The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians | Hacker News Reader

The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians

journals.plos.org

In the same way that Trump seems to have changed the norms of politics, it seems the election has changed the norms of HackerNews.

I wonder what the odds are that my HN RSS feed will stop being 30% political crap that's completely unrelated to tech...

Political threads are mostly bad when people use it as an outlet to complain and add nothing relevant to the discussion. This article is relevant since there is likely a disproportionate representation of Libertarians on HN

And yet it's still utterly unrelated to tech.

If we're gonna start including topics that are slightly tech adjacent, IMO you destroy the key differentiator that makes HN worth frequenting.

There's a danger of that.

It is worth noting that many of SV's most interesting projects are comprehensively dosed with political ideals.

Bitcoin, BitTorrent, Urbit. I'm sure you can think of more. I would also claim Google as a successful utopian project. And they're incubating more of them. One day Google will go 'pop' and thousands of spores will fly through the atmosphere to land on strange and alien shores.

Of course there is the Dark Side. The gravitational strength of the left/right divide across the whole Net is extraordinary. There isn't a prominent forum where partisans haven't dueled. Facebook is like Belgium, a hapless neutral buffer and yet the air rings with the whine of dogfighting and the report of the occasional sniper. The Great Project of moderation, to harness or vanquish these forces, is understated but probably matters more than most for the emerging Internet Culture.

tldr; You can dial it back from the worst extremes but you can't get rid of it because tribalism is human nature's firmware.

Plenty of good posts here are unrelated to tech (Pushkin's fiction, J.L. Austin's Saturday morning seminars), so that's not the issue. The differentiator here is "stories that gratify intellectual curiosity".

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I confess to having been genuinely baffled as to why people were discussing HN libertarian biases in the comment section of an article about librarians. Oh.

In about any discussion related to tech and government, there is always a good representation of libertarians in the comments. HN is the #1 place where I ever see Libertarian arguments that are not braindead stupid. So that's a good place for an article about it.

Moreover Uber, AirBnB, and the so called GigEconomy is definitively on topic here on HN and they are related to libertarians and likely going to be the economic reality in the near future.

> So that's a good place for an article about it.

That's a bad argument from an HN point of view. The fact that discussion here tends to be relatively high quality (emphasis on 'relatively'—it's still often pretty bad) attracts all kinds of posts that aren't right for the site.

Snowden changed it, at least as far as I can tell.

But at least I get how that's tech related, as it gets into the ethics of the role of technology in society.

But this? This article has exactly zero to do with tech. It appears relevant because it just so happens that there's a visible libertarian faction amongst developers. But if that's the definition of relevancy, you've lowered the bar so far that almost any topic could be considered "hacker news".

Hacker News has never been strictly about tech related material, as much as material with some intellectual interest.

I don't find this particular article interesting, but if you read the site guidelines they suggest "anything good hackers would find interesting," which means almost any topic could be considered "hacker news," if the quality were high enough.

That, and the fact that it's asking—practically begging—for a political flame war. I think we've had more than enough of those recently.

> it seems the election has changed the norms of HackerNews

When there's a political storm in the outside world, things get wet in here too. It's common to perceive that as a change in the norms of HN but I don't think it is. HN is not a political site and we're not going to let it become more of one in the long run.

Political posts to HN are routinely getting flagged now, including this one. That's good. If we need to, we'll declare a week of political detox and see how that goes. I doubt that we need to though.

Ayn Rand on libertarians:

http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-ideas/ayn-rand-q-on-a-on-...

Summary: "Libertarians are a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people"

And she nailed it, as usual.

Another quote, showing her true motives:

"I don’t think plagiarists are effective. I’ve read nothing by Libertarians (when I read them, in the early years) that wasn’t my ideas badly mishandled"

tldr;

(Below I am copy pasting some interesting quotes from the paper)

- libertarians reject moralities based on ideas of obligation to other people, groups, traditions, and authorities.

- Libertarians scored relatively high on just one moral concern: liberty.

- Libertarians will rely upon emotion less – and reason more - than will either liberals or conservatives.

- libertarians have a strong sense of self and the self's prerogatives, and a correspondingly lower sense of attachment to others. They exhibit a high degree individualism, a low degree collectivism, and generally report feeling less bonding with others, less loving for others, and less feelings of a sense of common identity with others.

>- libertarians have a strong sense of self and the self's prerogatives, and a correspondingly lower sense of attachment to others. They exhibit a high degree individualism, a low degree collectivism, and generally report feeling less bonding with others, less loving for others, and less feelings of a sense of common identity with others.

Politics completely aside, that sounds like a lonely, painful way to go through life. Shouldn't people with these inclinations find out ways to improve their relationships with others? I've never heard a libertarian self-identify as a misanthrope before, so I would think they want relationships with others.

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