Here is a potentially dumb idea: Before someone can declare candidacy for a public office, they should pass an exam that tests them on general and basic knowledge on a wide variety of topics that proves that the person has some level of general awareness of tech that is so ubiquitous.
Maybe you're misunderstand, and if not I think your response is a bit disingenuous given that the commenter is saying the test can be used to marginalize a minority.
The commenter's point is that these "tests" can be designed to be difficult for one race/community, but easy for another, thus preventing them from holding an office.
This isn't about claiming anything. It was very much used in practice for many years in southern states, to keep people who had the "wrong" colored skin from voting.
It's great to have high standards for public office, but it's the voters who should hold their elected officials to those, not an arbitrary test imposed by the government.
Your proposal suggests that this result is due to lack of knowledge, rather than malice. While I'm a fan of Hanlon's Razor in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the Governor's office clearly employs technologically competent people.
That means that the Governor is either persisting despite knowing better, or is remaining deliberately ignorant despite the expertise at his disposal. Either way, this is at least somewhat intentional.
I've got plenty of life experience that proves that people in power who employ technologically competent people often refuse to listen to expert advice because might makes right.
Right, but if they passed the exam that removes their ability to feign ignorance on the record, leaving malice as the de facto motivation (again on the record)
I agree that it's a potentially dumb idea, it sounds like just another kind of Jim Crow era law that could very easily be misused to prevent people from running for office for any reason that people in power see fit (e.g. racism, sexism, other -isms). The only way I see it being a good idea is if you just need to answer the provided questions, and not necessarily "pass" the exam, but that would necessitate voters actually caring if their lawmakers know anything about tech (or the other variety of topics included).
Who gets to set the test? This is a well-intentioned but very wrong-headed idea. History is littered with examples of how these things are abused.
It is up to voters to evaluate their chosen candidates for their qualities and qualifications for the job. The biggest problem right now is that too many vote on party lines instead of for candidates based on their qualities.
> History is littered with examples of eugenics programs, but that doesn't mean we should ban eugenics.
To which I'd argue we should absolutely ban eugenics because of the history of eugenics. Just like we should ban arbitrary political entry testing because of the history of exactly that.
I'm not making an "apples Vs. oranges" comparison, I'm making an "apples vs. historical apples" one.
There are already requirements for most elected officials. Age, citizenship, and residency requirements are common. Thus the slippery slope argument "if we have any requirements at all that's a slippery slope to having arbitrarily bad requirements" already applies equally to the current situation as it would to any proposal to change the requirements.
Which gets to the core of the point. The current requirements are fixed in legal stone and nobody gets to alter them. They aren't being [ab]used for political advantage.
People on here are proposing arbitrary ability tests that [someone] gets to create and alter using [some] undefined methodology.
You combine that with the history of ability-based testing (which, incidentally none of the existing requirements are) and it leaves a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.
I don't really understand your argument. All laws are set in stone and unalterable, except by the legislature of course. A proposal to change the requirements for an elected office would require the same process as any other legislative change. In the case of the governor of Missouri, this would require amending the Missouri Constitution. I don't think anyone is proposing that some random Hacker News commenter gets to create and alter a test whenever and however they want.
You have forgotten to propose to test for morals, dignity and mental health. Because the matter and issue, in the specific case, is not with "notions".
Edit: I don't even know why for some reason I forgot (probably because it comes without saying): basic wits.
And, seeing that somebody really calls is an "odd idea": no, there absolutely should be requirements. Getting the appropriate measurements, reliably and feasibly, that is difficult. Yet, still duly. Duty, in the same intensity that suggests that thing holding office should be flung into space.
There are a handful of states whose constitutions (ostensibly) “test” a for morals by requiring candidates for public office to believe in god. This, despite the federal constitution clearly stating:
> No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
This is (really) interesting and telling, but what it really shows is that extremely low sophistication and its somehow complementary, a massive (and, look: unjustifiable) amount of ignorance, are diffuse in the world and made part of the legislation (that "no belief does guarantee developed morals", and that "no belief is required to develop morals", and that "morals come from a realm different than belief"¹ is just an example).
The information you provided is a further alarm bell about the dire needs we have about vetting people in the current, desperate, worn out world. Normal social interaction as a way to fine tune the individual, the traditional selection way, shows to be ineffective today.
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¹Oddly, in a world in which the concept of "identification" is increasingly spread, "curiously and consistently" I have not yet heard the expression "X identifies as a moral (and/or dignified, intelligent, sophisticated, compassionate, judicious, reliable...) agent". The concept of "identification" seems to be restricted to tribal matters (and, still notably, "earthly" criteria). These two interlinked factors are very telling about the issues in today's society.
Better idea: make it actually illegal to explicitly threaten illegal state violence against people. The governor should at the very minimum be forcibly removed from power for threatening state violence against someone who has very clearly not committed a crime.
I suspect you would find almost no-one who would have been happy with both Trump's administration and then Biden's adminstration being in charge of writing a test to decide who gets to stand for public office.
Rulers can't be an expert in all the domains they oversee. Thus the test you speak of should be whether they can build a team of experts and harness that collective expertise to make good* decisions.
Alternatively you could pick the person who's decisions have most often turned out to be good* ones, and hope that they continue making good* decisions.
It's a strange and very Double-Speak response to frame this as a political attack by the newspaper who found the flaw - and in particular the individual journalist.
The idea that a journalist is "attacking" by finding an issue worth bringing up _must_ be cognitive dissonance, right? Otherwise all investigation would be a form of assault? Either someone with an IQ below 80 became governor or this is purely a strategic response.
Strategy being? This prosecution will never hold up in court, and we all think the governor is an idiot. So the accomplished goal seems clear: Everyone is now saying this governors name.
It also has a chilling effect on journalism (and free speech generally). Even the threat of prosecution for a non-crime serves to discourage others from publicly discussing his administration’s errors.
This situation is arguably the reason we have the first amendment: so the government can’t bully you into silence and submission when you’ve embarrassed them. When they’ve embarrassed themselves, really.
I hear what you're saying, but since there is such a zero chance this results in the journalist going to prison - I'm not entirely sure it has any effect - honestly if I was trying to become well-known as a journalist, I'd very much want to be in this spotlight - I'd be trying to find another mess up on Missouri's part to become part of this story. It very possibly has the opposite effect (the "Streisand effect").
The only _known_ effect is that this becomes a hot story and we're all outraged one way or the other.
Having criminal charges brought against you can ruin your life. Even if you’re completely and entirely vindicated in court it takes a serious toll on your mental, physical, and financial health. And that’s assuming you (can afford to) have a competent attorney and your boss is understanding of the situation enough not to fire you.
Are you familiar with Slapp Suits? These actions absolutely have a chilling effect. People just don't want to go through *the hassell* of having to go and fight in court, show up in court, watch their name get strewn through the mud in news articles, and so on.
Sure, I don't disagree at all - but again, this is a professional journalist and this is all driving _huge_ traffic to their employers newspaper and to their personal twitter (which is great, this is a very hot story - both the original story and what the governor is now doing!). I'm not at all claiming it has no deleterious effects, just saying that _we don't know the net result_. Again, Streisand Effect.
The only 100% proof-positive result is that we all now know who Gov Parsons is.
This kind of politics makes my heart hurt. Parson wants to control the situation and is doing everything he can to do that, no matter the cost to the tax payers of my home state, or lives he impacts. I'm genuinely sad people like this are in power.
The disclosure by the reporter was fair. The reporter waited to disclose the story until the department of education reviewed the matter. I don't see a court convicting from that fact, this is all for show on reelection.
What I'd like to see is Parson respond to community questions in a townhall and be held accountable for his words. Namely, can we see the line item breakdown of how we got to $50 million? That is _five_ times the cost it took to build Missouri's great Arch..
I find the article title kind of curious, given that it states Parson has "doubled down" which suggests that the video the article references is an active effort on Parson's part. It then goes on to state that the video was produced by a PAC Parson created but doesn't give direct input to. Comes off as unnecessarily inflammatory to me I suppose.
Having said that, this situation in particular really tests my willingness to assume good faith on the part of the governor and his body of advisors. Is he legitimately without a single person close to him that could inform him of how misguided this line of aggression is, and how fortunate it was that the individual who identified the security problem acted in such a helpful manner? On top of that he assigned the Missouri State Highway Patrol to investigate, because given his perceived severity of the situation that's the best agency at his disposal? It all just seems bananas.
I try not to assume that totally inane actions from elected officials are exclusively the result of political calculus, and I suppose I don't have any evidence to assume that's the case here either. But I'm at a loss as to how this situation could blossom into something so ridiculous.
It sounds like he’s part of the Strong Man party and cannot be allowed to be wrong. I don’t think it’s purely political, some people just can’t be reasoned with.
It's been eye opening to see and recognize such people on the internet over the past 10 years or so. It's been a lot more scary to be able to recognize the same character flaw in real people I'm physically around.
I highly recommend this [1] book on the topic as we navigate a post-truth world. The Narcissist's Prayer is also worth a read [2].
It's not all narcissism though; it can be difficult to reason with deeply ingrained belief systems when there is a lack of critical thinking and challenges to the Id and ego, not to mention innate tribalism.
EDIT: Agree with the deleted comment that The Narcissist's Prayer could also be The CEO's Prayer, based on the personality type the C suite attracts [3].
> First, let me get this Donald Trump issue out of the way: If you’re thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician.
He knows perfectly well who is to blame, but he's using the situation opportunistically to further his own career.
The issue isn't just that he's objectively and morally wrong, it's that most voters don't see through the grandstanding.
All they see - and all they want to see - is a rich old white dude punching down at some college-educated kid who thinks he's clever enough to have an opinion.
It's not obvious a jury will parse this any differently.
Although I'd hope someone like the EFF would turn up with some heavy hitter experts to add some friction to the self-serving bad take.
This is why it's hard to do politics. While everyone is fact-checking and getting outraged about the reality the political game is being played on a different level with different rules - by people who are often quite good at winning it.
>Although I'd hope someone like the EFF would turn up with some heavy hitter experts to add some friction to the self-serving bad take.
I think having "fact checkers" and "experts" debunk his claims will ultimately gain him support among his constituents. There's a sharp trend towards anti-expert, anti-intellectual sentiment that has assisted him throughout the pandemic, and there's no reason that I can see to believe that it won't serve him equally as well on this issue. We'll see, but I think this movement isn't something that will die out with the pandemic, but something that we will see permeate other areas of discourse.
Is it better to not assume malice, to an action that can perfectly be attributed to incompetence?
Should we assume that elected officials have software engineers on staff or on call? Or assume staffers with software engineering background exist.. in traditionally low-pay positions ("elected official liaison" or "advisor")
This argument, which I at least partially agree is probably true, always bothered me. If they just want to have their name out in the public often, they just need to to strongly push for any solution. Here, he could have been loud and vocal about how the security of these sites is unacceptable and started handing out public awards to the person (people?) that found the issue.
The fact that one approach was chosen over the other suggests where is more to the reason.
Sure, but that would been one, maybe two press conferences about it.
For the topic to continue to get attention, it has to be rage inducing.
The alternative here would be to claim that the state was going to crack down and prosecute those in charge of building/managing the web site in question. Almost as ridiculous, but without the benefit of pursuing "the media".
I have a strong feeling this will backfire spectacularly.
To any technical or even semi-technical person, the facts of this case are laughable. The Governor thinks that he can steamroll this case through, and is betting that most will not understand the underlying technical details and give into the fear mongering "hacking" narrative.
But the thing is, as soon as this goes to court, there is a 100% chance the EFF or another organization is going to step in. Once the defense can explain the layperson exactly what happened here, the governor is going to go from "protecting the people from hackers" to "dumbass trying to cover his own ass".
The Governor and his cabinet clearly think they have this one in the bag, but I think the EFF or another org is going to step in and hand his ass to him in court.
losing in court will just feed the GOP victim narrative. from a political standpoint, the Governor's ignorant aggression is a win-win. he can say he stood up to the liberal courts and the tech elite.
but then again, Trump often lies about his losses in courts, claims they were wins, and gets applause from his audience. the GOP is a counter-majoritarian party, which makes counterfactual statements inevitable.
>> Once the defense can explain the layperson exactly what happened here, the governor is going to go from "protecting the people from hackers" to "dumbass trying to cover his own ass".
Its standard GOP politics we've seen for the last 4 years. Use the legal system to bully people not to make you look incompetent. This is unique because he's using the criminal system and not the civil courts. How many people did Obama sue in office? Compare that to Trump who's gone after family members, the media, etc.
The background with Parson is that he is overtly hostile to the "blue" cities of St. Louis and Kansas City, and favors the more rural parts of the state. He has an especially hostile relationship with the press in those cities.
It doesn't surprise me that he'd want to make hay with this - he can promote himself, damage his political enemies, and look tough to his base, which (generally speaking) doesn't consist of professional technologists.
