Comment by crate_barre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crate_barre | Hacker News Reader

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Information dissemination must be similar to fluid dynamics. It just has to be.

It’s simpler and more insidious than that. I’ll use the old Eleanor Roosevelt quote:

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."

Most people are not that intellectual and probably spent most of their life gossiping. They wouldn’t know how to even discuss certain topics if the low hanging fruit of gossip and conspiracy wasn’t available to them to add something in a social interaction.

Take Reddit for example, some of them wouldn’t even know what to say if they couldn’t add that one immediate punch line (followed by sequential punchlines by other people). If you take this away, they will literally have no way of joining the convo.

They won’t be able to come up with an angle, ask a probing question, entertain an alternative perspective, provide analogues or metaphors, they’d simply have no voice. It’s akin to providing these people with ‘what do you think about the weather today?’ as a lifeline in casual social interaction.

> I’ll use the old Eleanor Roosevelt quote

The quote seems appropriate for a person that doesn’t want to be talked about.

I get what it’s going for but “only small minds talk about people” feels like it serves political elites very well. Don’t talk about me and my conduct. Talk about the generalised idea of conduct by people who are somewhat like me!

I studied politics at university and learned enough about political ideology to last me a lifetime. But my biggest takeaway from history is that ideology almost always plays a back seat to human beings that want to retain or expand their power. Ideas are pretty malleable around that aim.

Talking about people in politics is almost always a smoke screen. There are weakest links in every political caucus. Personal failings are a fine reason to dislike or vote against specific people, in most democracies we each vote for a person and who that is should absolutely matter, but it generally has nothing to do with the actual issues. The fact that you hate the Clintons (with you there) or can't stand Trump isn't really relevant IMHO to whether you vote for your specific local Republican or Democrat candidate.

Eleanor Roosevelt was instrumental in blocking the forced repatriation of large numbers of displaced persons to their various home countries that were in the USSR after WW2. A large number of these displaced persons were from the Ukraine(detailed numbers not known) and even though there was a huge effort by the USSR to get these people back, these largely failed and many countries settled them and gave them landed immigrant status. Exceptions were made for war criminals, who also tried to hide. Of those sent to the USSR, many were imprisoned/killed etc. Apologies for political stuff, but the spots on the leopard remain. (nothing against the beautiful leopards either)

http://www.dpcamps.org/repatriation3.html

This seems unnecessarily elitist. I mean, I would be glad if I could get away with just discussing theory and ideas, but reality and practical matters gets in the way. We vote for people, we evaluate people from events.

Exactly. We elect people not ideas.

This is highly debatable.

Politicians generally channel ideas in order to get elected - and then screw everyone over once they have power for 4 years.

Also, whether one likes Reddit or not, it has a huge userbase, and each subreddit is pretty much different than another. There are plenty of subreddits with really interesting comment chains.

It’s more frustration than elitism. Take the topic of Machine Learning for example, there’s really few people on planet earth that can discuss the implications of it in detail. To broaden membership into that discussion, you have to provide a lifeline in the context of ‘what are the implications of AI with respect to future work, will humanity ever have to work again?’ - ok, now most people can take part.

The frustration is, why is gossip and conspiracy lifelines necessary for topics that most people should have no issue discussing? You really can’t add anything without that stuff?

Anyways, I heard Hunter Biden is a drug addict, and Putin has cancer, and that’s why he’s invading Ukraine.

There are absolutely vast numbers of people who can comfortably discuss the implications of machine learning – people from all walks of life with many different perspectives, including technologists, artists, economists, politicians and more. This seems like a straw man.

Having a topic under discussion is hardly "gossip" or a "conspiracy lifeline".

Ironically, your comment is itself a perfect example of discussing an idea. In fact, I would argue that discussing people and events as proxies for the discussion of ideas does not fall foul of the maxim.

One thing is to discuss how candidate X chooses to dress, whether candidate Y cheated on their partner, or how candidate Z looked so stupid in that incident yesterday. Another very different thing is to discuss candidate X's personal background (and how it makes them more likely to understand a given issue), that candidate Y does not practice what they preach (and probably cannot be trusted), or that candidate Z has owned up to their screw-up yesterday (and self-criticism is a good trait for leadership).

You just spread "Fake News" about Eleanor Roosevelt:

See: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/18/great-minds/

It was on the back of my mind, I remember hearing this :p

She left off "Galaxy-brains discuss whatever is most pertinent to their interests and goals." :-)

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