Reading the comments in this thread and I am amazed at the sudden pro-authoritarian shift seen on HN lately, what's going on?
Internet comments get provoked by seeing something one objects to. When the thread is new, the only things to object to are the article and the title, so comments come from people objecting to those. Such posts tend to be reflexive and shallow because those are the fastest reactions to feel and the quickest to write. Mostly they are made from pre-existing thoughts and pent-up energy; there hasn't been time yet to absorb (let's call it) the fiber of a story—the specific information, the diffs, the curious bits. Thus they tend to be generic and angry, and usually are just triggered by some surface detail. Not good, but here we are.
Then there's a second wave of commenters who post objections to the objections. Those usually get upvoted, and that is how we so often end up with a "I can't believe these comments" or "WTF HN" comment at the top of a thread.
It's a mechanical process which has nothing specifically to do with either the content or the community. The community is simply large enough that for literally any $X there are sufficient readers who will reflexively object to $X. We're all full of reflexive reactions, just to different things.
Is that what we want here? No, but it's important to diagnose it correctly. The objections-to-the-objections wave (and yes, there are third waves too, and on it goes) can be just as reflexive and shallow as the original posts. The quality of these comments doesn't come from the content or the specific views being expressed—it's about what level of (let's say) the nervous system is producing them. If it's a fast, reflexive, cached reaction, that's not interesting. It can't be, because by definition it's about something else—something one has seen or felt or argued about before—while interest means being interested in this, what's new about it. For that one needs to access a slower, reflective mode (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Responses of interest are slower to appear and seem to come literally from slower processes in the body. It takes time to process new information and for a new response to form. New responses are interesting and produce richer waves of conversation, as people have new responses to those in turn. We could call that the curiosity dynamic and that's what we're going for here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
It'd be very interesting to see how a short delay of posting comments on new post would impact this.
Compared to other vote-based sites, HN is very health - but to your point, reflexive, shallow comments are the easiest.
If you take it to the extreme, a youtube video being posted and everyone having to wait 5 minutes to comment, there is enough people that will see it at 4.30 to have a visceral reaction and post inflammatory comments. You can extend that down to each level of comments.
You can, of course, click on the timestamp and see it anyway, so it's more of a speedbump for folks who don't know all of the details of how the forum works than a true delay, though.
I'm envisioning a use-case for this would be when say, an article briefly touching on tech interviewing (or with a title about tech-interviewing) is posted, and immediately the top-comment changes the subject to "Boy tech interwiews really grind my gears!" Suddenly everyone wants to vent and the thread is overwhelmed.
One natural reason for this penalty is that a highly-ranked comment brings along all the comments that ride along with it to the top. The most extreme form is when the entire comment page is a single comment-thread.
Alternatively, a flexible proposal is to allow users to choose their sort preference, like they can on reddit.
The fundamental issue here, at least to me, is that the upvote is an "I like this" signal. The instinctive use of an upvote is to see more of what you like. Turns out that what people like is what people already agree with.
Unless you build a strong culture that values the signal/noise ratio (remember that early reddit had much more of "UPVOTE IS NOT A DISAGREE" culture, hivemindy as it was), you're not getting your desired outcome. Worse, if you let in the mobs, it doesn't matter how principled your initial group was as they'll soon be overwhelmed by the crowd. The historical record there is obvious.
I think the only way about this is gate-keeping. You want that culture, you'd better enforce it. If you somehow start with a seed userbase of principled people, you only allow people voting rights once they meet whatever gatekeeping criteria that you've set. I don't think this is that scalable, but smaller more tightly knit communities might be a plus to some.
Actually, I'm wondering if something like this might have a niche out there somewhere. We know that Digg in the old days had the superuser group, and the strength of reddit was it's specialized subreddits. Would a system crossing specialized subs with hierarchical user privileges (viewer/voter/voter_with_grant_privs) be something that could work?
In a way it's sort of evolutionary. People attempt to propagate their own ideas or similar, and remove ideas they dislike from the meme pool, via voting systems.