(if you want evidence of his antipathy to Missouri's cities, look no further than covid vaccine distribution - St. Louis had maybe one single site, but rural areas had more vaccines than they could use. My elderly parents had to drive for hours to get to one of those underused sites because there simply weren't any vaccines to be found in the metro area.)
> (if you want evidence of his antipathy to Missouri's cities, look no further than covid vaccine distribution - St. Louis had maybe one single site, but rural areas had more vaccines than they could use. My elderly parents had to drive for hours to get to one of those underused sites because there simply weren't any vaccines to be found in the metro area.)
I lived in SoCal at the time and had to do the same thing. I drove about an hour and a half into the desert to get it when my name came up, and I lived in the city of San Diego.
> I lived in SoCal at the time and had to do the same thing. I drove about an hour and a half into the desert to get it when my name came up, and I lived in the city of San Diego.
The salient difference probably being demand (likely high in SD) versus malicious or apathetic political will.
That would be an incorrect assumption. At the time, we were still using the classification and opt-in system. The local and state governments knew exactly where demand was and wasn't.
I'm not saying you are wrong in this particular case (As I know nothing about the particulars of vaccine distribution in your state), but this has been the case across the entire country, red and blue. At a rough approximation, vaccines were distributed more or less equally across rural and urban areas, but due to high demand in urban areas, there were long wait lists in them.
His strong stance will deter all 'hackers' and like scoundrel from touching any government website! When would-be data breachers see how he treats anyone trying to be his friend, they'll dare not make an enemy of him.
Politically speaking, this can only be a victory for the governor. In conservative political theater, any association with "standing up to the liberal media" is valuable. Furthermore, if/when this whole thing fails in the courts, either conservative voters will never know about it, or the legal defeat will only contribute to the "standing up to the liberal media" narrative.
At this point, it's all about getting on Trump's radar in order to secure his VP nomination in 2024. I totally believe that's what's going on here - political posturing.
This is a "no such thing as bad publicity" political tact. If the case doesn't go forward because, you know, the actual 1st amendment, then the next response will be how he is being cancelled by the liberal media. This is mostly signaling to his base that he is out there fighting for them but the other side isn't playing fair.
As an aside, seeing the word "tact" used like this is a little disorienting, even if it is a widely used slang form of the word "tactic".
There is the (originally nautical?) term "tack" which means "A direction or course of action, especially a new one.", and it's hard to separate those similar sounding/meaning/looking words.
The trick is the realize that US politics today is essentially two groups of people who live in almost entirely separate realities that happen to spatially overlap. Public officials are in the odd state of being observed by members of both realities, but only acting and affected by one of them. The result is that their behavior looks super fucking weird to the other.
It's like watching someone navigate a glass maze that you can't see. The whole time you're wondering why they're taking such a circuitous path. They look like a crazy person to you, but it's because they're avoiding obstacles you can't see.
The reason we have two separate realities is that most of "reality" at the political level comes to voters by way of media. Almost none of us have directly witnessed, say George Floyd protests, abortions, industrial pollution, inner city gang violence, etc. Instead, we learn of these things through the news and social media.
But those in the US have become increasingly polarized. The picture of the world you get from watching Fox News or your Facebook feed if you have conservative friends shows an entirely different world than what someone watching CNN and the politics subreddit sees.
For politicians, winning elections is central. It is the source of all of their power. They know that the way to win elections is to get people on their side to show up and vote. Losing votes from the other side is essentially irrelevant — they weren't going to vote for them anyway. Politicians are fighting apathy, not the opposing party.
So almost all of their public behavior serves to make them appear good to their camp when viewed through that camp's media lens. The way it appears to the other side doesn't matter one bit because it won't significantly affect elections.
Once you understand this, Parson's behavior makes perfect sense. He got caught looking like a dumbass leaking SSNs so he has to do ("do" in the sense of some visible political behavior, not in the sense of solving the actual problem) something. If he frames it as the liberal press are evil hackers, then Fox News is happy to carry that narrative for him. His voters will see that narrative, be satisfied that it fits their worldview, and continue to support him.
The fact that his narrative is nonsense doesn't matter. No one likely to vote for him will ever see that, and those that do see it weren't going to vote for him either. Actually fixing the problem also isn't particularly relevant. Conservative media just wants him to win so won't run bad press if he doesn't fix it, so there's little incentive.
Every year, the US looks more like China Mieville's "The City and the City".
> For politicians, winning elections is central. It is the source of all of their power. They know that the way to win elections is to get people on their side to show up and vote. Losing votes from the other side is essentially irrelevant — they weren't going to vote for them anyway. Politicians are fighting apathy, not the opposing party.
This is called "perversion".
> Once you understand this, ...'s behavior makes [it]
an accomplice and an entity of abysmal value.
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Back to the elephant in the room: journalism was there to determine facts, reality. Outside narratives, facts exist, sometimes clear. It's like in judicial matters: advocatus dei and advocatus diaboli are there to attain to truth in a dialectic manner, proposed and implemented to exhaust the thinkable reasons involved - never there you meet the lunacy of "serving the client's interest". The disconnection to facts you indicate would be a horrible disease.
> Is he legitimately without a single person close to him that could inform him of how misguided this line of aggression is,
I've said it elsewhere and I'll repeat it here. People like Parsons who climb to positions of power think of security in terms of power, not technology. It's a sort of security-because-I-say-so mindset, which is more like what technologists would probably call "classified information". For a person of that mindset, calling it "secure" means that accessing it at all is a security violation, unless that person has clearance.
From the point of view of a person who sees security as "it's sensitive information because someone says so" accessing it without clearance is punishable, and I think that's where Parson and his ilk are working.
Even if Parson has someone close enough to him to explain the difference between security by technical means and security by declaration, the governor could still conclude, from his mindset, that a violation occurred because of the sensitive nature of the information.
As far as I know, neither Missouri nor any other state has anything like US federal-level information classification laws, for which a person can be found in violation and prosecuted even if they didn't have to overcome any technical security measures to access the information. But that doesn't seem to deter Parson from acting like there's an actual breach of law, according to his understanding. But someone could, possibly, reach the governor through explaining that there's no state law about sensitive information, and perhaps he would back down, although it might motivate him to push for laws that would look more like security clearance regulations.
Interesting interpretation. However, what the reporter did is pretty analogous to finding a classified document on the ground, looking at the first couple pages to see if they were legit, then informing the correct authorities before writing a news story. Which is still something you want to encourage, and is insane to prosecute.
I was sort of under the impression that in the story the reporter wrote about how to access the SSNs, which is a bit more than just flipping through the pages, and in the security-by-decree point of view that might be prosecutable.
Insane, yes, but if you also don't like that reporter for X reason, the laws around classified information do unfortunately allow prosecution in that sort of case.
Isn't this defamation? Would the reporter in question have a case against the Governor here? IANAL, would love an explanation of how I'm wrong by someone more knowledgeable.
Probably no, because all the important alleged facts appear to be public. Expressing opinions (including wrong ones) is not defamatory in the US, and an inference based on disclosed, public facts is an opinion.
"X broke the law" isn't a fact in this narrow sense; rather it's an inference drawn from a set of facts.
Calling someone a hacker when they are clearly not remotely hacking, and saying they exposed private info when in fact it was the government, both seems like things that could be defemation to me.
I agree this is a problem, but there are also problems everywhere. The US doesn’t have a monopoly on stupid. We’ve lasted through dumb, inept government before.
Obviously America has problems that should be addressed, but I tend to think these "blame the US for everything cuz it's irredeemable" are doing a pretty big disservice all around. If we could singularly find these problems to be a uniquely American thing, that would be great! That means we've identified the problems and conceivably we could change the US to suddenly fix it. I think the reality is that it's not that simple. History has shown us that people across basically every nationality are vulnerable to demagoguery, and I seriously don't think the US is unique in electing a bunch of blowhards as leaders.
There are lots of things about the US I would change (socialized healthcare being the obvious thing in my mind), but I don't think that we should delude ourselves by saying that the US is beyond redeemable.
It all depends. If one side believes the election was stolen and proceeds to rig elections in their favor in retaliation. America is done. We're at a point where fact don't matter. This is story illustrates that. Fact that SSN were sent out publicly doesn't matter. Fact that any security expert would say this wasn't hacking doesn't matter. Experts no longer matter. Whether they are doctors, scientists, etc.
I agree that the lies about election fraud and whatnot are dangerous, but I fail to see how that's uniquely American. Conspiracy theories exist all over the place, and predate anyone alive today.
I will agree that the acceptance of conspiratorial thinking in conservative circles is especially harmful (I wrote more detail about that in a sister thread), but you don't have to look very far in European history to find them electing demagogues too.
I know it's commonplace to wail on the USA because of all the shite that seems to be getting shittier but there is _so much_ goodness in the USA.
The systems are a bit broken. The constitution needs modernization, access to and application of the laws need to be made measuably fair, and the economic model requires reformulation. Racism, sexism, and perverse idolatry need to be educated out of the standard models of discourse. But.
The USA is still a paradigm of democratic republicanism. It's still full of amazing humans, many of whom work hard to improve other people's lives. It is seething with debate, invests hugely in technology, and still reacts quickly to changes of circumstances. It's fucked, but not irredeemably so.
Mainly it needs to focus on education and healthcare, especially by removing pernicious, profit-seeking, short-term motivations.
Also, stop voting Retardicans.
To be fair, Demoticrats are a pretty shoddy bunch of disorganised and intellectually confused herd of kittens, but they at least _try_ to improve the lot of other humans. The Retardicans are big business first and all else after, with a whole heap of contempt for thought on the side.
I'd hope that a court would (quickly!) find the truth of the matter, and the Gov further humiliated. If there is in fact a legal violation to stick here then there's even more of a public service done in highlighting that stupidity as well.
This feels like the reaction of a child who was embarrassed in front of their friends on the playground, too upset to understand that doubling down just makes it look worse. Sad to see that sort of behavior coming from one of the ~100 most powerful elected individuals in the country. Bad look for Missouri.
I also am incapable of understanding how this could be twisted into even vaguely being described as hacking. That’s like if I called myself a hacker for opening up the dev tools in my browser.
This is like perfect viral content for our demographic. It's in the "rage" category (the most engaging type of content), and it is a black-and-white situation with no gray area whatsoever.
When I lived in Missouri 10 years ago it would never have elected such an idiot. A state that brought decent thinking people like Thomas Hart Benton, President Truman, Roy Blunt and Claire McCaskill. There was a saying what goes Missouri so goes the nation.. this will never be true again. Thinking is secondary to outrage in this state. They have been outraged since Obama was elected.
Electing a black president permanently enraged a lot of hateful people across the country. We're going to be dealing with the fallout for a long time. To be clear I'm not saying we shouldn't have, but I think we underestimated just how many people in this country would react very badly to that from a political standpoint.
> There was a saying what goes Missouri so goes the nation.
That should scare every American. I can hop on a plane and be back in my country in about 5 hours, but what are you going to do if the whole country keeps trending the way that state is?
This attitude is how you attract the attention of many grey/black hat types willing to make you look foolish. I'm curious how long before someone accepts this as a challenge to expose truly damaging security missteps in the state government sites.
The most likely thing is that there are many trivial security issues such as this, they are actively being exploited, and the exploiters don't report because they can make more money just staying quiet and selling the data on the black market.
I'll risk making this a partisan issue and say the anti-intellectual and anti-science bent seems increasingly prevalent among Republicans like Mike Parson and their constituencies. One of the most shocking statistics I've seen recently is the Pew poll which shows that in the space of 2 years Republican attitudes about higher education saw a 20-point swing such that that most Republican voters now believe college is net detrimental to society. To me the attacks on journalism, technology and science feel like part of a larger trend, especially given the COVID denialism we've seen.
I consider myself a liberal, and i agree with the point that college is net detrimental to society. It makes people waste their best years, teaches them mainly, useless stuff, barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings, and makes people bitter because they feel they are not valued by society the way they believe they should.
This world needs a lot more new plumbers than new liberal arts majors. It is the society's fault that people feel compelled to go to college having little chance to make anything out of it.
To say nothing of _competent_ ones. It is a great deal of work to find a tradesperson that is 1) available and 2) competent. Unsurprisingly the most available ones seem to be the least competent.
If you look, most trades limit the number of new students they will accept for apprentiship programs. Even if everyone suddenly wanted to be a plumber (or electrictian, etc) they can't get into the programs that will allow them to become certified.
Its not just the trades, in my state, we have had an epidemic of retirements since 2008 for teachers, nurses, and police officers.
yet the programs that are required to get your licenses don't accept any more applicants per year than they did 15 years ago. The gatekeeping has to stop, or at least be increased to allow the market to actually meet demand. But the groups benefiting from that mismatch in demand have no reason to increase capacity.
>> I can find a competent plumber trivially. Hiring white collar jobs are much harder, especially specialized tech work.
This is broadly not true in most US cities. Skilled tradespeople who are insured, licensed, and bonded have major backlogs of work - especially electricians, but also plumbers, carpenters, etc.
