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Comment by abvdasker | Hacker News Reader

I'll risk making this a partisan issue and say the anti-intellectual and anti-science bent seems increasingly prevalent among Republicans like Mike Parson and their constituencies. One of the most shocking statistics I've seen recently is the Pew poll which shows that in the space of 2 years Republican attitudes about higher education saw a 20-point swing such that that most Republican voters now believe college is net detrimental to society. To me the attacks on journalism, technology and science feel like part of a larger trend, especially given the COVID denialism we've seen.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/08/19/the-gro...

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Please do not take HN threads into flamewar, including partisan flamewar. We got intense flamewar hell as a direct result of what you posted, and that's not what this site is for—regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You might want to update the guidelines (or your reaction to these types of situations) to be consistent, dang.

> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

This scenario clearly meets those criteria.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

The OP specifically said he wanted to have an intellectual discussion about how anti-intellectuality has recently become a prevalent issue among a particular political party, something of interest and concern to all people, regardless of country or political affiliation. I can't think of a more extenuating circumstance, especially with the disturbing historical precedents we've seen in the last century around this issue, but it's disappointing to see that you disagree.

You are trampling curiosity in the name of avoiding trampling curiosity.

(Things like this are probably better suited to email. Dan’s team is quite responsive.)

My feeling is that Dan’s decision here is conclusive proof that HN’s mod team is unbiased. I was genuinely concerned that this thread wouldn’t be penalized, because it was political flamewar dressed up as intellectual conversation. It was delightful to see HN’s spirit shine through in spite of political divisions.

Curiosity is a fragile thing. The original comment was entirely ineffective at fostering curiosity, and it’s interesting to analyze why. I think framing has a lot to do with it. There was no attempt made at asking questions, for example. Asking questions in earnest is the hallmark of curiosity.

I don’t think that broadcasting personal feelings to a wide audience was necessary to foster curiosity, either. Quite the opposite: it detracts from the discussion. It’s tricky to express feelings in a way that isn’t divisive, and it’s important for HN comments to become more substantive as the topic becomes more heated.

And you’d be hard-pressed to disagree that the topic became heated, I think. It was a lot match in a gas-filled room, and the explosive subthread was an entirely predictable, deterministic outcome.

Your comment is a bit too polemical for me not to feel that ideological passion is driving it, but I can see where you're coming from, because the GP wasn't really written in the flamewar style. Its tone wasn't flamebait. Nonetheless, the content was. It was the sort of comment that feels perfectly objective and neutral to people who already agree with it—but only to those.

There's one non-obvious link in the moderation logic here, which might help to explain a bit. We don't really moderate comments—we moderate subthreads [1]. In this case I was swayed by the fact that the subthread was 350 posts of especially-wretched flamewar hell.

I often put it this way: the value of an HN comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). This is a weird idea at first—it was to me, at least—because how can I be responsible for what other people do? But when the genre is conversation, and it's relatively predictable how people will react, it's my (i.e. each of our) responsibility not to do things that will predictably generate poor conversation. Conversation is a dance [2]. We need to take the other into account, regardless of how right we are or feel we are. It's not really about being right; there are more important things.

For those of us who tend to think of ourselves as atoms, this is hard to learn, especially because internet posts feel like atomic operations. They're not, though—they're molecular, and the threads are the molecules. To be a good atom, you need to take into account what ions are floating nearby and thus what molecules are likely to form out of what you post. It's not that hard to know this—the dynamics are relatively predictable.

[1] Coincidentally I wrote about this yesterday, if anyone wants more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28932445

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162386

I don't think that's true. We can see in the comments that there was almost no useful discussion. It just immediately devolved into personal attacks with tons of upvotes.

It's the southern strategy at work. It's not about what is true or what is morally right. It's about not letting *the other team* get any wins. This is why they needed to pretend COVID wasn't a big deal, because otherwise you are admitting that *the other team* was right.

That’s not what the southern strategy was. It was a cynical ploy by Republicans to court racist Democratic voters in the south who were unhappy with the civil rights bill. It worked and they switched to the Republican party, which realigned the ideological tilt of American politics.

Not letting the other team get any wins will be known as The McConnell Strategy in the history books, as he has practiced a policy of complete obstruction while in the senate.

> Not letting the other team get any wins will be known as The McConnell Strategy in the history books...

Absolutely right. He is Lucy with the football to the Democrats' Charlie Brown.

And he's just so damn good at it too.

That's not completely true. For example, the rationale behind the war on drugs (Nixon era and revived by Reagan, long before McConnell) was not about truth or moral virtue.

That appears to be everyone's strategy.

Trump had a win on getting covid vaccines made

And another one on setting a timeline for getting out of Afghanistan

His administration wasn't very good at running a government, but they still had a couple wins

Afghanistan is more complex, but I agree about the vaccines. But interestingly he can’t capitalize on it, because his fans are so locked into the anti-vax stance. He got booed by his own fans at a rally when he said he was vaccinated!

Please don't make this a partisan issue. I live in Missouri. I've voted for Republicans in the past. You're alienating people like me from being on your side.

It doesn't matter that you're probably right. It comes across as you posting this to make yourself feel good, and holy moly the sense of superiority from your camp needs a chill pill.

Parson is evil. I'll be doing my duty as a citizen and trying to vote him out of office. But none of this was anti-science, nor did it have anything to do with COVID, and you've brought up both.

> You're alienating people like me from being on your side.

On one side are the computer scientists and engineers who understand the nature of the problem. On the other side are ignorant and/or dishonest actors out to avoid being embarrassed.

It's all on you if you pick the wrong one out of loyalty to a political party.

It's okay for people to vote D on some issues and R on some other issues. That's pretty much an inevitability for any person with diverse views in a two-party system.

Besides, at the end of the day, how different are the two sides? One party wants to prosecute a reporter who found a site vulnerability, and the other party wants to prosecute the man who exposed the world to the dragnet surveillance being conducted by the NSA.

> and the other party wants to prosecute the man who exposed the world to the dragnet surveillance being conducted by the NSA.

I'm pretty sure both parties want that. Any successful system will work to perpetuate itself.

Show me a majority of democratic leaders wanting Ranked Voting, and I have a bridge to sell you, for example.

Democrats and Republican leadership *want* the "good v evil" dichotomy of their party versus the other.

What does ranked voting have to do with Snowden?

Sorry, too many threads here and I missed this one. I was specifically thinking about how the two parties love keeping themselves around, rather than helping the will of the people get through.

Come on. The two situations are entirely different.

One side is trying to prosecute a journalist who clicked view source and embarrassed an incompetent IT department. There was never any law broken under any remotely plausible legal theory.

The other side is trying to prosecute someone who violated their NDA to not disclose classified info. Now, you might think what he did was a net positive (I certainly do), but on the other hand it is objectively illegal. The DOJ could use their discretion and drop it, but they don't have to.

> One party wants to prosecute a reporter who found a site vulnerability, and both parties wants to prosecute the man who exposed the world to the dragnet surveillance being conducted by the NSA.

FTFY, unless you think Rs have any interest in dropping charges against Snowden. So even in your own examples, one party clearly has the upper hand, and it's not R.

> On one side are the computer scientists and engineers who understand the nature of the problem. On the other side are ignorant and/or dishonest actors out to avoid being embarrassed. It's all on you if you pick the wrong one out of loyalty to a political party.

A two party system has basically set this up to occur.

I can’t see that it could ever be changed, but it’s utterly toxic.

Both sides could accept intellectualism like they accept capitalism? There is nothing that says each party needs to take an opposing view on literally every topic. Rs and Ds like to fight all day in the media, but there is plenty of things concerning money and control that they will happily pass without public debate.

>On one side are the computer scientists and engineers who understand the nature of the problem

There are a hell of a lot of computer scientists and engineers who vote republican, certainty not a majority but definitely a large enough minority you can't discount them. They just don't broadcast it for reasons that should be obvious to anyone reading these comments.

At this point, voting for Republican candidates means supporting an institution that has given up on Democratic norms and is clearly aiming at an authoritarian takeover of the government of the United States.

Up until about 5 years ago I would agree that being even-handed on political matters is appropriate. But when one political party has gone completely mad with lust for power and has given up on science and rationality, how you vote is no longer just a political matter. The threat the Republican Party poses to the country and the world is existential.

And yes, there are crazies on the left, but no, they are nowhere near the threat posed by the GOP. The difference is several orders of magnitude.

And yes, I know this thread skirts the HN guidelines. I certainly don't want this to become another Cesspool of partisan flame Wars.

There needs to be another Forum that somewhere between Hacker News and reddit, moderated but with a relatively open set of subjects that include the impact technology has on society

If you believe Donald Trump gave up on democratic norms and was "aiming [for] an authoritarian takeover," then surely you must recognize that it was Republicans like Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Brad Raffensperger, Stephen Riche, and others who stopped him... right?

Yes, and the big guy has incessantly gone after each one you mention, hoping to drum them out of the party. I wonder what his motivation is...

Even now, the few who voted to impeach over Jan 6 are cowed and quiet. Mitt Romney just voted against the Manchin-approved compromise voting rights bill.

These cowards are all afraid of their shadows. It's an incredible, once-per-century show of absolute cowardice and submission to a strongman.

The US has a decent shot of going the way of Turkey, Hungary, and Venezuela. The elected GOP senators and congresspeople are 100% to blame. They are sad, sorry, craven and ineffectual people.

There's been, for a long time, an intra-party struggle between right-wing populist insurgents and establishment/institutionalists since Newt Gingrich. It was a slow process, but over time it seems the former are winning, the most obvious first sign was the McCain-Palin ticket (Palin being the populist). The scene as increasingly been victorious for the insurgents. Those guys you are pointing out are hanging on by their fingernails.

They're embarrassed to be seen supporting candidates that are so transparently anti-science, anti-education and anti-reason?

All three of those labels can easily be applied to both major parties, just with different examples.

Conservatives tend to not speak up because the hyperbolic vitriol has gotten out of hand.

they could easily find a social circle and likely a workplace too where their views are accepted or even celebrated. why don't they?

"Run a tech company that employs conservatives" is not a business plan. It isn't easy to know what kind of bubble you are getting into until it is too late.

OTOH, tech conservatives tend to be more libertarian than socially conservative, so (massive generalization here) tend to prefer to work at work and do politics elsewhere.

"Celebrating" political positions is such a foreign concept to me that I dont even know where to begin with that. Left or right, I would probably avoid it.

Yeah, hi from the peanut gallery. I vote R because they support some things I value. I just don't talk about it at work, because I'm not suicidal.

I don’t know how they vote or if they identify with any parties, but there is a disturbing, very patriarchal strain of neo-feudalism I have encountered in some tech circles — basically the idea that we need to return to a time of lords and serfs.

Of course I have found that when pressed, those who hold this philosophy seem to picture themselves as the lords in this fantasy utopia. Maybe these are just power fantasies, but some of them seem very serious about it (Curtis Yarvin is probably the most notable of the bunch)

I was really into early hacker and BBS culture in the 90s, and this point of view was rare to nonexistent. There was a lot of teen and young adult angst and egotism but that’s not unusual. It wasn’t ideological and the ideas tended to be either left or libertarian.

I would have called myself a libertarian back then but that was back when words meant things, or at least more than they do now. I stopped using the term when the fascists took it over.

