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Comment by thepasswordis | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that now we have all of these discussions on a stage in front of a mob.

Discourse is no longer a tool we use to approach a better mutual understanding, it’s a gladiator match where there has to be a loser and a winner.

I’ve run into this problem with people who use a lot of twitter. They would keep asking me to “state my position”, and also demand it to be about 1 sentence long. The problem being…I don’t usually have a “position”, but rather I have a set of things which haven’t yet been proven false. So it’s really a body of existing understanding, not an individual idea, which should be examined as part of a discussion. (I run into this problem with young people, in real life).

An prescient example might be my dislike of electronic voting machines. If I say this in public, to the audience that grew up on twitter, they’ll accuse me of being a Republican, an insurrectionist, racist, ivermectin conspiracist anti vaxxer.

I’m none of those things (although ever day I become close to being some sort of Republican), but the more complex discussion isn’t really possible on twitter. Because that is where so many people learn how to interact with others, snd where they learn to derive understanding, it doesn’t matter. And even trying to explain that some of these ideas can be bad independently springs some sort of Kafka trap.

Here’s a fantastic article that I think lays out a version of the problem: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres...

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It often feels to me like the more recent brand of this behavior is something like perfectly valid study of social phenomenon (revolving around social justice at this point) on a macro level where it makes sense .... then taken by some to use on a micro level with individuals where it stops making sense.

Obama had a speech where he noted the futility of talking to someone about their privilege ... when that person as far as they're concerned has had a hard life and everything stacked against them. And maybe that person is right, they did have a hard life / quite the opposite of privilege.

The macro study and ideas aren't wrong, but they don't work at a micro level.

The same extends now to phrases / patterns or any indicators at a macro level we associate with injustice ... and folks take them out like a guy with only a hammer to use and apply them to groups and individuals at a micro level that stops making sense.

A family member of mine is a teacher. They recently had a big discussion about how minority students (a specific minority actually) were more likely to be assigned to special ed services. Some folks identified this as troubling behavior as it was seen as a path where students would be stereotyped or other undesirable things might happen because of it.

The teachers listened to the concerns and presentation by some groups... but they're left wondering what to do when the 4th of 10 students who is this minority comes in to be evaluated and clearly needs help ...

On a macro and even historical level the concerns are valid and sometimes special ed in the past was used poorly. On a micro level now what do these teachers do with kids who need help?

Applying these concepts on a micro level without understanding the individual / individual situation isn't justice...

> Obama had a speech where he noted the futility of talking to someone about their privilege ... when that person as far as they're concerned has had a hard life and everything stacked against them. And maybe that person is right, they did have a hard life / quite the opposite of privilege.

This resonates true in tech. I know (white) developers who grew up poor. Poor as in, hide anything you have else it'll get pawned. Poor as in it doesn't matter the fridge is broken: since the electric bill is late the whole house is freezing anyways.

Then they get invited into diversity trainings and told that they are privileged, oppressors and should acknowledge it. Ohh and there's now a diverse hiring program which, so far, has hired three Ivy League educated sons of wealthy Nigerians.

This is what intersectionality is supposed to be about: the notion that privilege and discrimination aren't one-dimensional, but are complex products of many intersecting and possibly conflicting experiences, attributes, and contexts. Unfortunately this is a very nuanced idea, and we hate nuanced ideas -- especially about people -- because they require time, energy, rapport-building, context sensitivity, holistic thinking, and the ability to grab hold simultaneously of opposing ideas. (And worst of all for some, they require cutting off a supply of intoxicating self-righteousness.) None of that is going to happen in a one-hour workplace training session. If it's going to happen at all, it's going to unfold gradually over a lifetime. Since timelines of that scale are intolerable, we end up with the sort of ham-fisted oversimplifications you've experienced.

The issue with intersectionality is the same as the issue with affirmative action: a person is treated as an RPG character where the desired outcome is to "save" the person with the "lowest" stats or compensate for some real or perceived loss in that person's life. In the case of intersectionality, the "winner" is the person who can stack the most "undesirable" traits on his/her bingo card of victimhood (i.e. the victim Olympics) without any consideration given towards his/her personal agency. Intersectionality, both in premise and application, is, in my view, a collection of x-isms of low expectations masquerading as some grand revelation about societal functions.