Presumably you are talking about HN discussions but what your are saying sounds extremely general
This is a throwaway because I've deleted the passwords to my past 5-digit karma accounts because of my disgust with the commentor's of this site's obsession with freeze peach and their prepondency for posting misinformation.
Has anyone gone back and looked at Corona threads from earlier this year? Remember when HN was telling everyone that there was absolutely no societal harm posed by anti-science folks pushing anti-vaxx and flat-earth theories?
Meanwhile I know that numerous others like me have lost all interest in participating and have left. Because this is what happens when comment sections aren't moderated properly.
The parent post to this was talking about a pro-authoritarian slant, not the quality of post. Pro-authoritarian =/= reflexive, shallow, generic, angry. Can be. So can anti-authoritarian. Just as much. Sometimes more. Much more.
I don’t know how the pro-authoritarian observation leads to the analysis above. Frankly, I don’t see the pro-authoritarian slant from the top posts.
The whole discussion I’m reading is about the changed/expanded definition of a “journalist” for gathering stats. A valid, almost instinctive observation because practically everyone has a high-quality video camera in their pocket nowadays. And has then wondered, “well, if I capture an event, am I a journalist?” Not a deep life-changing musing, but everybody who has recorded a video event on a smartphone has thought it. So the 2020 mind is primed with those thoughts.
A result like this is posted, and the definitional issue is immediately brought to mind, because it isn’t that far away from lived current experience. The only issue I have with the discussion is nobody answered the basic question in the top responses...so was the definition of journalist responsible for the effect?
The name-calling against “pro-authoritarian” suggests that, in fact, it was. But just a guess.
After that, will be a wave of complaints about the first responders (e.g. in this case he pro-authoritarians). This wave gets upvoted heavily to sit at the top.
So when you and I arrive 9 hours after the drama, we'll see the top X comments either complaining about a slant that is now down-voted, or up-voted comments being reflective of the true biases of HN.
That's basically what happened here.... it's not that the pro-authoritarian comments are naturally shallow, is that they were merely the first comments posted in the first seconds after the article was posted, and are just reflexive since no one reads an article in seconds. If we post an article with a pro-authoritarian title, we'll get a wave of reflexive anti-authoritarian comments too.
I suppose there is, and it's segregated by thread. Some topics attract first responses from libertarian anti-authority types, such as crypto and intellectual property.
But even so there's a kind of overlap. It's anti-authority when it comes to obligations, and pro-authority when it's about property. Or more generally, anti-authority about us, pro-authority about them.
That's not so much "contrarian" as simply "selfish", but it does have the "pent up energy" that dang mentioned. And yeah, I do think you see a lot more selfishness on HN than in the past.
There is a healthy and natural cynicism and suspicion of what appears to be a lop-sided reporting of the occurrences during the protests and riots in 2020. That suspicion may benefit people who are pro-authoritarian because they can play on it, but it doesn't necessarily mean those who are suspicious are pro-authoritarian themselves.
The article does a lot to try to explain what it /doesn't/ classify as a journalist, but never says what it does classify as a journalist. Those definitions are central to the point of the whether or not these stats are actually meaningful in any bigger sense than to say "well duh, of course more people were arrested during a year of protest and riots".
Have we ? Would you like to point out more than 0 ? Since it's "a lot".
I'd like to see some evidence of that happening on scale. If there is no such evidence, I think, perhaps, your comment proves the parent's point.
Yes, 117 arrests is a lot.
he has hundreds(?) of examples if you scroll, but to save some time here's one from portland police
https://twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/128725192442150502...
Edit: ok searching "press" on the feed maybe like more like tens rather than hundreds with actual video evidence, but im sure i missed some
As for the second post. It is indeed a person wearing a shirt that says press on it who is not a journalist. However, the given reason was “so he would not be shot by feds” which to me highlights the spirt of this conversation, that there is growing concern as well as some evidence that the country has sifted toward a more authoritarian bent.
Edit: I forgot to mention that there were no rocks or molotovs being thrown in any of the videos I saw, which there were reportedly hundreds of.
https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1298145371009380352?s=2...
https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1296075594896039937?s=2...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/portland-protest-press-throwing-o...
https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1296610943514812418?s=2...
https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1300690653714591744?s=2...
https://www.portlandoregon.gov/police/news/read.cfm?id=26109...