It’s popular in some left leaning circles and particularly among people who did not live through that era to claim that libertarianism and cyberculture was always like this. It wasn’t. There was a mass conversion event around the early 20-teens that sort of coincided with Gamergate (not sure how important GG was but that was the era). I’d say a large proportion of an entire generation of younger “hacker” types were mass converted to fascism or neoreaction. Racism also made a massive comeback.

I still don’t fully understand it. The LessWrong orbit seems to be a major factor. I never found that whole circle particularly interesting, but a lot of people sure did.

Techbro libertarians are the worst - the people who think that because some can be successful, anyone who is disadvantaged is so because of personal failings and is underserving of help. Naturally this leads to anti-democratic leanings to protect their wealth.

See Peter Thiel: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

The freedom he desires is the freedom to use his privilege to oppress others.

On one side are the computer scientists and engineers who understand the nature of the problem.

Which includes Republicans: https://twitter.com/tonylovasco/status/1448672694065668105

If you want to make scientific ignorance a political issue, we can discuss nuclear power, GMOs, unreasonable COVID restrictions, and plenty more.

> we can discuss nuclear power, GMOs, unreasonable COVID restrictions

If you want to discuss those things, it's worth first pointing out that the US had the worst Covid death toll of the G7 countries[0] and that red states had higher case and death rates than blue states[1].

Also, it's possible to accept the science of nuclear power and GMOs while still not trusting large corporations to exercise sufficient care and restraint when given control over nuclear material and life itself, especially when the government agencies ultimately responsible for regulating those technologies are half the time appointed by a party that doesn't believe in regulations or government.

[0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/us-death-rate-worse-brita...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/10/politics/covid-cases-deat...

sigh

Kansas City native here.

I vote democratic and agree with the comment you are replying to.

there is one data point that this isnt a partisan issue, but a rather non-partisan one involving an elected official.

Go Tom Brady, give the Buccs another win and put some dirt in Maholmes' eye.

Do you expect people to pretend the trend isn't happening in order to comfort you? What does it say about your own values that they are so loosely held that you'd sacrifice them out of contempt like this?

> Do you expect people to pretend the trend isn't happening in order to comfort you?

This is a strawman. The parent was saying that in order to have an effect and convince people, you shouldnt alienate them. You can do this without lying or ignoring things that are happening. In fact, the people you're most likely able to convince are people in the middle and by alienating them you're actually causing the trend that you're denouncing.

> What does it say about your own values that they are so loosely held that you'd sacrifice them out of contempt like this?

This is just a straight ad hominem. I thought we were supposed to be above these sorts of things on hn.

Republicans have been trying to hold Democrats to a higher standard for 40 years, all the while playing low ball ... it has been a GREAT strategy for them that is nearing end game (courts stacked, gerrymandering, control of state houses, etc)

The "other side" has ZERO capacity/will/desire to ACTUALLY engage in meaningful dialog , but sole goal is to "win" no matter what the cost.

There is no logical appeal that can sway the state-level propaganda and brainwashing that billions have been spent on over the last 40 years.

Anyone who thinks only one of the two sides refuses to engage in meaningful dialog makes me think they have drunk far too much Kol-Aid from on side or the other. The fact of the matter is that nether side has tried to engage in reasonable dialog and exploration of the other sides views because it's apparently not good politics to due so. Both side's take a few random snapshots from extremists on twitter and try to paint the entire other side with that brush despite there being much more common ground between voters of the two camps. A significant proportion of "politically engaged" democrats think that half our country are literally Nazis and many "politically engaged" republicans have equally ridiculous caricatures about the average dem voter.

But that's what he's asking, why is it okay to avoid alienating people at the cost of the truth?

Thank You! As a younger person it is so difficult to comprehend the massive amount of wisdom and intelligence in this community, who actively converse almost exclusively in logical fallacies, and it is never referenced! Your comment made me feel like this is not a crazy observation.

We don’t live in a binary world where our only two choices are:

1. Respond one single way to events

2. Ignore events

There are lots of ways to express concern that are less alienating.

> Do you expect people to pretend the trend isn't happening in order to comfort you?

There are plenty of trends happening on the "other side" which are also veritably nuts, so I don't find this to be a very compelling argument. The ad hominem doesn't help, either.

This is called “whataboutism”.

All these "your side/my side" sideism stuff is going to destroy everything.

No one can have any nuanced opinion without all of their individuality being discarded and all weight being given to the party they vote for. It seems to me that the party they vote for is just an ephemeral label and really doesn't suffice in extrapolating much. We should stop contextualizing all conversations on the political affiliation of people.

I'll take your snowflake of nuanced positions on every issue, and bet on tribalism and dumbed-down sound bytes to win every time

"Whataboutism" is an informal fallacy that most non-technical folks (as in, not logicians) mis-invoke, like almost all other informal fallacies. My argument is not even remotely whataboutism. In fact, it can be even formulated without addressing the "other side" at all: you're making a category error by going from general (party trends) to particular (individual voters).

It's simply a bad argument. I only brought up the "other side" to help analogize it, my apologies if it confused things.

I can’t reply with emojis, so imagine this comment is just the eye roll emoji.

I'm trying to be as charitable, polite, and thoughtful as possible with my replies. It's a real shame that HN is slowly devolving into reddit.

So polite but still ready to insinuate other people are incapable of making a correct assertion because they are non-technical.

To me it’s just painfully obvious you think very highly of yourself.

> Do you expect people to pretend the trend isn't happening in order to comfort you? What does it say about your own values that they are so loosely held that you'd sacrifice them out of contempt like this?

And now we’ve come full circle. Using “whataboutism” to avoid conversations about topics is a problem. Whether you’re using it to deflect to a different topic or using it as an excuse to avoid talking about a topic altogether. Someone could argue your comment is the latter and is just as harmful.

But I think most of that is a limitation of text/internet communication that people don’t consciously notice. It’s much easier to have nuance in an in-person conversation.

Yes, I was very impressed by the nuance exhibited through in-person communication on January 6th

I don’t follow the logic. Saying something is whataboutism isn’t recursive.

There are two parties and you have to pick one. If the argument is that trends on the republican side are so insane you must vote democrat, it's certainly not whataboutism to argue there are also similarly insane trends on the democratic side... you can disagree but you can't honestly call it whataboutism.

> There are two parties and you have to pick one.

Well that’s certainly a dishonest premise.

Just a note: right-wing conservatives don't see "whataboutism" to be a fallacy.

>You're alienating people like me from being on your side.

You're alienating yourself by following reactionary impulses in response to true statements.

I'm also honesty not sure how true this theory of reaction is generally. I'm sure it's true for some, but in many cases it functions as a rhetorical strategy to put people on the defensive who are making legitimate criticisms.

>But none of this was anti-science, nor did it have anything to do with COVID, and you've brought up both.

It's anti-intellectual, and therefore a pertinent comparison, and they used the term anti intellectual and covered all the necessary bases. The cultural and social forces driving both are the same, and here, again, I feel like saying "don't talk about this because it alienates me" is just a rhetorical strategy to put people on the defensive without addressing the merits of what they are saying.

You're making it about sides. Facts are not one sided. If someone speaking truth makes you feel bothered, that's your problem, not theirs. We should be able to speak to one another without getting emotional about which team someone aligns with.

Republicans are fostering anti-intellectualism which is (in fact) anti-science. From my perspective you'd be alienating yourself out of spite. This goes for Democrats or any political party.

The problem is that democrats are also fostering anti-science anti-intellectualism.

Which side is worse is a matter of opinion. Personally I think they are both dangerous and won’t identify myself with either party as a result.

The result is that there is no point in leveling this accusation as part of a debate about something substantive, unless you just want to derail the conversation into a meaningless partisan bashing match.

We're still doing the "they're two sides of the same coin" thing in 2021, eh?

Group think is a hell of a drug in 2021, eh?

Care to explain?

Obviously that doesn’t reflect what I actually said, so no.

Refusing to hold people accountable enables the rule breakers. You have to decide which party is actually telling more damaging lies, taking more damaging actions, or doing more good, and act accordingly. Because some person who votes for Democrats somewhere said vaccines turn people into alligators doesn't balance out the strong majority of the Republican Party who deny anthropogenic climate change, or at least oppose doing anything about it. Democrats advocating covid measures of limited efficacy aren't balanced out by Republicans saying whether or not to be a disease vector is a personal choice.

Flawed opinions are not all of equal import. Representatives of a political party are not all of equal import. You have to actually evaluate the evidence and act accordingly, even if this puts you on the outs with friends, family, and co-workers.

This all being said, I think the prime driver of partisanship is not analyses of truth or impact but social connections. People are afraid to be exiled from the community they depend on -- their friends, family, co-workers, co-religionists, doctor, grocer, plumber, etc. Just as you can tell a lie more convincingly if you believe it, you can simulate partisan allegiance best by enacting it. If you are going to be ridden out of town on a rail if you are thought to have voted for a Democrat/Republican, then it isn't sufficient to say you voted as the mob prefers; you have to do it. The mob knows this. That's what the Second Amendment has come to be about: having guns to scare your neighbors over to your side. Better to be with the bully than against him.

Or, you could just not base your thinking on choosing a side which is ‘the lesser of two evils’ to be your savior, and recognize that the behaviors are a problem rather than the team.

It seems you are expressing two ideas which are in conflict. The "lesser of two evils" argument is precisely about choosing "behavior" (really results or goals) over choosing a team. But I'll give it a go anyway.

I am assuming you have to vote or abstain from voting. Then your choice is whether you are trying to achieve changes in the world or achieve a certain self image. If you are trying to achieve changes in the world, and the decision is close, you throw your weight behind the better side. If you are trying to achieve a certain self image, you vote for your ideal candidate whatever is at stake and whatever the balance between the two candidates that have an actual chance of gaining power. Or you abstain and remain unsullied by whatever evil taints each candidate.

Voting behavior is quite distinct from commenting online, or identifying with a particular side. Why are you talking about voting now?

As for ‘the lesser of two evils’:

> You have to decide which party is actually telling more damaging lies, taking more damaging actions, or doing more good, and act accordingly.

This is you telling us we have to make that choice.

Yes, you have to make that choice. That was my point: choose better over worse.

The "more damaging lies" part is just trying not to be too rosy-eyed about any particular party. Your choices are imperfect, but that's the world we live in.

ETA In case it was unclear, I think political behavior aimed at your self image is vanity and thus self-defeating. Even if your chief goal is thinking better of yourself or getting others to think better of you, forsaking a choice to do good for the world at large in the interest of your own vanity will not achieve your goal. If you want a better image, you should still choose better over worse, not pretty and pointless over ugly and effective.

It’s clear what you think, it’s just not relevant to the comment you replied to.

When you vote, you are forced to make a choice between parties. Nothing forces you to identify with a side when it comes to discussing who is anti-science or not.

> Which side is worse is a matter of opinion.

What perspectives do you see coming from the Democrat side that have the same mortality rate as vaccine refusal? (Or are there indicators you give equal/greater significance than mortality?)

Why is this question relevant? Anti-science views are anti-science regardless of the short term mortality rate you can attach to them or who is propagating them.

It's relevant because it would put some substance behind the "both sides do it" claim.

People commonly make this false equivalence, but as of 2021 it's fair to observe that it's just unequivocally false with respect to the question of respect for scientific consensus. If a lot of republicans disregard science (e.g. believe incorrect things about covid) and a few democrats do it (e.g. believing incorrect things about nuclear safety), people take these unequal examples and proceed claim it means both sides are the same, and believe that they are expressing a sophisticated position.

