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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

I think to gain anything from long form articles, you need to read and consider what's being written, rather than skimming, looking for the holy grail.

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What the author says here is better said by a dozen others. I just had an overwhelming feeling of no shit sherlock when reading this -- yes, it's obvious our media is polarized, for obvious reasons.

I'm going to guess his next chapter is about how money ruined the media and politics, which is "why you shouldn't write about these things" -- because the people with the loudest voice have the most to gain from the polarization of the media. Again, this is pretty obvious. The loudest voice becomes the only one you hear in an echo chamber.

It was insightful the first time I read it from Socrates and Aristotle. But at this point it should be common knowledge for anyone interested in philosophy (literally: the study of knowledge).

> What the author says here is better said by a dozen others. I just had an overwhelming feeling of no shit sherlock when reading this...

As far as I can tell, other writings on the topic haven't had any noteworthy effect in rectifying the problem.

Do have any insights on what we should do about the situation?

That would require an assumption that there is something that can be done. I'm not saying we all throw up our hands and die; but any attempt to fix the situation just adds another voice to the echo chamber and doesn't really solve the problem.

As far as I can tell from reading history, it's always been like this. We just haven't had a massive mutually-destructive war in anyone's lifetime to remind us why we should work together. Old soldiers are the best anti-war advocates there are. Because I'm pretty sure that's where all this is headed.

Indeed, looking back through history there's no shortage of reasons for pessimism - Mother Nature certainly left a lot of work for us to do ourselves. But if you're claiming that there isn't also plenty of reasons in history for optimism, you should maybe consider looking through a different lens.

At the risk of sounding glib, this style of thinking sounds a bit too much like the proverbial "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!" I mean seriously, while lots of people are drawing attention to these old issues with a modern twist, has anything really been tried to fix them? Perhaps it's going to take some time to get our act together at the political level, but is there anything stopping communities like this from putting on our thinking caps and seeing if we can come up with some new and useful ideas?

I do. Get rid of First Past the Post voting and replace it with something like Approval voting.

As it is, candidates in the middle can't get elected. Two dominant parties is an entirely predictable result of FPTP voting. Approval voting (or ones that tend to elect the Condorcet winner, which also should be the first choice of the median voter) would solve 90% of the problems cited in this article.

That seems like a fine idea to me. How might one actually accomplish it?

Ballot initiatives.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2018/11/15/1...

I suspect that proportional representation is even more important to establishing a multiparty system that forces cooperation rather than polarization.

I would say almost the opposite.

http://asitoughttobe.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/a...

But that is a much more significant structural change.

And I'm not convinced "multiparty" is what we want. I think we'd be better off if parties had far less significance. Special interest groups? Sure, they'll exist. People who advocate for, say, bigger vs smaller government, more or less military action abroad, antitrust vs laissez faire, etc. But they don't have to nominate individual candidates...that's really only needed when you have a system that has vote splitting.

(isn't philosophy, literally, love for wisdom?)

I read a lot, but since there's always so much more to read than I could ever handle, I need some way of doing triage. I skim stuff to get a sense of if it's worthwhile. The claim that you have to read the whole thing in order to evaluate it reminds me of the claim by some religions that you can't refute them unless you've invested many years learning their sacred scriptures. It absolutely could be a true claim; it just isn't feasible.

I understand your perspective on it. But I don't think I'm claiming that you can't refute what's in the article, and you certainly don't have to read it all to refute something.

But bambataa did not refute anything from the article, just saying that it doesn't contain anything "big", without actually reading it. I think that's a fairly different situation than the one you used as a example.

It would more be equal to "You can't criticize religion if you haven't read anything about it", which I think it fine. You have to at least understand what you are critiquing, otherwise you're basing your arguments on something that you could have misunderstood.

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