Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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> They would ignore them in their rhetoric, but augment them in practice. Whereas the left augments them in their rhetoric, but seeks to minimize them in practice.

I'm going out on a limb I suppose, but that isn't how political parties work. Outing myself as an engineer, if I wanted to increase/minimise something in practice I would start with a survey of the academic literature on times where the thing changed radically. Then I would attempt to replicate those conditions. Then I would assess the outcomes using pre-defined measures of success.

No political party works that way. Both wings of policies work near-exclusively with sounds-good-to-people-who-vote strategies. In particular, speaking cheerfully from the right, I've never seen a leftist "minimise [divides] in practice" strategy that looks like it started from a historic survey of what worked. I expect there are similar complaints about the right. I've never seen a political solution assessed for effectiveness, and most of them aren't effective.

I would argue both sides do attempt "literature surveys" but they're often tainted by the desire to justify their goals. It turns out you can twist numbers to mean whatever you want and both sides are guilty of this to some extent, though at the moment the pants-on-fire award seems to go to the right. If taken far enough, however, one gets to the level of trying to debate truth itself and "what is objective fact" which gets hairy...

If you read leftist literature, there are many attempts to do exactly that. It's just that in the US the left has essentially no power, it's shared between a centrist Democratic party and a right Republican party.

That being said, there are a lot of ineffective tactics in the left, because there is a lot of infighting (see the XKCD article on standards, as another commenter suggested), and very loose organization.

Well, I'm not really all that concerned with what the leftists do in literature. I'm concerned with what they do in power. If we don't actually have any in power in the US, then the only answer is "no data".

(And "literature" is a pretty poor way to try to refute the claim, which is what leftists do "in practice".)

The GP mentioned an engineering process and literature review. I answered their questions about how these problems are approached and what the process is. I think that's fairly adequate.

If you want to know what any politician will do in power, the process is to see what they are proposing, and to see what others with the same ideology do in practice in other places. If you want to know what the left would do, I suggest doing this.

> a centrist Democratic party and a right Republican party.

As right-biased as the two parties are economically, someone wanting to reduce immigration still has no-one to vote for. Even Trump gave nothing but rhetoric and unpopular, ineffective clampdowns on statistically negligible immigration sources, as any graph of US yearly immigration numbers will show.

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