It's precisely this kind of illiteracy in the ability to assess the relative merits of differently weighted examples that makes the false equivalence possible. This which is why demands for substantiation are relevant and necessary.

> People commonly make this false equivalence, but as of 2021 it's fair to observe that it's just unequivocally false with respect to the question of respect for scientific consensus. If a lot of republicans disregard science (e.g. believe incorrect things about covid) and a few democrats do it (e.g. believing incorrect things about nuclear safety), people take these unequal examples and proceed claim it means both sides are the same, and believe that they are expressing a sophisticated position.

I guess you’re arguing with ‘people’ then.

You might want to look into some of the other anti-science ideas strongly propagated by democrats. You don’t seem to have a good inventory. It’s not limited to minor false beliefs about nuclear safety. Consider the belief that there is no such thing as biological sex, for example.

>I guess you’re arguing with ‘people’ then.

I'm specifically and directly responding to your question of why we should be in the business of judging the relative merits of different claims, and I elaborated by explaining problems with false balance.

Edit, since I can't reply: parent commenter asked "What perspectives do you see coming from the Democrat side that have the same mortality rate as vaccine refusal? "and you replied "why is this question relevant" and I explained why. So I was indeed directly responding to you, despite your continued protestations to the contrary. Insisting that I wasn't being responsive to you is bordering on ridiculous.

> Consider the belief that there is no such thing as biological sex, for example.

I'm pretty comfortable dismissing this out of hand.

Edit: and I'm not missing the point, I understand the role you believe it plays in the logical structure of equating democrats to republicans. I understand that you're invoking the subject of gender and saying it's an example of Democrats being estranged from scientific consensus in a way that's comparable to Republicans being estranged from scientific consensus on covid. And it's at this point in the conversation where I'm no longer attempting to engage with you, and I instead direct my comments to others reading this thread on understanding what false equivalences look like.

I was initially focused on failures to accurately compare differently weighted examples. But there's a different category of false equivalence, where people confidently invoke a completely non-existent scientific consensus. The invocation of gender falls into that category.

> responding to your question of why we should be in the business of judging the relative merits of different claims,

That’s not a question I asked.

> and I elaborated by explaining problems with false balance.

Which is why this elaboration isn’t relevant.

>> Consider the belief that there is no such thing as biological sex, for example.

> I'm pretty comfortable dismissing this out of hand.

You seem to be missing the point that it is a common anti-science belief promoted by democrats.

As far as I can see you are just advocating for partisanship. That’s a common position to take, and you are welcome to it.

Sure does seem like you don’t have any examples to back up the assertion that democrats are equally anti-intellectual.

If you make that assertion, you can’t be upset when people ask for examples or evidence. It’s extremely relevant to the (as of yet) unsupported argument you made.

Nobody is upset, nobody asked for evidence, and nobody claimed anyone was ‘equally’ anti-intellectual.

It really doesn’t seem clear what you think you are responding to.

There aren't sides! I'm not on your side, I don't even know you. No one here owes you anything.

You're saying "you must woo me to do the right thing" and it's complete garbage (you've already admitted OP is "probably right"). If you're going to vote out of spite because people aren't "taking a chill pill" you can go pound sand. I'm tired of this "you didn't tell me in the perfect way, so I'm right and you're wrong" reductive nonsense.

Spoiler alert: there is no perfect way to tell them, that’s the point.

Right! that's what is so tiring about it. Maybe some people legitimately feel the way OP does, but more often than not it's just the ever-moving goalpost. It's impossible to tell the difference until you've wasted all your time.

Once the goalposts are moved back to the point where you're practically begging, they'll turn around and try to assert dominance by calling you weak for trying to reason with them like a perosn.

> Please don't make this a partisan issue.

It is a partisan issue though. Republicans across the United States are largely pushing to reject science and schooling and are increasingly pushing through laws and changes that make the populace dumber, and more easily controllable.

You know this is happening, yet you still voted for republicans in the past.

It's your own fault if you continue to do so even in the face of overwhelming evidence that this is destroying America.

Whether or not you feel alienated is no concern, your feelings don't matter here, and the fact that you are feeling alienated means you have the capacity to change, because the people that keep voting against intellectualism don't feel alienated, they feel emboldened when someone calls them out, they feel pride in knowing they are doing something "the left hates me for", even if that something is destroying America in the process.

This is literally the definition of an anti-science attitude from a camp that has demonstrated anti-science and anti-intellectual attitudes on a plethora of subjects for the last several years but even going as far back as 20-30 years ago. Heck Regan planted the seeds of anti-intellectualism in the (R) party decades ago and they have done nothing but take hold and flourish.

Alienation is exactly the type of thing one should use to combat this. Rationally minded people in the (R) camp SHOULD feel alienated by their intellectual peers when they spew anti-intellectual rhetoric and pass/support anti-intellectual policies or willingly associate, without protest, with people or groups known for doing so. You can't flip the script and say you feel alienated by your intellectual peers (HN) for not jumping with you onto the anti-intellectual band-wagon and/or for calling systemic anti-intellectualism out for what it is. Doing so would be as ridiculous as arguing that you find same-sex couples alienating/offensive/triggering because they tread on your precious sensibilities as an anti-LGBT person. In that scenario, you should feel alienated, because that is the primary societal force that will pressure you into recanting being an anti-LGBT person. Intellectuals are alienating you because they want you to get rid of the rest of your bad opinions, not just the select few you have already shed, before you can take your place at the table.

Three things:

1.) This is an attack against a type of security researcher. Attacks against researchers are always anti-science.

2.) You’ve admitted to feeling alienated by truth. You might want to think that over and ask yourself some questions. That’s genuinely sad.

3.) If the truth genuinely alienates you, I don’t care about you or your feelings.

>Attacks against researchers are always anti-science.

that's blatantly untrue. If a researcher is malicious, attacking their person is not anti-science.

I don't think this is true. If a scientist follows the methodology correctly, they are not malicious. And if they are not following the scientific method, then they are not scientists. The trick is to figure out which self-proclaimed scientists, aren't.

Andrew Wakefield?

My point is that he stopped being a scientist the moment he stopped using scientific method, it just took a while for the rest of the world to realize that.

Ah, so they're only a researcher as long as you want them to be? My point stands, attacking a researcher is not inherently anti-scientific, and attacking their research is... well, it's good science.

No, they are not being researchers the moment they stopped doing research (e.g. by manipulating the results). They can call themselves however they want, until someone calls out their BS. There's a reason why we want to see the methodology used and that the results are reproduced. Questioning a scientist is not an attack, you're actually doing them a favor (I'd like to be told if I'm wrong).

Re-read "anti-science" (a - relatively - minor collateral) with simply "bestial": refusing the value of a basic grasp of the world, and its function as a limiter. ("Bricks are not edible but that is not a valid reason to avoid eating them, when lower drives call". Very many are embracing the false and the absurd as "legitimate": it is just satanic.)

By the way: «voting [that thing] out» is not enough. That thing having held the office is a very horrible incident, and it must be made very clear to all those who were distracted.

This is a bad take. This new breed of Republicans thrive on personal attacks and ignore policy entirely when voting.

Of course it's anti-science. You don't think this governor has advisors that told him the reporter looked at source code that anyone can look at it and it's not hacking?

He's grandstanding for his constituency. Why? Because he knows his constituency won't understand nuance and won't hold him accountable, because he's attacking science, not guns.

> Please don't make this a partisan issue. I live in Missouri. I've voted for Republicans in the past. You're alienating people like me from being on your side.

Every group of humans - indeed, thanks to the central limit theorem, every sufficiently large sampling - is going to be normally distributed and there are going to be folks on either side offset from the mean.

However, that doesn't indicate that the mean isn't interesting or worthwhile to discuss, and isn't representative of the group as a whole.

That’s not what the central limit theorem says, and it’s not and cannot be true in practice.

I was taking humans political opinions as the sum of a sum of independent random variables :) still may have been a bit of flourish, I suppose.

Sorry, still doesn’t mean that the quantity that you’re averaging (position on the left-right political spectrum?) will be normally distributed. In fact, it almost certainly won’t be. But it’s a common error.

Well, thank you for letting me know!

As someone else responded, in the case of United States politics in 2021, it's pretty clear that there is not a normal gaussian distribution of opinions on various matters. I suspect for all the hot-button issues it's extremely bimodal.

> You're alienating people like me from being on your side. It doesn't matter that you're probably right.

You're blaming other people for something that is 100% under your control. If you don't want to accept the truth because you don't like the types of people who share it, that's just spite on your part.

Quit electing people like this.

There are signs WAY before you need to "try to vote him out of office".

“You’re right but don’t say that” is not a persuasive argument.

Hello, tone argument.

Throwing a temper tantrum when someone objectively mentions the ideology of a party - threatening to take your toys out of the sandbox - really doesn't help your case in the "superiority" department.

The reason things are so "partisan" is because of the political extremist actions and policies from your party.

You've broken the site guidelines by calling names. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and without swipes, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.

Edit: it looks like you've been doing this quite a bit, as well as using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's against the guidelines and we ban accounts that do it. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

How is it alienating to point out a trend that's clearly happening? I feel like this is exactly the problem, where refusing to acknowledge the problem is the problem. "Please don't bring these issues up, it's a problem I don't want to deal with".

Are we expected to just pretend like there's not this huge anti-science movement on the Right because your feelings might get hurt? Look at all the anti mask, anti vaccine rhetoric. This isn't ok.

Plenty of problems on the Left too, and we should talk about those too.

Everything good is on my side, everything bad is on the other. How dare you introduce nuance to such a clearly black and white conversation?

This is not really intellectually honest answer.

I really do not understand how it is possible to separate Parson from Republican Party in Missouri? They very very much the same.

It is like saying that Gavin Newsom is something different than Democrats in California.

He's just calling out whats mentioned in the polls. How is that alienating you?

It is absolutely anti-science and anti-intellectual. To prosecute this person relies on destroying a meaningful distinction, which is the distinction between computer hacking and security research. "Why were you poking around the website? Developer Tools? Why were you using Developer Tools?" The governor is saying you should do what the government says rather than thinking for yourself.

I'm sorry you feel that the parent comment has an air of superiority about it. Perhaps you can help some of us out by demonstrating how we can have a more productive conversation about the data and the graphs in the cited poll. Can you give an example of how you'd like the poll discussed? And I'm honestly asking here, btw, for the sake of the quality of discussion.

I grew up and spent some of my adult life in Missouri. I interacted with folks in the Missouri GOP quite a lot in the mid-naughts and early 2010s. Lots of GOP state rep staffers, some state reps, some state-wide candidates who have been oscillating in and out of politics in the years since, etc. I even had a few long meals with Eric Greitens way back in the day when everyone knew he was going to run for something but he was still playing Veteran Charity Organizer and denying any intention to run.

(Actually, I always pegged Eric for a moderate/conservative Democrat, but wasn't surprised to see him play the game he played given that his defining characteristic was always his careerism/ambition. I even mentioned after one of those meals that he'd probably prefer to run as a Dem but will definitely be running on the GOP ticket because he cares more about power and prestige than anything else & anyone with a brain knew running as a Dem in any statewide race in Missouri was a dead end. Actually, totally independent of this conversation, Eric is actually a really interesting case study in coalition politics; his resignation was as much about him snubbing folks with appointments than his sex scandal per se. Anyways.)

