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> The value of somebody else's commentary on political issues is pretty much directly proportional to their understanding of the political system and their command of objective facts.

I think this is objectively wrong for the specific case of politics; unlike, say, analytical chemistry, politics has an active opinion on how each of us live our lives and can't be "left to the expert" (the latter being what the political and legal experts would love everyone to accept).

Concrete counter-examples to your claim:

1) Does a homosexual couple with no knowledge of US marriage law not have a valid opinion on whether they should be allowed to marry?

2) Did poorly educated blacks or women need training in the subtleties of constitutional law before they could have a valid opinion on universal suffrage?

Politics, by its nature, shoves itself in everyone's face. Thus everyone has a legitimate basis on which to argue about how they are to be governed, even if they are ignorant of the details of the governance mechanism.

Counters to your counters:

>1) Does a homosexual couple with no knowledge of US marriage law not have a valid opinion on whether they should be allowed to marry?

No, that couple doesn't have a valid opinion. How could they? They don't understand that marriage is in the United States. That conceptualization of "togetherness" as a couple doesn't exist in their minds. The threshold at which they can form a valid opinion is, therefore, at the entry-level of understanding United States marriage laws.

>2)Did poorly educated blacks or women need training in the subtleties of constitutional law before they could have a valid opinion on universal suffrage?

Depends on what you mean by "training" - they need to understand what suffrage is, so in that sense, yes, they do need training. This is the threshold for having a valid opinion.

Here are concrete counter-examples to your counter-examples:

1) If a gay couple were asked if they wanted the right to be married without first being told the sociological context and culture of marriage in the United States, and without understanding the legal ramifications of being married, their opinion would be null and void - just noise. They don't know what they're agreeing/disagreeing with.

2) If you asked women if they'd like the ability to vote, and they said yes, but couldn't answer you when you asked them what a democratic republic is, or how representation works in the United States, their opinions would be meaningless. It would be equivalent to pathos-driven desire to be able to do something - ultimately, a useless opinion.

Understand - I'm not being pedantic. Your examples may show a somewhat low threshold for meaningful opinions, but the parent is correct in that you need some threshold for every opinion.

I was tempted not to reply because I think we're just arguing over the many possible definitions of the word "valid", and that can quickly become uninteresting. Here's a stab at not being too much of a hair-splitter.

In a nutshell, it sounds like your definition of "valid" (and parent's) refer to some frame of objectively true facts and a commonly accepted value system. I agree that one would have to take such a definition in order to find intellectual value in a person's opinions on political matters.

My definition of validity (in the context of the previous comment) has to do with recognizing subjective individual value systems that must occasionally be trampled upon in order to have a functioning state. By their nature, political institutions touch your life whether you want them to do so or not.

So my view is that all people affected by a political institution have valid opinions on the actions of said institution, even if those opinions are not particularly well informed or even logical. If an institution forces something into (or out of) your life, I take the position that you have a valid voice with which to support or oppose that action, even if I might find that support or opposition to be unpersuasive from a logical or evidentiary frame of reference.

To close the loop of example/counter-example, I think your two counter-counter-examples demonstrate opinions of low intellectual validity, as they do not stem from a body of knowledge. However, I think they are fully politically valid, because I don't see any way to have a politically legitimate institution while invalidating the opinions of those whose individual values are violated by its actions.

> They don't understand that marriage is in the United States. That conceptualization of "togetherness" as a couple doesn't exist in their minds.

Can you explain what these sentences mean in clearer language?

If you're saying what I think you're saying, then I think you may have it precisely backwards. Those individuals are the only credible experts on the particularities of their relationship, which has little, if anything, to do with the United States; from their perspective, it's the current legal status quo that lacks validity. (nb: there aren't actually "United States marriage laws" - the recent attempt to assert federal influence over the legal definition of marriage was ruled unconstitutional.)

Politics is about "ought", not "is", and understanding the nuances of established policy isn't a necessary precondition for proposing replacing it with some other policy.

You're right to say that the gay couple would be credible experts on their own relationship.