But incredible cost is because of the inflated demand. Too many people go to college who don't need it. Reduce demand by, pun intended, educating people that they don't need college unless they can make it to the top, and prices will fall.
I kinda doubt this. My mother wanted me to learn plumbing or to become an electrician because they were always in much more demand than supply and can effectively determine their own rates.
I largely agree with the sentiment that we need more plumbers than liberal arts graduates. One answer, though, is "why not be both?"
Post-secondary education, regardless of the specific major a student chooses, does provide a significant benefit to society: especially in the early years, it teaches students how to think critically. Perhaps this skill could be taught earlier during secondary education, but at least in the U.S., it is not. And this skill is incredibly important for becoming an informed member of the electorate who can separate truth from bullshit.
It absolutely is taught in secondary education in the US. Heck, it's taught during elementary education. But you can't teach someone something unless they're willing to learn it. Post-secondary education doesn't help that.
Young children's brains aren't developed sufficiently to build these skills. Even a lot of high schoolers have difficulty with it. It's largely taught in post-secondary education because by then, the brain has matured enough to handle the cognitive load.
Every kid does that. That’s not the kind of critical thinking taught in university, involving research and the evaluation of nuanced arguments, and I think you know that.
Not only is it not remotely true that children can't think critically or research something; not only is that irrelevant to whether or not it's taught to children; it's a mighty heavy assumption to say that people's brains have matured enough for anything when they're in college.
Most colleges have done the opposite in recent years. They provide echo-chambers for emotionally-fueled pseudoscience.
I've seen this while spending time at Boston University, Harvard, Brown, and Columbia. It's frightening how little people are able to think or question anything once they've gone through the college system. They become frightened by and angry at truths that don't align with the narrative they've been taught.
I've spoken to dozens of people who've gone through the wringer and come out the other side realizing how detrimental college was to themselves and their peers intellectually.
Please elaborate.. Did these people have world views that they didn't wish to have challenged and feel it was detrimental to challenge themselves? Or were they actually taught something detrimental?
They were taught, through teachers but especially through the peer community, that there's an established, unarguable set of world views that shouldn't be questioned or challenged, and the scope of that set only grows larger.
I believe it really stems from a belief that they are collectively special — that they're wiser, more moral, and more 'perfect' than their ancestors, their less-educated fellow citizens, and so on. They encourage people to become 'educated' on issues that they themselves aren't particularly educated in, aside from reading Instagram graphics. They seek to 'cancel' people who present other world views.
While most people I know have been through all that and eventually come to a place of humility after college, easily half of the students never did. They continue on, unfazed, with a radical belief in their own moral superiority.
I'm sorry for the length and vagueness of this — it's really incredibly hard to describe as it's so pervasive throughout everything, and generally it's something people only understand after going through the system. You've got me thinking of how to articulate it better!
You're gonna have to cite some kind of example of what you believe pseudo-science is if you're saying critical thinking was somehow detrimental to someone intellectually. That's actually a hilarious feedback loop of a statement, considering they decided to attend a university. I assume it wasn't to study the art of plumbing?
> You're gonna have to cite some kind of example of what you believe pseudo-science is if you're saying critical thinking was somehow detrimental to someone intellectually.
I said that colleges are teaching the opposite of critical thinking, not that critical thinking was detrimental intellectually.
> considering they decided to attend a university.
They attended university because almost all came from an upper-middle-class background where there is no viable alternative according to their families. If you think they decided to attend university, you're speaking of different types of people — the only decision for them is which college to attend.
What departments is this happening under? A lot of people (probably most people) who go to college just learn about some technical subjects and maybe read a couple classic books in gen ed courses. Politics happens on campus, but largely among students and not in classrooms.
> Post-secondary education, regardless of the specific major a student chooses, does provide a significant benefit to society: especially in the early years, it teaches students how to think critically.
(My highlight)
I wish that were true, but it isn't always the case.
My counter-example is my ex-colleague who started her science PhD at the same time as me in the same research group as me waaaay back in the late 1990s.
Long and short of it, we each did our 3-ish years in the lab, she wrote up her thesis, I wrote up my thesis, we each had our oral exam around the same time. Her writing (her words) was "torn to shreds", she ended up back in the lab for several months doing more work and some serious rewriting, I got away with only a handful of typos to fix.
I blame our supervisor for this, but that's another story.
I'm not sure how this is a counter-example of students being taught to think critically. Are you saying you did not think critically in your thesis but passed anyway?
Resource constraints basically, and the removal of the degree from free market mechanics. I.e. guaranteed loans, not being able to discharge upon bankruptcy, etc.
You also don't need to go to college to get an education in what are historically liberal arts subjects (history, etc.) and in-person classroom lectures for those topics really should be few and far between and extremely academic.
I probably remember or know as much about history as a random undergrad history major does just because I read a lot and you can't remember everything.
Most of those classes aren't worth a lot of money. In fact you can take pretty much any class you would want to for free with open lectures too. I'd also argue that most liberal arts courses don't teach students how to think critically as a broad skillset. Usually the professor just has a narrative or point of view that they want to push and you can't really write contrary to that without an inordinate amount of research which begs the question "why bother?" when the whole point of being there is to get a degree with good grades to get a job. The whole cycle is screwed up.
I'd also say besides some class signaling stuff I can't really tell the difference between university graduates and non-graduates. Work output is the same in my experience.
>especially in the early years, it teaches students how to think critically
Is this a thing only in the US? I went to university in Europe and there were 0 subjects that were unrelated to the (STEM) degree I chose. It was all 100% technical stuff.
This lack of any background in the humanities (including history, philosophy, or ethics) clearly shows. It is quite astounding to me how much a certain class of STEM grads like to wear their ignorance like a badge of honor and attempt to convince us all that their ability to piece together a mediocre argument using wikipedia and google searches is somehow worthy of merit.
Given the fact that the STEM subjects most in use by the HN crowd are the easiest to learn on your own I find it fascinating when people start bragging about all of the educational opportunities they avoided.
> It is the society's fault that people feel compelled to go to college
That may be true but the amount of assistance available through student loans and grants enables people to actually go. Without that, the people that feel compelled to go still wouldn't because they simply couldn't afford it.
Higher education in this country is a minefield of unintended consequences.
I strongly believe that one's best years can be after college. Our society fetishizes youth too much. I've grown more as a person in the few years following college than I did in the decade prior.
The whole "college = liberal arts majors" is a wildly reductive argument and is extremely common among the types that OP is referring to. It's pretty disheartening to see it repeated here.
What would over-represented mean in this case? Here's a graph[1] of bachelors' degrees granted in various fields - the social science are grouped with history and are not particularly popular.
I'm personally somewhat mystified when people talk about degrees like they're ice cream flavors. I've met people with a wide variety of aptitude and interest and energy and while I think that anyone can get any degree, I do think we each individually have proclivities and talents. Even if I wanted to double the number of STEM majors, I suspect that many of the people who have chosen not to be STEM majors did that because they liked their chosen major better.
Edit: For what it is worth, I do think we could use many more people in the trades. I also think that people going to trade school should have the option to get the same "gen ed" college curriculum that people going to college get. It might help the idea that trade work is lesser (which, of course, it is not).
People who take up STEM, are of course of different type, and for them, surely college is a net benefit. But that kind of people would go to college even 50 or 70 years ago already. All paranormal increase of college admissions in the last decades came from precisely those people who are getting those bullshit degrees just because they are the only ones they can get, and they feel compelled to get some kind of a college degree.
Even STEM degrees could be optimized. Most of what I've learned is not applicable to software dev, but at least some of the classes (like foreign language) were neat, although college classrooms are a suboptimal way to study that.
as a sw dev / sre / engineer with 10+ years of experience, i can say that without a doubt the skills one learns that are not hard STEM courses and programming are 100% useful. i need engineers with critical thinking, a sense of empathy, eloquence, and a host of other social skills that lots of nerds-turned-comp-sci-student lack
Outside of STEM classes, the only thing I learned that was relevant to my career was from my Technical Writing course, where I learned that people in charge can be capricious and screw you over in the process. The teacher didn't like me, so he consistently gave my work mediocre scores and couldn't quantify anything about the work or the scores.
Even some of the STEM classes were a waste of time, especially the Computer Science classes where the professor would grade people on attendance and random minutia.
I ended up just learning computer science on my own off of Wikipedia after I graduated since I couldn't get a decent hardware design job with my Electrical Engineering degree. It only took a couple of months, BTW, to get from the point where I was just playing around with JavaScript to where I could pass a coding interview laden with data structures and algorithms.
If I could go back in time for a day and talk to my former self, I'd tell him to just buy some used physics, math, and computer science textbooks, then spend six months couch surfing, partying, and studying on his own. Then he could go find a CS job and start making money right away
The UK government has taken a different approach to all-out anti-higher-ed. attack: cut 50% of the funding for many university arts courses, while keeping the overall budget fairly flat. In the UK media this is seen as an attack on "lefties", either justified or unwarranted, depending on the outlet.
I found college had a net positive effect on me. It gave me a great deal of discipline and the helped me develop important critical thinking skills. Though I did a mix of STEM and economics, I can't vouch for other degrees.
Regardless, I disagree that it's a waste of a person's best years. Most work is some variation of drudgery, I think it's great young adults get to spend a few years learning about interesting topics and making new friends.
It'd be nice if America could do that and not saddle these youngsters with crippling debt (as other countries manage to do), but I wouldn't say that feature of the American education system invalidates the basic concept.
> barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings
If you have any evidence to support this, I invite you to post it. Because according to the study below:
"Getting a Bachelor's degree adds another large increase in lifetime earnings. With median earnings of $56,700 ($27.26 per hour), or $2.3 million over a lifetime, Bachelor's degree holders earn 31 percent more than workers with an Associate's degree and 74 percent more than those with just a high school diploma."
But more importantly, college should NOT be job training. It should be a place to learn critical thinking, to experiment in a safe environment, and a place to learn what you even want to learn about. A college graduate should be able to learn what they need to learn, including pursuing a career in the trades.
I agree that we need more plumbers. But the idea that young adults -- in practice, working class and poor ones -- should be denied the opportunity to learn and grow and instead be offered trade school or nothing, is profoundly unfair.
This is not to say that we couldn't improve the status quo. We could make college less expensive or free, consolidate degrees (getting a law degree in 4 or 5 years of college rather than 4 years of college + 3 more of law school), etc. But a blanket statement that "college is net detrimental to society" seems ignorant even in the kindest light.
Does college actually measurably teach critical thinking? How is that measured?
Are sociology majors measurably better at critical thinking than plumbers?
I kind of suspect a significant portion of the "college teaches critical thinking" meme is just something college educated people say to feel superior.
Sociology teaches the sociological imagination, which is specifically a form of critical thinking. This isn't something people tend to just pick up on without higher education
The problem would be separating correlation and causation. It’s obvious that higher education is correlated with critical thinking (uneducated adults are far more likely to deny climate change or believe in pizzagate etc)
But maybe this isn’t causality, maybe people with better critical thinking are going to be more attracted to college
I don't like how you presented your argument. You make it sound like trade schools, with real practical skills like plumbing, involve neither learning nor growing.
Similarly, critical thinking should be learned long before college age. If you're learning that during college, you've got a very late start.
Maybe that's not what you meant, but that's pretty much what you've written.
By definition, a trade school is designed to teach people a trade, not what lies outside it. A liberal arts education (which OP was clearly referring to) exists to teach people about a variety of different things.
This might sound like I'm biased against the trades. I'm not! I think they're crucial, and I, along with about half the software engineers I know, often daydream about becoming a fine carpenter.
I'm also not biased against trade schools in particular. They provide an important service and are a pipeline to good union jobs. The criticisms I make at the top of this comment apply equally to students who go to a top music program like Juilliard or the Oberlin conservatory, as those graduates will tell you themselves. They go to learn music, not to broaden their horizons.
A bachelor degree makes $541,000 more in life time earnings than an Associate's degree, according to your source.
College costs on average $26K and $52K per year[1] according to my google skills. 4 years of college therefore amounts to roughly $100 to $200K, which in fairness you have to subtract from that initial $541K difference. Still a nice difference.
However, the parent poster mentioned plumbers. According to my google skills again, a plumber makes $55,160 on average, compared to the $56,700 bachelor average. That difference is rather small, and a bachelor probably is worse off than a plumber once you factor in cost of education.
Sure, and taking out loans for the $100K - $200K you need for college will also cost you more in the end, once you consider interest.
The thing tho is that people who do not go to college quite often do not have $120K just laying around to invest for 30+ years. In fact a lot of people who go to college (or their parents) do not have that kind of money lying around either.
And let's not forget that the people who do go to college and get that additional $500K can invest that additional $500K as well. Not as a lump sum either, of course.
The college you're speaking of doesn't exist today. Students are absolutely going to college to be trained for a career afterwards, and they are incurring decades worth of debt in order to do so.