From above police report link:
"Portland Fire & Rescue treated two Portland Police members injured by rocks thrown by individuals in the crowd. Both of them went to the hospital for further treatment. One of the rocks (pictured) weighed 9.5 pounds and was thrown by a person in group of people wearing "press" as the officer prepared to ride away on a truck. "
"At about 12:36 a.m., Portland Police began moving the crowd to the west as before. This went on for about twenty minutes. Police made more arrests. During this time people in the crowd mingled with those with "press" written on their outer garments as cover and threw rocks and bottles at police. People with "press" written on their outer garments also threw objects at police. Somebody threw a rock, which broke a window in the vehicle giving public address announcements. Others pelted the same vehicle with rocks causing dents. Other vehicles were dented by thrown objects. At least one car parked along a street had windows broken out when a rock or rocks thrown at police, missed them and struck the car windows. "
This is going to cause some serious psychological damage down the road. No one takes that kind of abuse and comes away unchanged.
The fact that at no point did police simply open fire in mass. Well that is truly impressive.
You think that it's "impressive" (?!) that the police, while working, did _not_ commit mass murder in response to being called names?
What hideous third-world country do you live in? And while many people see the police as degenerates, your description and expectations of them are about as low as a human being could go.
It's true that there was one police report you linked mentioning people labeled "press" attacking officers, and Andy Ngo himself claimed that this is happening. Everything else is just recycling of those claims (e.g. Andy Ngo retweets that Fox News reports that Andy Ngo says fake press are attacking the police).
If this really is happening all the time, I would expect it would be easy to find video evidence of it happening repeatedly, as we do find for other activities that definitely are happening all the time, like police brutality against protestors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95GCraUPiGE.
A single instance of a protestor who falsely claimed to be press, and did not commit any crimes does not prove that people who claim to be journalists are throwing rocks or molotov cocktails.
>While we recognize the importance and the rights of the private citizen who snaps a photo or video of an arrest, this site will only cover individuals who self-identify as journalists and have some track record of journalistic work.
Splitting hairs over the semantics of the word 'journalistic' is an attempt to discredit the study about authoritarianism being at an all time high in the U.S.
You have only to look at the numerous comorbid attempts to throw out broad swaths of democratically placed votes to see that it's not about "but are they a true journalist?"
There are plenty of instances where someone can fit into the article's definition of "journalist" where they probably shouldn't.
Yes, without question. It's tautological.
And as a Molotov-cocktail-throwing opponent of the regime, I want to raise the number of arrests of journalists, because that makes the regime look bad, as shown by this thread. Even if every single arrest is of someone like me - a left-radical with a Twitter account, not Walter Cronkite or whoever - it's unlikely that anyone will bother to check, and even more unlikely that, if anyone bothers to check, very many other people will hear about it.
I would say the focus is on opposite sides of the spectrum. When you are defining a group, the primary focus is on who should be included. The focus of gatekeeping is on the people who should be excluded. This is usually done in order to raise the status of those who are included or those who are setting the rules for inclusion. Those rules are often arbitrary or draconian and are usually set by some central authority (or someone who feels they have such authority). This authority will then be the one who doles out permission for others to participate.
That is where the software developer example comes in. Anyone can join the open source software development community and they will only be judged on the merit of their contribution. They might have never contributed to any OSS. They might have never been paid to develop software. They might have no formal education in software development. None of that would matter if we are defining people based on the merit of their work. However they would likely be excluded in a system that relies on gatekeeping.
Not really. Just track the statistics for full-time journalists. Then you don't have to engage in gatekeeping of journalism, you're just sensibly excluding full-time bounty hunters who wrote a news article that one time from the statistics on arrests of full-time journalists, even if the bounty hunter was, in that one instance, a journalist.
Maybe you'll argue that it's authoritarianism either way, and maybe you're technically right, but a top-down directive to arrest journalists sounds a lot different (and scarier) than the situation I described above.