The problem is that people tend to confuse their own personal experience with broader expertise about a subject. For example, the gay couple would not necessarily be credible experts on all, or even most, gay relationships.

Membership in a group doesn't qualify us to speak on behalf of all the group's members; the same is true for issues concerning race, gender, etc.

In other words, everyone is entitled to strong opinions based on personal experience — the "ought" part, as you put it — but they should be careful not to presume that others share their views and experiences.

> For example, the gay couple would not necessarily be credible experts on all, or even most, gay relationships.

So?

> Membership in a group doesn't qualify us to speak on behalf of all the group's members

The boundaries of groups are usually pretty arbitrary in the first place.

No one is ever speaking on behalf of anyone else, unless that someone else explicitly invited them to do so. When people express their opinions, they're expressing their opinions, so it's likewise an error to interpret one party's opinions as necessarily being those of anyone else.

I agree that no one should presume to speak for others, but this has nothing to do with the notion I'm arguing against here, that being that people's political views must somehow be validated by data in order to be credible.

No one is ever speaking on behalf of anyone else, unless that someone else explicitly invited them to do so.

I beg to differ. In fact, it's very common for people to extrapolate based on their own experiences and speak for others whom they see as being in the same situation, whether the situation has to do with race, economic status or sexual orientation.

Therefore, if people are arguing for a policy that affects many people, not just themselves, their proposal should be backed by some expertise other than just personal opinion.

> it's very common for people to extrapolate based on their own experiences and speak for others

No; it's very common for people to presume to extrapolate based on their own experiences, and to presume to speak for others. But they're not actually speaking for others.

Ask the same questions similarly of a hetero couple and a white male property owner, and consider the meaningfulness of their opinions.

unlike, say, analytical chemistry, politics has an active opinion on how each of us live our lives and can't be "left to the expert"

That's true of computing also, though, which is why you have a lot of non-techies with opinions about computing. Even if you aren't a technologist, you will likely be impacted by technology whether you want to be or not, because it structures a large amount of daily life, at least unless you are a hermit in the mountains. From that perspective, it's perfectly reasonable for everyone to have opinions on technology. Unfortunately, as with politics, the opinions not based on any kind of understanding of how things work tend not to be as useful in figuring out how to improve them.

Ted Nelson's version of it [1] is something like: technology is too important to be left up to the techies, but if nobody but techies understands technology at all, it will by default be left up to them, because nobody else will be able to say anything sensible about it. Therefore regular people need to learn at least something about technology, enough to analyze it intelligently and make decisions for themselves. That's how I view politics as well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib_/_Dream_Machines

I tend to agree with the GP. No matter how strong someone's opinions on, say, the US Iraq invasion are, they're not worth much if they're not grounded in some notion of world history since WWI.

"Does a homosexual couple with no knowledge of US marriage law not have a valid opinion on whether they should be allowed to marry?"

They have an interest in the marriage laws, but that doesn't make their opinions more interesting or well-founded. In fact, because of the obvious conflict of interest, it makes them suspect.

Politics is about "ought", not "is", and policy is entirely about the interaction of people with divergent interests. Your point of view make it seem like there's some objective context for politics in the first place, but there isn't: the entire context in which politics takes place, the substance that defines it, and the objects it pursues are created by people and their interests. Having an interest is having an opinion.

In light of your points, which I appreciate, perhaps I should recast my point of view this way: a person's opinion about politics is interesting or not (perhaps we could even say valid or not) to the extent that he is able to generalize his interests far enough to place them in a context informed by general principles and relevant domain knowledge, and beyond narrow self-interest. "Virginia should allow Gays to marry because I'm Gay and I want to live in Virginia and get married" is as meaningless, as a political opinion, as me saying "Everyone in the US should give me a dollar because I want a lot of money." Socrates took the hemlock not because he thought it would be good for him personally, but because he thought it was a good thing for citizens to obey the law.

Any statement that contains the word "should" is inherently a normative claim, which exists outside the scope of empirical data.

When people articulate their own interests - of which they are the most credible experts - and then say "the current policy framework is damaging to my interests/rights", they're articulating a far more valid position than someone who is trying to abstract their own hypothetical understanding of the world into some set of universal principles.

