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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Fwiw, I 100% agree with this. All of a sudden the constant judging is there, it's seeping into the once clean, apolitical world-of-mind. It started on the big tech platforms, the new weary giants of flesh and steel, but it's overflowing into our hacker-minded spaces as well now.

Like US families torn between 2 sides of their politics, they can't even have normal dinners together anymore. They can't communicate without judging, it's an illness, they've been weaponized against each other.

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Well, it's hard to break bread with someone who you fundamentally disagree about things like humans rights issues with. Family or not. You don't just skip over that, and in fact why should you? Having blood relations means you have to sit and eat with someone who thinks you or people you know shouldn't exist or shouldn't be allowed to have the same rights as other people? I'm very glad that we've normalized not glossing over this kind of stuff anymore, because of "family".

"our hacker-minded spaces"

Spaces full of people.

"once clean, apolitical world-of-mind"

This only ever existed for select few people.

> Well, it's hard to break bread with someone who you fundamentally disagree about things like humans rights issues with.

It's actually not. It's very easy to get along with people, even those from whom we have vastly differing moral axioms, if we only try. Sadly these days many people are disinterested in trying, believing (wrongly) that they will make the world a better place if they sow more division.

Why try to get along with someone you have vastly different moral axioms to?

It used to work quite well. Perhaps together you can think of a cause to the rift, and try to actively fight it instead of each other. Start with commonalities, not differences. I think it’s important to, at the very least, never stop trying.

How extreme of moral axiom differences should we tolerate?

I don't know if you notice what you're doing, but you're turning a low stakes / no confrontation situation into a high stakes / confrontational situation for no discernible benefit.

This type of self destructive behavior may seem worthwhile in the moment, but in the long run it doesn't bring any benefits, because you have to fight the people you're declaring war against and if the list of enemies is long enough, you're almost certainly guaranteed to lose against one of them.

Let me answer you with 2 other questions:

Is this line of thinking going to make things better for future generations or is it not?

How important is it to work on defining this boundary, compared to working towards a less polarized society?

How can society become less polarised if we normalise an extremely wide spectrum of different moral axioms? To reduce polarisation, people with extremist moral axioms must stop having them, which can't happen if extremist moral axioms are accepted.

For one, I think that the people you have put the "extreme" label on, are not as extreme as you think they are, and indeed could be quite agreeable when you'd seek them out and sit down with them over tea and try to communicate with them with more nuance than a 160 char message can deliver.

Yes, you will be able to find examples that confirm your statement, but they are an exceedingly small minority, probably despised (almost) as much by their "own group" (as far as people actually feel part of a group) as they are by you.

I believe it is the (incentives of) the (social)media and the bots that have made you believe otherwise, over time and in small steps.

The people I put the "extreme" label on believe that it's okay to kill millions of people in order to increase your own strength.

I'd love to have a beer with you, we could be at this all night haha.

.. And we know MS is used as a political tool (ie see their past with the NSA, and the whole business with the International Criminal Court), ie Linux is not, at least not "willingly".

The question assumes we know what someone believes before we've spoken to them. That's the actual problem here, people are being excluded based on assumed beliefs rather than demonstrated behaviour.

Opinions evolve through exposure to different viewpoints, not through isolation from them. The homophobes and racists of the 80s who changed their minds didn't do so because they were shut out of communities - they changed because they were forced to actually interact with the people they'd made assumptions about. That contact broke down the assumptions.

When you exclude someone pre-emptively because you've decided what they must believe, you've eliminated the possibility of that evolution happening. You've also replicated the exact mechanism that made 80s bigotry so pernicious: denying participation based on identity or assumed characteristics rather than actual conduct.

Everyone thinks they're right. The racists thought they were right. The homophobes thought they were right. You think you're right. I think I'm right. That's why behaviour-based boundaries matter more than belief-based ones. Judge people on what they actually do in the space, not what you assume they think.

If your moral framework requires everyone to already agree with you before they're allowed to participate, you're not building a community - you're enforcing an orthodoxy. And orthodoxies don't evolve, they just calcify.

Because they may be your neighbors, your colleagues? Because they're going to the same third place as you, whatever that might be?

I don't show it but honestly I also find it hard not to attribute the negative consequences (partially in Brussels funnily enough) of your preferred policies to people like you. Sometimes it gets hard to hide that.

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