Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is an interesting post if you also follow the subreddit for Yang[0].

There are a lot of people there that created Twitter accounts just to follow Yang and participate in those polls about who is more popular. So when the author mentions the creation of new accounts when Yang started, it actually doesn't surprise me. The campaign is very technocentric after all. Also, these people (a lot of them "true believers" types) do post A LOT on Twitter and get involved in any mention of Yang (go check any YouTube video about Yang). You have to "yang" everyone that you can. It is a really weird community to be honest. But one where they are actively telling one another to create social media accounts to promote Yang. What this post really tells me is that it is hard to distinguish real people from bots. Here's a post even about YouTube comments[1].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/YangForPresidentHQ/comments/esycun/...

Seems (to me) to be similar to the Ron Paul bots (fanatics, I should say, because they certainly weren't mechanical war-bots; They seemed like what the right calls NPCs these days, but they were just so ... into it! 24/7! It's actually kind of nice to see groups of new/young people get excited about politics - I think they might learn a lot through the process (maybe)) all over Reddit in 2008 (not just /r/politics, but they were everywhere), esp. since that also included all of the influx of rapidly migrating Diggers.

Maybe it's not the same, but those folks were all in on the Paul Train (or whatever they called it). They were eggcited!

So true, the "Paulestinians" as I called them were the first thing that came to my mind while reading this.

There is too little detail of methodology in this article to take it too seriously, but still interesting.

> "Paulestinians"

Ha! Never heard that one. It is by far more clever than any of the half-dozen or so that I did.

I had no position on Yang.

After a couple very negative experiences with the Yang Gang, where anything less than instant adulation must mean you're anti-Yang, I'm anti-Yang.

That's unfortunate. Yang himself isn't very dogmatic / ideological. But his supporters are very passionate about his candidacy. So i can see your bad experiences happening. I support Yang; not sure if i would call myself Yang Gang...

For me personally, Yang is the first political candidate who sees and reasons about the world in a similar way to myself. He's a systems thinker. Everything in society is connected and to correctly address issues you have to understand how one component will influence another. That is very exciting for me!

He has a lot of policies, i don't agree with all of them but i'm a lot more aligned with him than any other candidate. Left or right.

I've seen so many ...."Bernie's people are horrible" posts on the Yang subreddit which has turned me off the yang gang. Yang is still my 2nd though, because unlike Yang Gang folks, I don't base my support on the followers of a candidate cause that's just lunacy. I've chimed in on a few to set the record

A. we're not all that bad.

B. You can't blame us for what gets banned by mods of a reddit when they use bots to do so.

C. Many of us would support Yang if he were on top or higher than Bernie in polls. But we want a chance at winning, and Bernie has a strong grassroots.

D. Whether the online real/fake people on reddit/twitter are 'toxic' in your opinion doesn't even matter isn't relative because THEY aren't Bernie. They could even be bots or trolls. Listen to the candidate and make your decision from that, whether they're a good or bad person.

> I've seen so many ...."Bernie's people are horrible" posts on the Yang subreddit which has turned me off the yang gang.

Do please remember that the subreddit is not a full expression of Yang's support, as in it is biased towards people who are active on Reddit. The number of anti-bernie posts on there are indeed very annoying, and the quality has indeed gone downhill as the number of subscribers has increased (which is a very common, often repeated pattern, e.g. eternal september)

> C. Many of us would support Yang if he were on top or higher than Bernie in polls. But we want a chance at winning, and Bernie has a strong grassroots.

This is exactly why we need Ranked Choice Voting (or another similar non-FPTP system like Approval Voting), so you can actually vote your true preference. An alternative voting system is a concept that I've personally supported for many years and is one of Andrew Yang's policies: https://www.yang2020.com/policies/rankedchoice/ which is one of the reason's that I support him.

>I've seen so many ...."Bernie's people are horrible" posts on the Yang subreddit which has turned me off the yang gang

Well, Bernie's subreddit literally bans every single person who makes a post containing the word "Yang". They even remove him from the poll results. Certainly doesn't give any socialist dictatorship vibes (that, and his support of Venezuela).

Come on. People will get upset at you for speaking like this on the Yang subreddit, expect the same here. It doesn't matter if another group is more toxic or not. It isn't a competition about who can be more toxic. We say "Humanity First". If you really do support Yang, stand by that. You're talking to another human and you're also representing Yang. Be kind. We're running a campaign about unification, so expect to be called out if you're causing division.

I'm not American so I don't really support any candidate. I have my own preferences, and neither is Yang my preferred candidate, nor is Bernie my most disliked candidate.

Sorry you had a couple bad experiences with folks. I'm biased, but I think Yang's message is more positive than others.

Hopefully over time he can earn back your trust.

"Rewrite it in Yang"

Funny, I had the same experience with Bernie.

And I had the same experience with Hillary, yet I still voted for her (not as enthusiastically as I'd have liked) because I don't want to let a bunch of jerks make my mind up for me.

Well, w/ Hillary she herself was toxic/evil.

Her people were icing on the cake.

If nobody existed but a Yang Gang member and Bernie - could they really admit he wasn't authentic and wanted to make the world better?

Is he corrupt?

Is he in this for himself?

To enrich his businesses per se?

Sell more books?

Has he changed his message to win? Or is he consistent?

I mean look at the candidate. Sure the community can get toxic like a rivalry highscool football game with pranks and shit, but in the end. Are the players really evil, or do their fans just go way out of proportions and get way too overly excited and/or angry when things don't go their way?