If you have more unrest than usual (and it shouldn't be usual at all to have unrest) it's even more important to have more journalists circulating freely and writing/publishing freely: that's how you get to see and understand what's actually going on.
If you don't have journalists doing their job freely, you only have the state propaganda to listen to.
That's a symptom of the fact that the establishment does not want the press to document what it's doing, to the point that it's arresting journalists.
... or it's the other thing: more journalists in closer contact with crankier cops. Or maybe even some combination of the two. This is my point--we can't draw conclusions from an observed spike in arrests.
But if you would, you might still not be. I once got press credentials (and a steep press discount to an event) because I wrote for a group blog and knew a guy.
Yes, you are, and should be protected.
> If you wouldn't be granted press credentials for something, you're probably not a journalist.
This is a horrific definition. Being a journalist can't be defined by the willingness of the subjects to be covered. That's stenography.
> If it's a side gig you don't intend to make a living doing, you're very likely not a journalist.
So belief in anything is evidence that you aren't a journalist. Journalists are defined by their income.
> Yes, you are, and should be protected.
Protected from what? Being arrested for recording a public event, surely. Being arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail, surely not.
So the crucial distinction is what are these journalists being arrested for, and also do we have a surge of people who are trying to cover their own knowing illegal behavior by wearing a PRESS badge.
Those two things are not the same, and in many ways aren't even connected within the context of this article.
1. The article's definition of journalist would allow me to claim that I'm a journalist. I would never consider myself as such, nor would any reasonable person, yet my photography has adorned the covers of published books, my writing has been published on respected news sites, and I've been invited as a speaker to conferences as an authority on a variety of subject matters.
"Some track record of journalistic work" is a very low bar, depending on the meaning of "journalistic work" and "some track record".
"self-identifying as a journalist" is an even lower bar.
2. If you'd read the article, they even assert that half the incidents reported occurred to people not associated to any known or major media organizations and presumed to be freelancers.
So, I don't think it's just "splitting hairs", the definition is central to the validity of their methodology. Is there a problem with growing authoritarianism in the US? In my opinion, yes, unequivocally. I've been discussing this matter in my circles for more than a decade. The revelations from Snowden, the work the CATO Institute/Radley Balko did on police militarization and brutality, no-knock warrants, asset forfeiture, etc. are all strong evidence of a persistent and growing authoritarian trend in the US. That may or may not validate the evidence in the article, but the way the article states it's evidence and methodology comes very much down to semantics about what it means to be a "journalist", and that is not a decided question in 2020. One can recognize and acknowledge growing authoritarianism in the US while at the same time pointing out flaws in the article and it's associated study methodology.
I think it is not in good faith to try to tar people who bring up good questions about definition as "splitting hairs", or being pro-authoritarian, or in other ways trying to straw man their position. You can be anti-authoritarian, be against police brutality and the suppression of the press, have observed with your own eyes credentialed reporters being harmed and assaulted by the police in 2020, and still want to know with some specificity what this study considers to be a "journalist" for the purpose of reporting their stats.
If it's someone who has a shred of journalistic integrity, simply observing, recording and/or interviews regardless of their political stance, then I'm absolutely against their arrest. While I'm also against cherry picking journalism, oh well, they cant be targeted either.
If you're in one hand with a camera and the other hand a rock or molotov cocktail, you're not a journalist. Too many folks are claiming to be journalists when they're not and for me, that ain't right. This leads to governments being allowed to be authoritarian with, sadly, very good reason that will convince mass populations to vote against the freedom of the press.
How these two types of individuals are being confused, that's beyond me. Again, I think we should all just go back to being hunter gatherers and fight bears for blueberries at this rate.
This itself is an authoritarian tendency that is increasingly alarming me lately (a feeling that started after 9/11.) I think we're going to see "journalist" becoming a licensed profession within the next 20 years, which is a commonality amongst all authoritarian dictatorships. When people start talking about who is or isn't a journalist, and identifying ideological opponents as not journalists, the only outcome is a media that is defined as legitimate by how loyal it is.
Only approved organizations could publish on the election after a certain date.
We are soaking the propaganda and we don’t know it.