And I don't think your longterm timeline, even with the nuance and consideration you believe to missing from its application, would bring you to a world where people understand one another's circumstances and integrate these observations into their personal livelihood. Instead what you'll have is a world beset with the reinvention of tribalism and original sin. While intersectionality may have some merit as a sociological observation (even if I though I find its claims to be unfalsifiable), a sociological observation cannot be treated a deterministic inevitability supplanting human agency.

> In the case of intersectionality, the "winner" is the person who can stack the most "undesirable" traits on his/her bingo card of victimhood (i.e. the victim Olympics) without any consideration given towards his/her personal agency

This is a completely insane lie about intersectionality.

Where is the lie? Please be more specific.

I quoted it directly.

Let me rephrase. What makes my statement a lie?

Intersectionality is about marginalized groups working togther and supporting each other. Basically when Caeser says "Apes alone weak. Apes together strong" in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

The "Oppression Olympics" narrative is an offensive and bizarre strawman.

>Intersectionality is about marginalized groups working togther and supporting each other. Basically when Caeser says "Apes alone weak. Apes together strong" in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

That may be the theory, but "victim olympics" is the actual practice.

That's a category mistake on your part, if not an obvious lie with malicious intent.

> This is what intersectionality is supposed to be about

Intersect enough and you start dealing with individuals

And no one has time for that

The individual is the most oppressed minority.

Priveledge is such a stupid choice of words that using it for outreach instead of academia frankly seems like they are trying to start conflict for the sake of self-righteousness and one-upmanship purity spiral. The word "priveledge" implies that nobody deserves it by default when really it is the exact opposite. "Hidden Problems" is a clumsy top off the head synonym which would get the idea across better. It still fails to get across "what you take for granted they don't have" but it lacks the many sins of priveledge phrasing. Heck there are issues which aren't neccessarily anybody's fault like say being a minority in an area and finding it difficult to find people with the same related experiences.

...and they didn't get arrested for no reason, lived to adulthood, and when they tried to get a job they were taken seriously and evaluated mostly on their ability.

You are making a lot of assumptions.

Try showing up at a hiring event with a southern accent, no matter your race.

Try showing up to do anything at all without that southern accent and and without a professed love of jeebus where those accents come from.

This sad story of the unfairness of prejudice somehow inspires not a single tear.

That doesn’t match my experience in over four decades of living and working in the south.

But it is the same kind of story I hear time and time again from folks who don’t live in the south about the south. So it must be true I guess.

If you live and work in the south for over 40 years, then you are by definition no visitor.

Meanwhile, you don't even have to get out of your car to get told you're not welcome when people have big signs on the south bound side of the road proclaiming "You're in TRUMP COUNTRY now!"

Enjoy your denial.

Like I said, despite my long experience to the contrary it must be true because somebody on the internet said so.

And I’m sorry that stupid signs frighten you so…most people I know just ignore them.

Interpreting that observation as fear on my part rather than fear or ignorance on the part of the property owner is an excellent example of the very incivility you attempted to deny.

Why didn't I ever have the equivalent Obama sign on my yard, gloating in the face of anyone who came by that might not have liked it?

What is the person who does that doing exactly? Have you ever even taken 11 seconds to wonder where actions come from?

It's curious how when I give an example of someone getting off on insulting everyone who drives by their house, your reaction was to excuse that behavior and add your own insult to theirs, attempting to say something about the thickness of my skin, which in the end just says something about the thinness of your own.

Let’s recap. You mentioned that (paraphrasing here) that is difficult to near impossible to get hired in the south without a southern accent and a love for Jesus. I mentioned that wasn’t my experience. You take my response and turn into an anti-trump rant. Again, I mention have never found the south inhospitable, but acknowledged your opinion. I also mention that most people I know ignore stupid signs (because they do). Apparently you don’t or perhaps “can’t”—and that’s your reaction to own. Then you end this with some sort of assumption that the tiny percent of idiots that might place Trump signs in their yards are somehow representative of an entire region of the country. Including wrapping me into this group because I simply choose to ignore the idiots. You finish your obviously thin skinned rant by trying to project it on to me.

So again I say, I find your initial premise about employment difficulties in the south for folks without a southern accent or without a Christian faith to be be completely counter to my experience.

