Hacker News Reader

Comment by msluyter | Hacker News Reader

I like Krugman, but a Krugman editorial is the epitome of the sort of topic HN should avoid, imho.

Would you also rather HN avoids the topic of Krugman's editorial entirely, or just his take on it. Personally, I think the topic in general is extremely important, and relevant, for HN members, and I for one am interested in HN members' opinions.

We can start with Krugman in particular. He puts opposing views in the worst possible light and makes personal attacks on the virtues of his opponents. Those are not the debating practices of an intellectually honest individual. Whenever I am reading a Krugman column one adjective repeatedly leaps to mind: juvenile.

Krugman gives off the vibe that you'd have to be an idiot to disagree with him. But I've read many thoughtful writers who disagree with Krguman, giving him far more credit than he would ever give someone on the other side.

Well put. While Krugman occasionally makes interesting points, his style is abhorrent. I'd have more respect for him if he'd written about the protests the first day they were happening and hadn't tried to frame it as a partisan issue with his usual cast of good guys and bad guys.

The thing is that Krugman isn't framing the protests or the current economic crisis in traditional partisan terms. His columns and blog posts for at least 6 months now have continually heaped blame on Obama, Congressional Republicans, and European officials from a variety of countries and parties for not following Keynes advice and heeding the lessons we learned during the Great Depression.

Krugman has heaped blame on Obama? Maybe in a mild way, but in other ways he treats the Obama Administration with kid gloves. Case in point: here are a few of the top 20 businesses that contributed the most money to the Obama presidential campaign:

Goldman Sachs $1,013,091 JPMorgan Chase & Co $808,799 Citigroup Inc $736,771 UBS AG $532,674 US Government $517,908 Morgan Stanley $512,232

Source: http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cid=N00009638

Clearly, the narrative that it is only Republicans coddling the upper strata of the American plutocracy is failing.

Krugman has noted Obama's cozy relationship to the bankers before. Just last week he had this to say in his column about the protests:

"The Obama administration squandered a lot of potential good will early on by adopting banker-friendly policies that failed to deliver economic recovery even as bankers repaid the favor by turning on the president."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/opinion/krugman-confrontin...

Do you consider Krugman a voice of dissent though? In my opinion he chimes in once the issue is already "safe" and rarely says anything that would endanger his status as a columnist or his relationships with powerful people.

I would only go as far as to say that Krugman is a dissenter from the prevailing line of economic thought in the United States and Europe. He's useful precisely because the prevailing thought crippled our economy and has little success in repairing it.

I can't really speak to his relationship with powerful people.

And during the Clinton Administration, he criticized protectionist Democrats.

I think I disagree because I'm more interested in what some of the more inbiased Hacker News'opinions are. For example, I very much enjoyed geebee's comment and insight and it is one I don't think I would have gleened from the NYT Comment section or other source.

Why not say why you think Krugman's articles in particular should not appear on HN?

I want to see this kind of article on HN because it's hard to find a high-level discussion of these issues elsewhere.

You've touched on a need I've often felt as well. Frankly, I enjoy debating politics and would enjoy doing it here on HN if it weren't for the fact that I've mostly internalized a !politics filter, which there seems have fairly strong consensus.

Still, a forum for political debate that's both open and inhabited mostly by the reasonable and well-informed... I don't know if it's possible, but I'd like to see it.

*Edit: as for the why, I'd argue that most non-tech editorials shouldn't be here, period. Krugman's in particular -- even though I often agree with him -- because he's partisan and something of a lightning rod for the right.

> Still, a forum for political debate that's both open and inhabited mostly by the reasonable and well-informed... I don't know if it's possible, but I'd like to see it.

Probably not: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

Why is this being down-voted?

Paul Graham wrote a very well though out article on why debating politics, even with the best intentions, is extraordinarily difficult.

More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people's identities.

1000 upvotes. Let's keep both the regular NYT and WSJ opinion page writers off HN. The regular columnists provide zero signal as you can predict their positions on any issue (does anyone think Krugman will counterintuitively oppose OWS? Or that James Taranto will support it?)

These editorials carry zero information in the Shannon sense.

There is a lot more information in an editorial than a directional vote.

The substance -- not the source -- is what should be considered in every encounter with an idea.

There are too many ideas to consider them all. Source is a valid filter.

I'm in favor of Shannon based assessments of information. But you've assumed that the only information that could be carried is whether or not the author agrees with OWS. In addition to that (predictable / null) information, he also puts forward a theory on how WS reacts to criticism:

In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized

He may or may not be right, but either way it's a valid viewpoint, and one I find interesting. IMO, that's where the real signal is in this piece.

Yeah you could've seen Krugman's article coming from a mile away. Nothing surprising, really.

  > These editorials carry zero information in the Shannon sense.

Hyperbole much?

And I don't like Krugman, but if I wanted Krugman-bashing, I'd go read _Best of the Web Today_, so I'll refrain from any name-calling and just agree with you. :P

Reply on news.ycombinator.com