Hacker News Reader

Comment by ABCLAW | Hacker News Reader

>Anyway yeah, I'm a centrist and it's not because I'm trying to be neutral, it's because both sides are terrifying cesspools

You aren't being neutral. Your position is a very strong affirmative for the current status quo. You don't want anyone to be able to enact change.

That's an understandable position, but it isn't neutrality. Especially not if the status quo is actively negative for certain people.

As an aside, this portion of your statement:

>It's saying: not only is it not okay to disagree with me and be on the other side, it's also not okay to not passionately agree with my exact side.

Feels like a strawman. The existence of critique isn't a censure. It's just how rational analysis works. You find ideas and you work through them.

If your goal is to never be critiqued because you can't stand to be wrong, and that's why you've adopted a 'centrist' standpoint to get above it all that's a very political position to adopt.

View on HN

Not the OP, but I'll counter: >You aren't being neutral. Your position is a very strong affirmative for the current status quo. You don't want anyone to be able to enact change.

It's not that I don't want ANYONE to enact change, I just don't want people with extreme views enacting change. And it's this all-or-nothing discussion that drives the country apart and makes for little or no common ground on major issues. The US Federal laws impact hundreds of millions of people. In most cases, this requires gray areas, exceptions, and a one-size-fits-all approach leaning to one extreme or another creates externalities and negative consequences. People who hold extreme views either don't feel these consequences, don't know them, or do not care about them. If they did, then they wouldn't be in the extreme.

For any given situation there are extremes and some path of action between the two that is optimal. Let's say an infected finger - there are extremes (do nothing, cut it off) and an optimal path (some treatment). If OP is in the "some treatment" standpoint, he or she is not advocating for inaction (inaction is actually an extreme in this case), but may be advocating for an optimal, less aggressive approach.

I'm not sure how "Extreme views enacting change" => Centrism.

I was replying to OP: "Your position is a very strong affirmative for the current status quo. You don't want anyone to be able to enact change."

>It's not that I don't want ANYONE to enact change, I just don't want people with extreme views enacting change.

This position sounds fine until you realize all it has done is shift discussion away from the effectiveness and correctness of a given policy, to a pre-discussion of the reasonableness of that policy. The heuristic replaces the thing itself. "Is this an extreme position?" replaces "Is this good policy?"

This is fine when public discourse is a never-ending deluge of extreme ideas: 'should we commit genocide?' - let's not even bother working through that one.

However, in practice this position is often used to prevent or shut down discussion of social legislation aimed at fixing publicly broken but privately lucrative policy positions.

Is single-payer healthcare too extreme an idea for the states? Regardless of your answer you've likely seen this exact form of argument. It adds nothing to the discussion and creates a presumption that the status quo is correct.

The inverse position isn't 'Is single-payer healthcare good?', it's 'Is remaining on employer funded healthcare too extreme an idea for the states?' Note how the existence of the status quo makes this an uphill battle - how can what already exists be too extreme?

Everyone wants the policies they want. Being able to define the policies they do not want as 'extreme' is just an extra tool to ossify and slow legislative change. Which, again, is itself a position to take.

If a policy is effective and correct, I would not call it extreme.

I guess it depends on the definition of extreme, but I would not think "good" policy would be extreme in the sense that it has (whether real or perceived) negative externalities on a large portion of the population. Two years ago, I (and perhaps the country) would have said the PPP for paychecks would have been extreme. Given the (extreme) circumstances that occurred, it became a reasonable approach.

I would argue people that shut down dialogue are advocating for an extreme position (e.g. doing nothing and maintaining status quo can be an extreme approach in some cases).

I don't know if single-payer health care is too extreme, but any and all options should be discussed, and a reasonable course of action should be taken. I think most people agree that the current situation we have is a broken mess of half-measures. I don't think we're stuck with an either-or situation. [This feels like the most Yogi Berra thing I've ever written]

There is merit to discussing chopping off the finger or doing nothing. Both solutions are worth understanding - one avoids gangrene and the other saves the finger at the potential for the infection. Given no other choices or options available, the decision maker will have to choose one option or the other. But when other alternatives exist (e.g. modern medicine), creating a false dichotomy between the two camps yelling the loudest is not an optimal approach.

>If a policy is effective and correct, I would not call it extreme.

>I guess it depends on the definition of extreme, but I would not think "good" policy would be extreme

The issue is that you've begged the question in your definition: Good policy isn't extreme, therefore all policy that is extreme isn't good, therefore no extreme policy. You've just redefined extreme to mean bad - so we can't really discuss much more.

I'll propose a different definition for use here, one that accords with common use: 'Extreme', in this case, is whether or not the position is unreasonable, unmoderate, or exceedingly unusual.

With this definition we can find examples of positive extreme policy positions: We take take the abolition of slavery as an example of extreme policy. Granting women suffrage is another. Desegregation is another.

This isn't to say that all extreme policy positions are right - many, maybe most, are wrong. But digging into the trade-offs between the two requires a far more nuanced discussion than the one we're having here, because there's a lot of legal history about the relative velocity of legislative change and that's gonna take up more room than we have.

The abolishment of slavery wasn’t an extreme positive position to take in pre civil war America. A truly extreme position would be granting non-white races equal rights up to and including the right to vote. Pennsylvania and New Jersey abolished slavery but walked back equal rights in voting after once passing laws to allow it.

To contrast, the ideals of the slave holders were extreme.

As for abolishing slavery, internationally both slavery and serfdom had slowly been banned by every organized headed religion and country on the European continent. It was only in the US, and then only in the Southern states that people held the extreme position of needing to enslave an entire race despite how immoral and unprofitable it was.

I say this to argue that an effective policy is rarely an extreme one. Effective policies are simply one step to the left or right of where we already stand, not a great leap into the unknown. Often, as with abolishing slavery, we already will have examples where other people experimented with the policy.

There is a ton of room for movement between or beside the two extremes that are usually associated with Democrats and Republicans. And one issue voters would be able to find those points to move forward if it wasn’t an all-or-nothing situation.

I say “good” in the sense of good policy, not the moral sense. Good policy should obviously be moral but needs to be tractable and not extreme.

So yes, I would say extreme policy is bad policy, because it leads to all sorts of unintended consequences. First, it’s extreme because of impacts to others. A policy wouldn’t be considered extreme if the vast majority of people agreed with it and it aligned with common sense. People often don’t agree with it because it impacts them in a negative way.

You can’t pass “extreme” policy that is extreme in the eyes of the voters without blowback of some kind and a massive swing the other way. So I’d make the argument that incremental progress would get more done in the long run. We don’t need massive change that will be unwound when one side loses control in a few years.

And the abolition of slavery, woman’s suffrage, and desegregation were not “extreme” things. They were ensuring the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for United States Citizens. They were progressive, but not extreme in their time.

And do you have reading on the relative velocity of legislative change? I’d like to see how it changed as tech evolved.

>If a policy is effective and correct, I would not call it extreme.

Now if we could just convince most Senators to follow this principle!

>Anyway yeah, I'm a centrist and it's NOT because I'm trying to be neutral

> You aren't being neutral.

My claim is that I'm not neutral and that I'm also not trying to be neutral.

>If your goal is to never be critiqued because you can't stand to be wrong,

Speaking of strawmen.

> Your position is a very strong affirmative for the current status quo.

Non sequitur.

> You don't want anyone to be able to enact change.

Non sequitur.

> If your goal is to never be critiqued because you can't stand to be wrong, and that's why you've adopted a 'centrist' standpoint

Strawman.

I don't think there are or could be neutral political positions, nor would it be desirable to have them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com