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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

The strawmanning of arguments from both sides is so intense that most people lay in a bed composed entirely of strawman arguments. I firmly blame the media above all for this, but individuals carry a burden to for not trying to remake their bed.

It took me 15 years to to remake my bed into somewhat rational arguments, and still I find lots of hay in there. Generally both sides, or all sides really, want the same things and disagree on how to get there. And the truth is there is almost never an obvious or clear way to get there. It's fractal pros and cons all the way down.

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> but individuals carry a burden to for not trying to remake their bed

In what way? I turn on Fox sometimes and it's not that it's slanted, but it's just a stream of lies and BS. I've watched a bunch of Trump's speeches and in addition to being incoherent, he says the same lies and BS all the way down. Yesterday's tariff speech was a great example.

I don't consider myself progressive (though the MAGA right would think me so), but where do I go to try and 'remake [my] bed'?

I think what's meant is that you need to be open to changing your opinion and manner of approach to things. To stay with the analogy: when you "remake" your bed and it ends up the same, chances are that you didn't try to improve on its design.

By turning on Fox sometimes (provided it's not your main source) you might already not fall into the category of people not trying to remake their bed.

Wait, we're designing bedding now? Not just remaking our beds? What a strained analogy that when you 'remake' your bed and it's the 'same' (why would it be different?) then you didn't improve the design?? Even more shocking is that you ran with this as opposed to realizing that these were warning signs that either your fundamental argument is ridiculous, or your analogy is.

Well, the first thing is to realize CNN is also just a stream of lies and BS. Every media news organization in the world has become (they always were?) pure garbage.

Listening to first-hand sources is the way, I guess, but also remembering they can be lying as well, so be vigilant.

It's true, because all the upper levels of ALL large media organizations have been infiltrated by big-moneyed conservatives.

CNN and NBC weren't always as bad as they are now, but their descent has been obvious and dramatic.

Some of them still employ democrats to some minimal extent, such as Jamelle Bouie at the NYT, but that's merely subterfuge, lest their bent be glaringly obvious.

If someone can name a large organization that is an exception to my first paragraph, I would be happy to learn of them.

CNN has always been propaganda

https://youtu.be/rWtwjDhgN3Q

https://youtu.be/NlcSiYulhos

> Generally both sides, or all sides really, want the same things and disagree on how to get there.

No, that is just not true. For example, do you think Putin and his supporters wanted a functioning democracy in Russia and independent Ukraine? No, they wanted someone functioning as a dictator to restore Russia's cold war territory and influence, and they wanted to undermine western democracies that stood in their way.

History does not support your claim that everyone wants the same things. Some people want power and strong man to take over the government. We see that with the Trump administration. The religious conservatives want to use that to make America a Christian nation. The billionaire libertarians want to use it to deregulate their industries and run the government like a corporation. And Trump wants to act unilaterally to bring about his vision of being seen as some great figure. They have illiberal aims.

I'm speaking about the collectives, not the individuals. There are always deranged individuals and some of them, many of them, manage to get in power. But the ideological collectives all have pretty much the same core goals. Needs met, population happy.

What's your threshold where an "individual" becomes a "collective"? Certainly billionaire libertarians, religious conservatives, Putin and his supporters and the Trump administration (along with the judges he's appointed, the people in congress and state governments who ran on his platform and the 10s of millions of Americans who voted for them) are not individuals...

They also very obviously want different things compared to others.

Shy of a few fringe groups, I am not aware of any large suffering & death collectives. Every large collective is trying to achieve a better life for it's adherents, and is always welcoming to those who want to join. Christains might see living is the light of Jesus as the ideal life, and while not for everyone, you should at least be able to understand why they feel that way (as opposed to a religion of self inflicted torture).

Remember the goal here is not to become sympathetic to Trump, or Putin, or Sanders, or Netanyahu, or Islam. The goal is to have an accurate understanding of them, so that when you form arguments against them, you are actually attacking bedrock and not just straw.

> Christains might see living is the light of Jesus as the ideal life, and while not for everyone, you should at least be able to understand why they feel that way (as opposed to a religion of self inflicted torture).

Yes, but also we've seen how they've behaved in the past when they had vast political power in Europe. And we see what the goals of the Heritage Foundation is with Project 2025. There have always been a decent number of conservative Christians who want prayer, the bible and ten commandments in school. Who don't want legal abortion or gay marriage. And the more power they have, the more they would restrict. They also tend to believe in a lot of conspiracy theories, like the Democratic Party being controlled by satanists and communists, who have also infiltrated the "Deep State".

So you can imagine how those beliefs play out with enough political power.

politics, especially international geopolitics is a zero-sum game. The game of competition for limited resources and markets. Because resources are limited, the pie is fixed, and this makes it zero sum game.