As for the rest of your diatribe and opinions, I think I am just going to ignore them. Frankly, it reminds me just a little too much of the kind of attitudes and binary thinking that cause certain people to post “Trump country” signs in their yards.

Wait, being against electronic machines is a Republican position? Back in the 2000s this felt more like a tech literate position with most supporters being Democrats. My recollection is that Republicans under Bush oversaw a significant largest expansion of electronic voting (which probably explains the larger Democratic opposition at the time vs it being some genuinely held principle).

I'm not a Republican but I'm certainly only for some forms electronic voting where it's possible to manually verify[1] (e.g. Scantron). The more complicated machines that print a scantron for you should be reserved for the minority of people who actually need it for accessibility or language purposes.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec...

People seemed to have forgotten the Diebold voting machines, and their provably insecure implementation... and the conspiracy theories about Bush benefiting from it. Odd how that was a liberal position at the time, and nobody called them names.

Equally important to whether the vote is fair is whether people believe it is fair.

No one but the world's best computer security experts have a hope of comprehensively understanding a computer voting system. Even on the odd chance the entire software and hardware platform were open source and verifiable, it's probably beyond 90% of us here on Hacker News to even begin going about that independently.

The result is the election is no longer constructed out of an understandable system based on folk physics we all comprehend instinctively. We all understand the integrity of a physical ballot box, physical papers, and the difficulty of mass fraud against such a decentralized system.

Switch to fully-electronic voting and we lose that. It becomes a black box. Press a button. Get a result. With no faith in the process that rendered it. Our democratic result ceases to be the result of average citizens counting papers and becomes something just handed down by experts.

I'm not American, but if my country ever moves to eliminate paper ballots I will protest. I do like the idea of a terminal that prints your human-readable ballot for you as an assistive device, though.

The voting machines that americans are talking about [1] aren't "fully electronic black boxes", they're "paper ballots + a vote counting machine + maybe a machine that acts as an overly fancy pencil (but let's you verify the paper ballot afterwards, i.e. what you talk about in your last paragraph).

The paper audit trail, physical ballot box, etc still exists.

I don't know if these machines exactly justify their cost... but they don't seem to be security risks.

[1] So by this I mean "only the republicans are complaining right now" and "they aren't complaining about states where non-paper voting machines used". In fact it looks like that of the 7 states with some form of non-paper voting machines, all but New Jersey went for Trump. New Jersey was never going to be close enough that the republicans feel like they can complain about it.

[2] List of states and how they use voting machines here: https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...

Kentucky, Lousiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tenessee and Texas are the ones with "DRE without VVPAT" (voting machines that are more than a fancy pencil and/or paper ballot counter).

[3] Election results from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

Having a paper record helps, but only if it actually gets used to manually validate the results from the counting machine. (And if you're doing a manual count anyway, why bother having a counting machine in the first place?)

> And if you're doing a manual count anyway, why bother having a counting machine in the first place

Because that way you can report preliminary results faster? I guess you also get the "two independent ways of counting say the same thing" benefit, but I'm pretty sure that they're primarily there because the news likes it.

Doing manual counts of states that at are at all close or suspected to be at all close is... normal.

Sure, why not? I have no problem with counting machines that aren't actually used to produce the official count.

Doing manual counts only when it's close isn't good enough though, as that leaves you open to a vulnerability where the attacker simply arranges for it to not be close.

> a vulnerability where the attacker simply arranges for it to not be close.

That attack, for state and federal elections, involves falsifying multiple independent organizations' poll results, including exit polling on the day of. Otherwise the "not close" results will not be credible and they will be investigated.

I think they sample for validation and only do a full recount when fraud is suspected.

> Odd how that was a liberal position at the time, and nobody called them names.

I was with you until you threw in a blatant lie. Being against electronic voting has always been a position that got negative comments, insults etc. (unless foolish, luddite, naive, afraid, and so on are not insults anymore? Or maybe you don't consider them insults when your side issues them?). Perhaps you didn't experience that, or maybe you are just doing the whole "rose-colored glasses" view on the past thing. Either way, your statement about how no one called "them" names is just a sad attempt at throwing in a little dig, one that has no basis in reality, no real facts behind it, and only serves to divide everyone.