My interactions with folks in MOGOP back then scared the hell out of me. I could see the party coalescing around a pretty dark sort of nihilism. And not even really in terms of policy per se. It's the individual people, divorced of their politics, that really made me scared. On a personal and individual level. The deeply concerning interactions and conversations I had with specific rising stars in MOGOP are actually one of the reasons I left the state.

I understand your attitude toward partisanship, I really do, and I've voted for Missouri Repbulicans in the past as well. But that state party is in a really dark place right now. A few good apples -- and they do exist -- don't really matter when party leadership are scary as fuck narcissistic nihilists.

(And, yeah, all politicians suck or whatever... but MOGOP is really something else. The rising stars from back then who are all either ascendant or in control now are not just gross politician types... they're genuinely just really scary human beings.)

Can being a loyal Democrat or Republican diminishes your influence? It feels to me that most parties try much harder to please the undecideds than their base

> Please don't make this a partisan issue. I live in Missouri. I've voted for Republicans in the past. You're alienating people like me from being on your side.

this event is completely political and is made possible by the fact that one party alone has decided that facts don't matter - a whole team of said people rushed behind this governor to start a politcal campaign based on fact-free made up realities, which is now the common mode of action for the right wing. The GOP also happens to be a party that claims to be extremely upset about liberals supposedly trying to ban speech that "hurts their feelings". this is after all where the terms "snowflake" and "cancel culture" come from, and in fact was a campaign slogan by the Trump campaign called "fuck your feelings", which you would see emblazoned on shirts worn by what we would assume were previously congenial grandparents.

based on all of this, it would appear hypocritical for right wing voters to claim that speaking of these issues are "alientating". The grandparents wearing T shirts that said "fuck your feelings" was pretty alienating to see. Where were the right wing voices warning that liberals might feel "alienated" by that ? Does anyone on the right have the slightest concern for anyone not like them ? I've yet to see it.

The anti-science, anti-intellectualism, us vs them, anti-vaccine mindset that Parsons has is pretty emblematic of Southern Republican governors, senators, and congresspeople. Parsons responded in the expected, knee-jerk 'my political opponents are out to get me' that's been the theme of the GOP for a while now. Even though this security issue had nothing at all to do with politics. This was a consistent theme around Covid and vaccinations at both the state and national level. I think that's the background of the parent comment. Painting Parsons' response in his broader political actions and fellow party politicians' actions.

You can’t remove his actions from context though. They are only even possible because of a deliberate and calculated campaign to discredit science and knowledge and punish those who have it. They’re banking on people like you just looking to keep the peace at any cost.

If you’re not actively working to dismantle the current Republican Party, we cannot be on the same side. I don’t mind alienating you; the masters tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

I don’t mind alienating you; the masters tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

I've never heard this phrase before, but it equally applies to the situation where one thinks only they can wield a weapon. We can't assume that because we are "right," we have nothing to fear from the people who are "wrong" using our worst tactics against us. This is wrong whether it's one side "lying for Jesus," or the other side "censoring for freedom."

In the context of this thread, rising opposition on one side prompts a higher rise on the other side, in a vicious cycle. As parents are often heard to say, "I don't care who started it, I care who finishes it!"

It's a bit cliche to refer to STTNG for life advice, but a minor plot point of this episode influenced me quite a bit when I was a kid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_Worship_(Star_Trek:_The_N...

All the adults saw a problem, so they kept raising their shields higher and higher, but raising the shields was causing the problem in the first place. It took a kid to notice that the scale of the problem correlated with the scale of the adults' defensiveness. This was, obviously, a metaphor for any human interaction.

It's simply not possible to continually raise your defenses and offenses and end with a win-win, and when it comes to a roughly evenly divided society, win-lose is lose-lose.

> It's simply not possible to continually raise your defenses and offenses and end with a win-win, and when it comes to a roughly evenly divided society, win-lose is lose-lose.

This only works when both sides engage in good faith. That is not the case currently. We are better off excluding them than letting them abuse the process in bad faith like they always do.

The ones advancing this argument are always the ones with the least at stake.

Some people on every side engage in bad faith, and some in good faith. Find the ones who are operating on good faith and engage with them, rather than painting an entire side with a broad brush. And be mindful of the spectators -- they're the ones who arguments are most likely to influence, not the participants.

There are hundreds of millions of nominally reasonable people who fall into opposite tribes just by happenstance. If you attack their tribe as a whole they'll stick to their tribes because of tribalism, but if you act reasonably, even if the tribal figureheads are acting in bad faith, the members of each tribe can be persuaded reasonably.

Every line in tribe B's media about how party A is destroying the world with its anti-X agenda is perfectly mirrored by a similar line in tribe A's media about how party B is destroying the world with its anti-Y agenda. "Excluding" doesn't cut off people you disagree with, it makes them stronger, by consolidating them further into their tribes and cementing their opinions ("fight makes right")! We can try to see things from the point of view of reasonable people on both sides, or we can fail as a pluralistic society.

>It doesn't matter that you're probably right.

I guess reality does have a well known liberal bias :)

Well, so do I. :)

But you see how harmful it is to the site to do explicit political flamewar. Yours was the only non-aggressive reply out of five.

I don't think aggression has much to do with the factual content of the replies. Just because people reply to you angrily about an issue that is near and dear to them doesn't mean you can talk about them dismissively like this.

"your side" ... "your camp"

not deescalating.

I really enjoyed Colbert's white house correspondents dinner back in 2006. That isn't what you were referring to is it? [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X93u3anTco

That phrase long pre-dates Colbert.

Does it? I'm pretty sure he coined it.

Colbert's joke was based on a comment from a Bush staffer concerning the "reality-based community" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community):

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

It's actually a poignant, forward-thinking point about the malleability of "reality" and "facts" under empire, but predictably the third-way neolibs that still dominate the party failed to grasp that and first made a joke out of it, and then out of themselves as it was realized.

The other commenter is correct that Colbert coined the term. It's true that there was a lot of talk in that era about who did or didn't adhere to "reality" and how that related to partisanship, and a segment of the blogosphere that described themselves as the "reality based community," in reponse to that Rove quote, but none of that background context has anything to do with anything when it comes to the fact that the phrase itself, "reality has a liberal bias" is something that came from Colbert.

Of course it was in an intellectual climate where those words were charged with political meaning that made them salient enough to set up the joke. But to say it didn't original with Colbert would be to say that phrase itself was coined by a different person, and if it was, you could say who it was, and when and where. Otherwise it's just a confused detour into the weeds that lost track of the original question of attribution.

This is a huge detour, so to tie it back to the original thread, I think talks of "bias" are poisoned by a false assumption sides are equally estranged from scientific truth. It feels fair to make a both-sides argument, but it really just doesn't hold water under any serious examination especially when it comes to which party affiliation more systematically aligns with, responds to, and believes in scientific consensus.

Being extremely concerned over the precise origin of one particular phrasing of the joke rather than its context and influences is hilariously on-point for the 'reality-based community.' Judicious!

The background context is important, and it's true that Colbert really did coin the term. This really isn't that hard.

It should be possible to hold these two different thoughts in your head at the same time without descending into angry incredulity at anyone offering clarification.

I don't know where you see anger or incredulity in my response. Colbert told the joke first! It also doesn't matter, in exactly the way which liberals misunderstood the comment in the first place! Now it's like a double-joke because it's so ironic, and also the US is probably irrecoverably fucked up. Laughs all around!

I thought so too, but any find any evidence of this. Have you got anything?

Words like "your side" and "your camp" don't exactly de-escalate here. BTW I'm not trying to avoid making it a partisan issue, on the contrary.

About that sense of superiority, it is relative to a pretty low bar, when people prioritize whether a person is on their side even over whether the person is right.

The clustering of inane views amongst a particular identifiable group of people is fascinating. And inane views happen on both sides. I find it super interesting to see how each side chooses which bonkers views they do, and how they line up.

Especially interesting is when they are not self consistent. For example, "my body, my rules," which is adopted by both sides in different contexts (abortion and vaccinations) both of which arguably are issues that involve personal choice but that also (again, arguably) affect the well being of others.

Finding the partisan alignments amongst these things is super interesting and should not be a third rail (meaning an untouchable topic) in discussions, imho.

why should we have to coddle you

Practical answer? Because their vote in the ballot box is exactly as strong as any other voter's.

From a pure realpolitik standpoint, alienating voters who can be convinced to do the right thing is just foolishness.

with all due respect there is almost no evidence that republican voters ever "switch sides". it's not a thing. these people aren't voting against their own in any useful numbers no matter what.

This is completely false. I personally know lifelong Republican voters who abandoned the party in 2016. They didn’t just leave the party, they voted D.

that's an anecdote. there's lots, but there are not enough such anecdotes to change national election results.

We don't have the numbers to assert that one way or the other, since the ballot is secret.

In Virginia, more people voted for Biden in 2020 than Clinton in 2016, and for Trump in 2020 than Trump in 2016. Clearly higher turnout mattered, but whether the individual votes were switch-voters, new voters, voters who sat out 2016 showing up in 2020, voters who sat out in 2016 (but had a past history of voting one way) showing up for the other party's candidate in 2020 is much harder to assert.

I think I'd have to see numbers on that (and those numbers are hard to build out without falling prey to a "No True Scotsman" fallacy).

Virginia currently has a Democrat legislature for the first time in two decades, and it's paired with a Democrat governor for the first time I can remember. Either there was a massive demographic churn or someone switched sides. (Anecdotally: I have family in Virginia, and a lot of lifelong GOP voters in my family looked at the party's double- and triple-down support of Trump and went "Whatever this party is, it's not my GOP").

well we can start that virginia turnout was 3 points higher in 2020 than 2016: https://www.elections.virginia.gov/resultsreports/registrati... about 400000 more votes than 2016. How many points did D legislators win by compared to 2016? if they moved only three points to win, then it was likely mostly turnout related, not party switching. Also you need to accommodate for the GOP voter that says "not my party" is very likely to simply not vote, or vote third party, likely moreso than to vote for a Democrat. This would indicate "alienation" of such voters is a good strategy in fact. It's certainly the strategy that the GOP uses against Democrats in order to get us not to turn out.

put another way, I have a lot of republicans in my family. There is zero chance of any of them ever changing. It's absurd that we all would need to be concerned about speaking the truth of the GOP party for fear of "alienating" these people. This is a silencing tactic, plain and simple. The GOP takes no such steps to avoid losing potential D switchers.

>I've seen recently is the Pew poll which shows that in the space of 2 years Republican attitudes about higher education saw a 20-point swing such that that most Republican voters now believe college is net detrimental to society.

I am not quite sure how much of this is anti-science as opposed to anti-college.

Colleges, not science or education in general, have been at the heart of the culture war, especially in the US, and have been viewed by many - not just right/Republicans, but centrists and moderates as well - recently as problematic when it comes to things like mandatory overreaching PC culture, title IX kangaroo courts and "rape classes", safe spaces (and racial segregation of dorms to provide such safe spaces, for example), coddling of students, college educational quality and how it correlates with college profits (including minor scandals of celeb parents bribing their kids into good schools), racial bias in admissions, speech codes, left-leaning faculty, etc, etc, etc... The list of areas that people receive as "problematic" is long.

I am not here to judge all these accusations on merit, just wanted to point out that they exist in the wider public debate (no matter the level of truth to them), and this is what may have swung the polls a lot more than a general anti-science stance.

I consider myself a liberal, and i agree with the point that college is net detrimental to society. It makes people waste their best years, teaches them mainly, useless stuff, barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings, and makes people bitter because they feel they are not valued by society the way they believe they should.