I've never met a college grad who came out of college having learned critical thinking while in a bachelors program in college. If they are critical thinkers it was a predisposition. If anything it teaches conformism to a central line of thought. More critical skills seem to be developed if they decide to pursue a higher degree and/or engage in some research which not nearly as many people pursue.
Increase in earnings is a poor way to look at it, that is mainly from the credentialism that companies look for (which is horrible but it is what it is), and the networking that happens.
Youre underestimating the value of a college degree. Research like [1] shows that degree holders have significantly more lifetime earnings than high school. You also miss how the democratization of education has benefited our society and helped lift millions out of subsistence lifestyles and class lock-in.
"This world needs a lot more new plumbers than new liberal arts majors"
This is a completely subjective and politically charged statement. I think the world needs more informed and educated critical thinkers. Its curious how the 90s led to a collapse in liberal arts departments and enrollments, and 20 years later we're now in an era of disinformation at massive scale.
Many in the tech community turn exclusively to technology to solve every problem. It doesn’t occur to such people that e.g. sociologists, who study problems of society as a discipline, have any answers whatsoever to our problems as a society. To them, sociology is just another useless liberal arts degree without job prospects.
In my opinion, if we listened to more socieologists instead of the Zuckerbergs and Bezoses of the world, we’d be much better off as a country.
But I did listen to sociologists when I took a distribution requirement in college. I'll never do it again. It was 80% totally obvious facts about human behavior that don't need to be taught and 20% totally contrived BS. No science going on there.
So you took 1 intro class into a subject and determined the entire field is worthless? Do you apply this decision-making process to other aspects of your life?
Also, not a lot of actual "science" going on in Computer Science departments (meaning following the scientific method in the course of conducting research, as opposed to "here is a thing I built, isn't it neat?"), but that doesn't stop tech-inclined people from joining in droves. So I'm not sure what the "no science going on" criticism means. It's not like the scientific process is used when deploying technology solutions to problems. We just say "Here's a thing! Let's distribute this to as many people as possible!" without any forethought into what consequences will be.
To that last point, from my recollection of the late aughts, early 10s, it was sociologists who first identified that maybe Facebook and Instagram would be bad for society. Turns out they were right. Again.
But this doesn't adjust for intelligence. If employers are just using the degree as a proxy for a base level of intelligence (and they really are, also class) then you would see tremendous value by this measure. But really that would be 100% waste, because you could do the same thing in an hour with an IQ test that is currently being done with 4 years of college. The tech industry basically does this now with algorithm problems. Google DGAF if you have a degree if you can memorize a bunch of algorithms.
> You[']re underestimating the value of a college degree
Tony Blair's university pledge has failed, says his son
"Tony Blair's landmark target for half of school leavers to attend university is no longer fit for purpose, his son has said – claiming that the former prime minister agrees with him [..] critics have argued that it encouraged an unhealthy focus on higher education which led to a proliferation of pointless "Mickey Mouse" degrees and lured undergraduates into racking up large debts without a meaningful increase in their salary prospects."
The very same article I linked to suggests yours is a minority view among those who have attended college:
> When it comes to their own experiences with higher education, an earlier Center survey found that the vast majority of college graduates (from both two- and four-year institutions) say college was useful for them in terms of helping them grow personally and intellectually (62% say it was very useful in this regard, 31% say it was somewhat useful). Large majorities also say it was useful in opening doors to job opportunities (53% say very useful, 29% say somewhat) and in helping them develop specific skills and knowledge that could be used in the workplace (49% very, 35% somewhat).
I think the cost of higher ed is an enormous societal problem which leads some to feel embittered towards the system as a whole for good reason. But it's important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater and to separate the ballooning cost from the education itself.
Worth noting that Ivy League costing hundreds of thousands is quite different from college too. Also, the major matters heavily. In something like computer science, you may be able to get by fine without a degree, but good luck becoming a doctor or lawyer with an online education.
We'd need to significantly improve high schools before considering eliminating college. Let's face it. We can't expect American high schools to teach students anything about the world. We've had schools try to spin the slave trade as sending "workers" to the New World. We've had attempts to show "both sides" of the Holocaust. And yes, college isn't perfect at teaching liberal arts, but it's better than not learning at all.
I don't mean to straw man you, so I'm not implying this is what you said, but a liberal arts education is extremely important! Where else do you learn that racism isn't just slurs, that a bus route can be racist, that a health policy can be racist? Where can you get introduced to writers of color, to works by people from all times and all races? Where can you get an in depth view into how art reflects society and society reflects art?
Even if you don't step into a classroom, college teaches so much by forcing students out of their hometown and out of the communities. One of the biggest issues with racism and discrimination and partisanship is that most people haven't met the other side. College is a way to meet the other side in one's formative years.
I'd argue that college is the single most liberalizing institution in people's lives. No other institution takes students, transports them into a (hopefully) diverse, intellectually stimulating center and teaches them about society.
I'd firmly disagree. Workers has an implication of voluntary, paid work. There's a reason we have a specific word for unpaid, non-voluntary work. Not to mention slavery extended beyond work. Being a slave was not only backbreaking unpaid labor, but also a whole host of horrors outside work such as rape, family separation, forced breeding, torture, etc. Calling slaves "workers" is a deeply inaccurate categorization.
I would associate that more with "employee," with "worker" being an umbrella term. Note that "worker" is also used in a bunch of other contexts. Worker bee, worker thread, miracle worker, etc.
Okay but using umbrella terms obscures the crucial aspect of being a slave: non voluntary, unpaid labor. Yes, it is technically correct in an extremely literal sense. But that's not the same as it being the right term in the context of teaching students about the slave trade. If I said "his great grandfather was a worker", it would not imply slavery, indeed most people would assume the opposite connotation, that his great grandfather was a paid worker.
I can't help but feel like you're confusing literal correctness with appropriateness. And while literal correctness is an easier judgement to make, there are many literally correct statements that absolutely miss the point. Saying that slaves were "workers" is one of them.
What do you mean "waste"? Just that they're building career capital instead of directly earning money? You've got your whole life to work, spending that time learning, meeting new people, and trying new things seems way less "wasteful" than just starting your career 4 years sooner. Plus it gives you time to figure out what you want to do, most 18-year-olds aren't really equipped to decide what they'll want to be doing when they're 50 and the value of starting a career sooner is greatly diminished if you just end up switching careers anyway.
> teaches them mainly, useless stuff
Meh, most knowledge is useless, but it's not always easy to determine which knowledge will be useful in advance. I thought my linguistics class was useless (though interesting) at the time, years later I went into data science, turns out linguistics is pretty important for NLP. Also, I think learning for the sake of learning is a Good Thing, even given that most knowledge is useless.
> barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings
Got a source for that? Cause last I checked, holders of even most "useless" degrees out-earn those with just a high school diploma by something like $15k/year, making them well worth it financially unless you pay the sticker price for a private or out-of-state school. For better or worse, there are a ton of decent jobs in the US that just require any college degree.
> and makes people bitter because they feel they are not valued by society the way they believe they should
I haven't seen that at all. I know people who are bitter because they have a ton of student debt and are struggling to pay it off, but I don't know anyone who expects to be put on a pedestal because they have a college degree, if anything they're bitter at their colleges and/or their high school guidance counselors. Also, those people are outliers in terms of their debt levels, the average new college graduate (among those who take out student loans) earns ~$55k and leaves with ~$30k in debt, which is very manageable almost everywhere in the US and probably puts them at a higher income (though with less wealth) than their peers who started plumbing apprenticeships at 18.
> You're just a lab rat if you take the vaccine before it has had 209,348 years of trials.
Or, you know, 3. Like most new vaccines. Except with this one, an exception was made because people were (are) dying by the millions, and because most of those 3 years is an observation period for rare and obscure side effects that take time to manifest. But do nevertheless happen. We did what we usually do in medicine: risk-benefit trade-off. The decision wasn't a close one, but that doesn't mean that being concerned about the risk is somehow absurd.
Point being: using charitable interpretations of your opponents' arguments does not make for brief and funny sound bites.
It's the southern strategy at work. It's not about what is true or what is morally right. It's about not letting *the other team* get any wins. This is why they needed to pretend COVID wasn't a big deal, because otherwise you are admitting that *the other team* was right.
Afghanistan is more complex, but I agree about the vaccines. But interestingly he can’t capitalize on it, because his fans are so locked into the anti-vax stance. He got booed by his own fans at a rally when he said he was vaccinated!
That’s not what the southern strategy was. It was a cynical ploy by Republicans to court racist Democratic voters in the south who were unhappy with the civil rights bill. It worked and they switched to the Republican party, which realigned the ideological tilt of American politics.
Not letting the other team get any wins will be known as The McConnell Strategy in the history books, as he has practiced a policy of complete obstruction while in the senate.
That's not completely true. For example, the rationale behind the war on drugs (Nixon era and revived by Reagan, long before McConnell) was not about truth or moral virtue.
It is not 70% of kids, and this number is not hard to look up. It has been trending around 30% for enrollment into 4-year institutions. Of those, ~60% complete the degree within 6 years.
I agree that most students who got to college don't make good use of the time or investment, but it is still a minority of people who even attempt college.
For me going to college was about getting away from my horrible family. They still managed to screw me over and prevent me from finishing my last year of schooling, but my life was forever made better by the distance.
The class stratification in society is absolutely intense, if you're coming from a bad family you just need to get away from them as soon as you can. I made the mistake of not estranging myself from my own family much sooner. If I could change one thing about the way America works I'd eliminate the requirement for parental involvement when it comes to getting financial aid.
If your parents like to beat you up, you should be able to just walk out when you're 18 and get help to go to school. But that's not the system now. Aside from a small handful of exceptions which are painfully difficult to get, you're basically on your own. I think in Europe everyone just gets help to go to college so this isn't an issue there.
Then reform college: you need to increase the chances that make instances like that thing holding office in Missouri incidents of the past. You need to educate people, to help develop the eyes to see and cringe.
This is my favorite time of the decade because it’s at the nadir of political tension in the US. We’re exactly halfway between elections and the next election is an unimportant one (relatively). The only people still talking about politics are people who are genuinely interested in politics or who have interesting insights.
Nothing that anyone says politically right now matters. For proof, consider how many of your friends even remember that Afghanistan fell just two months ago - likely none if they’re like my friends. In fact, there’s a consequential NJ gubernatorial election coming up in the next month and no one’s talking about it. I love the peace and respite we’re getting from politics personally.
Anyways, to respond to you, Parson is in charge of a state that regularly has multiple cities top the US murder rate charts. Anything he says that makes you forget that fact, even temporarily, is a win for him.
The upcoming midterms are extremely important because the out of power party is likely going to take back the House, and all signs are pointing to them not affirming any winner of the 2024 election if that person is a Democrat, which will directly lead to the utter breakdown of Democracy in the USA.
I think "a lot of the skepticism" is a VAST over estimate. Are you telling me that the anti-vaccine, anti-CRT (created a boogeyman out of nowhere btw), and various school boards revising how we should try to more objectively teach history/science are worried about higher ed being ineffective?
I mean yes there is definitely criticism on higher ed and what value students are getting for the now extremely high price tag, but to say that this is what is the issue is definitely missing the point
Please don't make this a partisan issue. I live in Missouri. I've voted for Republicans in the past. You're alienating people like me from being on your side.
It doesn't matter that you're probably right. It comes across as you posting this to make yourself feel good, and holy moly the sense of superiority from your camp needs a chill pill.
Parson is evil. I'll be doing my duty as a citizen and trying to vote him out of office. But none of this was anti-science, nor did it have anything to do with COVID, and you've brought up both.
Do you expect people to pretend the trend isn't happening in order to comfort you? What does it say about your own values that they are so loosely held that you'd sacrifice them out of contempt like this?
> Do you expect people to pretend the trend isn't happening in order to comfort you?
There are plenty of trends happening on the "other side" which are also veritably nuts, so I don't find this to be a very compelling argument. The ad hominem doesn't help, either.
> Do you expect people to pretend the trend isn't happening in order to comfort you? What does it say about your own values that they are so loosely held that you'd sacrifice them out of contempt like this?
And now we’ve come full circle. Using “whataboutism” to avoid conversations about topics is a problem. Whether you’re using it to deflect to a different topic or using it as an excuse to avoid talking about a topic altogether. Someone could argue your comment is the latter and is just as harmful.
But I think most of that is a limitation of text/internet communication that people don’t consciously notice. It’s much easier to have nuance in an in-person conversation.
There are two parties and you have to pick one. If the argument is that trends on the republican side are so insane you must vote democrat, it's certainly not whataboutism to argue there are also similarly insane trends on the democratic side... you can disagree but you can't honestly call it whataboutism.
"Whataboutism" is an informal fallacy that most non-technical folks (as in, not logicians) mis-invoke, like almost all other informal fallacies. My argument is not even remotely whataboutism. In fact, it can be even formulated without addressing the "other side" at all: you're making a category error by going from general (party trends) to particular (individual voters).