Although there is a way to frame political alliances as a win-win when two parties increase their share at a cost of some other third party losing theirs.

Because of that, the arguments will always be straw-man, because people want to win resources, not to argue in good faith.

Any political issue can be framed in terms of zero sum game, if you look at the whole picture

That's not how economics works. The pie is not fixed, it tends to grow over time as there's more trade between countries and their economies get bigger. The global economic pie has increased a massive amount over the past century.

the trade has increased because jobs have been offshored, corporations have been running labor cost arbitrage and making a profit from a difference in labor cost in US vs elsewhere

And as with most arbitrages, costs have lowered as a result. It means a piece of technology with thousands of individual parts can be in your hand for $200. Labor efficiency differences have resulted in an explosion of value-for-dollar for the American consumer.

This is incorrect. There are few physical resources that we have reached the limit of, such that one entity’s gain is necessarily another’s loss. There are also a great many things of value that aren’t simply raw resources, for which the pie will never be fixed, because the pie is made by humans and can be made bigger or smaller.

This zero-sum narrative is only true in a world of no growth, where all resources are being fully utilized to maximum effect. That is very far from the world we live in, where there is enormous room for additional extraction, creation, and efficient utilization of resources.

the zero sum will always be true because of the fundamental law of physics: Law of preservation of energy.

Everything in the economy thats worth producing/consuming costs energy and labor. Energy and labor is not free.

You may be conflating win-win with debt-based growth, where economy can grow at the cost of running fiscal deficit and accumulating debt. Sure the economy and market can grow, but the debt will also grow and the inflation will cancel out the nominal growth

We use about 1 part in 10000 of the sun's energy deposit on earth... No, we are _really_ far away from preservation of energy being a limiting problem

yes, the only way to increase economy without stealing from someone else is technological advancement and efficiency improvements (which amounts to R&D spend = $$$$)

Again, the law of preservation of energy only makes things zero sum between entities if all the energy is already being used at maximum efficiency, which it isn't.

For a simple example, consider farming, where plants are used to harness the energy of the sun and capture it in a form useful to humans. Yes, there are inputs that go into it, but the output is more valuable (economically and otherwise) than the material input, because the plant also captured a bunch of solar energy that would have otherwise done nothing useful for anyone's economy. My economy has now grown, without having to take or go into debt from some other economy.

Even in a scenario where I do take on debt to get the materials/water/whatever, the value that is created is greater than the debt taken on. If it wasn't, then I wouldn't do it.

Humans create value by harnessing more energy and using it more efficiently for things that humans (and therefore economies) value. This is an ongoing process, with a long way to go.

I guess I can interpret the strongest form of your argument to suggest that resources and markets have a specific level of economically relevant supply at any specific time, which I suppose is an empirical claim that’s true. I feel like recent days’ trade policy earthquakes might operate along a similar line of reasoning: there’s only so much, “they’ve” been getting better off, which means they’ve been “taking” from the US, so the US is taking back.

In the same sense it’s true that there are only so many bushels of seed corn left after the winter. At the moment, we can squabble over how to divide the fixed supply. I could take all the corn, eat half, keep the rest for myself to plant this season. Or, if I’ve already got enough to plant all my land, and you’ve got more land and nothing else to do, I could invest some of my leftover corn with you and we can all have double the harvest in a few months… when the supply will have dramatically expanded, assuming I don’t treat it as a zero-sum game right now. Or I could focus on “winning” right now, and we’ll both be poorer after the harvest than we would have been otherwise.

While I agree that you could frame most any political issue in zero-sum terms, I feel like the blind spot is the same: it tallies the score based on assumptions fixed in time, and it takes a pessimistic view of cooperative potential, of humans’ power to influence the constraints themselves.

the zero sum will always be true because of the fundamental law of physics: Law of preservation of energy / Law of preservation of matter.

Everything in the economy thats worth producing/consuming costs energy and labor. Energy and labor is not free.

Any free lunch one can have in the economy is only possible in nominal terms, when your economy/market grows, but your sovereign debt and fiscal deficit also grows and in real terms, after inflation there is no real growth.

if you look at the core, the bottom of the economics it is just pure physics: The flow and exchange of energy and materials, labor and capital. The fight is over a distribution of the flows between various factions

Aren’t we so, so, so far from physical limits though? To the point that we speak of likely energy reserves in terms of centuries of consumption at current levels, even if we only get around to proving the next couple decades’ worth at a time?

If Musk et al get their wishes, and we become “spacefaring civilization” or whatever—aren’t the conceivable physical limits of known reality so far away as to be irrelevant?

And isn’t the story of the industrial era one of compounding productivity per unit of labor?

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