The trend that I'm more worried about is identifying journalists as ideological opponents. Or even as "enemies of the people".
What is it about so many of the commenters in this thread that they're allergic to good faith objectivity? When you write a study for publication, or arguably when you report about a study, one of the things you're responsible for doing is to define any terms which may otherwise be ambiguous for their usage within the context of the study. Defining what this one study / article means by the word "journalist" is not the same thing as gatekeeping, and it certainly isn't some slippery slope of demanding that journalism be a licensed profession. I haven't seen a single comment advocating for that. What I am consistently seeing is several people asking "For the purposes of this study, what qualifies as a "journalist"." Which is a very fair question and deserving of a good faith response.
Ive watched a lot of livestreams of the protest and never once saw a livestreamer throw a rock or molotov cocktail
I remember when a website counting how many days James Clapper has avoided a prison sentence after he gave a false statement was big on the front page a while back.
Just the other day there was a thread about experts identifying an illegal toxin used on protestors in Portland while LE illegally blocks access to storm drains so that further evidence of it cannot be collected.
Both threads pertain to law enforcement overstepping their bounds with impunity and secrecy. The toxic gas one was flagged off the front page despite 125 upvotes in a short time.
https://futurehuman.medium.com/scientists-identified-a-green...
This is how you see someone getting beaten during an arrest and people are like "but this guy was once arrested for such and such". The assumption being, since they are "bad" people, that's the reason why bad things happen to them. And, therefore, that won't happen to "me". This requires one to ignore the fact that force wasn't called for.
In this particular thread you see that: "they must have been doing other things rather than just filming" – while we have seen multiple, documented, instances of people doing precisely nothing.
We also see "No True Scotsman": "What exactly is the definition of a journalist?". Which would be fine if we were just trying to understand the methodology, but not "these weren't actually journalists, therefore, they shouldn't count and everything is normal".
It's not a small adjustment in one's worldview, and it's normal and common for people who have benefitted from the false narrative to want to cling to it and reject contradictory evidence, as you pointed out.
You say that I want to reject contradictory evidence, but you never provide the contradictory evidence. Having a bunch of people convinced that the police are evil isn't contradictory evidence. Having people repeat your viewpoint isn't proof that the viewpoint is correct.
For an extraordinary claim you need extraordinary evidence. For something like your anti-police sentiment (which is funny because now all of the sudden nearly all police are evil, in all states, all counties, no matter the gender or race breakdown of the police, no matter what city/county/state/department laws and procedures are, all of the sudden police are all just evil? That's curious isn't it?) it isn't backed up by evidence. You can link to videos alleging "police brutality" but none of them that I've ever been linked to show such a thing. Of course mistakes are made, when there's millions of interactions between citizens and police every day, a one in a million or even one in a billion mistake still happens, humans aren't perfect. But for the claims you're making there should be extraordinary evidence, and there isn't any.
Now, somebody else in the world will read your comment and in some part incorporate it into their viewpoint, and repeat it elsewhere, just propagating the idea further.
You've never seen the Rodney King video?
Of course immunity leads to more bad behavior. How could it not?
Most of the people I know have been beaten or robbed at least once, or narrowly escaped being beaten or robbed. In almost all cases, the perpetrators were never caught. Are we the underclass?
The vast majority of cases of assault, robbery, and murder are not carried out by wealthy landowners or the police. If you're that concerned with people being beaten, robbed, and killed, your priorities should be different.
As for murders, most of them are from people you know, there is a vanishingly small chance that you are killed by someone that you do not know unless you yourself are a criminal.
But murders and beatings yes are an exception. Outside of times of war, where you again are likely to die or get seriously injured to protect the interests of the owner class.
Also, criminals are generally not prosecuted very often because it's not that important to the system that you get justice, really. With police, it's different, because it's not a question of not caring, but instead of actual accountability.
The United States has a sitting president who is attempting a self-coup with the majority of the legislatures in his party supporting it, or at least not condemning it.
It's just... shocking.
DeSantis urged Pennsylvania and Michigan residents to call state lawmakers and urge them to intervene. “Under Article 2 of the Constitution, presidential electors are done by the legislatures and the schemes they create and the framework. And if there’s departure from that, if they’re not following the law, if they’re ignoring law, then they can provide remedies as well,” he said. https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-tr...