It's simply a bad argument. I only brought up the "other side" to help analogize it, my apologies if it confused things.
All these "your side/my side" sideism stuff is going to destroy everything.
No one can have any nuanced opinion without all of their individuality being discarded and all weight being given to the party they vote for. It seems to me that the party they vote for is just an ephemeral label and really doesn't suffice in extrapolating much. We should stop contextualizing all conversations on the political affiliation of people.
> Do you expect people to pretend the trend isn't happening in order to comfort you?
This is a strawman. The parent was saying that in order to have an effect and convince people, you shouldnt alienate them. You can do this without lying or ignoring things that are happening. In fact, the people you're most likely able to convince are people in the middle and by alienating them you're actually causing the trend that you're denouncing.
> What does it say about your own values that they are so loosely held that you'd sacrifice them out of contempt like this?
This is just a straight ad hominem. I thought we were supposed to be above these sorts of things on hn.
Republicans have been trying to hold Democrats to a higher standard for 40 years, all the while playing low ball ... it has been a GREAT strategy for them that is nearing end game (courts stacked, gerrymandering, control of state houses, etc)
The "other side" has ZERO capacity/will/desire to ACTUALLY engage in meaningful dialog , but sole goal is to "win" no matter what the cost.
There is no logical appeal that can sway the state-level propaganda and brainwashing that billions have been spent on over the last 40 years.
Anyone who thinks only one of the two sides refuses to engage in meaningful dialog makes me think they have drunk far too much Kol-Aid from on side or the other. The fact of the matter is that nether side has tried to engage in reasonable dialog and exploration of the other sides views because it's apparently not good politics to due so. Both side's take a few random snapshots from extremists on twitter and try to paint the entire other side with that brush despite there being much more common ground between voters of the two camps. A significant proportion of "politically engaged" democrats think that half our country are literally Nazis and many "politically engaged" republicans have equally ridiculous caricatures about the average dem voter.
Thank You! As a younger person it is so difficult to comprehend the massive amount of wisdom and intelligence in this community, who actively converse almost exclusively in logical fallacies, and it is never referenced! Your comment made me feel like this is not a crazy observation.
You can’t remove his actions from context though. They are only even possible because of a deliberate and calculated campaign to discredit science and knowledge and punish those who have it. They’re banking on people like you just looking to keep the peace at any cost.
If you’re not actively working to dismantle the current Republican Party, we cannot be on the same side. I don’t mind alienating you; the masters tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
I don’t mind alienating you; the masters tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
I've never heard this phrase before, but it equally applies to the situation where one thinks only they can wield a weapon. We can't assume that because we are "right," we have nothing to fear from the people who are "wrong" using our worst tactics against us. This is wrong whether it's one side "lying for Jesus," or the other side "censoring for freedom."
In the context of this thread, rising opposition on one side prompts a higher rise on the other side, in a vicious cycle. As parents are often heard to say, "I don't care who started it, I care who finishes it!"
All the adults saw a problem, so they kept raising their shields higher and higher, but raising the shields was causing the problem in the first place. It took a kid to notice that the scale of the problem correlated with the scale of the adults' defensiveness. This was, obviously, a metaphor for any human interaction.
It's simply not possible to continually raise your defenses and offenses and end with a win-win, and when it comes to a roughly evenly divided society, win-lose is lose-lose.
> It's simply not possible to continually raise your defenses and offenses and end with a win-win, and when it comes to a roughly evenly divided society, win-lose is lose-lose.
This only works when both sides engage in good faith. That is not the case currently. We are better off excluding them than letting them abuse the process in bad faith like they always do.
The ones advancing this argument are always the ones with the least at stake.
Some people on every side engage in bad faith, and some in good faith. Find the ones who are operating on good faith and engage with them, rather than painting an entire side with a broad brush. And be mindful of the spectators -- they're the ones who arguments are most likely to influence, not the participants.
There are hundreds of millions of nominally reasonable people who fall into opposite tribes just by happenstance. If you attack their tribe as a whole they'll stick to their tribes because of tribalism, but if you act reasonably, even if the tribal figureheads are acting in bad faith, the members of each tribe can be persuaded reasonably.
Every line in tribe B's media about how party A is destroying the world with its anti-X agenda is perfectly mirrored by a similar line in tribe A's media about how party B is destroying the world with its anti-Y agenda. "Excluding" doesn't cut off people you disagree with, it makes them stronger, by consolidating them further into their tribes and cementing their opinions ("fight makes right")! We can try to see things from the point of view of reasonable people on both sides, or we can fail as a pluralistic society.
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
It's actually a poignant, forward-thinking point about the malleability of "reality" and "facts" under empire, but predictably the third-way neolibs that still dominate the party failed to grasp that and first made a joke out of it, and then out of themselves as it was realized.
The other commenter is correct that Colbert coined the term. It's true that there was a lot of talk in that era about who did or didn't adhere to "reality" and how that related to partisanship, and a segment of the blogosphere that described themselves as the "reality based community," in reponse to that Rove quote, but none of that background context has anything to do with anything when it comes to the fact that the phrase itself, "reality has a liberal bias" is something that came from Colbert.
Of course it was in an intellectual climate where those words were charged with political meaning that made them salient enough to set up the joke. But to say it didn't original with Colbert would be to say that phrase itself was coined by a different person, and if it was, you could say who it was, and when and where. Otherwise it's just a confused detour into the weeds that lost track of the original question of attribution.
This is a huge detour, so to tie it back to the original thread, I think talks of "bias" are poisoned by a false assumption sides are equally estranged from scientific truth. It feels fair to make a both-sides argument, but it really just doesn't hold water under any serious examination especially when it comes to which party affiliation more systematically aligns with, responds to, and believes in scientific consensus.
Being extremely concerned over the precise origin of one particular phrasing of the joke rather than its context and influences is hilariously on-point for the 'reality-based community.' Judicious!
The background context is important, and it's true that Colbert really did coin the term. This really isn't that hard.
It should be possible to hold these two different thoughts in your head at the same time without descending into angry incredulity at anyone offering clarification.
I don't know where you see anger or incredulity in my response. Colbert told the joke first! It also doesn't matter, in exactly the way which liberals misunderstood the comment in the first place! Now it's like a double-joke because it's so ironic, and also the US is probably irrecoverably fucked up. Laughs all around!
An emphatic attempt to say that a correct answer to a simple question either "doesn't matter", or is an obsessive hyperfixation, or is a failure to understand The Real Lesson is a lot of combat to engage in, all for the meager returns of taking a simple yes-or-no question and turning it into an unfocused derail.
Colbert really did coin the term and it really is that simple. You seem to just want to take a question about where a quote came from and turn it into a broader conversation about the history of the 2000s, which is all well and good but.... it's just not an answer to what was being asked.
I don't think aggression has much to do with the factual content of the replies. Just because people reply to you angrily about an issue that is near and dear to them doesn't mean you can talk about them dismissively like this.
> You're alienating people like me from being on your side.
On one side are the computer scientists and engineers who understand the nature of the problem. On the other side are ignorant and/or dishonest actors out to avoid being embarrassed.
It's all on you if you pick the wrong one out of loyalty to a political party.
>On one side are the computer scientists and engineers who understand the nature of the problem
There are a hell of a lot of computer scientists and engineers who vote republican, certainty not a majority but definitely a large enough minority you can't discount them. They just don't broadcast it for reasons that should be obvious to anyone reading these comments.
"Run a tech company that employs conservatives" is not a business plan. It isn't easy to know what kind of bubble you are getting into until it is too late.
OTOH, tech conservatives tend to be more libertarian than socially conservative, so (massive generalization here) tend to prefer to work at work and do politics elsewhere.
"Celebrating" political positions is such a foreign concept to me that I dont even know where to begin with that. Left or right, I would probably avoid it.
At this point, voting for Republican candidates means supporting an institution that has given up on Democratic norms and is clearly aiming at an authoritarian takeover of the government of the United States.
Up until about 5 years ago I would agree that being even-handed on political matters is appropriate. But when one political party has gone completely mad with lust for power and has given up on science and rationality, how you vote is no longer just a political matter. The threat the Republican Party poses to the country and the world is existential.
And yes, there are crazies on the left, but no, they are nowhere near the threat posed by the GOP. The difference is several orders of magnitude.
If you believe Donald Trump gave up on democratic norms and was "aiming [for] an authoritarian takeover," then surely you must recognize that it was Republicans like Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Brad Raffensperger, Stephen Riche, and others who stopped him... right?
There's been, for a long time, an intra-party struggle between right-wing populist insurgents and establishment/institutionalists since Newt Gingrich. It was a slow process, but over time it seems the former are winning, the most obvious first sign was the McCain-Palin ticket (Palin being the populist). The scene as increasingly been victorious for the insurgents. Those guys you are pointing out are hanging on by their fingernails.
Yes, and the big guy has incessantly gone after each one you mention, hoping to drum them out of the party. I wonder what his motivation is...
Even now, the few who voted to impeach over Jan 6 are cowed and quiet. Mitt Romney just voted against the Manchin-approved compromise voting rights bill.
These cowards are all afraid of their shadows. It's an incredible, once-per-century show of absolute cowardice and submission to a strongman.
The US has a decent shot of going the way of Turkey, Hungary, and Venezuela. The elected GOP senators and congresspeople are 100% to blame. They are sad, sorry, craven and ineffectual people.
And yes, I know this thread skirts the HN guidelines. I certainly don't want this to become another Cesspool of partisan flame Wars.
There needs to be another Forum that somewhere between Hacker News and reddit, moderated but with a relatively open set of subjects that include the impact technology has on society
I don’t know how they vote or if they identify with any parties, but there is a disturbing, very patriarchal strain of neo-feudalism I have encountered in some tech circles — basically the idea that we need to return to a time of lords and serfs.
Of course I have found that when pressed, those who hold this philosophy seem to picture themselves as the lords in this fantasy utopia. Maybe these are just power fantasies, but some of them seem very serious about it (Curtis Yarvin is probably the most notable of the bunch)
Techbro libertarians are the worst - the people who think that because some can be successful, anyone who is disadvantaged is so because of personal failings and is underserving of help. Naturally this leads to anti-democratic leanings to protect their wealth.
See Peter Thiel: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
The freedom he desires is the freedom to use his privilege to oppress others.
I was really into early hacker and BBS culture in the 90s, and this point of view was rare to nonexistent. There was a lot of teen and young adult angst and egotism but that’s not unusual. It wasn’t ideological and the ideas tended to be either left or libertarian.
I would have called myself a libertarian back then but that was back when words meant things, or at least more than they do now. I stopped using the term when the fascists took it over.
It’s popular in some left leaning circles and particularly among people who did not live through that era to claim that libertarianism and cyberculture was always like this. It wasn’t. There was a mass conversion event around the early 20-teens that sort of coincided with Gamergate (not sure how important GG was but that was the era). I’d say a large proportion of an entire generation of younger “hacker” types were mass converted to fascism or neoreaction. Racism also made a massive comeback.
I still don’t fully understand it. The LessWrong orbit seems to be a major factor. I never found that whole circle particularly interesting, but a lot of people sure did.
It's okay for people to vote D on some issues and R on some other issues. That's pretty much an inevitability for any person with diverse views in a two-party system.
Besides, at the end of the day, how different are the two sides? One party wants to prosecute a reporter who found a site vulnerability, and the other party wants to prosecute the man who exposed the world to the dragnet surveillance being conducted by the NSA.
Come on. The two situations are entirely different.
One side is trying to prosecute a journalist who clicked view source and embarrassed an incompetent IT department. There was never any law broken under any remotely plausible legal theory.
The other side is trying to prosecute someone who violated their NDA to not disclose classified info. Now, you might think what he did was a net positive (I certainly do), but on the other hand it is objectively illegal. The DOJ could use their discretion and drop it, but they don't have to.
Sorry, too many threads here and I missed this one. I was specifically thinking about how the two parties love keeping themselves around, rather than helping the will of the people get through.
> One party wants to prosecute a reporter who found a site vulnerability, and both parties wants to prosecute the man who exposed the world to the dragnet surveillance being conducted by the NSA.
FTFY, unless you think Rs have any interest in dropping charges against Snowden. So even in your own examples, one party clearly has the upper hand, and it's not R.
> On one side are the computer scientists and engineers who understand the nature of the problem. On the other side are ignorant and/or dishonest actors out to avoid being embarrassed.
It's all on you if you pick the wrong one out of loyalty to a political party.
A two party system has basically set this up to occur.
I can’t see that it could ever be changed, but it’s utterly toxic.
Both sides could accept intellectualism like they accept capitalism? There is nothing that says each party needs to take an opposing view on literally every topic. Rs and Ds like to fight all day in the media, but there is plenty of things concerning money and control that they will happily pass without public debate.
> we can discuss nuclear power, GMOs, unreasonable COVID restrictions
If you want to discuss those things, it's worth first pointing out that the US had the worst Covid death toll of the G7 countries[0] and that red states had higher case and death rates than blue states[1].
