Hey thanks. I've heard of HackerNews but never think to regularly check.

oh my god >_<

You know, it is true that, on some level, we should be debating our fundamentals more with each other in America. It's so tempting to want to aggravate people with libertarian/stupid world views, rather than actually fight the core ideologies of their belief system. Trolling is currency. Though in general I think there's a weird divide, more people seem to recognize that the recent GOP tax plan is just a blatant money grab except 1. the most insulated of Trump's diehard followers and 2. people with socio-economic beliefs so wrong they couldn't identify a dollar from a yuan. Still, nobody's trying to bridge the gap, it's mostly Twitter slapfights and echo chambers.

Specifically, anyone who believes the GOP is about anything other than stealing from Americans to benefit the rich, or anyone with a sort of anarcho-capitalist/libertarian/objectivist belief system. I do actually try to engage with "neoliberal" or otherwise more centrist economic authorities, especially mainstream economics because they're IMO the only viewpoint that is at least worth taking seriously.

Just be warned. It's basically 4chan meets Stanford objectivists sucking up to venture capitalists. It's a mixture of what slashdot used to cover with a very homogeneous group of temporarily embarrassed billionaires. Of course there are also a bunch of professors and old-school hackers that won't have any of it and offer intelligent rebuttals, but there's tons of trash that gets regularly upvoted. The main difference from Reddit is that humor is totally banned. The result is an increase in quality of the topics of discussion, and although it doesn't translate to uniformly good discussion, it brings some very knowledgeable (if sometimes paranoid) people out of the woodwork.

It's easy to miss, but a super crucial feature of hacker news is the ability to collapse comment threads. What often happens is that an idiot writes something that superficially sounds right to some people because it is very detailed, and this gets upvoted to the top comment, and a gazillion people respond. But you can just collapse the entire thread. In my experience the best comments are sometimes somewhere in the middle of the page.

In a lot of ways the site is basically a very strange subreddit.

Sounds about right, and any time you're around a group of self-described "hackers" you're probably speaking to people with statistically higher rates of questionable belief systems. Still probably useful to get a dose of Silicon Valley perspective in my reading, as the gravity of American economics is pulling me in that direction anyway.



To be fair, on nearly any corner of the internet now, you have a glut of lesser-informed people trying to fit in. r/neoliberal is an interesting case in this. I mean, I'm left-socialist leaning, and r/neoliberal is decidedly anti-socialist, so it's good reading to challenge my own beliefs. Or so it was in the early days, until Reddit edgelords realized that being neoliberal was the 2.0 version of being libertarian or whatever, and the quality of discussion dropped dramatically.

There's actually partly a reason why subreddits like /r/badeconomics are some of the only good ones, and it's for basically the same thing you mention with HackerNews: they're anti-humor and demand people explain themselves, so that forces interesting discussion.

Of course I know basically nothing about economics proper so I just have to trust my gut instinct in spotting cranks, various ideologies, and possible biases in the people speaking. I wouldn't say it's like throwing darts blindfolded, more like if you had super blurry vision and an intuition about where the board is.

https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/79zxz8/q_why_hasnt_arbitrage_eliminated_the_gender_wage/

Threads like this being the kind of stuff I love to read when I'm feeling learny.

The weird thing about hacker news is that humor is banned, so the only humorous comments are the ones that are unintentionally self-parodies of Silicon Valley excess, and get upvoted by people who lack self-awareness. Which is to say, almost every single thread. You just have to learn to filter over that kind of thing if you are interested in the meat, which admittedly has mostly to do with technology for its own sake. Which I actually assume you aren't really enthused about.

OTOH they are really good about being watchdogs for corporate and government intrusions of our privacy, and post things from the EFF all the time.

I get the feeling Eversor might like r/NeutralPolitics/.

Don't put me in a box, bro.

But I'll admit, that box does look like an Eversor-shaped box.

I actually didn't necessarily think you would want to read it.

The box makes sense mostly in comparison if we observe that Reid is in our presence.