This world needs a lot more new plumbers than new liberal arts majors. It is the society's fault that people feel compelled to go to college having little chance to make anything out of it.

> barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings

If you have any evidence to support this, I invite you to post it. Because according to the study below:

"Getting a Bachelor's degree adds another large increase in lifetime earnings. With median earnings of $56,700 ($27.26 per hour), or $2.3 million over a lifetime, Bachelor's degree holders earn 31 percent more than workers with an Associate's degree and 74 percent more than those with just a high school diploma."

But more importantly, college should NOT be job training. It should be a place to learn critical thinking, to experiment in a safe environment, and a place to learn what you even want to learn about. A college graduate should be able to learn what they need to learn, including pursuing a career in the trades.

I agree that we need more plumbers. But the idea that young adults -- in practice, working class and poor ones -- should be denied the opportunity to learn and grow and instead be offered trade school or nothing, is profoundly unfair.

This is not to say that we couldn't improve the status quo. We could make college less expensive or free, consolidate degrees (getting a law degree in 4 or 5 years of college rather than 4 years of college + 3 more of law school), etc. But a blanket statement that "college is net detrimental to society" seems ignorant even in the kindest light.

https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2011/c...

A bachelor degree makes $541,000 more in life time earnings than an Associate's degree, according to your source.

College costs on average $26K and $52K per year[1] according to my google skills. 4 years of college therefore amounts to roughly $100 to $200K, which in fairness you have to subtract from that initial $541K difference. Still a nice difference.

However, the parent poster mentioned plumbers. According to my google skills again, a plumber makes $55,160 on average, compared to the $56,700 bachelor average. That difference is rather small, and a bachelor probably is worse off than a plumber once you factor in cost of education.

[1] https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance...

[2] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/plumber/salary

Except that the plumber’s knees and back will be shot before they hit 50.

People forget that “real” work is not kind on the body.

$120k sitting in a fund earning 5% a year for 30 years will be worth $518k.

Sure, and taking out loans for the $100K - $200K you need for college will also cost you more in the end, once you consider interest.

The thing tho is that people who do not go to college quite often do not have $120K just laying around to invest for 30+ years. In fact a lot of people who go to college (or their parents) do not have that kind of money lying around either.

And let's not forget that the people who do go to college and get that additional $500K can invest that additional $500K as well. Not as a lump sum either, of course.

The college you're speaking of doesn't exist today. Students are absolutely going to college to be trained for a career afterwards, and they are incurring decades worth of debt in order to do so.

Your vision is good, but its not reality.

I've never met a college grad who came out of college having learned critical thinking while in a bachelors program in college. If they are critical thinkers it was a predisposition. If anything it teaches conformism to a central line of thought. More critical skills seem to be developed if they decide to pursue a higher degree and/or engage in some research which not nearly as many people pursue.

Increase in earnings is a poor way to look at it, that is mainly from the credentialism that companies look for (which is horrible but it is what it is), and the networking that happens.

Does college actually measurably teach critical thinking? How is that measured?

Are sociology majors measurably better at critical thinking than plumbers?

I kind of suspect a significant portion of the "college teaches critical thinking" meme is just something college educated people say to feel superior.

Sociology teaches the sociological imagination, which is specifically a form of critical thinking. This isn't something people tend to just pick up on without higher education

The problem would be separating correlation and causation. It’s obvious that higher education is correlated with critical thinking (uneducated adults are far more likely to deny climate change or believe in pizzagate etc)

But maybe this isn’t causality, maybe people with better critical thinking are going to be more attracted to college

I don't like how you presented your argument. You make it sound like trade schools, with real practical skills like plumbing, involve neither learning nor growing.

Similarly, critical thinking should be learned long before college age. If you're learning that during college, you've got a very late start.

Maybe that's not what you meant, but that's pretty much what you've written.

By definition, a trade school is designed to teach people a trade, not what lies outside it. A liberal arts education (which OP was clearly referring to) exists to teach people about a variety of different things.

This might sound like I'm biased against the trades. I'm not! I think they're crucial, and I, along with about half the software engineers I know, often daydream about becoming a fine carpenter.

I'm also not biased against trade schools in particular. They provide an important service and are a pipeline to good union jobs. The criticisms I make at the top of this comment apply equally to students who go to a top music program like Juilliard or the Oberlin conservatory, as those graduates will tell you themselves. They go to learn music, not to broaden their horizons.

I largely agree with the sentiment that we need more plumbers than liberal arts graduates. One answer, though, is "why not be both?"

Post-secondary education, regardless of the specific major a student chooses, does provide a significant benefit to society: especially in the early years, it teaches students how to think critically. Perhaps this skill could be taught earlier during secondary education, but at least in the U.S., it is not. And this skill is incredibly important for becoming an informed member of the electorate who can separate truth from bullshit.

> it teaches students how to think critically

Most colleges have done the opposite in recent years. They provide echo-chambers for emotionally-fueled pseudoscience.

I've seen this while spending time at Boston University, Harvard, Brown, and Columbia. It's frightening how little people are able to think or question anything once they've gone through the college system. They become frightened by and angry at truths that don't align with the narrative they've been taught.

I've spoken to dozens of people who've gone through the wringer and come out the other side realizing how detrimental college was to themselves and their peers intellectually.

Please elaborate.. Did these people have world views that they didn't wish to have challenged and feel it was detrimental to challenge themselves? Or were they actually taught something detrimental?

What is the nature of this pseudo-science?

They were taught, through teachers but especially through the peer community, that there's an established, unarguable set of world views that shouldn't be questioned or challenged, and the scope of that set only grows larger.

I believe it really stems from a belief that they are collectively special — that they're wiser, more moral, and more 'perfect' than their ancestors, their less-educated fellow citizens, and so on. They encourage people to become 'educated' on issues that they themselves aren't particularly educated in, aside from reading Instagram graphics. They seek to 'cancel' people who present other world views.

While most people I know have been through all that and eventually come to a place of humility after college, easily half of the students never did. They continue on, unfazed, with a radical belief in their own moral superiority.

I'm sorry for the length and vagueness of this — it's really incredibly hard to describe as it's so pervasive throughout everything, and generally it's something people only understand after going through the system. You've got me thinking of how to articulate it better!

You're gonna have to cite some kind of example of what you believe pseudo-science is if you're saying critical thinking was somehow detrimental to someone intellectually. That's actually a hilarious feedback loop of a statement, considering they decided to attend a university. I assume it wasn't to study the art of plumbing?

> You're gonna have to cite some kind of example of what you believe pseudo-science is if you're saying critical thinking was somehow detrimental to someone intellectually.

I said that colleges are teaching the opposite of critical thinking, not that critical thinking was detrimental intellectually.

> considering they decided to attend a university.

They attended university because almost all came from an upper-middle-class background where there is no viable alternative according to their families. If you think they decided to attend university, you're speaking of different types of people — the only decision for them is which college to attend.

What departments is this happening under? A lot of people (probably most people) who go to college just learn about some technical subjects and maybe read a couple classic books in gen ed courses. Politics happens on campus, but largely among students and not in classrooms.

> One answer, though, is "why not be both?"

Resource constraints basically, and the removal of the degree from free market mechanics. I.e. guaranteed loans, not being able to discharge upon bankruptcy, etc.

You also don't need to go to college to get an education in what are historically liberal arts subjects (history, etc.) and in-person classroom lectures for those topics really should be few and far between and extremely academic.

I probably remember or know as much about history as a random undergrad history major does just because I read a lot and you can't remember everything.

Most of those classes aren't worth a lot of money. In fact you can take pretty much any class you would want to for free with open lectures too. I'd also argue that most liberal arts courses don't teach students how to think critically as a broad skillset. Usually the professor just has a narrative or point of view that they want to push and you can't really write contrary to that without an inordinate amount of research which begs the question "why bother?" when the whole point of being there is to get a degree with good grades to get a job. The whole cycle is screwed up.

I'd also say besides some class signaling stuff I can't really tell the difference between university graduates and non-graduates. Work output is the same in my experience.

>especially in the early years, it teaches students how to think critically

Is this a thing only in the US? I went to university in Europe and there were 0 subjects that were unrelated to the (STEM) degree I chose. It was all 100% technical stuff.

This lack of any background in the humanities (including history, philosophy, or ethics) clearly shows. It is quite astounding to me how much a certain class of STEM grads like to wear their ignorance like a badge of honor and attempt to convince us all that their ability to piece together a mediocre argument using wikipedia and google searches is somehow worthy of merit.

Given the fact that the STEM subjects most in use by the HN crowd are the easiest to learn on your own I find it fascinating when people start bragging about all of the educational opportunities they avoided.

Yes, most liberal arts programs will have a variety of general education requirements.

For my math degree, I also had requirements in: psychology, philosophy, religion, science, writing, and foreign language.

In the US and UK you can choose a (completely unrelated if you want) “minor” subject to broaden your horizons

It absolutely is taught in secondary education in the US. Heck, it's taught during elementary education. But you can't teach someone something unless they're willing to learn it. Post-secondary education doesn't help that.

Young children's brains aren't developed sufficiently to build these skills. Even a lot of high schoolers have difficulty with it. It's largely taught in post-secondary education because by then, the brain has matured enough to handle the cognitive load.

Tell me you haven't raised kids without saying you haven't raised kids. Mine have been critics since before they could speak.

Every kid does that. That’s not the kind of critical thinking taught in university, involving research and the evaluation of nuanced arguments, and I think you know that.

Not only is it not remotely true that children can't think critically or research something; not only is that irrelevant to whether or not it's taught to children; it's a mighty heavy assumption to say that people's brains have matured enough for anything when they're in college.

> And this skill is incredibly important for becoming an informed member of the electorate who can separate truth from bullshit.

Which is why both sides either denigrate college or treat it as some sort of tech jobs training.

Which "both sides" denigrate college? Last I checked some progressive Democrats wanted to make college free, not denigrate it.

The question is do they want to produce more nurses and web developers, or more informed citizens. I believe the emphasis is on the former.

> Post-secondary education, regardless of the specific major a student chooses, does provide a significant benefit to society: especially in the early years, it teaches students how to think critically.

(My highlight)

I wish that were true, but it isn't always the case.

My counter-example is my ex-colleague who started her science PhD at the same time as me in the same research group as me waaaay back in the late 1990s.

Long and short of it, we each did our 3-ish years in the lab, she wrote up her thesis, I wrote up my thesis, we each had our oral exam around the same time. Her writing (her words) was "torn to shreds", she ended up back in the lab for several months doing more work and some serious rewriting, I got away with only a handful of typos to fix.

I blame our supervisor for this, but that's another story.

I'm not sure how this is a counter-example of students being taught to think critically. Are you saying you did not think critically in your thesis but passed anyway?

My colleague didn't seem to think at all. I've no idea why she did a PhD, and I don't think she knew either.

EDIT: (Follow-up Q) who exactly is supposed to be teaching critical thinking?

Can critical thinking be taught?

Through practice. It can be shown, but learning by doing is the only way.

Youre underestimating the value of a college degree. Research like [1] shows that degree holders have significantly more lifetime earnings than high school. You also miss how the democratization of education has benefited our society and helped lift millions out of subsistence lifestyles and class lock-in.

"This world needs a lot more new plumbers than new liberal arts majors"

This is a completely subjective and politically charged statement. I think the world needs more informed and educated critical thinkers. Its curious how the 90s led to a collapse in liberal arts departments and enrollments, and 20 years later we're now in an era of disinformation at massive scale.

1. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education...

> You[']re underestimating the value of a college degree

Tony Blair's university pledge has failed, says his son

"Tony Blair's landmark target for half of school leavers to attend university is no longer fit for purpose, his son has said – claiming that the former prime minister agrees with him [..] critics have argued that it encouraged an unhealthy focus on higher education which led to a proliferation of pointless "Mickey Mouse" degrees and lured undergraduates into racking up large debts without a meaningful increase in their salary prospects."

If this is the problem in the UK where education is cheap, it is even more of a problem in the USA.

But this doesn't adjust for intelligence. If employers are just using the degree as a proxy for a base level of intelligence (and they really are, also class) then you would see tremendous value by this measure. But really that would be 100% waste, because you could do the same thing in an hour with an IQ test that is currently being done with 4 years of college. The tech industry basically does this now with algorithm problems. Google DGAF if you have a degree if you can memorize a bunch of algorithms.

Many in the tech community turn exclusively to technology to solve every problem. It doesn’t occur to such people that e.g. sociologists, who study problems of society as a discipline, have any answers whatsoever to our problems as a society. To them, sociology is just another useless liberal arts degree without job prospects.

In my opinion, if we listened to more socieologists instead of the Zuckerbergs and Bezoses of the world, we’d be much better off as a country.

But I did listen to sociologists when I took a distribution requirement in college. I'll never do it again. It was 80% totally obvious facts about human behavior that don't need to be taught and 20% totally contrived BS. No science going on there.

So you took 1 intro class into a subject and determined the entire field is worthless? Do you apply this decision-making process to other aspects of your life?

Also, not a lot of actual "science" going on in Computer Science departments (meaning following the scientific method in the course of conducting research, as opposed to "here is a thing I built, isn't it neat?"), but that doesn't stop tech-inclined people from joining in droves. So I'm not sure what the "no science going on" criticism means. It's not like the scientific process is used when deploying technology solutions to problems. We just say "Here's a thing! Let's distribute this to as many people as possible!" without any forethought into what consequences will be.

To that last point, from my recollection of the late aughts, early 10s, it was sociologists who first identified that maybe Facebook and Instagram would be bad for society. Turns out they were right. Again.

I found college had a net positive effect on me. It gave me a great deal of discipline and the helped me develop important critical thinking skills. Though I did a mix of STEM and economics, I can't vouch for other degrees.

Regardless, I disagree that it's a waste of a person's best years. Most work is some variation of drudgery, I think it's great young adults get to spend a few years learning about interesting topics and making new friends.

It'd be nice if America could do that and not saddle these youngsters with crippling debt (as other countries manage to do), but I wouldn't say that feature of the American education system invalidates the basic concept.

The whole "college = liberal arts majors" is a wildly reductive argument and is extremely common among the types that OP is referring to. It's pretty disheartening to see it repeated here.

People who take up STEM, are of course of different type, and for them, surely college is a net benefit. But that kind of people would go to college even 50 or 70 years ago already. All paranormal increase of college admissions in the last decades came from precisely those people who are getting those bullshit degrees just because they are the only ones they can get, and they feel compelled to get some kind of a college degree.

Even STEM degrees could be optimized. Most of what I've learned is not applicable to software dev, but at least some of the classes (like foreign language) were neat, although college classrooms are a suboptimal way to study that.

as a sw dev / sre / engineer with 10+ years of experience, i can say that without a doubt the skills one learns that are not hard STEM courses and programming are 100% useful. i need engineers with critical thinking, a sense of empathy, eloquence, and a host of other social skills that lots of nerds-turned-comp-sci-student lack

Outside of STEM classes, the only thing I learned that was relevant to my career was from my Technical Writing course, where I learned that people in charge can be capricious and screw you over in the process. The teacher didn't like me, so he consistently gave my work mediocre scores and couldn't quantify anything about the work or the scores.

Even some of the STEM classes were a waste of time, especially the Computer Science classes where the professor would grade people on attendance and random minutia.

I ended up just learning computer science on my own off of Wikipedia after I graduated since I couldn't get a decent hardware design job with my Electrical Engineering degree. It only took a couple of months, BTW, to get from the point where I was just playing around with JavaScript to where I could pass a coding interview laden with data structures and algorithms.

If I could go back in time for a day and talk to my former self, I'd tell him to just buy some used physics, math, and computer science textbooks, then spend six months couch surfing, partying, and studying on his own. Then he could go find a CS job and start making money right away

The UK government has taken a different approach to all-out anti-higher-ed. attack: cut 50% of the funding for many university arts courses, while keeping the overall budget fairly flat. In the UK media this is seen as an attack on "lefties", either justified or unwarranted, depending on the outlet.

https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/19-25-july-2021/funding-...

Do you have any actual numbers on BA vs BC (or BA vs BSc)?

There's value in the arts, but I think it is overrepresented in universities.

> I think it is overrepresented in universities

What would over-represented mean in this case? Here's a graph[1] of bachelors' degrees granted in various fields - the social science are grouped with history and are not particularly popular.

I'm personally somewhat mystified when people talk about degrees like they're ice cream flavors. I've met people with a wide variety of aptitude and interest and energy and while I think that anyone can get any degree, I do think we each individually have proclivities and talents. Even if I wanted to double the number of STEM majors, I suspect that many of the people who have chosen not to be STEM majors did that because they liked their chosen major better.

Edit: For what it is worth, I do think we could use many more people in the trades. I also think that people going to trade school should have the option to get the same "gen ed" college curriculum that people going to college get. It might help the idea that trade work is lesser (which, of course, it is not).

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cta#4

> it is overrepresented

Definitely relative to the available jobs in those fields.

Should college primarily function as job training? No, but unfortunately - for what it currently costs - it has to.

> makes people waste their best years

What do you mean "waste"? Just that they're building career capital instead of directly earning money? You've got your whole life to work, spending that time learning, meeting new people, and trying new things seems way less "wasteful" than just starting your career 4 years sooner. Plus it gives you time to figure out what you want to do, most 18-year-olds aren't really equipped to decide what they'll want to be doing when they're 50 and the value of starting a career sooner is greatly diminished if you just end up switching careers anyway.

> teaches them mainly, useless stuff

Meh, most knowledge is useless, but it's not always easy to determine which knowledge will be useful in advance. I thought my linguistics class was useless (though interesting) at the time, years later I went into data science, turns out linguistics is pretty important for NLP. Also, I think learning for the sake of learning is a Good Thing, even given that most knowledge is useless.

> barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings

Got a source for that? Cause last I checked, holders of even most "useless" degrees out-earn those with just a high school diploma by something like $15k/year, making them well worth it financially unless you pay the sticker price for a private or out-of-state school. For better or worse, there are a ton of decent jobs in the US that just require any college degree.

> and makes people bitter because they feel they are not valued by society the way they believe they should

I haven't seen that at all. I know people who are bitter because they have a ton of student debt and are struggling to pay it off, but I don't know anyone who expects to be put on a pedestal because they have a college degree, if anything they're bitter at their colleges and/or their high school guidance counselors. Also, those people are outliers in terms of their debt levels, the average new college graduate (among those who take out student loans) earns ~$55k and leaves with ~$30k in debt, which is very manageable almost everywhere in the US and probably puts them at a higher income (though with less wealth) than their peers who started plumbing apprenticeships at 18.

> makes people waste their best years

I strongly believe that one's best years can be after college. Our society fetishizes youth too much. I've grown more as a person in the few years following college than I did in the decade prior.

We'd need to significantly improve high schools before considering eliminating college. Let's face it. We can't expect American high schools to teach students anything about the world. We've had schools try to spin the slave trade as sending "workers" to the New World. We've had attempts to show "both sides" of the Holocaust. And yes, college isn't perfect at teaching liberal arts, but it's better than not learning at all.

I don't mean to straw man you, so I'm not implying this is what you said, but a liberal arts education is extremely important! Where else do you learn that racism isn't just slurs, that a bus route can be racist, that a health policy can be racist? Where can you get introduced to writers of color, to works by people from all times and all races? Where can you get an in depth view into how art reflects society and society reflects art?

Even if you don't step into a classroom, college teaches so much by forcing students out of their hometown and out of the communities. One of the biggest issues with racism and discrimination and partisanship is that most people haven't met the other side. College is a way to meet the other side in one's formative years.

I'd argue that college is the single most liberalizing institution in people's lives. No other institution takes students, transports them into a (hopefully) diverse, intellectually stimulating center and teaches them about society.

> spin the slave trade as sending "workers" to the New World

That's not spin. That's exactly what the slave trade was.

I'd firmly disagree. Workers has an implication of voluntary, paid work. There's a reason we have a specific word for unpaid, non-voluntary work. Not to mention slavery extended beyond work. Being a slave was not only backbreaking unpaid labor, but also a whole host of horrors outside work such as rape, family separation, forced breeding, torture, etc. Calling slaves "workers" is a deeply inaccurate categorization.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/publisher-promises-rev...

I would associate that more with "employee," with "worker" being an umbrella term. Note that "worker" is also used in a bunch of other contexts. Worker bee, worker thread, miracle worker, etc.

Okay but using umbrella terms obscures the crucial aspect of being a slave: non voluntary, unpaid labor. Yes, it is technically correct in an extremely literal sense. But that's not the same as it being the right term in the context of teaching students about the slave trade. If I said "his great grandfather was a worker", it would not imply slavery, indeed most people would assume the opposite connotation, that his great grandfather was a paid worker.

I can't help but feel like you're confusing literal correctness with appropriateness. And while literal correctness is an easier judgement to make, there are many literally correct statements that absolutely miss the point. Saying that slaves were "workers" is one of them.

> It is the society's fault that people feel compelled to go to college

That may be true but the amount of assistance available through student loans and grants enables people to actually go. Without that, the people that feel compelled to go still wouldn't because they simply couldn't afford it.

Higher education in this country is a minefield of unintended consequences.

The very same article I linked to suggests yours is a minority view among those who have attended college:

> When it comes to their own experiences with higher education, an earlier Center survey found that the vast majority of college graduates (from both two- and four-year institutions) say college was useful for them in terms of helping them grow personally and intellectually (62% say it was very useful in this regard, 31% say it was somewhat useful). Large majorities also say it was useful in opening doors to job opportunities (53% say very useful, 29% say somewhat) and in helping them develop specific skills and knowledge that could be used in the workplace (49% very, 35% somewhat).

I think the cost of higher ed is an enormous societal problem which leads some to feel embittered towards the system as a whole for good reason. But it's important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater and to separate the ballooning cost from the education itself.

Worth noting that Ivy League costing hundreds of thousands is quite different from college too. Also, the major matters heavily. In something like computer science, you may be able to get by fine without a degree, but good luck becoming a doctor or lawyer with an online education.

I can find a competent plumber trivially. Hiring white collar jobs are much harder, especially specialized tech work.

I think the anti-college popularity ties directly to the incredible cost of it in the USA, not that its necessarily a bad thing.

>> I can find a competent plumber trivially. Hiring white collar jobs are much harder, especially specialized tech work.

This is broadly not true in most US cities. Skilled tradespeople who are insured, licensed, and bonded have major backlogs of work - especially electricians, but also plumbers, carpenters, etc.

> I can find a competent plumber trivially.

You must not live in any major U.S. coastal city. Plumbers and other skilled tradespeople are in extremely high demand right now.