Also, it's possible to accept the science of nuclear power and GMOs while still not trusting large corporations to exercise sufficient care and restraint when given control over nuclear material and life itself, especially when the government agencies ultimately responsible for regulating those technologies are half the time appointed by a party that doesn't believe in regulations or government.
How is it alienating to point out a trend that's clearly happening? I feel like this is exactly the problem, where refusing to acknowledge the problem is the problem. "Please don't bring these issues up, it's a problem I don't want to deal with".
Are we expected to just pretend like there's not this huge anti-science movement on the Right because your feelings might get hurt? Look at all the anti mask, anti vaccine rhetoric. This isn't ok.
Plenty of problems on the Left too, and we should talk about those too.
> Please don't make this a partisan issue. I live in Missouri. I've voted for Republicans in the past. You're alienating people like me from being on your side.
Every group of humans - indeed, thanks to the central limit theorem, every sufficiently large sampling - is going to be normally distributed and there are going to be folks on either side offset from the mean.
However, that doesn't indicate that the mean isn't interesting or worthwhile to discuss, and isn't representative of the group as a whole.
Sorry, still doesn’t mean that the quantity that you’re averaging (position on the left-right political spectrum?) will be normally distributed. In fact, it almost certainly won’t be. But it’s a common error.
As someone else responded, in the case of United States politics in 2021, it's pretty clear that there is not a normal gaussian distribution of opinions on various matters. I suspect for all the hot-button issues it's extremely bimodal.
with all due respect there is almost no evidence that republican voters ever "switch sides". it's not a thing. these people aren't voting against their own in any useful numbers no matter what.
I think I'd have to see numbers on that (and those numbers are hard to build out without falling prey to a "No True Scotsman" fallacy).
Virginia currently has a Democrat legislature for the first time in two decades, and it's paired with a Democrat governor for the first time I can remember. Either there was a massive demographic churn or someone switched sides. (Anecdotally: I have family in Virginia, and a lot of lifelong GOP voters in my family looked at the party's double- and triple-down support of Trump and went "Whatever this party is, it's not my GOP").
well we can start that virginia turnout was 3 points higher in 2020 than 2016: https://www.elections.virginia.gov/resultsreports/registrati... about 400000 more votes than 2016. How many points did D legislators win by compared to 2016? if they moved only three points to win, then it was likely mostly turnout related, not party switching. Also you need to accommodate for the GOP voter that says "not my party" is very likely to simply not vote, or vote third party, likely moreso than to vote for a Democrat. This would indicate "alienation" of such voters is a good strategy in fact. It's certainly the strategy that the GOP uses against Democrats in order to get us not to turn out.
put another way, I have a lot of republicans in my family. There is zero chance of any of them ever changing. It's absurd that we all would need to be concerned about speaking the truth of the GOP party for fear of "alienating" these people. This is a silencing tactic, plain and simple. The GOP takes no such steps to avoid losing potential D switchers.
This is completely false. I personally know lifelong Republican voters who abandoned the party in 2016. They didn’t just leave the party, they voted D.
We don't have the numbers to assert that one way or the other, since the ballot is secret.
In Virginia, more people voted for Biden in 2020 than Clinton in 2016, and for Trump in 2020 than Trump in 2016. Clearly higher turnout mattered, but whether the individual votes were switch-voters, new voters, voters who sat out 2016 showing up in 2020, voters who sat out in 2016 (but had a past history of voting one way) showing up for the other party's candidate in 2020 is much harder to assert.
The anti-science, anti-intellectualism, us vs them, anti-vaccine mindset that Parsons has is pretty emblematic of Southern Republican governors, senators, and congresspeople. Parsons responded in the expected, knee-jerk 'my political opponents are out to get me' that's been the theme of the GOP for a while now. Even though this security issue had nothing at all to do with politics. This was a consistent theme around Covid and vaccinations at both the state and national level. I think that's the background of the parent comment. Painting Parsons' response in his broader political actions and fellow party politicians' actions.
You're making it about sides. Facts are not one sided. If someone speaking truth makes you feel bothered, that's your problem, not theirs. We should be able to speak to one another without getting emotional about which team someone aligns with.
Republicans are fostering anti-intellectualism which is (in fact) anti-science. From my perspective you'd be alienating yourself out of spite. This goes for Democrats or any political party.
The problem is that democrats are also fostering anti-science anti-intellectualism.
Which side is worse is a matter of opinion. Personally I think they are both dangerous and won’t identify myself with either party as a result.
The result is that there is no point in leveling this accusation as part of a debate about something substantive, unless you just want to derail the conversation into a meaningless partisan bashing match.
What perspectives do you see coming from the Democrat side that have the same mortality rate as vaccine refusal? (Or are there indicators you give equal/greater significance than mortality?)
Why is this question relevant? Anti-science views are anti-science regardless of the short term mortality rate you can attach to them or who is propagating them.
It's relevant because it would put some substance behind the "both sides do it" claim.
People commonly make this false equivalence, but as of 2021 it's fair to observe that it's just unequivocally false with respect to the question of respect for scientific consensus. If a lot of republicans disregard science (e.g. believe incorrect things about covid) and a few democrats do it (e.g. believing incorrect things about nuclear safety), people take these unequal examples and proceed claim it means both sides are the same, and believe that they are expressing a sophisticated position.
It's precisely this kind of illiteracy in the ability to assess the relative merits of differently weighted examples that makes the false equivalence possible. This which is why demands for substantiation are relevant and necessary.
> People commonly make this false equivalence, but as of 2021 it's fair to observe that it's just unequivocally false with respect to the question of respect for scientific consensus. If a lot of republicans disregard science (e.g. believe incorrect things about covid) and a few democrats do it (e.g. believing incorrect things about nuclear safety), people take these unequal examples and proceed claim it means both sides are the same, and believe that they are expressing a sophisticated position.
I guess you’re arguing with ‘people’ then.
You might want to look into some of the other anti-science ideas strongly propagated by democrats. You don’t seem to have a good inventory. It’s not limited to minor false beliefs about nuclear safety. Consider the belief that there is no such thing as biological sex, for example.
I'm specifically and directly responding to your question of why we should be in the business of judging the relative merits of different claims, and I elaborated by explaining problems with false balance.
Edit, since I can't reply: parent commenter asked "What perspectives do you see coming from the Democrat side that have the same mortality rate as vaccine refusal? "and you replied "why is this question relevant" and I explained why. So I was indeed directly responding to you, despite your continued protestations to the contrary. Insisting that I wasn't being responsive to you is bordering on ridiculous.
> Consider the belief that there is no such thing as biological sex, for example.
I'm pretty comfortable dismissing this out of hand.
Edit: and I'm not missing the point, I understand the role you believe it plays in the logical structure of equating democrats to republicans. I understand that you're invoking the subject of gender and saying it's an example of Democrats being estranged from scientific consensus in a way that's comparable to Republicans being estranged from scientific consensus on covid. And it's at this point in the conversation where I'm no longer attempting to engage with you, and I instead direct my comments to others reading this thread on understanding what false equivalences look like.
I was initially focused on failures to accurately compare differently weighted examples. But there's a different category of false equivalence, where people confidently invoke a completely non-existent scientific consensus. The invocation of gender falls into that category.
Sure does seem like you don’t have any examples to back up the assertion that democrats are equally anti-intellectual.
If you make that assertion, you can’t be upset when people ask for examples or evidence. It’s extremely relevant to the (as of yet) unsupported argument you made.
Refusing to hold people accountable enables the rule breakers. You have to decide which party is actually telling more damaging lies, taking more damaging actions, or doing more good, and act accordingly. Because some person who votes for Democrats somewhere said vaccines turn people into alligators doesn't balance out the strong majority of the Republican Party who deny anthropogenic climate change, or at least oppose doing anything about it. Democrats advocating covid measures of limited efficacy aren't balanced out by Republicans saying whether or not to be a disease vector is a personal choice.
Flawed opinions are not all of equal import. Representatives of a political party are not all of equal import. You have to actually evaluate the evidence and act accordingly, even if this puts you on the outs with friends, family, and co-workers.
This all being said, I think the prime driver of partisanship is not analyses of truth or impact but social connections. People are afraid to be exiled from the community they depend on -- their friends, family, co-workers, co-religionists, doctor, grocer, plumber, etc. Just as you can tell a lie more convincingly if you believe it, you can simulate partisan allegiance best by enacting it. If you are going to be ridden out of town on a rail if you are thought to have voted for a Democrat/Republican, then it isn't sufficient to say you voted as the mob prefers; you have to do it. The mob knows this. That's what the Second Amendment has come to be about: having guns to scare your neighbors over to your side. Better to be with the bully than against him.
Or, you could just not base your thinking on choosing a side which is ‘the lesser of two evils’ to be your savior, and recognize that the behaviors are a problem rather than the team.
It seems you are expressing two ideas which are in conflict. The "lesser of two evils" argument is precisely about choosing "behavior" (really results or goals) over choosing a team. But I'll give it a go anyway.
I am assuming you have to vote or abstain from voting. Then your choice is whether you are trying to achieve changes in the world or achieve a certain self image. If you are trying to achieve changes in the world, and the decision is close, you throw your weight behind the better side. If you are trying to achieve a certain self image, you vote for your ideal candidate whatever is at stake and whatever the balance between the two candidates that have an actual chance of gaining power. Or you abstain and remain unsullied by whatever evil taints each candidate.
Yes, you have to make that choice. That was my point: choose better over worse.
The "more damaging lies" part is just trying not to be too rosy-eyed about any particular party. Your choices are imperfect, but that's the world we live in.
ETA In case it was unclear, I think political behavior aimed at your self image is vanity and thus self-defeating. Even if your chief goal is thinking better of yourself or getting others to think better of you, forsaking a choice to do good for the world at large in the interest of your own vanity will not achieve your goal. If you want a better image, you should still choose better over worse, not pretty and pointless over ugly and effective.
It’s clear what you think, it’s just not relevant to the comment you replied to.
When you vote, you are forced to make a choice between parties. Nothing forces you to identify with a side when it comes to discussing who is anti-science or not.
Re-read "anti-science" (a - relatively - minor collateral) with simply "bestial": refusing the value of a basic grasp of the world, and its function as a limiter. ("Bricks are not edible but that is not a valid reason to avoid eating them, when lower drives call". Very many are embracing the false and the absurd as "legitimate": it is just satanic.)
By the way: «voting [that thing] out» is not enough. That thing having held the office is a very horrible incident, and it must be made very clear to all those who were distracted.
I grew up and spent some of my adult life in Missouri. I interacted with folks in the Missouri GOP quite a lot in the mid-naughts and early 2010s. Lots of GOP state rep staffers, some state reps, some state-wide candidates who have been oscillating in and out of politics in the years since, etc. I even had a few long meals with Eric Greitens way back in the day when everyone knew he was going to run for something but he was still playing Veteran Charity Organizer and denying any intention to run.
(Actually, I always pegged Eric for a moderate/conservative Democrat, but wasn't surprised to see him play the game he played given that his defining characteristic was always his careerism/ambition. I even mentioned after one of those meals that he'd probably prefer to run as a Dem but will definitely be running on the GOP ticket because he cares more about power and prestige than anything else & anyone with a brain knew running as a Dem in any statewide race in Missouri was a dead end. Actually, totally independent of this conversation, Eric is actually a really interesting case study in coalition politics; his resignation was as much about him snubbing folks with appointments than his sex scandal per se. Anyways.)
My interactions with folks in MOGOP back then scared the hell out of me. I could see the party coalescing around a pretty dark sort of nihilism. And not even really in terms of policy per se. It's the individual people, divorced of their politics, that really made me scared. On a personal and individual level. The deeply concerning interactions and conversations I had with specific rising stars in MOGOP are actually one of the reasons I left the state.
I understand your attitude toward partisanship, I really do, and I've voted for Missouri Repbulicans in the past as well. But that state party is in a really dark place right now. A few good apples -- and they do exist -- don't really matter when party leadership are scary as fuck narcissistic nihilists.
(And, yeah, all politicians suck or whatever... but MOGOP is really something else. The rising stars from back then who are all either ascendant or in control now are not just gross politician types... they're genuinely just really scary human beings.)
This divisive rhetoric is what got us here in the first place; a breakdown in civil communication. The blue team mimics the red team in this respect. I wish we could have a more mature dialogue but I wonder if we're past that. Violent communication is normalizing.
One important fact you might consider is that not all Republicans are the same. ...and that the worst actors held up by the media are not even representative of the average.
...and that moreover, you might consider you are intentionally fed biased information to help reinforce your political stances and hyper-emotional content, because emotional voters are more loyal than thinking voters.
Think for yourself. Recognize the good in your opposition. Denounce the bad in your own. No political party (nor their associated media outlets) are above lying and public manipulation.
> "As we say in Germany, if there's a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis"
Is this in jest? Or are you truly suggesting that even conversing with someone who holds an opinion that differs from yours somehow makes you of the same opinion?