> Being against electronic voting has always been a position that got negative comments, insults etc. (unless foolish, luddite, naive, afraid, and so on are not insults anymore?

Is that really true? I always thought it was a pretty popular position, at least in the tech community. I might be biased, but I don't know how anyone who has a modicum of understanding about computer (in)security and has performed an update query could ever be dismissively enthusiastic of electronic voting.

Moving the goalposts is a fun game, but not helpful in this situation. I guess if you only limit yourself to counting those of a particular career with a particular set of interests as people, then sure you may have a point. I tend to think of humans (no extra qualifiers) as people though, so your point makes no sense to me.

I think you're failing to apply the appropriate context to the situation back then.

Your framing of the Hursti Hack [0] and how socially acceptable it is to discuss its merits does not seem to consider the very different way society tended to handle things like this in those days. Society has changed a lot. During the Bush/Kerry race I distinctly remember that being against the voting machines was decidedly counter-culture, but definitely not indicative of being a luddite or naive. Back then, being counter-culture was "cool," and only a sliver of the population actually cared to take a position against it.

The considerable research and publication [1] related to this incident helps demonstrate that society saw this issue in quite a different light a mere 15 years ago.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hursti_Hack [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161202140146/https://www.suppo...

Good deflect, but it completely ignores the point - I and many others were insulted for being against voting machines.

Also - which is true?

* only a sliver of the population even cared

* it was the liberal position back then

Your personal experience of your thoughts is not in any way related to the statement: "Odd how that was a liberal position at the time, and nobody called them names." They are just a tangential anecdote.

Since you do somehow think anecdotes are super duper relevant though:

I was an adult for bush/kerry. I remember too. Things were very different on the surface, but the divide was there then too - it was deep and it was pervasive. I remember coming out of a screening of 'Fahrenheit 9/11' and being yelled at by a crowd of people who thought I was a 'dirty liberal' and 'scumbag' for even seeing it. I remember having people threaten me because I was against the Iraq war and Afghanistan occupation. I remember being told my volunteer work to help underserved communities get access to the internet was pointless because "those people will never learn". The sides and arguments haven't changed - what has changed is the volume. The language of "us vs them" hasn't changed. The ignorant argument style of "here's my one personal viewpoint as proof that you are wrong" hasn't changed. The talking heads are still east coast liberal elites in an ivory tower (or fascist assholes just spewing lies and stirring up hate).

Perhaps my experience is an outlier. Perhaps you are just doing that "good old days" thing. Either way, neither of our stories have anything to do with the very specific point you replied to.

> Your personal experience of your thoughts is not in any way related to the statement: "Odd how that was a liberal position at the time, and nobody called them names." They are just a tangential anecdote.

The statement in and of itself is also an anecdote. A hyperbolic one, at that.

The amount of butthurt people are displaying in this thread indicates to me that my point is quite on the money. The degree of controversy and rudeness that comes across in your own posts in particular is astonishing.

You're clearly older than I am, by the way. That's pretty sad.

I'm not sure this is the appropriate context, though. There are plenty of people today who think it's "cool" to be counter to the dominant culture, including active research and security analyses claiming to show flaws in voting security. The difference is that the dominant culture has shifted strongly in a direction that you and I favor, so we care about being excluded from it in a way we didn't in 2005.

That's because most of the criticism wasn't in the form of conspiracy theories or accusations, but instead in the form of technical or at least logical arguments against their use. It was, "this is a problem and it isn't being addressed at all."

With the 2020 election, it was -- after the fact -- "all these machines are now corrupt because I lost". And I use the term "I lost" because it was the Trump campaign and it's most adherent supporters that were making the claims. And then there were recounts and investigations... which turned up nothing, but the complaints continued into court cases... which also turned up nothing, but the complaints and court cases turned into rallies... which became riots and insurrections.

So the difference is that the first group was largely rational and reasonable -- you'll note the distinct lack of injury and death -- while the second group ignored the facts, didn't care about the actual problem of the machines, and used it as a scapegoat to fuel insurrection, violence, and populism.

I'm sorry if you can't see it, but it's really not very subtle.

Also the entire year before the election concluded, one side was openly talking about contesting the results only on the basis that they didn't like not winning.

Fake populism.