To say nothing of _competent_ ones. It is a great deal of work to find a tradesperson that is 1) available and 2) competent. Unsurprisingly the most available ones seem to be the least competent.

If you look, most trades limit the number of new students they will accept for apprentiship programs. Even if everyone suddenly wanted to be a plumber (or electrictian, etc) they can't get into the programs that will allow them to become certified.

Its not just the trades, in my state, we have had an epidemic of retirements since 2008 for teachers, nurses, and police officers.

yet the programs that are required to get your licenses don't accept any more applicants per year than they did 15 years ago. The gatekeeping has to stop, or at least be increased to allow the market to actually meet demand. But the groups benefiting from that mismatch in demand have no reason to increase capacity.

> I can find a competent plumber trivially.

I kinda doubt this. My mother wanted me to learn plumbing or to become an electrician because they were always in much more demand than supply and can effectively determine their own rates.

Most are self-employed. (UK).

But incredible cost is because of the inflated demand. Too many people go to college who don't need it. Reduce demand by, pun intended, educating people that they don't need college unless they can make it to the top, and prices will fall.

Needing it is defined by employers considering them as base qualifications

The left has its fair share of growing anti-science sentiment. I agree it's quite a bit worse with Republicans but it is growing in both directions, which is a concern. People pick their science a la carte as long as it confirms what they want.

- Denial of the science of sex differences

- Denial of the science of intelligence differences, the relevance of intelligence in life outcomes and how heritable it is

- Belief without evidence that black/white racial differences in outcome are completely due to racism and not partly due to a byproduct of cultural differences

- Anti-nuclear sentiment that wildly exaggerates the risks of nuclear power

- Historical revisionism (e.g 1619 project and NYT begrudgingly making stealth edits)

Then (as it was already well known and evident) you have a deeper problem with a faulty political system, that creates monstrous overgrowths of mental patterns begging for votes instead of progressive ("look-up-to") models.

Telling example: "We believe in self-determination" // "There are unclaimed votes available in those anti-abortionist tribes" // "Ok then, we take them". This should be a joke, not an event. There is a systemic issue.

Most of my friends are politically and socially liberal, whereas I'm liberal on some issues, conservative on others, and have a decent number of views that are hard to categorize on a liberal/conservative spectrum.

One thing I've noticed about the friends who are dyed in the wool liberals is that they seem to be more susceptible than average to pseudoscientific practices such as reiki, crystals, homeopathy, etc.

And that jives, I think, with historical trends. Go back 100 years and G.K. Chesterton was chiding the liberal upper-class socialites who were taken in with this stuff.

Of course, my own observations are just anecdotal, but I would be curious to know if anyone else has noticed it.

Yes, there's a niche part of the left - the new age/hippie types, very high in openness and very low in conscientiousness - that is profoundly anti-science (or perhaps just ignorant of it). They tend to buy into woo-woo of all sorts and buy into science denialism around GMOs and synthetic pesticides. They would also never accept the tentative evidence that marijuana damages the brains of teenagers.

> Denial of the science of intelligence differences, the relevance of intelligence in life outcomes and how heritable it is.

> Belief without evidence that black/white racial differences in outcome are completely due to modern systemic racism and not partly due to a byproduct of cultural differences

I think what you're describing is that a lot of liberals and leftists are opposed to the use of science to justify what they would probably consider racist beliefs. They might point to the use of scientific racism in the past as a reason not to repeat such mistakes. They might also question the intentions of the (disproportionately white) people who tend to focus obsessively on these issues to the exclusion of many others.

I wonder how much of this trend of distrusting colleges which looks like anti intellectualism is actually based on the wide conservative perception (whether true or not, the perception is certainly there) that conservative voices and ideas are increasing squelched in universities. Or treated with contempt. It engenders a distrust of those "ivory tower" people.

I wonder if this is what has polluted and spilled over into other areas so it has influenced a general anti intellectual / elitism sentiment that gets in the way of critical thinking and science.

I'm born and raised in California and I've never voted Republican in my life.

There's a really good article written about this subject by Jose Duarte: http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/i-was-denied-admission-to-a-p...

I really recommend giving it a full read. The gist is that higher education is very, very clearly biased against particular groups. "Net detriment" is loaded, but "unfairly biased against us" is a not only reasonable, but demonstrably true conclusion. Negative reactions are warranted.

There's a real problem here within education.

There's a difference between being critical of higher ed and being anti-intellectual / anti-science.

A lot of the skepticism of higher ed is precisely because they have not been doing a good job teaching science and critical thinking.

I think "a lot of the skepticism" is a VAST over estimate. Are you telling me that the anti-vaccine, anti-CRT (created a boogeyman out of nowhere btw), and various school boards revising how we should try to more objectively teach history/science are worried about higher ed being ineffective?

I mean yes there is definitely criticism on higher ed and what value students are getting for the now extremely high price tag, but to say that this is what is the issue is definitely missing the point

I think college is a good thing, but right now I think its 70% of kids go to college which is a complete waste of time and money for most of them.

For me going to college was about getting away from my horrible family. They still managed to screw me over and prevent me from finishing my last year of schooling, but my life was forever made better by the distance.

The class stratification in society is absolutely intense, if you're coming from a bad family you just need to get away from them as soon as you can. I made the mistake of not estranging myself from my own family much sooner. If I could change one thing about the way America works I'd eliminate the requirement for parental involvement when it comes to getting financial aid.

If your parents like to beat you up, you should be able to just walk out when you're 18 and get help to go to school. But that's not the system now. Aside from a small handful of exceptions which are painfully difficult to get, you're basically on your own. I think in Europe everyone just gets help to go to college so this isn't an issue there.

It is not 70% of kids, and this number is not hard to look up. It has been trending around 30% for enrollment into 4-year institutions. Of those, ~60% complete the degree within 6 years.

I agree that most students who got to college don't make good use of the time or investment, but it is still a minority of people who even attempt college.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_302.60.a... https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=40

I got 70% from here:

https://admissionsly.com/percentage-who-go-to-college/

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/14/fewer-kids-going-to-college-...

Then reform college: you need to increase the chances that make instances like that thing holding office in Missouri incidents of the past. You need to educate people, to help develop the eyes to see and cringe.

The goal of most politicians from either party is to pit Americans against each other instead of against the corrupt system. This way the politicians and the actual ruling class (billionaires and corporations) can keep their power all while making it seem like the other team is the true enemy. Unfortunately Americans are buying it hook, line and sinker.

I've a bold take on your offered perspectives:

Journalism has been degrading its own reputation through supplanting the standard journalistic integrity with biases.

Science is in the middle of a crisis of integrity where 'publish or die' and intradepartment funding incetives push academics to pursue publications of a certain flavor, not to mention the standard of 'how was this result p-hackes' many must have to read.

this isnt a republican issue, this is a governor behaving with a survivalist mindset and abdicating any real leadership by forcing a hammer on a whistleblower.

also, is it so difficult to see how a 20 yr old will question the value of a 200k education? Ever see that Columbia School of Journalism piece? observe the data on climbing tuiting prices? I treasure my education, but have trouble explaining the true value when younger people simply see an increasingly diminishing return on that investment.

College is a net detriment to society. The business model of colleges is 'lie to young people and then saddle them with thousands of dollars in crushing debt for questionably valuable degrees'.

The growth in the cost of college hasn't improved standards, but rather it served to fatten administration departments at colleges.

Additionally, quality is dropping severely. I've seen it first hand. I can't count on two hands the amount of new grads from "quality" schools with their shiny CS degrees who cannot write code. Not leetcode, just any code. They can't solve business problems at all. It's like they learned to pass tests. That's CS, which still has some value. What about useless degrees like Political Science or Gender Studies? Those are outright scams given the results. The victims are young people.

You are 100% right, I'm sick and tired of these damn Republicans first it was an unnecessary war then it was discriminating against blacks, not to mention the open collusion with foreign powers to get their person in the White House, now they are actually killing people with their stupid illterate anit-vacc stances, enough is enough I say. We need to do something about these dangerous people that subscribe to dangerous ideals.

I think we should start tracking them. Maybe we could force them to attend re-education, it would be a pain to implement and enforce on a wide societal level but maybe we could concentrate them in some sort of camp or something. I think this would be a good solution we could finally be rid of these dangerous ideas, and the people who hold them.

This is either excellent satire or a symptom of going off the deep end.

Satire? I am offended, this is a real solution I'd dare say a final solution to the dangers of misinformation and people who think that they should be able to do what they want because of "freedumb".

I think at very least we should mark people who are unvaccinated so that other people can know to stay away from them since we shouldn't make innocent people suffer because they are too evil to do the decent thing. Maybe we could make them all wear brightly colored armbands or something so everyone knows who the dangerous individuals in society are.

Bravo. For anyone not following the very serious joke about the dangers of doing what is detailed in the parent comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution?wprov=sfla1

Anti-intellectuallism is fully bipartisan at this point in time. Framing it as belonging to the other, the unenlightened side, is just tribalism and itself anti-intellectual.

This trend is increasingly prevalent in both parties. If we are to solve anything, one has to first recognize the reality of the situation and stop getting lured in by us vs them.

I 100% believe that the true issue is religion.

The Church, as an institution, is dying. In their death throes they are basically doing everything they can to turn back the clock on society to a time they played an important role in dictating how we live. Every societal problem we have today is a result of Christian, Muslim and Jewish religions preaching their versions of ignorance and intolerance, every single Saturday and Sunday to millions and millions of Americans across the country.

Economic conservatives hate ignorance too - you need math skills to count your profits and to best gauge how to screw over your minimum wage employees, an accurate sense of history and economics in order to best manipulate markets and legal skills to avoid IRS and SEC penalties. They are just as frustrated with general stupidity as the rest of us.

But religious conservatives? They're fucking insane. They really, really, really believe what the Church tells them, and the shit the Church says is truly, truly, batshit crazy and has been for millennia. I personally know of people who truly worry about the "mark of the beast" from the COVID vaccination because that's what their Church says. In 2021 this should not be possible.

Until the secular American people realize who the real enemy is and go after the Church and all its leaders, in real, concrete ways, we're going to spend the rest of our lives dealing with this shit.

Still cracks me up to know that the "mark of the beast" is just a rudimentary hash folks in the bronze age used to communicate semi-secret names, in, for example, love letters.

What's funny about the fact that there was a numerical encoding system for names/words in the first century AD? It's kinda cool, actually. Also, the "mark of the beast" isn't the hash, it's a physical mark that contains "the name of the beast, or the number of his name."

The number of its name is generated similar to a hash. And it existed outside of and before the beast reference as a cultural trend. It’s seen multiple times in ancient writing.

It’s funny because it’s a reference to a common way to encode/obscure the name of someone, not literally a mark on the most evil person spawned from hell, and with all we know today people still believe it’s a physical mark that will identify evil or turn one towards evil. That shit is hilarious.

I agree that the number is generated like a hash, and that this "hashing algorithm" existed before Revelation was written. I don't think anyone disputes that.

The context, though, is: "[The second beast] causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark". That sounds like a literal mark to me, not just a hash function.

Yeah I think we are agreeing. I’m just saying it’s a funny interpretation that Revelations took of that technique to make it physical and believing that interpretation when there is prior art is also funny.

I believe there was also prior art for slave owners branding or tattooing slaves with their initials[0], so it is quite logical for the Book of Revelation to describe a Beast doing this to people who were enslaved to it.