Texas, supported by President Trump, tried to sue Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, claiming fraud, without evidence. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/11/945617913/supreme-court-shuts...
"After waiting over a year to challenge Act 77, and engaging in procedural gamesmanship along the way, they come to this Court with unclean hands and ask it to disenfranchise an entire state," they wrote. "They make that request without any acknowledgment of the staggering upheaval, turmoil, and acrimony it would unleash." --SCOTUS https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/944230517/supreme-court-rejec...
2) A coup d'état is defined as an illegal, unconstitutional seizure of power.
3) A self-coup is coup d'état by a leader who originally came to power legally.
3) Ergo Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election is an attempted self-coup
4) Few Congressional Republicans have condemned this coup attempt, and, in fact, seventeen Republican state attorneys general and more than half of Republicans in the House of Representatives signed an amicus brief supporting it.
These are all provable facts.
You have to remember that HN is by and of a very specific part of wider society.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Views_on_race...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Military_techno...
I wrote "HN is by and of a very specific part of wider society". (I can see how "by" could be interpreted to mean the community, but I meant the authors/operators.) Are there any poor people who work on or for YC or HN? Genuinely curious; I assume that YC's staff and most everyone involved in maintaining and running both this site and YC in general is relatively prosperous, at least compared to the median in the US.
I'm sure that a website of this level of traffic receives all manner of visitors and participants, but I was specifically referring to the people who created and run it, and set the rules and general expectations of tone/topic on it. (I'm not calling you authoritarian, just "of SV" and not-poor.)
[edit: Also maybe I'm wrong and that the ratio of participants vs authors/operators is so vast that the operators play no part in setting the tone beyond the rules (and of course your hard work), in which case my conclusion should be dismissed and the question about why it seems to skew authoritarian should be reopened.]
During the Anonymous era and Snowden leak era HN and the internet seemed much more anti-authoritarian.
For many, this would be the main place they ever come across those people, which would make it seem unusually conservative.
To counter balance the above blatant and unfair stereotyping above, I'll add some devil's advocate too: "change the world" type leaders might also be more idealistic and would vote progressive anyway, even if it's not good business sense.
That doesn't make sense. If someone feels unduly burdened by the status quo, why would they vote to preserve it?
Regulations tend to take a lot of money to comply with, making it difficult for small businesses to compete with larger ones.
So it is in small business owners' interests to support candidates that claim to be in favor of removing regulatory restrictions.
Which tends to be a Republican talking point (whether or not they actually do anything to advance the cause once elected)
Often it's a libertarian flavor, particularly here in the startup community where the cliche of the self-made-person looms large. Libertarians have some overlap with liberal positions in some areas (personal freedoms in general, drugs specifically) but disagreements in others (government regulation and spending, etc).
In practice though most libertarians today can generally be characterized as conservatives who want freedom in the areas that affect them personally. They want to smoke weed, or get gay married, so those things are good, but they're conservative in most other areas.
I've been reading HN since the late 2000s and only noticed this post-election. It always seemed as if HN was incredibly liberal. Now there are conservative-leaning voices and opinions cropping up everywhere that are being upvoted as top comments.
I'm seeing a markedly conservative shift in tone.
I'm not saying this is good or bad, but it feels new.
Particularly in the tech scene, you can get the feeling that everyone is very liberal, and so you better just be quiet and keep to yourself.
Personally, I saw so many people completely overplay their hands when it came to things Trump said or did, that it made me more comfortable having them downvote me through the floor and tell me nasty things because honestly who cares? Someone on the internet disagrees with me. Neat. I can disagree back.
Part of that is maybe just me being four years older though and really has nothing to do with the garbage fire that has been the news and media environment since 2016.
I think its more likely that some HN users have gone so far to the left that any comment they don't support can only be from the right.
Here's an example from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25389506. I could give you a hundred more. Both sides feel like the site is dominated by the other side, to a degree in proportion to the intensity of their own views. In fact this phenomenon is so reliable that one can use it to predict not only a person's politics but how strongly they feel about it.
