Show HN: Mest – Place to talk with those you disagree with

I'm not saying any of this to detract from this tool or any of the other interesting tools linked here, I think its great to try to find as many solutions as possible but its just been my observation recently that humans interact best face to face, hopefully we can find a more scalable solution though.

My guess is that open-mindedness must be cultivated from a young age by exposing kids to a wide-variety of cultures/ideas.

Say what you want about holiday themed drinks, but the coffee shop, bar, and church are essentially the only mass, small-town American discussion forums. And I'd say only the first tended to really breed in-depth conversations between unlikeminded neighbors.

Coffee chains could give two shits about inspiring conversation. In fact, it's downright bad for business (at best more seating requirement, at worst danger of disagreement). So it's optimized away.

Doesn't the last part of your comment contradict your entire comment? Imagine gathering a hundred people together and making the differences between each person clear. Instead of uniting everyone, what will ensue is hatred. Shouldn't the point be to find a common ground and not focus on our differences?

Our body language reading machinery is weak and ignorable when a person is reduced to a small 2 dimensional image, let alone text. And it's the signals that this machinery produces that trigger empathy. Without it, and especially when talking to strangers, it's easy to slip into a mild kind of psychopathy.

Standing in long lines at the DMV in Virginia in 2000-something, a man says to me, "See what happens when you let the Democrats run things?"

Watching the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, a woman told me, "My grandmother said this would happen. She said the economy always collapses under Republicans."

Working IT at the Coast Guard for ten years, people talked politics all the time. All of that talk about as informed as the quotes above, but I try not to think less of people who are misinformed. Politics is hard. It's complicated, but we are all expected to participate in it and try to stay informed while most of us are unaware of how much or cognitive biases cause us to misunderstand and misremember the things we learn about the whole complex morass that is almost entirely run by lawyers.

For me, this election is now an exercise in compassion. I overheard two coworkers talking yesterday about how they both voted for Trump because they hated Clinton so much. What surprised me was the tone of fear and uncertainty in their voices at having won. They want what's best for America, just like their political opponents do, and they honestly thought their candidate was the better choice--with strong reservations. My life is great at the moment, so I sincerely hope their candidate delivers what they feel is missing in their own lives.

It's mainly geared toward single-issue consultations and discussions, but definitely worth understanding.

I know some folks who facilitate municipal consultations in one of the largest Canadian cities, a job for which helping often divided participants to arrive at meaningful consensus is high-priority. Their comment after the demo was "My mind is honestly reeling right now. Never in my life did I think any part of my job could be automated and democratized, because what I do is synthesize fuzzy participant feelings in a very unscalable way. But this tool just might automate away some of what we do."

If you want more than 2 polarizing parties to emerge, you have to use an alternative voting system which allows ranking, such as IRV, and thus encourages third parties instead of disincentivizing them (due to spoiler effect).

To see how the came to that conclusion. It's not like they hate brown people that speak funny, they have real issues that rightly or wrongly get blamed on immigration.

Maybe you could talk about smaller and more specific aspects of the issue with people, like

* How has present-day opposition to immigration in the U.S. developed? Was there always strong anti-immigrant sentiment in this country? How were immigrants viewed in different eras? Were parts of those views accurate or inaccurate?

* What are the moral arguments in favor of people's right to migrate? What are the moral arguments in favor of a nation's right to prevent or limit migration? Is it important what existing citizens of a country think? Is it important why they think it?

* Is the present-day international system of nation-states and borders a good idea? How about various notions of citizenship? Are some criteria for citizenship obviously reasonable or unreasonable? Should criteria for citizenship be decided politically by existing citizens or are some kinds of decisions they might reach clearly unfair or morally wrong?

* Should people who live in a country feel proud that others want to move there? Should they feel proud of allowing or encouraging others to do so?

* Why are so many economists so strongly in favor of unrestricted or nearly unrestricted migration? Why have other people found the economists' consensus hard to accept?

* How do immigration restrictions interact with policy mechanisms like a welfare state and minimum wage?

* Is it good, bad, or neither for a government to favor the interests or preferences of existing citizens over others' interests? If it's not bad to do so, are there clear limits to how or to what extent the government may neglect or override foreigners' interests?

* What do we think about cultural differences between people living in different parts of the world? Would we like to acculturate as many people as possible to our own culture and way of life if we had the opportunity? Do we think that acculturation of this sort is inherently good? Do we think existing cultural differences are good, bad, or neither, and do we think at least some cultural differences can be placed on a hierarchy where one culture gets something more right than another?