I think most positions like "electronic voting machines" are just ... issues of convenience and not really tied to any political ideology.

Frankly I think that's most political situations.

"No nation building" was a vary big part of Bush Jr's platform ... and then he started some nation building that we only just got out of 20 years later.

Distrusting electronic voting machines only marks you out as a Republican conspiracy theorist when a Democrat is president, like now. It was a perfectly respectable position held by tech-literate Democrat supporters in the 2000s under Bush, became one again the moment Trump took office, and ceased to be one as soon as it seemed like Biden won. It really is that simple and that partisan.

On Twitter, where literally everything is a political shibboleth.

If you're security conscious, it's entirely possible to know there's no reason to believe anyone successfully tampered with voting machines, AND know that it's something that could happen one day if we don't take it seriously.

> On Twitter, where literally everything is a political shibboleth.

Left unchecked, that kind of thinking will destroy America. If too many people look at everything through the lens of partisanship, paralysis follows, and that eventually leads to death.

And it's a both sides thing. I've seen a lot of people act like anyone who has problems with the implementation of the Afghanistan withdrawal is a Trumper clone of Stephen Miller. That kind of thinking has led to some truly awful things said in apologia for it.

> Distrusting electronic voting machines only marks you out as a Republican conspiracy theorist when a Democrat is president

I'd modify this.

Distrusting electronic voting machines only marks you out as a conspiracy theorist (of any political leaning) when you only care about the issue if an election doesn't go your way.

People who actually care about the issue continue rallying for changes to election security even if their party won.

If you stop caring once things go your way, you don't actually care about election security, you're just using conspiracy theories to comfort yourself when you lost.

I work in computer security and I see a lot of experts like Matt Blaze being inundated by crazy conspiracy theorists. These are people who have spent years working against the tide to improve voting technology -- primarily by advocating for paper trails in electronic voting systems. Now, having seen many of these goals achieved, these experts are being attacked on Twitter by conspiracy theorists who are attacking even voting machines with a paper record based on insane theories (involving the President of Venezuela). These positions have nothing to do with the security of voting machines, they're crazy nonsense. Much of which is being promoted by supporters of a candidate who refuses to accept that he lost.

To pretend that a bunch of people just "switched sides on the issue of voting machines" is totally counterfactual. It's perfectly reasonable to want to improve insecure DREs, and many people on all sides of the political spectrum wanted this. It is not reasonable to decide (en masse) that the family of Hugo Chavez owns a voting machine company, and that somehow they're conspiring to change votes in ways that can't be detected in the paper trail -- and moreover believing all of this insanity without the slightest shred of evidence.

I don't expect much from HN, but I do expect much, much better.

You might be noticing that the media does not demand any logical consistency from democrats.

Democrats don’t operate on a spectrum of logic, instead they operate on a spectrum of virtue signaling.

I’d modify this to say that for the last 30 years they tended to view success of their party’s platform more on the virtue of their good intentions rather than the outcome that platform or policy achieved.

It's kind of a youthful trait, isn't it? An idealism that may carry a ton of insight, really, but no understanding of application.

So they think complicated things shouldn't be complicated and get angry about it. (I did. The Great Recession landed at a critical age in my life)

They demand simple answers, because complicated ones take too long and require real attention and dedication.

People grow out of that. While their politics may not change, usually their approach and understanding do.

For any of the good it's done, it seems like Twitter has arrested that other process. Maybe it's the immediacy, or the audience, or the format, or a combination—don't know. But it used to be the only place you found that kind of squabbling was talk radio, cable TV, or a bar—easily avoidable and not as polluting of regular discourse.

Twitter has certainly accelerated it. I recently lost a previously intelligent and talented long-time friend who struggled with mental illness to Twitter.

He only started seriously getting into it a year and a half ago when the pandemic started, but the difference was stark. Gone was his usual curiosity and desire to engage in debate -- his interactions began to simplify into snarky one-liners. And to disagree with anything he said was to invite the real life equivalent of a quote tweet clapback. It's like dealing with a cult member.

I used to like Twitter. I still do. But now, feeling personally the way it exacerbates things for those who struggle with mental illness -- it's hard to not feel like it (and Facebook) are deeply complicit in harvesting mental illness for the attention economy. I was fortunate to not have family members or close friends radicalized by media outlets into becoming insufferable people to be around, but now that my luck has run out, I feel a lot more empathy for the pain so many others have gone through.

