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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

> Curious how even the most die-hard leftists seem to be a-ok with this.

You should talk with some actual 'leftists'! They aren't at all what your sources say. Just read some leftist blogs or news sources or talk on HN. It turns out that the great majority of people of all stripes are reasonable, normal humans, and the those who tell you otherwise are the threats, the ones trying polarize and control others through hate - if people started having civil, respectiful conversations, the polarizers would be done.

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I've come to realize and eventually accept that it shouldn't be called "left/right" but rather "faster/slower".

As we vote, we don't strike a ±10 on some symmetrical scale; rather we decide between 0-10 on some speed range.

It correlates with the strong observation in poli. sci. that the older we get, the more we tend to vote conservatively (the younger we are, the less we stand to lose since a life has yet to be made and wealth be accumulated; conversely the older we get, the more stakes we have to lose if we upend the status quo). This seems true across cultures and generations, and corroborated by a slew of psych. data.

Your "normal" range of people (able to have a reasonable discussion etc.) is a fat 70-ish % of the population, centered on some '5' speed mark. Astoundingly, these people both left and right are ignored by insanely polarized politics who mostly focus on the edges, the extremes, where electoral battles are seemingly won in a dirty side-effect of the uninominal voting scheme. Hint: rank-based choice is one easy solution to this problem, but notice how most parties around the democratic world seem to ignore that yet simple and easily computable fact as of the 21st century.

What I mean is that we choose to mislabel and misunderstand the problems and their solution; somehow this insane polarized and wildly suboptimal situation is maintained by whoever's in charge at most political forces as we speak.

I think it's time we bring back some engineering mindset in the design of societal governance, because we might just have been too busy making the internet to notice that the people in charge are no wiser than most of us; in fact they're pretty much the very type of human beings we usually don't listen to for serious matters —at least when we're on the 'good' timeline of humanity.

> Hint: rank-based choice is one easy solution to this problem, but notice how most parties around the democratic world seem to ignore that yet simple and easily computable fact as of the 21st century.

Please stop thinking the "democratic world" means the US. The countries with that broken system are US, Canada, UK and former colonies. Meanwhile in the EU the norm is proportional representation, which doesn't have that problem.

Furthermore, i disagree with the notion that social or economic progress means "losing" something to significant amounts of the population ( higher taxation of the highest income individuals would be a loss for them, but they're a fraction of a fraction of the population), and i disagree even more with the notion that younger people have less to lose, especially on the social axis.

> I think it's time we bring back some engineering mindset in the design of societal governance

I'd love to see that, but for engineers (who generally value things like accuracy), being involved in politics is particularly distasteful. Instead, we live in world run by lawyers and moderated by marketing consultants, where the truth is unimportant, and discarded completely if it's a hurdle to winning.

There are ways to fix this, even simple, well known ways (your suggestion of ranked choice voting being one of them), however the paradox is that those who have the power to implement them, are the ones who are benefiting from the status quo, thus have no incentive to fix things.

> I'd love to see that, but for engineers (who generally value things like accuracy), being involved in politics is particularly distasteful. Instead, we live in world run by lawyers and moderated by marketing consultants, where the truth is unimportant, and discarded completely if it's a hurdle to winning.

Look at Facebook, adtech, cryptocurrency, etc. and tell me how honest and accurate engineers are.

If you really care about the truth, discard these simplistic notions about lawyers, marketing, engineers, etc. They are fodder for Internet discussions, a distraction for the public, but serious reality is a very different thing.

> I think it's time we bring back some engineering mindset in the design of societal governance, because we might just have been too busy making the internet to notice that the people in charge are no wiser than most of us; in fact they're pretty much the very type of human beings we usually don't listen to for serious matters —at least when we're on the 'good' timeline of humanity.

This is a classic mistake, thinking you or your tribe (in this case your profession) are a special case that will save others. You're right that 'the people in charge are no wiser than most of us', but also you are no wiser than they are. It's humanity all the way down!

It's the people who think they are superior and will help everyone else that are the danger - in fact, the magic of democracy is that it give the power to the everyone else. Often, those superior people are blind to and disregard the needs of others - they are superior and know better, after all - and they have another big problem:

The only way you (or I) can really help is to realize that, and realize we are prone to the same mistakes, biases, corruption, systemic influence, etc. If you don't, then you won't anticipate and manage those risks, and they will sweep you up like so many of your predecessors.

To put it in engineering terms, you would be like a developer who expects that they, unlike everyone else, will write bug-free software and therefore schedules deadlines that way and worse, doesn't provide for any tests, documentation, debugging, failure modes, etc.

Many of your predecessors thought the same as you, and were eaten alive and swept away by the systems in place. Those systems haven't survived by being easy to overcome; plenty of smart people have tried. And there are plenty of hardened veterans of it who will be licking their lips when they see you coming.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't get involved - do, by all means! But please go in with plenty of humility.

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