"General principles" don't actually exist - principles only exist in the minds of people, and there are many people, each with his or her own own worldview. Attempting to treat politics as a means of perfecting the world in accordance with putatively universal principles can lead to only one outcome: an escalating cycle of ideological conflict.

The relevant "domain knowledge" here would apply to the proper domain of politics: reconciling the disparate interests of actual people.

> Socrates took the hemlock not because he thought it would be good for him personally, but because he thought it was a good thing for citizens to obey the law.

Then Socrates was as much a victim of his own defective ideals as he was a victim of the Athenian establishment. Law is a tool we use to mitigate and restrain conflicts among actual human beings. If the law is perverted into something that harms the rights and interests of actual human beings, then it shouldn't be called law at all; it becomes merely a weapon, and remains so, no matter what grandiose ideals are appealed to as justification for its excess.

Say we are in the US before the Civil War. Since we can't, according to your methodology, insist on the general principle that slavery is wrong (because general principles don't exist) then the proper role of politics, in your view, is to reconcile the interests of the slaveholder and the slaves. The non-slaveholders who want to eliminate slavery don't count, because they don't have a direct interest, in your analysis. They only have an interest in decency, but that is just another general principle. So how to we reconcile these opposing interests? Abolishing slavery would seem to be off the table, because that just benefits one side. Limit the number and severity of beatings?

> Since we can't, according to your methodology, insist on the general principle that slavery is wrong (because general principles don't exist)

No - we can insist on anything we want. There's just nothing general about it. Our principles are ours, not the universe's.

You've actually picked out a great example: that one generated some absolutely immense conflict.

Maybe most of us share an opinion that we feel so strongly about that we're willing to accept and to engage in that level of conflict in order to ensure that our position dominates. When matters of life and death, freedom and slavery are made into political questions, then the possibility that the political process will succumb to violent conflict certainly increases. Perhaps you feel that the cost is worth it to eliminate slavery or to destroy tyranny, and I'd agree with you. But how many questions is it really worth it for? Can you name a single modern political issue that you'd think was worth a civil war?

I'm merely pointing out that principles aren't general: they belong to people in particular, and when people with conflicting principles attempt to universalize their values in the same space, the result is escalating conflict. For the vast majority of modern political controversies, I prefer the "agree to disagree" approach, finding viable ways for people with incompatible values to live by their own values within their own space, enabling them to peacefully coexist with each other, and to enjoy the benefits of interacting with each other to the extent where and when their values don't conflict.

NB: the example of slavery is actually even more interesting here, because in a famous ruling in 1772 (in a dispute known as Somersett's Case), slavery was determined to have always been illegal under the common law. It took positive law enacted by colonial and, later, state legislatures to legalize it where it historically existed.

> 1) Does a homosexual couple with no knowledge of US marriage law not have a valid opinion on whether they should be allowed to marry?

Does a redneck from the south with no knowledge of US marriage law have a valid opinion on whether gays should be allowed to marry?

Does you opinion on what's a valid opinion change depending on whether you think people would agree with you?

I think that the main thing this misses is the words "directly proportional".

There's a threshold of expertise, which is ridiculously low, but as someone who keeps an eye on the polyamory community, one of the things being bandied about right now is that the legal concept of marriage is problematic for certain definitions of polyamory, and people who want to advocate polyamorous marriage have a far less valuable opinion because they haven't been able to make clear what they intend to advocate as a group.

    >> "Politics, like religion, is a topic where
    >> there's no threshold of expertise for expressing
    >> an opinion."

    > I agree that this is how people tend to see it.
    > But it isn't really true. Like JavaScript or auto
    > mechanics or animal husbandry, there is indeed a
    > threshold of expertise for expressing a *meaningful*
    > opinion.

But that's the entire point. Lots and lots of people feel that they have something to say, and they say it, whereas very few actually have a meaningful opinion, and they get drowned out.

Although you say "it isn't really true" you have, in fact, agreed entirely.

Right, I am not disagreeing with the OP's premise.

