pushing and shoving? Undesired minorities. By what means are you allowed to be selfish? Well, you might not be in an affected class! This is a failure of solidarity. You must be willing to defend the rights of others, if you expect them to defend your rights as well.
Allow me to introduce a few samples who disagree with your nuanced analysis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_tol...
Pragmatism cannot be escaped simply by complaining that I am pedantic. Saying something is an action. Practicing a ritual is an action. Dressing a certain way is an action. Eating certain foods is an action.
Recall that your original post insinuated that most people are too selfish to choose to die for their beliefs. I am trying to explain to you that people do not choose to die for their beliefs; rather, they choose to take certain actions, and then their killers choose to kill them because of those actions. It is the selfishness of those personal actions which we are considering.
And, once we have achieved this scale, we can clearly see that killing itself is an action. It is simply another tool for achieving our selfish ends. A person can choose to selfishly kill as many people as they can reach. This suggests that our morality needs to not just account for making the choice to "die for what you believe in", but also the choice to kill for what you believe in.
Finally, let us consider the context of your original comment. The comment recounted a tale of folks who were sent to concentration camps in the USA during WW2. They claimed that the average person has no control over federal politics; you agreed and asked people to consider how they would prefer selfishly to not stick their necks out for the sake of ending the concentration camps. However, there are two grand ironies there: first, that we today claim to have entered WW2 in order to destroy concentration camps; and second, that we today have concentration camps on our southern border.
I don't know exactly what your point is, since you're not using your words well, but I think that you should take a step back and try to figure out where you're headed. I have the luxury of an elected representative who already is trying to close down the concentration camps, so I know which side I'm on.
>I know that you want to have an attitude where you are indignant that I am minimizing genocide and war
No.
I re-read your original message. Your examples in some can be prevented by interrupting specific actions, as you describe it. Indeed speech, clothing, ritual, and any other behavior can be interrupted. For the OP, how would s/he interrupt being Asian?
>people do not choose to die for their beliefs; rather, they choose to take certain actions, and then their killers choose to kill them because of those actions
What is the substantive difference? I am also uncertain on "kill them because of those actions", or more precisely I do not believe there is a way for making such nuanced distinction. Looking through the list of genocides, I am hard pressed to find a set of actions that could have been interrupted to prevent death. At State level, maybe.
> This suggests that our morality needs to not just account for making the choice to "die for what you believe in", but also the choice to kill for what you believe in.
I had no disagreement with this statement in your first post, which is why I did not comment to it.
>concentration camps on our southern border
I do not know what country you live in.
>I don't know exactly what your point is
My original post was in response to describing the current willingness to '"care" about politics' but not to "die for" or "kill for".
(As part of the "kill for", I am certain neither of us are advocating murderous rampage, but more like a para-/military action to liberate.)
Again, appreciate your responses.
Also, please stop using HN primarily for political battle. We ban accounts that do that (regardless of which politics they're battling for), because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for. I had to go quite a way back in your comment history to get to a place where you weren't doing that. Fortunately I eventually found it so I'm not going to ban you right now, but can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit?
And it doesn’t for 99.999% of the US. How much time and energy was lost on the first Trump impeachment and the year investigation leading up to it. Absolutely no relevance for the day to day life of US residents.
How much time was spent hearing about a phone call to Ukraine? Also not relevant to real life.
Even the events in Congress last week were bad, but literally had no impact on people’s lives outside of the politicians/cops/etc in the building.
I do not consume the news or social media and don't find this to be true. Politics do impact me.
I was arrested when I was 21, prior to joining the military, for an offense that was quite trivial. I was man-handled, hauled off to jail, and forced to wait until a friend read that I was arrested in the town paper (yes, that was pretty humiliating too) and bailed me out.