* Are immigration critics right to worry that a culture could be made worse (and in some way less effective) by the arrival of lots of people with different cultural values? Are immigration supporters right to hope that a culture could be enriched by the arrival of lots of people with different ideas and traditions?

* Is there a meaningful moral difference between trying to deport existing residents who entered a territory without following its official migration rules, and trying to prevent other people from doing so in the future?

* What are the differences between population growth through migration and population growth through reproduction? Doesn't this undermine a simple intuition that migrants take away jobs from existing residents?

* How legitimate is it for members of an ethnic or cultural group to want to have their own nation-state and to make that nation-state somehow reflect the character or interests of that group rather than other groups?

* Is it true (as an article recently posted to HN suggested) that migration almost always makes the economy bigger and creates more total employment, but that the benefits of this growth may be quite unequally distributed or captured? Could migration economically benefit most people while economically harming some people?

* To what extent should a country try to assimilate migrants and to what extent should it be proud of having done so? Are there likely problems if large-scale migration happens without a corresponding assimilation? How successful has assimilation been in the past? Is there something legitimate in the preferences of migrants who don't want to assimilate (or only want to assimilate a little bit)? Is there something legitimate in the preferences of people who strongly want migrants to assimilate?

* Is there some kind of hypocrisy in creating or enforcing significantly stronger immigration restrictions today than those that prevailed in the past?

* Are there reasons for migration that are more or less important than others? How much should discussions about immigration address migrants' motivations? Are there motivations that change the moral status or significance of someone's desire to migrate?

* Many governments have created programs that try to draw distinctions among would-be migrants on the basis of their desirability. Have these programs worked well on their own terms? Who proposed them, and who got to create the criteria for desirability?

* What could governments reasonably know or ask about visitors or would-be immigrants?

* How much migration might occur if practical restrictions on it were removed? What might the long-term consequences be?

* If it's legitimate to physically restrict some kinds of immigration, what kinds of enforcement measures are proportionate and should people be punished somehow for circumventing or attempting to circumvent them?

* What if a country allows people to immigrate easily but makes it difficult or impossible for them to acquire citizenship? (How about temporary "non-immigrant" work visas?)

I bet there are about a dozen more things that could be discussed in this area.

I mention these things because I think it's possible to learn something from talking about them with people who radically disagree with you (and you don't have to give up your moral outlook on the situation, nor your political goals!).

I'd like to see this built on top of Facebook, where a) people are already having conversations unproductively, and b) you have the demographic information to understand who you're pairing without having to bluntly ask them which side of an issue they're taking.

Also: lots of front-end developers are into personal fame - and because they are front-end people they are also good at web-based marketing strategies. This works recursively :/

Oh and also: lots of front-end developers are relatively speaking weak in terms of architecture and general programming ability. (There; I said it.)

How big do you think a java client to do the same thing would be?

The alternative is giant blocks of text which are off-putting to many, harder to parse, hard to find time for, etc.

- Crocker's Rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881288

- Principle of Charity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12774600

- Rapaport's Rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12774692

"Republicans" say rip it out, go back to what we had before, don't adopt anything from it.

"Democrats" say to keep it and try to fix it.

Can it be fixed? Who knows. But ripping something out because it isn't perfect after two years is completely insane.

The US has a completely broken healthcare system and handing it back to corporations isn't going to fix it.

Maybe if you had more similar examples?

One thing we have to be careful about is wrong associations, equating two things that actually differ subtly. As they say, the devil is in the details.

Source: http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=datool&surl=/arrests/index.c...

You need a place where there are no teams, where it's not A vs. B, but a place where you're tackling smaller problems and talking solutions which can be understood and validated.

I;m not talking about changing views. I'm talking about making them aware of their views. They don't think they are racists. They don't think they are homophobic. Nobody has ever told them, they have never been confronted by someone they actually know and respect. Only once they understand that their views are describable in such terms can we ever then hope to change those views. It's a two-step process.

We all assume that convincing someone that they are racist will cause them to change. That denies the reality that someone can be a proud racist, a proud homophobe. I've got a pile of emails coming in from elderly family members who are very very proud of their anti-muslim and anti-gay views. Many start along the lines of "It may be racist, but that's what we need to fix today's problems." At least they acknowledge the description.

Clinton won the popular vote.