I'm more just lamenting the truth of it -- and expressing disappointment that we haven't seen better discourse here on HN (where actually I think the signal to noise on stuff like node vs go, should you ever use rails for anything, etc, is actually pretty good, all things considered...).

Edit/Addition: What I mean to say is, the article isn't wrong, but the people it describes are wrong. Wrong to think that weighing in on a serious topic with essentially zero knowledge is acceptable, and wrong to conflate their politics with their identity. There is a bedrock of objective truth underlying virtually any political discussion, and it is just as stupid to conflate your own individual identity with a political party or TV station as it is to do the same thing with your smartphone OS or web app framework.

> The value of somebody else's commentary on political issues is pretty much directly proportional to their understanding of the political system and their command of objective facts.

Politics isn't about objective facts. Politics deals with ought, not is. There are certainly objective, measurable facts relevant to any particular question, but political debate rarely focuses on those; it's usually a contest among people pursuing different ends, not arguing over which means best effect ends that everyone agrees on. Even what appears superficially to be an argument over facts is usually just rhetorical cover for contesting underlying values and intentions.

> There are certainly objective, measurable facts relevant to any particular question, but political debate rarely focuses on those; it's usually a contest among people pursuing different ends

That is true only for a few set of issues, like abortion, immigration, etc. I'm socialistic-inclined and my neighbors are mostly republicans, I usually start conversations with them by saying "Look, we both want the same thing: we want the greatest amount of people in America to be eating well, being well-educated, living in dignified places... we just disagree on how we can get there". Then we discuss -- and we get along surprisingly well.

But you're (a) making an assumption that the full set of end-goals that your neighbor desires aligns exactly with yours, and (b) speaking in very generalized terms about what those end-goals are, without making reference to details of questions that people might evaluate differently.

Your attempts to build common ground with your neighbor will approximate tautologies as the actual intersection of your respective value systems shrink. You can say "Look: we all want more good things and less bad things", but what are you actually proposing?

If I asked you and your neighbor a more particular question, i.e. "should the state intervene to ensure that the greatest amount of people in America are well-fed, well-educated, etc., in its own judgement", I might get different answers from you and your neighbors. If I asked you to define what constitutes "well-fed", "well-educated", etc., I'll likely get different answers. If I asked you whether it's desirable to allow top-down, universalized definitions of these terms to form the basis of public policy, I'll likely get different answers.

All of these are questions of desired ends, answered differently due to different hierarchies of values, and not due to divergent interpretations of empirical data.

People need some notion of the current state of the world in order to have a meaningful opinion of how to change it. Most people think that income taxes on the rich ought to be raised and most people think that 33% is an ideal marginal tax rate for the rich, but the rich already pay more than 33% on their marginal income.

Or there's the position that we ought to balance the budget by cutting foreign aid.

Or the idea that we shouldn't accept any level of radioactivity in our food.

> People need some notion of the current state of the world in order to have a meaningful opinion of how to change it.

It goes without saying that if you want to get from here to there, you need to know where 'here' is. But I'm arguing that political debate is rarely about how to get from here to there, but rather is about which 'there' we should be heading for in the first place.

Do you think the commonplace opinions that you've described are the result of people misjudging circumstances, and drawing incorrect conclusions about them, or do you think they're not even evaluating circumstances, but merely projecting values onto the world?

Politics in this country (U.S. -- especially, if also elsewhere) has been coopted by a... "religious fervor". To our detriment. It appears, at least in the reported news, to have drowned out the rational thought and decision making that are central to an effective political environment.

We have a similar relationship to professional sports teams. For many, it is of paramount importance to "root" for "your team". And... many of these people do not actually play, themselves.

There may be "no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion". But we should all seek and use such thresholds when accepting political opinions.

Just in many professional areas of life, your success or failure will be marked not by blind obeisance but rather by critical thinking.

People's right to have their interests and values weighed in communal decision-making does not (in principle) deserve any "threshold of expertise" requirement. When discussions (quite necessarily) move into precisely how that translates into policy there quite definitely is a demand for expertise. Unfortunately, our systems don't do a very good job pulling those apart.