There's nothing new about it besides the scale (other media obviously predates it). But society and especially the most vulnerable members are not handling or even recognizing this mental contagion very well if at all.

I'm sorry for your loss.

I am hopeful that within our lifetime, humanity will figure out that social networks as currently implemented are a net loss in terms of damage to mental health, communication skills, isolation from meaningful human contact, and time wasted.

> It's kind of a youthful trait, isn't it? […]People grow out of that.

I wish you were right, but I've met enough angry mobs of 50 to 70 people online to know you aren't unfortunately.

Face to face, people are usually pretty civil and they don't easily call name on one another (because you know, a punch in the face is just painful), but even in real life, when the discussion happens in front of a group, discussions are quickly getting hotter. And being separated by a screen and an internet connection make things far worse.

> Face to face, people are usually pretty civil and they don't easily call name on one another

It used to be the case that this was true even with written and remote (telephone) communication. Now with the way people behave on facebook and twitter (and yes, hacker news), snark, insults and exaggerated outrage are the "new normal" for non-business written communication.

The younger generations haven't known anything different, so part of me wonders if we'll see a shift in face-to-face communication that more closely mirrors how we see people (poorly) behave on social networks, or whether the threat of real physical violence of an in-person confrontation will keep that in check.

I don't know if it's true that face-to-face communication is actually better when you begin to talk about controversial, political subjects. There's a reason why it's been common courtesy not to talk about politics or religion at any large family gathering.

The key word here is “large” I think. It's deeply irrational, but in front of people, discussion usually become a contest to assert one's status among the group, and it's just too hard to “surrender”.

But importantly, face-to-face doesn't do anything to mollify that, which is against what the GP says.

Oh fortunately it does, people don't usually insult each other in real life at family events. Yes people are speaking louder and louder, and ends up using a ton of sophism and Ad hominem but that's it. On Twitter this is what a civil conversation looks like…

It's the speed of information, it's inhuman. Even if the amount of information is the same, it's presented in tiny bits of info that are largely overlapping and with no depth. There is no end to the list of factoids, so people never learn to make confident conclusions, so they go with gut feeling.

Good insight! Putting it in that frame, it sounds like encoded data reaching an endpoint in the wrong packet order.

In many of our daily jobs, that would be considered a bug and would result in removal of dependent features, or active reworking until resolution.

Yeah that’s definitely a part of it, I read at one point that the human brain doesn’t develop nuance until a persons late 20s

Also, if you try to say neither side is right on some issue, you'll be called an "enlightened centrist" ironically. Because you know, you're supposed to pick one side and believe they're right on everything, like some sort of school rivalry.

Off-topic story time: A few years back I had a conversation with a friend of mine. I knew we both leaned left on a lot of the same things but this particular day we started talking about politics. Turns out he was a rather devoted democrat. I eventually came around to mentioning my belief that the two-party system was the worst thing about our democracy and that both parties basically exist only to fight each other, which means rationality is by default excluded from US politics.

Wow, he did not like that one bit. I'm pretty sure we would still be speaking today if I just lied and said I was a republican!

Well, I wouldn't stop talking to you for thinking that - if you are a decent person with the attempt to defend your points, I wouldn't want to sever that for a single misunderstanding or disagreement.

To move off-topic, it is infuriating that people think the Democratic party (and the people who vote for that party) are effectively the same in their stated policy goals as the Republican Party.

I believe the two party system is awful, and I think the need for large reforms of our voting systems to something (anything) other than first-past-the-post is critical. Golly Gee, which party is advancing infrastructural changes to voting and districting for the advancement of democracy?

Two party system is bad. Democratic party has its own issues of political machinery and infighting. ALSO they are objectively a hell of a lot more pro-democracy and pro-America than the Republican party.

It always amuses me how the prevailing criticism of moderates or centrists is always some compliment levied in a scathing tone. Those dastardly centrists, always waiting for conclusive information before jumping to conclusions!

>Those dastardly centrists, always waiting for conclusive information before jumping to conclusions!

The problem isn't that they are waiting for conclusive information -but that they pick "both sides" out of moral cowardliness. When people accuse them of "both sides" it's cowardice that they're being accused of.