Using a numeric hash of the name instead of the text form also makes sense, just like the way TLS certificates use hashes of the domain name (and other details).

I guess I just don't see the funny side because what is described in Revelation is reminiscent of both terrible abuses of the past and modern day infringements of rights.

[0] https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/article/tattoos-in-roman-world...

Ah, good point. Thanks for saying that and I apologize for my absurdity.

I nonetheless do still find it funny that people in the information age still believe in bronze age concepts used to describe the world.

well, a lot of these people could not afford college, so they send a ton of their time dismantling the system that they feel has rejected them. but, like you implied, it comes from a failed governments action on making college obtainable and desirable to the average blue collar worker. i’ve lived in the bible belt before, college was actually not talked about and then later on discouraged there, when i finally got out of that headspace and decided to go to college, a lot of people who were younger than i was who were attending college kind of treated me like i was a second class citizen and not serious about my life for waiting this long to get into college, yet i spent most of my time doing jobs to service white collar persons. jobs that otherwise would have not been done if everyone decided to go to college. so, i don’t know. the stereo type has to be broken both ways, because there is a growing intolerance that is dividing america even more so than when i was a kid. i am now living in a state with the most amount of college educated people in the us, and i still run into people who are extremely disconnected from the average american to the point where they look down on them with their rhetoric, i do not think that is healthy at all and like i said, it has become a social disease of sorts. but all of this starts at the top, with leaders that you mentioned and quite frankly, a decent portion of democrats as well.

I suppose I fall in the a republican camp so i'll bite.

College is too expensive for what it gives. You gain a ton in maturity, soft skill building but unless you're in a STEM major, the material does not prepare you for the real world. Depending on what my kid wants to study, I will not be encouraging college.

So much journalism is so insanely biased. I respectfully disagree to anyone who thinks Biden is treated the same as Trump was.

I don't deny covid's existence at all. I took it very seriously in the beginning of the pandemic. But as more data came out, I realized it wasn't a big deal for my age group. I later got covid and only lost sense smell/taste for 4 days. Didn't feel the need to miss any work (remote job).

I don't like the boomer-esque decisions some of these republicans make in regards to tech security, abortion, or cannabis but I guess I have to side with that over freedom reducing laws, excessive money printing, and increased taxes

Excessive money printing that also happened under an R admin? Freedom reducing laws like laws that limit the freedom to access a safe abortion? Or laws that limit the freedom to vote? What freedoms specifically?

Increased taxes for who? Taxes were massively cut for wealthy people a couple years ago and the only proposal to raise them that got any traction recently didn’t even raise them back to the previous level - still a net cut.

Also, Covid is a big deal for the families of the 600k dead from it directly and the unknown number indirectly due to inability to access medical services. Just because it didn’t affect you personally doesn’t mean it’s not a real problem.

I took it seriously as well, realized it probably wouldn’t kill me, but still followed precautions so as to avoid hurting others who would most likely have died or gotten seriously ill. I feel like that’s a pretty minimum requirement for a functioning society - compassion for others, who are not in your exact situation.

All fair points on the money printing parts. I am well aware Trump printed trillions as well. I wasn't a fan then and not now.

state laws != federal laws. I am pro-choice but I think allowing states to make decisions for their own is good and the system is working as intended. I want states to have more freedom to legislate what their constituents want than a giant federal government making decisions for the whole nation.

The taxes proposed in the infrastructure bill are egregious. For the first time in my entire life I will make a decent amount of money this year and will bump right into top bracket. Giving the government over 50% is insane.

I never said covid wasn't a big deal, or that is wasn't a problem. Again, I said I took it seriously. But to have any sort of lockdowns/mandates at this point are not cool. Or make me choose between a job or some unnecessary medical treatment. the goal posts on vaccine metrics or herd immunity are constantly moved. No one talks about natural immunity. Biden has used excessively divisive language emboldening people who are pro vaccine to accost those who haven't received the vaccine.

You will get taxed 50% on the amount you make over X is what you mean, not that your total tax rate will be 50% - if that were actually the case. The top bracket is $400k for an individual and the Build Back Better or whatever it’s called act proposes to raise that tax rate to 39.6% I believe. I’m curious where you’re getting 50% from.

Vaccine mandates are a pretty normal requirement at a lot of places. I worked in healthcare - flu shots were mandatory with very rare exceptions. When I was a kid I had to have MMR, polio, whooping cough, etc, vaccines to be able to enroll in school. This sudden “but muh freedom” crap doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny when the same party saying vaccines should be optional because it is a personal medical choice is the same group saying other medical procedures (that are potentially necessary) should be banned (abortion, in case that wasn’t clear) - even though they are also personal medical choices and nobody is trying to even mandate them.

I think he may be combining state and local tax in the 50%. Which is fair.

Ah good point. I forgot about states with income taxes. But I still think the “50% of my income” number is wrong - he either doesn’t understand how tax brackets work is being willfully misleading to make his argument look better.

> Or make me choose between a job or some unnecessary medical treatment. the goal posts on vaccine metrics or herd immunity are constantly moved

You know what goalpost doesn't move? Not having ICUs at full capacity with people who could have just taken two shots 6 months ago.

You're probably completely unaware that the excessive money printing (quantitative easing) you seemingly blame on democrats was proposed and initially implemented by by a Bush appointee (Bernanke) and then more recently and more famously done by a Trump appointee (Powell), both in cases where the alternative would've been a global financial catastrophe not seen since the great depression.

> I respectfully disagree to anyone who thinks Biden is treated the same as Trump was.

People respect Biden more than they respect Trump. This isn't Biden's fault, nor the fault of the people.

Journalists are supposed to leave their "respect" for the person they are reporting on at the door. That's the problem.

"Respect" is not an expression of personal loyalty.

> I later got covid and only lost sense smell/taste for 4 days. Didn't feel the need to miss any work.

Bruh. You went to work while you were sick with covid?

I am remote

> I respectfully disagree to anyone who thinks Biden is treated the same as Trump was.

Of course they are not. How could they be, considering the large difference in behavior towards journalists and the world in general?

Conservatives say that about college not necessarily because they have a disdain for education and learning, but because they think colleges have become a breeding ground for a dangerous type of bourgeois identity politics. I'm not taking any sides here just pointing out that the justification for rejecting higher education may not be coming from an anti-science perspective. That said, Parsons appears to be an idiot.

Since the student loans became impossible to bankrupt, the college prices have risen disproportionally to the income. The average time it takes to pay it off is twenty years.

High level of debt makes people more risk-averse to changing jobs, starting a business, or even having children. I believe that the greedy bloated system of higher education is responsible for many personal tragedies.

How can you say this about Republicans when Democrats and their increasingly radical dogma include such blatant anti-science as: any distinction between men and women is imaginary, that vaccines are better than naturally acquired immunity, that skin color determines virtue, that speech is violence, that COVID is more dangerous to a child than forced isolation, that an unborn child is not alive, etc. etc. etc.

You're damn right people are going to be skeptical of higher education when they indoctrinate in the anti scientific cult of leftism. People are starting to smell the rotting corpse of common sense and rest assured there will be a societal reboot soon enough.

You would probably be better off with an attitude reboot. You don't always have to be the victim.

I did have an attitude reboot. I used to not care. But with the demolition of the cultural norms I grew up with my attitude went from "I don't really care" to "enough is enough and I need to start speaking up."

What part of my comment indicates I am playing the victim?

What distinctions between men and women are being denied that you feel need to be made?

Have you done any work to asses your biases along these fronts? What makes you think that the immunity after getting infected from covid is better than getting vaccinated and not getting sick at all? I know I don't personally have the time to be sick, I have a family to feed.

Sure, I can back up all of my claims.

For one thing, the argument on the left that gender and sex are not the same and a biological man can become a biological woman is currently scientifically impossible. Men and women are fundamentally distinguished by DNA. Even with genital mutilation surgery and hormone therapy you are only changing about 0.01% of what makes and man and a woman different as every chromosome in that person's body is the same biological sex they had at birth. Setting aside any political or subjective "reality" they are trying to push on to others.

Second, Pfizer scientists are on tape stating that antibodies gained through COVID infection are more robust than those gained from their vaccines. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/oct/5/project-veri...

This is my favorite time of the decade because it’s at the nadir of political tension in the US. We’re exactly halfway between elections and the next election is an unimportant one (relatively). The only people still talking about politics are people who are genuinely interested in politics or who have interesting insights.

Nothing that anyone says politically right now matters. For proof, consider how many of your friends even remember that Afghanistan fell just two months ago - likely none if they’re like my friends. In fact, there’s a consequential NJ gubernatorial election coming up in the next month and no one’s talking about it. I love the peace and respite we’re getting from politics personally.

Anyways, to respond to you, Parson is in charge of a state that regularly has multiple cities top the US murder rate charts. Anything he says that makes you forget that fact, even temporarily, is a win for him.

The upcoming midterms are extremely important because the out of power party is likely going to take back the House, and all signs are pointing to them not affirming any winner of the 2024 election if that person is a Democrat, which will directly lead to the utter breakdown of Democracy in the USA.

Interesting framing. Democrats seem to have taken “Science” to be a new type of religion. “Trust the science”, has been a catch phrase for the last 18 months.

Science is fundamentally about skepticism, and democratic politicians/the media have commandeered its meaning to push their agenda.

Many Covid-19 policy decisions based on “science” are not actually based on sound science, and it doesn’t seem like democratic politicians have any interest in addressing this.

Here are a few examples of highly questionable policies:

Mask mandates when everyone is vaccinated, school closures, gym closures, exemptions for wearing a mask when eating indoors.

Most worryingly, it seems like academics are scared to publish data that contradicts the mainstream progressive narrative, because they may have their career canceled.

You don't do do science by being skeptical of things. You do it by asking questions and by developing experiments that can test the hypothesis within ethical bounds. How do you start to make these experiments where the outcomes could lead to an increase in deaths?

The problem is that they're using science to protect themselves while speaking out against it.

I see all politicians as blank humans who reflect their constituents. Not everybody needs to agree, especially the further they are geographically.

You're just a lab rat if you take the vaccine before it has had 209,348 years of trials.

9.693 million doses have been administered over about 10 months. If we assume linear administration, that's 4,039,164 human life years of testing.

Not how "long term" studies work, you can't take 9 women and produce a baby in 1 month.

People here aren’t good at detecting sarcasm.

It's hard to see sarcasm when people also genuinely hold the belief.

> You're just a lab rat if you take the vaccine before it has had 209,348 years of trials.

Or, you know, 3. Like most new vaccines. Except with this one, an exception was made because people were (are) dying by the millions, and because most of those 3 years is an observation period for rare and obscure side effects that take time to manifest. But do nevertheless happen. We did what we usually do in medicine: risk-benefit trade-off. The decision wasn't a close one, but that doesn't mean that being concerned about the risk is somehow absurd.

Point being: using charitable interpretations of your opponents' arguments does not make for brief and funny sound bites.

I think people are missing the sarcasm here.

As an immigrant from a country where we generally believe that science made the US what it is, it's unbelievable the stance the Republican party has taken with regards to science. To the extent that under Trump, there was an overt push to "take science out of the EPA". How is that even acceptable in a country like this?

I don’t observe that to be generally true. Each party has its favorite science facts to deny. Republicans tend to invent controversies in climate science and evolution in order to misstate the types of uncertainties that exist in those fields. Democrats, increasingly, like to deny the basic reality of embryonic development and sex in humans, that can be found in any basic biology textbook.

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