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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

How do you reconcile solidarity, aka consensus with individuality?

By accepting a compromise between the two, which seems like the only sane way to do it to me. Otherwise if you go too far in terms of solidarity you end up with totalitarianism (everything is the state & the state is everything)

The compromise you speak of is simply neither, which is not reconciliation

It’s sort of a false binary where neither can actually exist, they’re just ideological terms. If you wanted to think about it in a simplified and overly broad way you could model it as a range of 0 to 1 where the actual reality can only ever be a decimal.

Are you asking how to make sure that the society is accommodating to those who are not willing to be accomodating to others?

You don't. If the group is too strict, you find another one. Having no borders would sure help.

But yeah, global issues need a global consensus. Can't let someone kill the planet for all of us.

Pretty easily in fact, with old liberal non-aggression principle.

Non-interference unless what an individual is doing obstructs good of others. Includes the expenses if they are high enough. This cannot be defined individually.

The non aggression principle cannot work without a shared definition of aggression.

And, 9/10 times between mutually aggrieved parties there is no shared definition of aggression.

So, no, it's not that easy.

This is actually where a shitload of disagreement and misunderstanding comes from. Due to peoples different perspectives, people have varying definitions of various terms. This makes discussing heated topics like politics super difficult because the people with different perspectives fundamentally generally don't understand the definitions used by the other and assumptions are made leading to disagreement

This is also why defining terms is so important in a conversation. "Robber baron" and "job creator" refer to roughly the same set of people, but have wildly different connotations. Whoever sets the definitions gets to set the framing of the entire conversation that follows. Sometimes, this means that even using the name of a group lean a conversation one way or another. (e.g. The term "Objectivism", Ayn Rand's name for her own philosophy, is accepting that there is something objective about it.)

To paraphrase Fred Brooks: "Show me your arguments and conceal your definitions, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your definitions, and I usually won't need your arguments; they'll be obvious." (s/flowcharts/arguments/ and s/tables/definitions/ from the original.)

That's a great quote from Fred Brooks, thank you for sharing! Do you happen to know where its from?

According to wikiquote[0], it is from The Mythical Man-Month. Also, just to be clear, this is a paraphrasing of the original with the substitutions as mentioned in the original comment. The initial context was of software data structures and software algorithms, emphasizing that the data structures are by far the more important.

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks

That's a feature. Human words are supposed to be flexible. Re-defining and re-shaping them is a key way that we evolve as a society.

Insisting that everyone in the room uses the same definitions for all words, and trying to force some mono-mind of language, rather than actually working to solve problems is counterproductive. It can be productive to discuss and understand how terms are being used differently by different parties, and it is absolutely necessary for everyone in the room to understand that words are different for different people, but then you have to actually start working on the shared problems.

It's incredibly frustrating when people waste everyone's time trying to come up with a completely new shared "compromise vocabulary" that no one is happy with and will get discarded the moment people leave the room.

The problem could be solved by simply discussing definitions at the start of a debate, there's no need to come up with new vocabulary.

Human words should change over time, as that helps communication. However, human words varying across participants of the same conversation drastically harms understanding.

As a non-political example, the first time I heard the term "server-side rendering", I thought it was one of the soonest ideas I had ever heard. With the latency between client and server, needing to go back to the server for every screen draw would make for an incredibly laggy interface. I hadn't known that JavaScript developers use "rendering" to refer to making HTML, whereas I associate it only with making an image to be displayed. Because there was no shared definition, communication was harmed.

Non-aggression is when people who completely disagree don't attack each other.

Solidarity is when people who substantially agree on something act in concert.

I can't see how one can substitute the other.

Through: liberte egalite fraternite

People have been doing it since "at least" the French Revolution, I am sure that you could chuck some Pericles speeches in there too

I think there are too many people that cannot do this reconciliation.

This reconciliation is embodied in phrases like, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Solidarity is not conformity. You can be different. There is likely no person on this planet with which you truly have no shared interest, no shared objective, no shared sympathy. Even if you find you identify strongly with your difference with another, the ability to see more fundamental shared interests, objectives and sympathies are the underpinning of things like secularism, freedom of speech, and liberalism in general.

I don't think what you're describing here is individualism though.

On the other hand, going a little further with that phrase: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - while it's a benign ideal, looking at applications of that philosophy in practice you often seen it being applied in an inconsistent manner, whereby someone's "right" to say someone infringes on the autonomy of others (essentially a case of competing rights). It's only in cases like that where individualism comes into play.

Individuals can very well voluntarily donate to charities without having government goons force to give half of their profits

This would work great if we were a species of ants

You mean "spend some time helping others, without being coerced", right?

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