I'm a veteran, one that's been to Afghanistan with mild to average combat experience. When I got out in 2012 I watched my friends struggle, I struggled, and there were few options to get support and help. The help that was available often came with a catch 22. There was a time I spoke about these experiences more candidly under my real name and I was attacked by other veterans and even non-veterans for doing so. The statistics are grim from my point of view and that's not just speaking about suicide statistics. Things have, in some ways, gotten better. I've used my success to help fund some of my friends starting foundations that focus on jobs and mental health but progress is slow.
A number of my childhood friends were killed during the opioid epidemic, some while I was mid-service and was unable to go home to bury them.
The list goes on. When I read things like:
> You just have the great privilege of letting other people take care of that dirty work.
It always comes across as a dismissal, that I must be just living in denial or that I've somehow reached some stage in life where these things don't affect me anymore. Feel free to read through my post history, they do. When I talk to my friends that are still patching their lives together post-service I am reminded that my own journey continues on-wards and often with them. They are the only people I can readily depend on to know experiences I know the way I know them.
The problem with politics is that change is slow. Getting a whole country the size of the United States to realize why and how your group is important and worth paying attention to takes time, energy, and resources which do not appear over night. People will doubt you, even question you, and it takes a piece of you with it every time they do. These are exacerbated if you appear mad, vindictive, or frustrated in the process and it's hard not to.
News on the other hand moves at the speed of lightning. Attitudes and windows of understanding rapidly close and open and it can be difficult to watch in real time. I've told people before that history is macro-understanding, news is micro-understanding, and social media is nano-understanding. History I can do, the rest; well, it's a bit overwhelming and it has everything to do with my attachment to these subjects and the discourse in between that inevitably belittles me as a human with real experiences.
I agree, as did stevecalifornia.
It seems you're arguing against something that was not claimed by the relevant commenters.
The criticism of the President comes from the demonstrable fact that he simply did not take it seriously, and constantly contradicted and undermined the scientific leadership in an attempt to prop up the stock markets long enough to win re-election.
It's saddening, but maybe for the best too.
This feature alone would allow readers like me quickly to filter out topics that cause mental fatigue like politics, shiny new JS and co.
The goal of staying politically informed is not so that you will necessarily take direct action. It is so that you will be able to take direct action if it becomes necessary for you to do so.
As many others have pointed out in the thread, it is quite selfish for you to do what you did. Millions of folks do not have the food security, income security, or essential freedoms and rights which are secured to you. However, selfishness is not inherently bad. What is bad is the myopia and the willingness to be ignorant which comes with it.
At the end of "Game of Thrones", nothing of interest happened. We all just turned off the TV and went on with life. However, politics is not just on TV. Your username suggests that you live somewhere in California; I live in Portland. Not all of us have your luxury.
Unfortunately I actually do need to follow news in order to keep up with covid rules which at least here in Denmark changes with very low warning.
I am looking forward to getting out and getting drunk with my friends and forgetting the news even exists once this is over.
Analogously it would seem that citizens of dictatorship-based regimes don’t have to worry about these details (hopefully the dictator and their lieutenants have taken care of everything) and can focus on enjoying their lives.
Before seeing dang’s post here, I would have thought that removing politics would have helped.
It's turning HN into r/politics, I personally don't come on HN for that, there is already many many places online where political discussions happen, like reddit. When I say politics here I'm talking about USA cantered partisan politics.
HN is a great place for tech discussion AND it's also an opportunity to talk directly to founders, or important people and technologists in IT, in a better format than Twitter. I'd like for HN to stay in that niche.
To rephrase, I don't think most discussions around policy involve providing peer-reviewed studies with relatively conclusive evidence in regards to a potential policy change, or objective evaluation of the communication, legislation and vote records of politicians. It is too easily converted into ad hominem attacks, bold assertions that one might believe have evidence but if (quite) thoroughly investigated might be disproven. More regularly each side dismisses the other based on strongly held beliefs formed on very shallow investigation.
[0] https://www.v-dem.net/en/publications/democracy-reports/ (specifically https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/de/39/de39af54-0bc5... PDF)
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00027162188187...
There is nothing to inhibit. An open political discussion on the internet between the left and the right is no longer possible. That train has left the station.