>Is this in jest? Or are you truly suggesting that even conversing with someone who holds an opinion that differs from yours somehow makes you of the same opinion?
Are you truly suggesting the correct action to take with Nazi's is a discussion? Because there is a certain British PM that tried that approach back in the day....
If you ignore facts it is impossible for a best solution to arise or for any answer to be accepted so a conversation cannot move on and has no end point, this drives a "You are the problem"/"You are attacking me" feeling.
The poster is discussing populations being polled, but you are talking about yourself. Can a single individual act as the spokesman of an entire population?
There was a time, maybe 2008, when this way okay. 2016 was a little iffy, but understandable the way things went.
But after 2020? There's no plausible deniability left. That the loser of the last election used imagined fraud as a basis to launch a coup attempt, and the subsequent attempted memory-holing and normalization of that event by the Republican party have changed everything. It's clear what they are doing now. Namely:
1) take away independent control of state election processes and install a partisan election process that will "determine" whether any particular election result is "fraudulent". The result of the Arizona audit by the "Cyber Ninjas" reveals the playbook:
- use the audit to kick up a cloud of dust (we are investigating reports of paper ballots from china containing Bamboo!)
- muddy the waters (we are definitely going to find fraud, it's astounding)
- find no fraud (The results show Biden won, but we have a list of concerns we will focus on instead of the actual count)
- declare there was fraud anyway (Trump's statement on the result: "We won on the Arizona forensic audit yesterday at a level that you wouldn’t believe. They had headlines that Biden wins in Arizona when they know it’s not true. He didn’t win in Arizona. He lost in Arizona based on the forensic audit.")
2) Use these fabricated claims of fraud to send your own choice of electors to the Congress to select the next President.
3) The Democrats will object, because of the obvious fraud
4) The process, being contested, will follow the Constitution and eventually a vote will go before the House, where each state delegation has 1 vote
5) Because Republicans control more state houses than Democrats, they can just choose whoever they want as President
6) Any court challenges will end up at a court stacked with Republicans, 3 of whom were appointed by Trump, 5 of whom were appointed to the court by Republican Presidents who lost the popular vote their first term in office.
That's how Democracy ends in America, and Republicans are setting up that exact scenario in 2024. If you wake up in November of that year and the person elected (read: appointed) lost both the popular vote AND the electoral college, well don't be surprised. That's the literal end of elections in America, and it's not hyperbolic at all. That's their stated plan: see the Eastman memo.
If you are voting for Republicans post 2020, you are voting against democracy. I'm sorry, there's no other way to put it. This whole effort is anti-democratic and against the rule of law. I mean, it's fine if you don't believe in democracy and want an American dictator in the style of Putin (complete with the associated corruption of the rule of law and the neutering of elections as a method of self governance), but just be honest about it.
Much of it likely comes down to (a) misinformation coming from news sources they trust, (b) lack of trust in institutions (perhaps for good reason), and perhaps most importantly (c) prioritizing moral values differently than you do.
I suspect (c) is at the root of much of the R-D split, with (a) and (b) being symptoms of it.
Many Republicans and Democrats have non-negotiable moral values they hold to, and they hold their noses as they elect leaders who give lip service to those values but have glaring problems elsewhere. Elections are more about who people don't want in office than who they do want.
One consistent stance on bodily autonomy would be that vaccinations should be mandatory, and so should abortions.
I hope no one is seriously advocating for that position, so obviously the issue of "consistency" is more complicated.
An adult is able to weigh for themselves the risks and benefits of receiving a vaccine. A child is not able to weigh those risks and benefits, and it reasonable in general to have that decision made by their parents.
I suppose someone could say, to be consistent, that we should allow parents to decide for the child in his or her mother's womb how to weigh the risks and benefits of being aborted versus being born, but at least for a healthy child we would never accept that being born is a worse outcome than being dead.
So I think that protecting adults from unwanted vaccinations and protecting pre-birth children from being aborted can be a consistent stance, even though, I accept, the problem is much more complicated than even that.
Let me know when someone wakes up after being drugged at a frat party and is pregnant with a vaccination, that they need to care for, financially and emotionally, for the rest of their life. Especially if that vaccine told the person they loved them, and it'd feel better if they used bare mRNA instead of a vector.
I know someone whose elderly relative with dementia was given a covid vaccination despite the family's expressed wishes for that to not happen. That relative now has antibodies and possibly complications that may affect them for the rest of their life. (I admit, though, that the likely medical outcome for them is a positive one, compared to not being vaccinated).
Conversely, if someone becomes pregnant they can put the child up for adoption, and the state should make the father pay for that child's needs for the rest of their life. If the father knew that the mother was under the influence of drugs, he should also spend a large portion of his life in prison learning to care about other people.
It’s not the elderly with dementia that are out spreading COVID by refusing a vaccine, they’re the ones who are just dying within a few weeks. I’m sad for all the elderly especially those in communal living spaces who have limited mobility and control over their socialization, protective equipment, or schedule. Agree with your point, that their options seem to die sooner without the vaccine than with it. That’s a sad state.
As for the pregnancy idea, sure, in a perfect place with great social support, little stigmatizing of sex & adoption, and a legal system that can impose on the father (from flight or responsibility). I don’t see that anywhere, so how would we get there?
I'm not sure what examples you'd give of "stigmatizing of sex" and how lowering that stigma would result in fewer unwanted pregnancies, but as for "how would we get there?" you'll no doubt be reassured to notice that most states in the US are closer to achieving proper support for adoption than they are to outlawing abortion. The fact that people can (in principle) travel across state lines for both adoption and abortion is probably also reassuring to you.
I, uh, guess you didn’t grow up in the South in a Christian family. The stigmatization of sex seems pervasive if you have been involved in the south or conservative religions.
I never was taught that cold sores are a virus transmitted via saliva contact, including sharing a glass, ditto for mono. I was just told kissing or engaging in sexual behavior led to terminal illness or pregnancy. Also if one becomes pregnant there is strong pressure from parents on both sides to marry and raise the child despite a total lack of maturity or social or romantic connection. This is the experience of many Americans.
How do you define proper support for adoption? How can you measure that on a scale of that vs a scale from outlawing abortion to proper abortion? Also what is proper abortion?
A strong factor of oppression is a restriction on mobility. For a 15 year old girl, how does she ask for a ride to the next state? When I was 15 I felt shady riding my bike ten miles. We are almost certainly going to talk past each other. Good day to you.
The problem is that the true moral values held don't appear often enough in political speech.
I and almost all of my friends and family hold that "humans are created in the image of God, and thus their inalienable rights begin at conception. Therefore abortion at any stage is committing murder against the baby."
Not exactly context-dependent, unless I'm missing something. Perhaps you could elaborate?
I would construe your belief to be summarized by "all life has value and should be protected/valued".
The missing context is that your argument seek to protect the baby's life BEFORE birth , but after ... generally speaking the (R)/pro-life stance is pretty weak on social safety net, should the child have adequate (free!) health care, nutrition, etc.
Does that life "deserve" these things when they are only an infant? How about when they are 5-10 ... or 10-20 , or ANY age?
Passing laws to force women to give birth, but then systematically strip and reduce the social safety nets available seems highly context-dependent, and weakens greatly the belief that you "value life"
> generally speaking the (R)/pro-life stance is pretty weak on social safety net, should the child have adequate (free!) health care, nutrition, etc.
I don't know if I can generalize across Republicans, but as I understand it:
- humans naturally have both rights and responsibilities. Being human by itself grants inalienable rights, and as someone matures or is given positions of membership or authority they also incur further rights and responsibilities.
- Inalienable rights are to be protected by government. If it's not something that's naturally there and needs protecting, it's not an inalienable right. (Founding fathers summarized inalienable rights as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" - those can't be given by a government but they must be protected by all governments).
- By making a woman pregnant, a man has incurred the responsibility to protect and provide for that woman and her baby. If he fails to do so, she has every right to seek redress -- and doing so ought to be easy for her, since she and her baby have a right to his protection and provision.
This is the ideal. I know it's not the reality, but protecting inalienable rights and holding people to their responsibilities when redress is sought ought to be the first priorities of government. While they are important, social safety nets don't even appear in my belief system. If they exist, they ought to be a last resort, only to be relied upon if the father, the mother, their family, their community (church or another organization), or local non-profits are not able to provide. But the government would do even better to be holding the responsible people accountable instead of giving them a way out.
Nothing in my belief system assigns responsibility to the government for taking care of people. That should be the people's job via healthy non-government institutions (especially marriage, family, and community organizations). If people aren't getting taken care of, that's not the government's job to fix. It's the people's. It's literally MY job, and yours too. If the government is ever involved, it ought to be holding people responsible for taking care of one another, especially within families -- instead of giving them an easy way out of their duty.
So when I vote against your Democratic party policy, I'm not voting against the heart behind it. I'm saying "great ideas, but that is not the government's job. Go form an NGO to do that (that doesn't also promote abortion) and I will donate!" In the mean time, stop taxing me so you can give people an easy way out of their responsibilities! I take care of my responsibilities (myself, my wife, my kids). No one else has to do that - it's my job and I do it. God forbid the government should do that for me. I also give to my parents, my wife's parents, my church, including those in my church who are poor, several non-profits that take care of the poor and spread the good news of God's love, and poor people I run into -- I give away more than 20% of my net income. Please don't hear me saying "look how good I am" (far from it, there are many people who make less and give far more) but to hopefully to share how much I believe taking care of people is my job and yours, not the government's.
People should take care of their own responsibilities to the extent they are able. When they don't, the government should hold them accountable. When they can't, it should make it easy for other institutions to do their job and help the poor. People love one another better through giving voluntarily, not paying taxes so the government can "love" people.
Finally, institutions are the engines through which human visions are carried out and sustained across generations. Different institutions have different responsibilities. The government ...
Let's start with the hypothetical that a pregnant woman is expected to die unless her fetus is aborted. In this rare, but frequent enough situation, society must choose between murdering the fetus through action and murdering the mother through inaction. Who would you choose to murder?
Abortion isn't the only topic that people make a "moral" stance about, and in some ways it's the least interesting. It hinges on an arbitrary "It's alive!" moment that's not really debatable, so much as a gut feeling.
On second thought, it does illustrate the difficulty most people have in thinking about continua rather than binary variables. Aliveness is, to me, clearly not binary. The fetus is minimally alive at conception and becomes alive at birth, but during the pregnancy is neither fully alive nor fully not alive. Similarly, an adult with brain damage, in a coma, isn't quite dead, but is also not fully alive.
I think that if we discussed specific situations, nearly everyone would wind up agreeing with the continua. It's only in the abstract that they insist on their binary labels. That's been my experience, anyway. Everyone's ethics are parsimonious, until it's their friends, family, or themselves that are in consideration.
> Let's start with the hypothetical that a pregnant woman is expected to die unless her fetus is aborted... Who would you choose to murder?
First, how ever cruel and wrong doing so may be, letting nature take its course isn't murder - it's something else altogether (sometimes morally defensible, sometimes not).
Second, your hypothetical situation is a well-covered case in situational ethics -- "whose life to save when not all can be saved". I know in this case many Catholic hospitals would save the baby and let the woman die -- so they can baptize the baby and save its soul (so they believe... correct me if I'm wrong). I disagree.
In my ethical framework, the woman's life is the one worth saving. Between the two of them, it will be more devastating/hurtful overall for her to die than the baby... not to mention devastation/hurt to those who love her. Therefore it is more loving to save her. And if the baby dies, I believe he/she goes to heaven (that's not justification for infanticide or abortion, just that based on scripture, I don't agree with the Catholic belief that the baby has to be delivered and baptized for him/her to receive salvation).
> It hinges on an arbitrary "It's alive!" moment that's not really debatable, so much as a gut feeling.
... except that science has pretty much established when a new organism begins for every other species. It's well known. People just don't want to accept the moral ramifications for human babies.
Consider someone on a ventilator who is otherwise a vegetable -- yes they're alive, and stabbing them would be murder. However, it's not necessarily murder to let nature take its course -- to let them die by unplugging the machine that's keeping them artificially alive.
I think it's your ethics (or perhaps your gut feeling, as you put it) that doesn't allow for a binary "alive or dead" state. But biology is pretty clear on when an organism is alive or not.
Yes there are edge cases when tissue lines are kept alive for years, or organ transplants are done... but no one disagrees about how alive or dead someone is in those cases. The point is whether a human fetus is an alive person - that's where the rubber hits the road ethically. And biologically there's certainly no question in that case. He/she is a human and he/she is alive -- that's the moral starting point. Anyone who says otherwise is equivocating to avoid the moral ramifications.
> First, how ever cruel and wrong doing so may be, letting nature take its course isn't murder
We disagree on the definition of murder. I suppose the law might call it negligent homicide. That sounds like a type of murder.
> biology is pretty clear on when an organism is alive or not.