Other bits on this if anyone cares:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Not even kidding. I'd participate, and I'd be fascinated to see the results.
A sibling comment mentions that tech is not immune to the divisiveness that is happening to at the moment, and I think that's right.
I also think that tech, or just humans in general, are not immune to being self-interested. Once you have a 100k+ salary and potential for more in the future in the USA, it's not in your interest to support social unrest or anything that upsets the status quo. I imagine this does subside a bit once you get real security in your life ( some significant property, savings, strong network, etc ) but there is a large gap between being secure enough to be comfortable in your own life and being comfortable enough that your own interests are secondary.
This _definitely_ does not apply to all people and all situations, but I think it is an effect, it's typically framed as "as you get older you get more right-wing" but I don't think it's anything related to age particularly and more to do with where you are on the ladder.
Do you realize what you are asking for?
(This will unfortunately have to be my last comment on the matter, so sorry in advance for the lack of response - I've been instructed by the mods in the past not to discuss this topic at any length.)
[1 ]https://www.valuewalk.com/2019/05/ray-dalio-late-long-term-d...
I'm sure if anyone responds to this, it will be to tell me why Julian's case is actually different and now he's dangerous for democracy...but sorry, no, his case isn't different. You're just a hypocrite.
I'll work with anyone (within reason) to build a better tomorrow.
It's not a matter of "reassurance" - it's about economies of scale. If the best explanation you can come up with for why a bunch of people exhibit a behavior you don't is "they have a personality flaw", this is very strong evidence that you don't actually have a good grasp of people's motivations.
> If the best explanation you can come up with for why a bunch of people exhibit a behavior you don't is "they have a personality flaw"
Conformity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity
I’m sure you’ll appreciate this since your profile is all about “radical honestly”. Taking Dalio seriously is another sign of a hopeless midwit with an inflated sense of intelligence.
Proven through product creation and job performance.
"strength in numbers". ≠ "economies of scale"
The former is about relative group size, mutual defense within the group, and reducing the risks of aggression against outgroups.
The latter is about increasing the effectiveness of coordinated activity more generally (which, yes, can include defense and aggression), especially those activities that persuade people. Winning hearts and changing minds about issues, especially across faction/party lines.
Making common cause with others who mostly share your views, even if the issues you most care about aren't the same ones, is just good tactics. Making common cause with those you mostly DISAGREE with on the issues that you DO agree on is good STRATEGY.
99% of institutional journalists are sockpuppets for prog neoliberal authoritarianism. I can think of a single-digit number of well-known journalists who I actually respect and generally expect to provide useful/unbiased information. This isn't a left/right authoritarian/libertarian thing - anti-corpo-journalist sentiment is pretty widely shared across the spectrum.
Edit: Ok now I am getting downvoted because I called them libertarians when they’re libertarians.
There's also a ton of people who are just reflexively hostile to the idea that society is systematically unjust and exceptionally hostile to the idea that they benefit from the ways in which it is unjust, and as mainstream journalism has been largely sympathetic to these ideas, they are in turn reflexively hostile to mainstream journalism.
Part of me thinks it's 'intellectual elites' here that simply can't fathom not working at a FAANG job making 250k+ and don't understand the problems most people have. And if you aren't working at one of those you must be the ultra silicon valley entrepreneur trying to do the next big thing because money.
Probably downvoted for this but whatever, I think it's the truth. When I first was on this site a few years ago I thought it was a cool forum for geeks, but it's just not that at all really.
I think human nature of having opinions and diversity of opinions exist in all groups, no matter how we categorize/stereotype them.
On HNs it is normal to denigrate the "MSM" while cheering on some blogger and his completely unsubstantiated claims. Attacks on the press, because there's a strong Trump contingent here that have an issue with reality and fact having an "anti-Trump bias", are cheered on.
It isn't surprising at all.
Which they obviously are not.
It is 100% planned and engineered. They know their talking points. They know what to point to in response to police accountability discussions. Change the subject to talk about random looters instead of the 99% of protestors who peacefully assemble and then are brutalized night over night.