Ask HN: Why do anti-progressive comments get so many down votes?

Progressive views tend to lean towards thing thing that sounds nice

  - everyone should be equal

  - everyone should have a good standard of living

  - everyone should get a good education

It's easy to throw out this category of things in a vacuous way wherein everyone on every side of the spectrum agrees with these statements, but the progressive angle is to downplay the difficulties and simply assert things as rights and disparage anyone who claims it is more complicated than this whereas the stock conservative angle is to focus on the logistical issues

  - how do we afford this?

  - ensuring "everyone is equal" involves forcefully holding some people back

  - through what process do you plan to ensure the right?

  - what happens if this societal goal conflicts with my rights?

These things all sound "mean" compared to the things in the first group and are far easier to criticize than the nicer sounding but ultimately incomplete ideas in the first set.

Obviously this is a drastic oversimplification and there are all sorts of people on both sides who don't fit this mold but as a rule, more often than not, this pattern plays out.

I would guess it's a matter of presentation. If you present any idea in dogmatic, absolutist fashion, you get down voted. Rhetorically allow for disagreement, nuance, respond to criticism, you may not get any votes, but you probably won't get down votes.

"Anti-progessive" means "traditional" basically. Dogmatically advocating for tradition is going to come off as bull-headed, and without logical or empirical underpinnings. Nobody wants to argue with someone who is illogical and won't change their minds, so it's easier to just down vote.

There are plenty of ways to get downvoted on HN which have little to do with anti-progressivism. The old "When in Rome, do like the Romans..." wisdom also applies to tone, style, context, and {attributes which someone who took Rhetoric 101 would know the terms for}.

The old "always know your crowd" vaudeville wisdom also applies. HN seems dominated by a pretty young crowd of techies, who are moving up in the world (or identify that way), thanks to their own skills with computers. Their favoring Progressive ideas is no more surprising than powerful monarchs favoring the Divine right of kings ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_right_of_kings ).

A worldwide trend to more left leaning views has been taking place since before ww1. Despite short term localised reverses to nationalism, and rightist trends, a case is made that irrespective of the agenda in teaching, an increase in learning to secondary and tertiary levels is not just correlative to this: the enquiring mind seeks equity, and equitable outcomes more than the adversarial traditionalist ones.

True conservatism, in its purest sense, is not actually about capitalism per se, but a rejection of the assumption that all which is new is better. But that aside, most capital has conservative roots. It is the nature of accrued land and wealth to vest in fewer hands, and to run against redistribution and progressive trends to social equity. Many conservatives love land and nature, hate industry and development despite dependence on it for much of their wealth.

If this worries you, consider how much it worries the Chinese, Russian and like states: they hate progressives every bit as much as rightist conservative trends in the developed west.

Churches display the same thing btw. Young priests have to be warned against populism and progressive ideas in all faiths.

Personally I welcome anti progressive comments. They're interesting. They make me question my own progressive beliefs. I lose far more arguments than I win. In 61 years I have yet to feel less progressive than in my youth. Less revolutionary, perhaps.

Maybe it's because progressive ideology is activist ideology and progressives like to exercise their downvote.

Definition is necessary. What's 'progressive'?

Is post-modernism (and associated Social Justice Activism, identity politics and focus on culture-wars) 'progressive', or is 'progressive' defined as old-school, 'social democratic' politics, social justice, rights/freedoms and classic liberalism? These are almost diametrically opposed viewpoints.

You could ask this about any forum and it would be pertinent, or you could ask why left wing societies like the USSR, China etc always have more censorship in general than the right.

Here's one theory for you to try: leftists/progressives in general are much more concerned with speech and language control than non-progressives. Why is that? Well, this ideology or philosophy or whatever you want to call it, is fundamentally about the Power of Man to reshape the world through the Power Of Ideas. Ideas in turn are objects manipulated entirely using words.

So, people on the left believe very deeply that words and ideas are very powerful. Not the implementation of ideas, but the ideas themselves. That is, merely articulating an idea can itself change people and thus the world, almost immediately! They therefore elevate and protect "intellectuals", using Sowell's definition of people whose primary status in society depends on their production of ideas. People not on the left (I don't think the right is really a consistent thing worth talking about as a coherent unit), generally don't believe that to the same extent. They are much more concerned with implementations, practical experience, the evolved wisdom of traditions and so on, and may find many ideas to lack common sense, be wishful thinking, etc.

What happens if you deeply believe that merely hearing words can significantly change the world, or people's beliefs about the world? Well, then controlling what other people say becomes critical. After all, if someone writes some anti-progressive ideas then other people might see them and change their beliefs away from progressivism, which would be terrible. But if you can't directly control it, then hiding the words is the next best thing. Forum downvotes are the second best option available to hide a post, abusive flagging is of course the best and so if you turn on showdead and browse https://news.ycombinator.com/active so you can see flagged posts you'll see that anything anti-progressive in any way gets flagged very quickly regardless of any merits the story or post may have.

What can be done? Mostly, better forum software would fix this. The mechanisms for getting posts pulled or reranked need to be divorced from abstract voting, where it's never really clear what a downvote is meant to mean (mere disagreement vs "get rid of this post" for other reasons). Fully algorithmic ranking, for example, would allow heavily downvoted posts to nonetheless be at the top if they scored well on other metrics. However not many people make or run forums so such ideas don't get much experimentation.

Because tech has a left-wing bias [1], and HN is mostly a tech forum.

I personally think that will change in the coming years though. There's a limit on how much tech and denial of reality can coexist. Perhaps the reason that they have been able to coexist for while is that most tech workers tend to work in fields adjacent to computer science. They live in the world of bits, not atoms.

By denial of reality I mean things like denying the enormous role of genetics, or basic economics (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory), or insisting on human equality at every level (which is of course utterly untrue, e.g. von Neumann was smarter than almost all of us here), or the war on merit (i.e. "affirmative action"), or heavy use of propaganda and censorship and doublethink to avoid social stigma for particular groups, or denial of basic biology (when it comes to fitness, or gender differences), or even Orwellian [2] insistence on the "fact" that 2 + 2 = 5. [3]

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/07/02/most-liberal-tech-compan...

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_%2B_2_%3D_5

[3]: https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/129047933047724032...