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Comment by GrinningFool | Hacker News Reader

Seems to me public review is a failsafe - an acknowledgement that laws and regs can't always keep up with real life harms.

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Public review in practice is a mechanism for concentrated local interest groups that don't have enough democratic legitimacy to win at the ballot box to instead win via a series of Tuesday night meetings normal people don't go to. There's literature on this: public comment overwhelmingly trends negative. People show up to prevent change. They rarely show up to support it, even if they do support it; normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.

> normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.

That's not how the vast majority of this works, and the average best case scenario on this you get to vote a politician out after they already fucked people over.

This sounds like porting assumptions about national and statewide politics into local politics, which is a totally different animal. I hear this a lot from people, and if you're referring to local electeds as "politicians fucking people over", you're probably not thinking locally. If you disagree, can we reconcile our premises? What local politics are you doing that's indicating otherwise to you?

I feel like this is a complicated issue, because there are two competing values here.

On one hand, fair representation is important, and the idea that every person has an equal say in how governmental decisions are made. One person one vote.

On the other hand, not everyone has the same ‘skin in the game’ for different decisions. For example, if we are deciding if a noisy building should be allowed to be built, someone who lives 5 miles away is not going to be affected by the noise, so they aren’t going to care about that. If someone comes to a community and says “we will give everyone in the community $50 if you let us build this loud building here”, then all the people out of the noise range are going to think that is a great deal. They get $50, and they don’t hear the noise anyway. Why WOULDNT they want to approve that?

So is it fair for the community to decide to make one (or a few) people miserable for years so they get $50?

So things like public review that let a “concentrated local interest group” have more power makes some sense if the thing they are reviewing also has a concentrated local impact.

Of course, there has to be some balance, otherwise we will live in a NIMBY world and nothing will be built.

People naturally have varying levels of skin in the game on various issues. They should not have varying levels of voting power. But that's essentially what public comment process does.

And your natural inclination is to assume that turnout at public comment maps to those people most impacted by an issue. But that's not at all the case! Turnout maps to those most activated by an issue, which is a function of how much free time they have (public comment is generally wealthier and older) and how fearful they are of change (public comment biases sharply towards "no").

I'm fond of asking people locally here how many of them have even considering turning out at public comment opportunities to support new apartment development. I've never met someone who has, even though people here are broadly supportive of housing. But go to a Plan or HPC meeting: there's a line of commenters out the door opposing the apartments.

Public comment is antidemocratic.

> Public comment is antidemocratic.

This is a fascinating train of thought. I get the logic, but where does it stop?

If the idea is that any situation where people are influencing the government/making decisions without absolutely everyone in the electorate being involved, is anti-democratic, at what point are people in the government allowed to make decisions without consulting everyone?

We have representatives for a reason, and part of that reason involves making decisions without having a vote (even when that decision is made by someone several rungs down the chain from the person actually elected).

I'm highly sympathetic to the idea that the actual effect of these types of "public comment" situations and hopefully anyone involved in one keeps in mind the inherent biases of who shows up, but I don't see how you can flat out deny the idea of asking people, you know, the voters, to come give opinions on decisions being made that are inbetween the actual elections.

We arrange to have everybody vote on a designated day. We publicize that day. We make a very big deal out of getting people to vote. We don't do it too often. People show up and make decisions. They should then be able to leave and assume those decisions will be put into action. But in local politics they often can't, because interest groups that lost the election will camp every meeting afterwards with canvassed public commenters jawboning officials to make different decisions.

> People show up and make decisions. They should then be able to leave and assume those decisions will be put into action.

But this isn't the case. In every representative democracy around the world, including ours, the bedrock principle is that elected politicians "vote their conscience", i.e. they are not bound by what they said they'll do if elected. So in practice you can't assume that what you voted for will be put into action. If anything, the track record on that is pretty poor.

This again sounds like national politics and not local. They really are totally different. In local politics the electeds are your neighbors. They serve part time. All of them have full-time jobs (except sometimes the mayor). You don't communicate with them by making time with their staff --- none of the have staff. Instead you generally just text them or meet them for coffee. I've never met Tara Stamps, my county commissioner, but I could be face-to-face with her inside a couple days if I wanted. And that's Cook County, one of the largest densest counties in the country.

> I've never met Tara Stamps, my county commissioner, but I could be face-to-face with her inside a couple days if I wanted. And that's Cook County, one of the largest densest counties in the country.

This was literally my point about "public comment".

We vote for representatives. They then make decisions based on all sorts of things like ancient holy texts and whoever they spoke to most recently.

How is this formal meeting to give opinions antidemocratic but you setting up a personal meeting to influence someone is just fine?

That all makes sense - I'm not involved enough in local politics so I can't comment knowledgebly.

But that doesn't mean the people trying to prevent change have (only) invalid reasons.

Voting is critical, but it still lags behind. Kicking someone out of office a year after they sign off on the new data center doesn't stop the data center from getting built.

Yes. I'm specifically not saying that working the refs with canvassed public comment invalidates an underlying substantive grievance. Public comment can be used "for good" or for evil. All I'm saying is that people using it "for good" are helping clear a path for all the evil usage, which I'd claim right now dwarfs the good.

I happen to disagree with most data center opposition, but I'm not saying data center opposition is per se bad because it's delivered through public comment.

You can't give all citizens effective veto power and then expect it will only be used for good in cases where the law is behind.

Right. But what about the cases it is used for good?

Hey man Sam and Elon gotta eat

In many environments it ends up acting like a generic "don't build things" mandate. Such a mandate's wins are by accident more often than by target, and it does more harm than good.

I mean, this is way too vague to really talk about usefully, but like, adding some friction to certain processes can be pretty useful.

While that is true, the current default situation in the US is way too far on the anti-build side.

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