I'm interested in technology, for sure, just not on the level of obsession, or weird worship status some people give to technology.

Maybe Reid likes r/UnneutralPolitics

If they lean objectivist, then my suspicion would be they're terrified of the government figuring out how they evade taxes. *shrug*

Someone's clearly never had soylent. It will make you believe.

The site isn't at all homogeneous. A bunch of the EFF support has more to do with Richard Stallman ideology. Objectivism isn't the main ethos there, that's just because the site is run by a venture capitalist. Rather, the site actually has legit claim to the term hacker because people who hail from the MIT movement of 60's hacking often frequent the board. This group largely corresponds to the former slashdot crowd.

If I could summarize, it might suffice to say that the site combines left and right ideologies of freedom, with the shared belief that technology will be our salvation. The leftist hackers are like Stallman, and the objectivists hackers are more silicon valley. Since technology requires some intelligence to build, both groups are also paranoid about intrusions into their visions for their technologically flavored visions for the future, whether it be due to government regulation, dangerously out of control corporations, or security breaches.

What you probably won't find is communal deliberation about how to limit the actions of people like themselves (like Jefferson's yeoman farmer, the idyllic hacker is not a billionaire, but probably at most a millionaire who bootstrapped a company or organization with a small number of employees and a loyal fan base). Almost everybody on that site wants to invent the future, and all the knowledge in the world won't change their inclination to do so. So you get a mix of optimism, paranoia, and esoteric and useful knowledge.

Well, and here's the thing, I looked at the sidebar of /r/neutralpolitics and saw this:



This works fine when someone is speaking to a community college students about how to write an essay. But this sort of view is profoundly wrong about how humans.. just.. work. First off, logic itself bears nothing on opinion - logic is, as far as I'm concerned, a sort of game we play - logic tries to take language and reduce it to simple rules so we can follow each other more strictly. Okay, that's fine in some contexts, for instance, it's a useful way to express mathematical language, since mathematics is so unfamiliar to us in daily life we need a specific manner of speaking to facilitate understanding. Okay, that's fine. But does logic relate to how we speak and understand the everyday world? Not at all! We are enormously illogical, and as far as I can tell, most efforts to "erase" or "purify" humans of being illogical instead create cultlike dogmas - it births ideas like Objectivism, LessWrong, FreeDomainRadio, and so forth. And, as my influence by Nietzsche would suggest, all of these "objective" frameworks, where we judge validity through something "external" to us humans, utterly collapses in on itself and fails, because we aren't wired to think that way.

As per facts, most facts we can state - facts where there's near unanimous agreement, **** you'd have to be entirely wrong-thinking to not believe - 1+1=2 **** - are not at all useful to the important part of political discussion. In virtually all science done that's politically relevant, there's enough room for doubt that anyone pigheaded enough can debate it forever - it's meaningless to debate facts at a certain point, it spins everybody's tires and sinks them into the mud.

I can say that personally, and as far as I'm concerned, for all people ever, people only change their mind politically after they decide to doubt their own political views, challenge themselves and seek validity in the views of their opponent. Does this lead to chaos and change within a person's own belief system? Sure, but I think a bit of that is necessary.

But, and this is the key issue, what does it even mean to say you're not favoring political opinions? Is such an idea even coherent? Is there such a thing as a "political fact" that's not informed by an opinion? I think that's a hilariously backwards view as to how people reason and come to conclusions. People tend to suspect a truth and seek facts to support it, and this effect is ever as rampant in politics as it is in any other arena of discussion.

So, I'm so pessimistic about the role of facts and logic in political decision making. If anything, fostering a culture where people are self-critical and attempt to honestly evaluate the facts (whether or not they succeed, the exercise is good) is the only way to actually politically invigorate a culture. Leave the debate team losers in the dumpster where they belong.

The funny thing about that ideal hacker, though? If they do blow up and get bought by a big corporation, you have the strange situation in which on the one hand you have a gross congratulatory vibe with people complimenting them on their "exit" (ugh), but on the other hand, people bemoaning the fact that the actual site that got bought will almost certainly get shut down.