> Has he changed his message to win? Or is he consistent?

Serious question, why is this a metric?

Changing your mind should be a good thing. I find this odd coming from a tech and more science oriented website. I'm not saying that we should just encourage people to change on a whim but changing positions because 1) you're presented with new evidence and/or 2) the people you are representing have changed positions, this should be respected. There's a difference between changing positions and feigning belief. It is especially bad if you feign a position and work against that position (I can respect you if you even if disagree with a position but work for it because your constituents hold said belief). #1 is obvious why it is good (because we're human and fuck up). #2 is good because you're adapting to what those that you represent believe.

I for one DO NOT want a president that is going to double down on bad beliefs and not change beliefs as either culture changes (e.g. Obama changed positions with gay marriage as the US culture changed) or because they are presented with new evidence. These things should be regarded as a good trait.

tldr: why is consistency such a highly regarded metric?

> Serious question, why is this a metric? Changing your mind should be a good thing. ... why is consistency such a highly regarded metric?

It's not about consistency, it's about being right consistently. Unfortunately, most decisions whether made by an individual, CEO, or politician have to be made with imperfect information. The data just isn't there to do a full analysis. In data's absence, when you need to make a decision, you rely on instinct and foundational principles.

Of course, when the data becomes available you can adjust, as anyone should. But when you have good enough instincts or principles, you can operate effectively without good data, and that makes for a good leader.

> it's about being right consistently

Does that even exist? We're not talking about something that can be scientifically modeled here. There's always going to be a "better" answer post hoc. Like you're suggesting. So it seems like a weird metric still. I think you're agreeing too. But it takes more critical thinking to judge someone on the decisions they made given the data available to them vs judging them based on decisions made from a post hoc analysis. The latter is always easier, you have (at least partially) the answer in front of you.

I think it’s a balancing act of adjusting your position based on new information without straying from your core principles. This is most definitely an art more than a science and requires extremely effective communication to explain why you’re making a better decision vs. flip flopping or poll chasing.

I'm curious why you think it's weird for a group of people to believe passionately about a candidate?

I like Yang, but I've never been one that idolizes another person. I would 100% vote for Yang above another candidate (I'm actually even surprised HN, which is pretty pro UBI, isn't Yang Gang), but I've never been passionate about another person. I don't understand people that will move to another state to campaign for a candidate. I've never been part of that kind of movement before, and in it I don't understand it. So it is weird to me. I will describe people in Bernie's camp, Trump's, and others the same way. Fanatics confuse me in the same way. I do also have a religious past and it reminds me of the fanaticism of that as well. But we're all humans and see through different lenses. It just is a lens that is odd to me.

I understand that perspective, but I hope you can see that unlike a religion, politics, especially in USA is through people. People need to push a specific candidate because they represent a vision for yourself and the people you love.

One key thought experiment I like to do is to project out a behavior pattern for all people and then asking whether that would be a positive or negative for yourself and society. If everyone were to campaign and push for the ideas they care about, I do believe that would result in a more informed and better society. Through the marketplace of ideas, we can fight through the differences and hopefully create better policy and have better leaders execute on our future.

I think for a lot of people, taking action to affect change for the community/society you live in is very natural. On a small scale that can be something like running for class president or joining your HOA. At a larger scale, politics is where change happens.

If you believe in a set of principles, it is sometimes worth your personal time, effort, and money to affect change. Hopefully you can see that from their perspective they are about their own future and this is the most effective way to impact that prospective future.

I see that perspective and appreciate the comment. To be more clear, the weird thing to me is the __degree__ of fanaticism. I understand being passionate, there are many things I'm passionate about. But there are very few things where I would drop everything and campaign for someone. This REALLY reminds me of religion (I left a religion that sends people to go knock on peoples' doors for 2 years of their lives).

I also think politics (I'm not sure if it has always been that way, but I don't remember it like this when I was younger) has a lot of parallels to religion and that similarity is growing. I do actually believe this is rooted in the growing partisanship. That political answers are not "best solution vs a different solution" but "good vs evil". Partisanism relies on good vs evil. There's a John Cleese skit about extremism that always makes me laugh[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXCkxlqFd90

To take the religion + politics thing further, consider that the president is hailed as being sent by God, and is surrounded by Christian Dominionists that are actively trying to apply make the U.S. a theocracy.

That's bound to stir up some passion on both sides, being that the stakes are rather high.

My comment was based on facts, not opinion or conjecture. I guess certain people just don't like facts that don't look good to them.

I think it’s quite personal. Yang is the first candidate in my lifetime I’ve felt excited about and the first time I’ve donated. (I’m 34)

For me it’s because I see massive potential in UBI to transform society.

So it’s easy to understand there are others who are uniquely attracted to his campaign and want to do whatever they can to help.

I have always found this type of behavior perplexing as well. I had a Kickstarter campaign a few years ago and one of my backers latched onto me like glue, he was repping and praising my product like it was god's gift to man, incessantly for weeks on end. It was flattering but also a bit confusing. I scrolled through his FB wall the other day and see that over the years he's done this pretty much over everything that's gained some traction in the media.

He became a "bitcoin zealot" when that was popular, he became a AI fearmongerer, now he's a Trumpian provocateur. There is no cohesion between any of these identities other than the fact that they are reflections of what's popular at any one point. To me it's facade he's constantly draping over himself but to him that is identity.

I think humans are evolutionarily tribal and naturally some members are going to be more dogmatic than others. Myself not exhibiting that behavior, it's somewhat odd to observe from the outside.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com