"visceral disgust" seems like such a superlative reaction to have at this.
I didn't realize there was so much McCarthyist fear in the HN community. I wonder to what extent this is new, or if it has always been this way.
I didn't realize there was so much McCarthyist fear in the HN community. I wonder to what extent this is new, or if it has always been this way.
- The teachers were concocting some way to fix the lego problem.
- Their way to fix the problem was to exercise total, unrelenting control.
- Their total power was juxtaposed with their bewilderment about the lego problem (this bewilderment was somewhat reminiscent of the "what's a potato" dinner date story from reddit). Is this the first time the lego problem has come up??
Those three things gave me the feeling that, even beyond taking away the legos, something very unfair and very annoying was about to happen. This was confirmed when I got to the part about their twisted waste-of-time game. Do they think the kids learned anything? I actually recall having to play a similar classroom game. I remember being annoyed at the teacher for wasting my time. I hope those kids are part of some longitudinal study, because their recollection of the lego fiasco would be pure gold.
Then the kids had to do drawings about power instead of playing with legos!?
How can a person with any anti-authority sensibilities react positively to this article?
It has (at least for the last five years while I've been here) always been this way - there is a very wide spectrum of humanity represented here.
When a poll is voluntarily responded to, even if the poll is eligible to the entire population you want to poll, you'll end up with some pretty heavy biases - first off the middle is always underrepresented - people who don't have strong feelings on a topic won't bother taking the time to reply and people who aren't familiar with the topic at all will generally (generally there are obviously people who reject this) decline to respond out of shame. So then you're left with the group of supporters and opposers - it turns out that, as a general rule, you should expect an across the board negative bias on any polls: if I asked "Is vanilla ice cream the best ice cream?" I'll end up getting a much stronger response from the people who disagree compared to those that affirm - when it comes to our attention things we don't like naturally draw more of our attention so that accounts for a decent part of the bias... Additionally the status quo tends to be underrepresented because people who are comfortable with the way things are are less likely to view broadcasting that belief as important... in general underdogs fight a lot harder.
So, back to your point... when discussing anything on the internet, regardless of the forum, expect the responses to be unrepresentative of the population in general and instead be composed of a higher proportion of dissenters than actually exists.
That all said, I do think HN has a notable left-lean. I think technology in general tends to underrepresent strongly religious individuals (there are exceptions: see larry wall) and the tech centers tend to congregate around educational centers which tend to be more liberal than the country as a whole.
Lastly, HN prides itself on being (or aspires to be) a relatively politics free zone - so a large number of people will downvote comments just because they lean in either political discussion because they don't want the conversation to turn into a miniature scale representation of modern US politics.
So yes, you get a strong reaction when advocating free markets just like other people get strong reactions when advocating socialist policies.