Cowardice aside, Centrists and Moderates are not people who are sitting on the sidelines carefully weighing the issues.

Far from it!

It would be useful to do some reading on who and what "Centrists" really are about:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-moderate-middle-is-...

https://novaramedia.com/2019/12/11/the-centrist-delusion-mid...

https://www.vox.com/2014/7/8/5878293/lets-stop-using-the-wor...

It’s not cowardice, it’s that centrists or moderates are looking at issues rather than teams, so on some issues they’ll vote Republican and others Democrat. But partisans don’t understand the concept of “trying to do what’s best for one’s country”, so they can only understand this as “fear of committing to a team”.

It is cowardice when it's used as an excuse to not commit to a stand on an issue, and a lot of people do take issue with that.

But this is a strawman. There’s no evidence that any significant portion of centrists are so motivated.

> Those dastardly centrists, always waiting for conclusive information before jumping to conclusions!

While it is appealing to believe that moderates/centrists really did look at all available data and came to a principled conclusion from first principles, I somehow doubt that that is the case.

That’s not necessary. Centrism and moderation are justified merely by a lack of evidence. E.g., I don’t know enough so it’s imprudent to make a drastic change in either direction.

The moon is made of cheese, agreed?

I'm either too smart or not smart enough to understand your quip.

The average person does not have enough evidence to refute that the moon is not made of cheese. That does not mean one should hear out a lunarcheesist.

My argument is that we shouldn’t make drastic changes without ample evidence. Your moon cheese analogy doesn’t address this at all.

You should still use common sense to determine courses of action when you don't have evidence.

Absolutely, common sense is almost always avoiding drastic, often absurd changes (e.g., abolishing police). You might say that common sense is fundamentally a moderate position.

Another ultimate irony is that people who can see part of the problem will say "it's always the other side that polarizes things" without seeing that this makes the problem.

> I’ve run into this problem with people who use a lot of twitter. They would keep asking me to “state my position”, and also demand it to be about 1 sentence long. The problem being…I don’t usually have a “position”, but rather I have a set of things which haven’t yet been proven false.

It's like choosing between two bad options at a restaurant. Then you suggest going to a completely different restaurant and all you get is blank stares, like you suggested something they can't imagine. Quite like the "NPC" meme that was deemed so "problematic"

Reminds me of Yann LeCun quitting Twitter [0] after basically getting mobbed by "AI ethicists" (you'll recognize some names in the article...). Yann, of course, responded with explanations and technical expertise but realized at some point he was battling with a non-technical crowd that were trying to turn the conversation into identity politics.

[0] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...

I forwarded that article to someone and they pointed out that much of it could also apply to the right -- particularly in the anti-vax, anti-mask, stop the steal segments.

> Debate and conversation, especially when they rely upon reason, rationality, science, evidence, epistemic adequacy, and other Enlightenment-based tools of persuasion are the very thing they think produced injustice in the world in the first place. Those are not their methods and they reject them. Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience [...]

Having seen much of the education system focus in the past on writing how you "feel" about a subject rather than "evidence based" writing (thank goodness for common core!)... I'm not surprised.

> writing how you "feel" about a subject rather than "evidence based" writing

... but ... these are both important. a healthy human mind has and needs both. it's important to look at data, evidence, useful models, and then it's also very important to accept that sometimes (and nowadays many times!) it conflicts with our gut instinct, this makes us feel frustrated, and yeah, we need to learn to process this.

one without the other is either complete dogmatic rage/jihad or literally just mindless computation ("fact finding").

On a few occasions, I have quit interesting arguments with people I respect, because it was in public Facebook comments and I could feel (and see, via reactions) the baying crowds forming camps on either side. And sure, hypothetically it could go to PMs, but these weren't close friends. "Gladiatorial" is exactly the kind of feeling I get from it.

I don't think messageboards used to be this way before the proliferation of 'share' buttons and engagement-tracking algorithms. In the old days, people had to choose based on the thread title whether they wanted to read it. Today, Facebook notifies you: Trevor and Dan are going at it again.

Unfortunately I'm finding this sort of us-vs-them mentality starting to creep up even around HN, even though the guidelines suggest to assume good faith.

