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Comment by sarchertech | Hacker News Reader

No he is on record as telling elected officials to ignore people showing up to town meetings, writing letters etc… because he believes that negative comments are overrepresented.

Which may not may not be true, but you could say the same thing about votes on a referendum, or names on a petition. One side or the other is in most cases more likely to turn out. That is just how democracy works. You can’t divine the true will of the people, you can only act on their public participation.

Anything else is just a license to politicians to push through anything they please.

A company is trying to push through a very large wood burning power plant a few miles down the road that will impact air quality for half the state. If people convince politicians that dissenting voices are overrepresented, that’s one less tool we have to stop things like this.

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>No he is on record as telling elected officials to ignore people showing up to town meetings, writing letters etc.

I don't think that's a charitable reading of what tptacek was saying. I read it as: ideally, democracy should give everyone an equal voice regardless of age, political views, or economic status; local political participation as it exists today skews heavily toward negative affect and toward older, wealthier homeowners, giving those groups a disproportionate voice in the process. We should move toward alternative processes that make it easier for everyone to participate, not just people who have the luxury of showing up to a town hall.

In a comment a few weeks ago he literally said exactly that.

>local political participation

Voting skews older as well. If you don’t participate you don’t get a voice. We can’t try to divine the public’s true intent.

We should be making it easier to participate, not giving politicians an excuse to ignore those people who do participate.

"Making it easier to participate" is precisely what's at issue here. I don't think that's incompatible with what you were replying to. Note, nobody in this thread said that the public shouldn't have input, just that the existing processes of getting public input are broken.

Telling people to ignore it when 100 people show up to your town meeting to say don’t do something because there’s secretly 500 people at home who want you to do that thing but aren’t doing anything to externally to indicate their wishes isn’t what I’m talking about.

I’m saying do things like hold town meetings multiple times at different times of day so people with different schedules can attend.

Not try to guess about people really believe. Give them easier opportunities to tell you what they believe.

You're still responding to points that nobody in this thread made. Can you show me a direct quote where someone said that we should ignore people showing up to town hall meetings, or that we should try to guess what people believe without getting their input?

I had a conversation with the OP a while back where he was posting about how people are much more likely to show up to speak against something at a town hall and how he was talking to elected officials about this bias.

I’m this very thread he is asserting that we should get rid of the public comment process which in many cases is just filling out an online form because it is biased towards naysayers.

The naysayers inherently feel more strongly, and so are more likely to make their feelings known regardless of the process. What other alternate is there than making a (maybe educated) guess.

We should ignore people showing up to give public comment in front of elected bodies, outside of literal Town Meeting governments, which are rare.

If only there were some way of communicating remotely. Some sort of inter-network of devices and people could register their values and opinions so they'd have easier opportunities to tell people what they believe.

What would we call such a thing‽

You realize that the majority of “public comments” in the US are made by filling out a web form.

I've got news for you: public comments on web forms are uniformly ignored at the state and federal level.

That’s not true. For federal comments you can google for a list of explicit changes to regulations that came out of public comments.

Even for emails and form submissions to members of Congress a 2021 study showed that congressional staff frequently review their correspondence records before writing speeches and drafting legislation.

To the extent that it is ignored, we should be encrusting legislators to listen not telling them to ignore comments because they skew negative.

This isn't a hill I'm interested in dying on but I think submitting public comment on state/federal matters through standard online public comment process is one of the least effective ways you have of influencing policy.

That's not true at the local level! Public comment is a much bigger deal locally.

> is one of the least effective ways you have of influencing policy.

Sure but it’s also the easiest, so from a cost-benefit perspective, it’s an attractive option.

> That's not true at the local level! Public comment is a much bigger deal locally.

That’s a good thing. Giving people thw ability to meaningfully participate in the process beyond voting every 2-4 years is a feature. Even if it sometimes slows progress or reduces efficiency.

No, it's a bad thing, because it's not universal: it selects for specific people and privileges them with what is in effect a second vote. It's not hard to explain why this is a problem, and if you can't engage with that argument, we're just talking past each other.

I will tediously continue to point out that this is not one of my hot takes; it's an extremely au courant policy argument in 2025-2026; maybe one of the biggest ones. It's hard to see how anyone could be paying attention to domestic US politics and not have confronted it already. Barack Obama dedicated some of his 2024 convention speech to it!

Is it possible we're just talking past each other because you're not American? I have no idea who you are and in these kinds of conversations one failure mode is assuming everyone's coming from the same political tradition.

The person he is responding to has so frequently made comments with strong "the peasants are stupid and wrong" undertones I think the lack of charity is earned.

Oh, that explains a lot.

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