Generally, they shouldn't want to do this. In specific spaces, however, this makes a lot of sense.
From a more distanced perspective, political discussions are exhausting at best, as you need to discuss many varying aspects influencing a complex system, and harmful at worst, as soon as they turn toxic (which they tend to on some topics). Having a break from these is necessary. That doesn't mean we don't need those - having these discussions is important. But there is a reason politician is a full time job.
Additionally, HN has a very international audience. Internal politics is irrelevant to a large part of the readership - irrespective of the discussed country - and therefore these discussions are simply annoying.
It is a representative democracy after all. Citizens should feel like they've done their duty after choose a representative. Not (poorly) running a thousand mini-parliaments online.
As someone who has lived in both types of regimes, I can assure you that it is also one of the downsides of living in such a regime, as you yourself allude to in your last comment.
> As a result, would it not be reasonable to assume that most of these individuals are very knowledgeable about a variety of aspects of public policy?
This really doesn't follow from the premise, and I would argue is demonstrably false. No - most individuals are not very knowledgeable about them. Just as many who have the privilege to eat healthy still do not.
I'm not sure if you are being serious or satirical (if the latter, I salute you!)
I'm using the Userscripts Extension in Safari for reference. But the code should work in any browser. https://github.com/quoid/userscripts#readme
Try pasting my snippet into your JS console on the homepage to see what i mean (code is short, no HTTP calls)
Humans are tormented by choice/options. The hardest time for someone on a diet is when they have the option to choose junk food. My user script removes it from your HN homepage.
He isn't going to overturn Trump's things, but also not continue them. (At least the things I checked on - for example he won't keep building the wall, but he's also not going to take it down.)
But he'll probably have pressure to actively overturn everything, so who knows.
He's gonna tear down the metaphorical wall right quick.
A big part of the people working for influencial companies (GAFAM) are most certainly members of this community.
So this made me wonder: would it be possible that we have a collective responsibility or influence over those companies through those people? Would making the debates and trends here more interesting, sane and positive have a positive influence on those?
Edit: I just noticed that it was from 2016
Even then, there'd probably be a better time for a politics detox week than the current week, since it will be so impossibly difficult to not discuss the goings on. I mean, these are historic times (in the US, with international repercussions).
Redefining a thing narrowly as its uncouth and hard-to-participate subset, and then blasting the thing (using its original wider definition) is a good way to drive people away from participating. Which is what we don't want.
The funny thing I have found is that there truly is 'nothing new under the Sun.' For instance, read through some of Frédéric Bastiat's stuff from the 1850s: http://bastiat.org/
It could have been written this year.
Another goal of mine has been, if I get tangled in some current affair, to try and dig into what first principals are being addressed (or ignored) and reflect on my core beliefs in that area (rather than arguing the more surface issue that is being currently discussed). It's certain I don't have very much correct.
And lastly, and most obvious: avoid Teh socialz except where they build up value. Like, I might engage other illustrators through instagram - where we encourage each other, but completely avoid the fomenting and political bickering etc.
Sort of. AFAIK HN get money from this https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs and this https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/.
I cannot think of a thing that is free from politics.
We can choose to ignore these questions, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. While they aren't directly answered with "The Democrats" or "The Republicans" or whatever, they pretty quickly have answers that fall into one camp or another.
That's about my feelings towards (partisan) politics. I totally understand the impulse towards politics; I have a preferred political camp too, and I think it'd be great if they achieved more power and influence. But I don't think my camp is so important that it ought to go around intruding on every discussion in the world.
Second, I think my brain is hardwired to ask these questions. To me, it's a systems problem like an engineering problem.
The difference between burritos and politics for me is that the questions I often ask are about people. Who benefits, who is being exploited, are people being treated fairly. I'd use the word justice, but that's a pretty loaded term. When I play a game, for instance, I wonder how people were paid, was there crunch, etc.
