Hacker News Reader

Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

I got most of the way through this and found many things to disagree with. I started to write a reply and then I read this part:

> Expertise is, in a certain sense, a bourgeois concept, a by-product of the ideological imperative to organize our lives and activities in a rational way.

God help anyone who takes this shit seriously.

I don't know when, if ever, austerity is called for (even Paul Krugman has called for deficit reduction in certain circumstances: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/opinion/us-budget-deficit...). But this review is dripping with ideology to the point that it's genuinely disconcerting.

View on HN

In a college poetry class, I learned that literary analysis isn't about being "right" (what did the author actually intend to say?), but instead, being "interesting" (what's a cool way of framing this?). Any subjective interpretation is valid if it's thought-provoking.

I think that is the mental framework with ideology-saturated economic opinion pieces like this one. I don't think they care about being right. Instead, the goal is to make cool, edgy, story-book-good-vs-evil narratives independent of empirical validity ("any subjective interpretation is valid if it's thought-provoking")

I think there's a bit more to the background mental framework. Postmodernism (as best I understand it) says that all truth claims aren't actually about truth. Those who believe such things need not concern themselves with whether the facts support their position. So far I'm restating what you said.

But postmodernism says more. It says that truth claims aren't actually about truth, but are assertions of power. Those who believe such things are likely to have that intent when they write. Keep that in mind when you evaluate what they say.

Makes sense. And the extent to which human communication is embedded with latent assertions of power is an empirical question, which seems more a question for science than philosophy

An issue with your reasoning is it can be liberally applied, including to your very own message. You provide no basis for discounting the opinion piece you disagree with other than projecting stuff you don't like onto it.. But anyone can do that to anyone.

Id agree with you here. I didn't offer any substantial criticism or engage with the articles points. I'm just throwing shade at articles with intense ideology-jargon, which isn't the best thing to do.

However, do you think ideological language is a predictor of a valid, fact-based take on an issue, or the opposite? I'd be hard pressed to say "more ideology -> more empirical validity", but maybe they're orthogonal

I would bet other things your read are laden with ideological language, you just don't notice because you've already decided you agree with it.

Sure, but that would still make it bad, right? I may be a hypocrite (for argument's sake), but that doesn't change whether being steeped in ideology is a bad thing.

Would you agree? Or do you think being steeped in ideology leads to more rational decision making? (independent of whether ideology is needed for social mobilization)

The worldview for commies depends on that. Pay no mind to facts or experts, those are all stacked against you by way of conspiracy. All that matters is the utopian ideal, which incidentally, they argue isn't utopian. That is thoroughly betrayed by Hegel-lite rhetoric that what they want (the "ought") can be realized without any consideration for reality (what "is").

Reply on news.ycombinator.com