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Comment by throwaway22032 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway22032

I agree with you, but I'm surprised that you then go on to write off conservatism seemingly flippantly.

There is no reason to believe that social norms can only change for the better, and in fact a lot of evidence that they aren't moving in a positive direction.

The US right may be overreacting to this by rolling back too many changes and throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

But that doesn't mean that conservatism in general is a bad idea. There is certainly something to be said for assessing the outcomes of a change before running many experiments in parallel without a control group.

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People here talk a whole lot about Chesterton's Fence when it comes to engineering topics and promptly forget it all when switching over to sociopolitical topics.

at the same time many here seem to think "not understanding a system" can involve totally good faith arguments like "sticking your head in the sand" and "putting a blindfold and earplugs in and saying LALALALALALALA!"

Conservatism offers no solutions here so we can safely write it off for this particular issue. There is no way to prevent content creators and media companies from running uncontrolled experiments to maximize advertising revenue or user engagement or whatever metric. In the USA we have the rule of law and constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression. The potential benefits of pushing right up to the line are so huge that there will be no voluntary restraint in the general case. Even if YouTube or Instagram were to restrict risque content the creators and consumers would eventually move on to a new service.

I agree that there is not a regulatory measure capable of curbing content creators from carrying out these kind of videos.

However, the previous comments were suggesting that a broader adoption of social conservatism could potentially influence the algorithm's function, mainly due to the increased likelihood of individuals shunning such videos.

Conservative individuals still watch those videos in private while virtue signaling against them in public. They're all hypocrites.

> But that doesn't mean that conservatism in general is a bad idea.

It's crazy to me that conservatism has become a dirty word. And I wasn't immune to that either when I was younger. It's only as I've matured that I realized what the word actually means and that conservatism is actually the center on the reactionary-conservative-progressive axis. I also learned that progressivism is mainly ideologies driven from academic circles who consider themselves an intellectual elite that should decide where society is headed and that those circles have been catastrophically wrong in the past with things like eugenics and communism.

In my experience, conservatism means tax cuts for the wealthy and whatever it takes to sell them. "Family values" were the sales pitch when I was a kid and they could use that against a president who liked to diddle the interns. Nowadays, they seem to be taking a different direction since the leader of their party is a genital-grabbing philanderer, but he did get them their tax cuts.

You're equating conservatism with the US republican party.

I've often thought that if I moved to the US I'd have no-one to vote for. Both sides seem to have some insane, out there policy.

Yeah conservatism as in tax cuts for the middle class and poor and less government services as a result is not a policy in the US lol

I'm talking about the social policy.

Simplified, republicans seem to have an issue with abortion. Democrats seem to think there are eleven genders.

Both just seem super out there to me as a Brit.

Financial policies aren't really something I care about to the same degree.

I will say that the left leaning social policy in the US seemed silly to me at first until I became better friends with people who are in those groups and a bit of it is still silly but it does make a lot more sense from their perspective.

People have been denouncing prostitution as debasing, demoralizing, and distracting for as long as writing has been available, maybe longer.

Manipulating people with sex is nothing new, and we will keep finding new ways to do it with every new technological innovation.

I didn't mean to write off social conservatism. I just meant that it's unappealing to roughly half the country and it's unclear what liberals are supposed to tell men and women to discourage this behavior.

Ah, fair enough.

I don't really know the situation on the ground in the US. In the UK I feel like we're a fairly conservative country in general, the majority of the population are socially conservative (if perhaps not fiscally), but then the political parties are split in a way that makes this complicated.

Put simply - in the UK, half of the country are capital C Conservative, but probably >80% are conservative.

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