I cannot turn this part of my brain off even for things I enjoy. Again, it's like handing me an interesting engineering problem -- I'm going to be thinking about it when I'm not distracted.
Some things are perhaps coincident with the politics of the thing. Whether manufacturing uses sweatshops or child labor, for instance. I'm not sure that's separable.
It's hard to discuss net neutrality, or content moderation, or even applications of certain technologies (stems cells, for instance) without mentioning politics.
And that's not even touching science topics like evolution or climate change.
We are in a very tense political landscape. Obviously people on HN need to talk it out. At least let's encourage healthy and proper conversations.
Maybe even have a specific "political discussion guidelines". The using downvotes to remove noise/unhealthy conversations we can have some proper arguments.
Because yesterday I could say some words that would be considered improper, unhealthy, and worse today.
Tomorrow, will be different words.
And, we have not even discussed better, healthy, and proper opinions.
For what definition of "we"? As an EU citizen, Corona seems to have calmed politics down quite a bit compared to the trouble that brewed beforehand.
I agree that there are issues which need to be talked about, but I do not think that HN is the right place. That being said, as of now I find the political content to be either sparse or relevant enough to not be annoying.
This is a pipe dream.
Notice as well they're called guidelines and not "rules". To me, the word choice was intended.
Even at the time there was no intention to get rid of politics on HN permanently, but it turns out if you say "we're just trying X for a week", people hear "we're instituting X". That's one lesson it taught me.
In the end, I think we got to the right place about how to handle political topics on HN. It isn't entirely simple, but it's as simple as possible, and it works, and it has proven stable. More on that in the links up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785637.
This makes it essentially a political move on HN mods side, ie. not neutral at all, even though it "bans everything equally".
Mainstream political ideas disseminate through all other sorts of sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube or even cable news. Whilst alternative ideas do not. (Arguably not even on Reddit anymore)
Whilst you can certainly make the argument that what we post here doesn't matter because there isn't a million users on Facebook that it might reach, I think reaching the correct people, even if only less than a hundred, is worthwhile and arguably more impactful.
Now, with the way the world is moving forward right now, with Twitter and Parler, it turns out that allowing political subjects to be debated isn't exactly a neutral stance either. That it is essentially a stance that is "for" the alternatives, at least according to some powerful people in control.
Which puts the HN mods team in a damned if you do damned if you don't kind of seat.
I think in a more healthy world a site like this could and should stay on topic, avoiding political subjects outside the occasional coding-language or distro flamewars. ;)
But since the world is arguably terminally ill right now, HN should continue on it's current trajectory and "keep siding with the alternative political ideas", and allowing politics to be discussed.
I don't want to come off as accusing them of actually siding with any side however, I'm just stating that in the current climate, they come off that way whether they like it or not. In my personal opinion, a forum that allows moderated political debate is truly neutral, period. But my personal opinion doesn't set the tone for the political climate just yet.
I'm glad to hear you've never dreamt of trying anything like it since. :)
"We have a golden period of forty-some days before a new administration comes to power that has shown every intent of using that information to deport people and create a national Muslim registry."
Lol, no.
FOSS is politics. DNS is politics. Stray dogs is politics. The weather is politics. Banning political discussion is politics. Any disagreement or difference of opinion is politics.
Politics is inescapable.
> This sounds like a cop out and I question whether this post would have been made had Trump lost and Clinton won.
Per comments from dang it looks like the reason is “it didn’t work”. Still funny how it turned out to be true.
Can you ban discussing politics on a website largely about Technology (and heavy on the Silicon Valley/IT side of things) when one of the largest stories in the world at the moment is the interaction of the internet (read Twitter) and politics (read Trump) and how these things influence one another and lead to real world consequences (read January 6th)? Now, arguably more so than back in 2016, technology is playing an ever larger role in how we interact with one another. I fail to see how not acknowledging and discussing that is going to help anything.
In short, good luck sticking your head in the sand. If you ignore it, things won't get better. And you're free to not read any of links or the comments at any time.