And in the vein of the latter, a classic type of rant on HN is list all the great things that Google used to provide, but shut down or let fall apart in quality.

In fact, the entire life and work of Wittgenstein is a huge testament to this entire discussion. His work and views on logic are fascinating, and the guy was brilliant on a level far past me - a complete devotee to truth, and with frequent Gordian knot slayer style way of approaching problems in philosophy. If you're ever bored and have a lot of time and patience for philosophy, understanding the arc of his beliefs and philosophical views is really informative on the topic of logic and facts.

I remember reading on hacker news that they were leaving out some crucial vitamin. Oops!

Yeah. I think that sub-Reddit is intended as a place where people are self-critical and attempt to evaluate facts honestly. I'm not sure what you're going on about.

No wonder my teeth have been turning black and falling out of my skull!

In summary, fostering a culture of trust, openness and willingness to self-doubt are how people are convinced to change their mind politically, debate does nothing. Which is why America's future looks so grim.

I just don't get why those buzzwords are used that way. It's the exact opposite of a place for "no political opinions" - it's the place for political opinions, every thread there reflects deep political opinions. You're possibly* right that it's a place for self-criticism and honest evaluation of facts, at least the people who are there in good faith and not because they just wanna debate some people. I just think that self-characterization is entirely wrong and reflects an ideology in our culture that's completely ass-backwards, ignorant and hindering.

*I'd suspect not all participants there are entirely in good faith, but many seem to be.

When have prophesies of doom improved on that situation though?

Are you saying that a neutral discussion about a social system that you view as inevitably doomed can only distract them from your doom proclamations?

I've said it in the past and you dismissed it in a huff, but you clearly have an idiosyncratic understanding of what debate is.

Maybe yours is ideological and non-representative of actual politics? It's fine to have ideals for how debates should go, but the real world moves on how it goes whether or not the rules are respected, and that's the point - debate isn't stopping the GOP from raping the country.

I find it funny that in making a case against this thing you call debate you're doing the precise kind of pedantry you claim is part of debate.

No, actually, I just don't think they're that useful of a way to learn about things.

I feel I learned more and was more influenced politically by that long post on /r/badeconomics discussing the wage gap than I was by ever reading or participating in any debate on the topic, ever. Going and reading one source, with one person giving their one opinion, mattered much more to me than any amount of "hurdy durdy source your facts" crap. Well-written, protracted, informed, opinionated pieces are good.

Nothing to do with doom and gloom.

When you write a reply that matters, I'll think more about what you're saying.

If you're going to talk like that, then you don't really think people in general need to be more open-minded and self-critical. You really think that your political opponents need to be more open-minded and self-critical. By which you really mean you think they should think how you think.

Thanks, Eversor. I really enjoy talking to you.

Reid is an idealist whose hope for humanity has been tested by harsh truths, leaving him perpetually frustrated by those who don't acknowledge these same harsh truths at every step of the way (we would call this"cynicism").

So maybe Reid would get anlong best with people who have the bleakest outlooks. I'm sure there are plenty on some of those subreddit he mentioned if he can't get enough from Jon`C here.

That makes sense, and I totally agree. I don't read that subreddit either, but have skimmed it on occasion to get a clearer picture on topics I only marginally cared about and were of little consequence, but which I felt that both sides had been treating in a murky way.

You're complaining about a Reddit group that holds "logic" and "facts" as virtue and trying to make the case that neither logic nor facts are applicable in political discussion. But to make your case, you're using logic.

By the way, while you're trying to problematize the value of "facts" in political debate, it's blisteringly obvious that all they mean is that if you make an argument that would best me made with supporting evidence, you should cite a source. I don't see how you could think you're remotely reasonable if you don't see the value of evidence in argument.

You can engage me if you want.

Because to Reid, you shouldn't waste your time with that, and just go to the far left hideout where everybody already agrees so much on things that they don't bother to check their facts.