It's particularly weird when you play devil's advocate on some topic (which is really just a tool to promote evaluating topics from a different perspective) and people start jumping at you with pitchforks assuming you're "against" them.

Last year, some thinktanks were saying that Trump giving voice to far-right was dangerous precisely because it shifted narratives in ways that extremists from both sides would start to feel validated and come out of the woodwork, and now here we are. I've read about a similar trend regarding portrayal of China in western media and their sentiment towards us in return. Frankly it's everywhere now.

On the one hand we try to teach our kids that calling each other names and escalating fights leads nowhere, but then we turn around to look at social media and it feels like people never got that memo themselves. I'm always trying to avoid falling into that trap. A quote from Dalai Lama that always stuck with me is "I'd rather be kind than right, you can always be kind". There's a bunch of other similar quotes, and it's interesting that a lot of them are about self-improvement (ironically, self-improvement the same spiritual aspect that people criticize "religious" zealots for ditching nowadays)

That's a great quote. For me, it usually ends up that I need to just be silent and ask questions. And yet more and more, people are forcing an opinion, essentially taking the "If you're not with us, you're against us" stance, regardless of if I agree or disagree or how much I validate their own thought process.

Just pondering, why are people not allowed to keep their opinions to themselves now, especially if they are doing so to be kind to the other person? My own opinion is often that the reality of people and situations is nuanced, and blanket policies don't work at all levels. But even that is an unacceptable position in peoples' eyes.

HN is the most good-faith forum I visit. I think there is some allergy to centrism/both-sides-ism because there are so many trolls on other forums trying to subvert true discussion, by slipping in one centrist/contrarian viewpoint then use that as a wedge to support all their other stances.

> creep up even around HN It's happening in this very thread!

I still think you can have good discussions, but you have to enforce the Chattenham house rule and be willing to boot anybody who breaks it. With the rule in place, and perhaps a moderator, it is very hard to play politics and very easy to learn something.

With a chaotic neutral AI, optimized for engagement (Twitter), you can only have conflict.

That "AI" is more like a mythical demon that feeds off anger, so it does everything it can to create that anger.

You got to deal with them the same way you deal with a herd of Buffalo. As long as the herd is running in circles, its not going to run of a cliff or into the sea.

So keep them running in circles and stay out of the center.

Stone age man knew how to do that, so I am quite confident we will survive Twitter and the stampeding herds it generates.

> Discourse is no longer a tool we use to approach a better mutual understanding, it’s a gladiator match where there has to be a loser and a winner.

This is affecting all parts of our culture.

High school debate is starting to see the same sort of techniques seen in online discourse: Winning at all costs. Which leads to talking over people, steamrolling, shouting matches, the gish-gallop.

Every discussion on the internet is an argument and it is automatically treated that way by now.

Sometime if you write a response to an answer and agree with it, the original author still justifies himself because it is perceived as a counter argument. Happens more on certain platforms than on others.

> they’ll accuse me [...]

Because they are afraid. They need this rigidity to feel safe and another symptom is becoming an authoritarian mind. A simple image of an enemy helps too.

An interesting site, and I don't want to reject it out of hand, but I find it humorous that a site run almost entirely by one person, and whose author claims to be a "leading expert" on CRT and thus rejects it, and which hosts articles entirely deriding the "woke" and "CRT" movements, claims to be apolitical and open-minded in nature.

Probably I am lucky but I don't meet a lot of people who use Twitter outside Twitter.

I believe that Twitter is not a cultural influencer as much as a product used by people who already have a rather shallow philosophy. So I do not buy into the cultural decadence argument since they fail to convince me that Twitter-like media significantly influence people behavior.

What do you make of academia’s complete embrace of Twitter?

Just an anecdote, but on Friday I posted a tweet about a research paper we did jointly with University. Both the main researcher (post-doc) and the professor we cooperated with do not have twitter accounts.

Is there a stat somewhere about how many academics use twitter?

I don't know, I think Trump was Twitter incarnate. It's the ideal platform him: shallow philosophy represented in short, attention grabbing snippets. Naturally, it's where he first grew into popularity as a political figure.

One can be again EVMs without holding the position that they were used to transfer votes to Biden illegally and stole the election from Trump. Was that your position? Did you try stating that?

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