Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

1. An airplane crashes, everyone dies. Clearly a bad thing. Not so quick. For the funeral industry this means additional business, a good thing. And this is true for a LOT [1] of things, they are not good or bad, right or wrong, their judgment depends on perspective and personal preferences.

2. Which means that there is generally no policy that makes everyone happy. So you need a party with a program that aims at finding compromises that are acceptable for everyone.

3. But nobody will vote for such a party. Why would you vote for a party that gives you 50 % of what you want if there is a different party that is more aligned with your views and preferences and promises to give you 90 % of what you want?

4. In consequence the political direction tends to hop between extremes instead of settling on compromises. One group gets really unhappy with the current situation, shows up for elections, votes their party into power, moves the situation into the direction of a different extreme, until others get unhappy enough to start the process all over again.

5. Even in political systems where [sometimes] a coalition of parties exercises the power and they are forced to compromise, the outcome is all but ideal. Things move slowly because finding compromises is hard if you do not really want to compromise. Voters look down on the party they voted for because they are not delivering what they promised but only compromises.

I guess the moral of the story is that the voters have to realize that their view is not the only valid one and that voting for compromises would probably yield better outcomes than voting for extremes and either going in that direction for some time until turning around or maybe arriving at a forced compromise that no one voted for.

[1] Exercise for the reader, find something politically relevant that does not depend on perspective and personal preferences.

Here's a recent blog post in a similar vein: https://benthams.substack.com/p/voting-self-interestedly-is-...

Although your plane crash example falls afoul of the broken window fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Plus the simple fact that, by the same logic, you can try to both-sides plain murder on the ground that the murderer wants to murder (and, again, that the undertakers and coroners and such must be kept in business). Clearly, whilst every policy will have supporters and detractors, some detractions are more worthy of consideration than others.

The point of the example is that something that would generally be judged as obviously bad often turns out to not be bad from all perspectives. The same obviously also holds for good things. But I did not intend to imply any economics. The crash investigation might uncover an issue that gets fixed and prevents future crashes, also in this sense the crash had a positive effect. The better outcome in some overall sense would probably still have been for the airplane not to crash and the families spending the money on something better than funerals.

[...] some detractions are more worthy of consideration than others.

This is probably quite hard to justify in general.

I want zero cents of my money to be wasted on climate change, I live now and I want to enjoy my life as much as possible. I do not care if the planet gets burned to a crisp in a hundred years when I am dead.

One can certainly have a different perspective and vehemently disagree, especially if you have children that will have to live through that future, but otherwise? How would you argue that this position is somehow less valid than any other?

Are you seriously suggesting that there are different acceptable perspectives on the first point?

I think it's important to hold on to such things, that's how we get further and get agreement, to try to agree on fundamental principles. No reason to upset that balance by suggesting that a plane crash is ever preferable.

What do you prefer, a plane crash or a nuclear war? But that does not matter, I did not say a airplane crashing is preferable over something, I said it is not a bad event for everyone. It is bad for the people on board and their friends and families but there are also people that benefit from a crash. That still does not mean that people benefiting from the event are in favor of more airplanes crashing. And for the majority of people it will essentially be neutral, half the planet might never even hear about this particular crash and for many more it will be a thirty second news segment they once saw.

I enjoyed your comment.

Over the long term, democracies have mostly avoided self-implosion, so this political see-saw does seem to work.

The question is: is there anything we can do to make it feel better to live in?

Democracies solve the succession problem. Autocracies often don't have peaceful transition of power and swing far more extreme. Sometimes even civil war.

I wasn't trying to argue against democracy. I was asking about how we make it feel better.

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