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Comment by ben509 | Hacker News Reader

He's definitely angry, but from skimming it, it sounds like he had some ideas, put them out there, and no one bit.

And he's uspet that it didn't pan out, and he's quite clear on a fairly reasonable, if hyperbolic, explanation of why the ideas didn't work.

I read it as him coming to grips with the common blind spot of "my ideology would work just fine except for all the people who don't hold my ideology". You hear it from proponents of all major ideologies; liberalism "they're on the wrong side of history", conservatism "what happened to common sense?!" and libertarianism "but in a libertarian society..."

His stuff is ranty and tone-deaf, and he probably shouldn't include it on a page on set theory, but he's not delusional.

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For all of the political ideologies you listed, we have concrete examples of societies which trend in those directions. Sure, most real societies do not trend toward radical versions of those ideologies, but at least we can each get an okay sense of the first derivative, so to speak, of "goodness" with respect to variation in political leanings.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like anything like "Infoliberalism" has ever been tested (and the author even _says_ as much). Before jumping on the boat of a radical political ideology, I'm sure that any reasonable person would at least like to have an _idea_ of what it leads to.

Yeah, I broadly agree. But I think a person can only be radical if they disregard normal social inhibitory / moderating influences. I'm reluctant to write him off as delusional because I'd have to write off most activists. And he's pretty clear that he's aware that he's behaving out of the bounds of polite society, and he's taking his ideas to their logical conclusion.

And I think for any new idea that is non-trivial, whether it's a new ideology, business plan, or whatever, a reasonable person also has to admit the only practical way to figure out if a thing works is to do it.

Yes, I absolutely agree with your second statement. However, the issue I take with the author is that they say that they are not a programmer, and they're frustrated that they cannot get a programmer to help build a prototype. Being _frustrated_ that people won't work for you _for free_ is delusional. The author could have also decided that their idea was worth enough to them to _learn_ how to program, so they could build a workable prototype, and possibly attract other developers as part of an open source project. However, the author seems more content to just sit there and complain about being "misunderstood." Implementations typically are worth a lot more than ideas, and this is exactly what the author doesn't seem to get.

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