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Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

> I’ve since learned that overly online keyboard warriors are the least important people to convince. The most important people are on your local city council or state legislature. Furthermore, instead of wasting time with hard cases or elected officials who are dead-set against your ideas, you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles. This often means giving up on your own city or state, at least for the time being, and pursuing a “succeed anywhere” strategy instead.

It's best to avoid people who will challenge your ideas and instead create a large group of loud people who believe your promises. What could go wrong?

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Author here. My actual point is:

- I've spent the last five years dutifully responding to each and every criticism I've found online. My entire original article series was about responding to the three most significant critiques of the movement. On my blog you can find many other such replies to critiques that have come in since then.

- This is important to do for epistemic reasons. However, it has nothing to do with actually changing things. You simply do not change the world by responding to your most hard-bitten critics. That's an entirely orthogonal problem.

Agreed it doesn't change anything. You can change things if you're willing to destroy enough or promise enough and ask for forgiveness later.

You don't get it done from discussion; you learn if you should do it. But if everyone who disagrees is a "keyboard warrior" then maybe you won't.

I’ve followed the authors work for years and one important aspect to land reform is there is some people with a such a strong status quo bias that they can’t be reasoned with. If someone truly believes land use should never change they will just oscillate between arguments that are not coherent or well intentioned.

So the author is right that at a certain point you should disengage with these types and focus on racking up real world wins.

Nobody changes their mind by reading a debate on the internet. They change their mind by experiencing things that are different to what they believe.

I wouldn't say that's entirely true. I've changed my mind reading debates on the internet, and less frequently I've changed my mind months or years after having had a debate on the internet.

No, it's more like realizing that advocacy is the least effective form of politics but the easiest to engage in.

disingenuous comments such like these are, in fact, pointless to engage with

If you're not demonstrating why it's disingenuous then it's just name-calling.

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