It is not clear at all. Are viruses alive, for example? A human body is comprised of a variety of things that might be considered individual organisms if they lived outside the body. Are they alive, separately from the human they're a part of? How about a fetus? If it's not viable outside the womb, then how can it be alive as distinct from the mother? Does technology change that decision? If so, does aliveness change depending on access to technology?
This is a lesson from Gödel, Escher, Bach's Tortoise and Achilles stories too. Because the Tortoise refuses to accept Modus ponens (if A implies B, and A, then B), Achilles is unable to convince it of anything. The facts Achilles tells the Tortoise aren't any less true for its stubborn refusal to accept them, but Achilles won't convince the Turtle of them.
If people won't be reasoned with, don't waste your time trying. On the upside, Mother Nature doesn't care what you believe - as hundreds of Americans, disproportionately Republicans, are learning every day at the moment.
For the benefit of a non-US reader can you be specific about this? What exactly are they stupid about as in, presumably, refusing to act appropriately when a fact stares them in the face. How relevant to the argument is it that the group are Republican? Are there no examples where groups of Democrats behave in a similarly stupid fashion - assuming the validity of your claim? You are clearly desperate to make a partisan point.
In most countries, anti-vaccination positions are found in crazy sub-groups with both left and right tendencies and so can reasonably be said to have nothing to do with any mainstream political party. The serious opposition parties in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, or Canada, would have different policies on the minutia of the pandemic, but they aren't opposed to the vaccinations the government bought.
But in the US that's a tacit Republican party position. Most senior Republicans have of course actually been vaccinated, but watch so many of them carefully choose their words to avoid endorsing vaccination. And the more junior Republicans, hungry for voter enthusiasm and maybe less scared of dying themselves, will outright say it, e.g. Lauren Boebert.
Result: Dead Republicans.
And I really don't have a partisan point here, it's usually Kang versus Kodos, it's just that the Republicans decided to go, as they say "full retard". You don't need to have a partisan dog in the game to know that the point of Democracy isn't who wins an election but the fact of peaceful transitions of power, and who did we see trying to prevent that peaceful transition of power in the US? Exactly.
At this point, some kind of mandatory deprogramming might be the only way to save those taken in by the crazy cult that the Republican party has transformed into.
They're essentially incapable of reason at this point.
> This divisive rhetoric is what got us here in the first place
What you're doing is called "pearl clutching", and is not adding in any constructive way to the conversation.
The way we got here is intentionally by using divisive rhetoric to ellicit "engagement". Traditionally, this has been used politically by identifying wedge issues with the explicit intention to divide people along belief borders.
This has been accelerated and amplified n-fold via social media. Engagement is a proxy for divisive rhetoric, as that is what algorithmically produces the most engagement, thereby triggering the reward function(s).
The cat's out of the bag. Its too late to go back and say "but what about the kids?" etc, (especially since there is so much overwhelming evidence that these themselves are simply rhetorical devices to push a particular argumnent or point of view).
We know these arguments are not in good faith, so why should we give them that due process and respect?
Can you explain which of abvdasker's, hackerswords's, unsui's posts were not nice? I sincerely want to know, so I can argue against you further without being "unnice".
Related: 53% of Democrats and 56% of Republicans see other Americans as being the greatest threat to America's way of life (over foreign threats, economic disaster, and climate forces). [0]
It pains me what's happened to discourse in the last 10 years. I suspect social media has played a role. Many liberals and conservatives frequent these online partisan bubbles where they are exposed to the crazies of the other side (and only the crazies) while dodging the controversies that would make them question their own beliefs.
Surely, if there are foreign propaganda peddlers on social media, then the strategy they follow is not to aid one party or the other, but to pull from both sides until we collapse in the middle.
This has been "red team" strategy for a long time. Be insufferably stubborn and immoral, force the "blue team" to talk and talk and talk until they stop making sense or get frustrated, then point out how incoherent/irrational/emotional the blue team is and declare victory.
I thought the original comment at the top of this thread was quite respectful and written in a non-inflammatory way. It may contain an uncomfortable truth, but that doesn't make it divisive, other than to the extent that saying "this this true - and this thing is false" is divisive.
The people who consider themselves "on the fence" aren't enabling the extremists. They are orphaned and alienated by the extremists in all parts of current politics. They aren't the ones trying to storm the capital or burn down federal court houses.
In any grouping of humans, there are bad actors and good actors. Using the bad actors to characterize the entire group, when they're a minority of that population is how you create stereotypes that break-down discourse. Empowering and encouraging the moderates in your opponents camp is is diplomacy 101. Insulting them empowers your enemies.
That's the same logic used to say all young black men are criminals, all young arab men are terrorists, all white farmers are racist, etc...
To compare from the "other side" (though I'm not actually a Democrat), this is how I feel when I see the people I vote for screech propagandized speaking points for anti-gun stances.
There are 2A Democrats out there that have to tolerate the insane (to them) things their representatives support.
Only insane in the context of recent decades. The vast bulk of jurisprudence (centuries) supported a much more restrictive reading of 2A, and changing that was a concerted effort of conservative groups (starting in the ~1980s), particularly out of more conservative law schools such as those in Tennessee.
This was pretty well documented at the time if you would like to read about it[0].
Separate things. Black Panther activity in California led to Reagan passing some restrictions in that state. I'm referring to jurisprudence at the higher court levels, which generally did not support the very strong individual rights to gun ownership that you see stated as "basic" rights now. The popular (and largely in practice) understanding of what 2A means for an individual is pretty different today, and very expansive.
A vote can go to a bad candidate if other candidates are worse, isn't it common sense? You also got timing wrong: this incident wasn't known at the time of voting.
You've never met the person you've declared them as "EXACTLY" the problem of "on the fence"... How do you know that all your assumptions about this person are true?
> Can you find an example of dems attacking science/education/free-press in the manner the Republicans have over the last 10+ years
The snowden leaks where in 2013 and the democratic administration and politicians definitely where not supportive of free press in that case. They were actively hostile against both domestic and foreign press.
Attacking another user like this, and taking threads further into flamewar hell like this, is not ok on HN and will get your account banned. Please review the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and stick to them in the future. At minimum that means (a) editing out swipes, which help nothing; and (b) making your substantive points thoughtfully.
> Please don't make this a partisan issue. I live in Missouri. I've voted for Republicans in the past. You're alienating people like me from being on your side.
this event is completely political and is made possible by the fact that one party alone has decided that facts don't matter - a whole team of said people rushed behind this governor to start a politcal campaign based on fact-free made up realities, which is now the common mode of action for the right wing. The GOP also happens to be a party that claims to be extremely upset about liberals supposedly trying to ban speech that "hurts their feelings". this is after all where the terms "snowflake" and "cancel culture" come from, and in fact was a campaign slogan by the Trump campaign called "fuck your feelings", which you would see emblazoned on shirts worn by what we would assume were previously congenial grandparents.
based on all of this, it would appear hypocritical for right wing voters to claim that speaking of these issues are "alientating". The grandparents wearing T shirts that said "fuck your feelings" was pretty alienating to see. Where were the right wing voices warning that liberals might feel "alienated" by that ? Does anyone on the right have the slightest concern for anyone not like them ? I've yet to see it.
>You're alienating people like me from being on your side.
You're alienating yourself by following reactionary impulses in response to true statements.
I'm also honesty not sure how true this theory of reaction is generally. I'm sure it's true for some, but in many cases it functions as a rhetorical strategy to put people on the defensive who are making legitimate criticisms.
>But none of this was anti-science, nor did it have anything to do with COVID, and you've brought up both.
It's anti-intellectual, and therefore a pertinent comparison, and they used the term anti intellectual and covered all the necessary bases. The cultural and social forces driving both are the same, and here, again, I feel like saying "don't talk about this because it alienates me" is just a rhetorical strategy to put people on the defensive without addressing the merits of what they are saying.
Throwing a temper tantrum when someone objectively mentions the ideology of a party - threatening to take your toys out of the sandbox - really doesn't help your case in the "superiority" department.
The reason things are so "partisan" is because of the political extremist actions and policies from your party.
You've broken the site guidelines by calling names. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and without swipes, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
Edit: it looks like you've been doing this quite a bit, as well as using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's against the guidelines and we ban accounts that do it. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
There aren't sides! I'm not on your side, I don't even know you. No one here owes you anything.
You're saying "you must woo me to do the right thing" and it's complete garbage (you've already admitted OP is "probably right"). If you're going to vote out of spite because people aren't "taking a chill pill" you can go pound sand. I'm tired of this "you didn't tell me in the perfect way, so I'm right and you're wrong" reductive nonsense.
Right! that's what is so tiring about it. Maybe some people legitimately feel the way OP does, but more often than not it's just the ever-moving goalpost. It's impossible to tell the difference until you've wasted all your time.
Once the goalposts are moved back to the point where you're practically begging, they'll turn around and try to assert dominance by calling you weak for trying to reason with them like a perosn.
It is absolutely anti-science and anti-intellectual. To prosecute this person relies on destroying a meaningful distinction, which is the distinction between computer hacking and security research. "Why were you poking around the website? Developer Tools? Why were you using Developer Tools?" The governor is saying you should do what the government says rather than thinking for yourself.
Can being a loyal Democrat or Republican diminishes your influence? It feels to me that most parties try much harder to please the undecideds than their base
Words like "your side" and "your camp" don't exactly de-escalate here. BTW I'm not trying to avoid making it a partisan issue, on the contrary.
About that sense of superiority, it is relative to a pretty low bar, when people prioritize whether a person is on their side even over whether the person is right.
The clustering of inane views amongst a particular identifiable group of people is fascinating. And inane views happen on both sides. I find it super interesting to see how each side chooses which bonkers views they do, and how they line up.
Especially interesting is when they are not self consistent. For example, "my body, my rules," which is adopted by both sides in different contexts (abortion and vaccinations) both of which arguably are issues that involve personal choice but that also (again, arguably) affect the well being of others.
Finding the partisan alignments amongst these things is super interesting and should not be a third rail (meaning an untouchable topic) in discussions, imho.
I don't think this is true. If a scientist follows the methodology correctly, they are not malicious. And if they are not following the scientific method, then they are not scientists. The trick is to figure out which self-proclaimed scientists, aren't.
My point is that he stopped being a scientist the moment he stopped using scientific method, it just took a while for the rest of the world to realize that.
Ah, so they're only a researcher as long as you want them to be? My point stands, attacking a researcher is not inherently anti-scientific, and attacking their research is... well, it's good science.
No, they are not being researchers the moment they stopped doing research (e.g. by manipulating the results). They can call themselves however they want, until someone calls out their BS. There's a reason why we want to see the methodology used and that the results are reproduced. Questioning a scientist is not an attack, you're actually doing them a favor (I'd like to be told if I'm wrong).
I realize you don't want to follow the site guidelines, but it's also not in your self-interest to post like this. The effect you're having is to drive people further away from whatever you believe is true. That weakens you.
It is a partisan issue though. Republicans across the United States are largely pushing to reject science and schooling and are increasingly pushing through laws and changes that make the populace dumber, and more easily controllable.
You know this is happening, yet you still voted for republicans in the past.
It's your own fault if you continue to do so even in the face of overwhelming evidence that this is destroying America.
Whether or not you feel alienated is no concern, your feelings don't matter here, and the fact that you are feeling alienated means you have the capacity to change, because the people that keep voting against intellectualism don't feel alienated, they feel emboldened when someone calls them out, they feel pride in knowing they are doing something "the left hates me for", even if that something is destroying America in the process.
I'm sorry you feel that the parent comment has an air of superiority about it. Perhaps you can help some of us out by demonstrating how we can have a more productive conversation about the data and the graphs in the cited poll. Can you give an example of how you'd like the poll discussed? And I'm honestly asking here, btw, for the sake of the quality of discussion.
> You're alienating people like me from being on your side. It doesn't matter that you're probably right.
You're blaming other people for something that is 100% under your control. If you don't want to accept the truth because you don't like the types of people who share it, that's just spite on your part.
This is a bad take. This new breed of Republicans thrive on personal attacks and ignore policy entirely when voting.
Of course it's anti-science. You don't think this governor has advisors that told him the reporter looked at source code that anyone can look at it and it's not hacking?
He's grandstanding for his constituency. Why? Because he knows his constituency won't understand nuance and won't hold him accountable, because he's attacking science, not guns.
This is literally the definition of an anti-science attitude from a camp that has demonstrated anti-science and anti-intellectual attitudes on a plethora of subjects for the last several years but even going as far back as 20-30 years ago. Heck Regan planted the seeds of anti-intellectualism in the (R) party decades ago and they have done nothing but take hold and flourish.
Alienation is exactly the type of thing one should use to combat this. Rationally minded people in the (R) camp SHOULD feel alienated by their intellectual peers when they spew anti-intellectual rhetoric and pass/support anti-intellectual policies or willingly associate, without protest, with people or groups known for doing so. You can't flip the script and say you feel alienated by your intellectual peers (HN) for not jumping with you onto the anti-intellectual band-wagon and/or for calling systemic anti-intellectualism out for what it is. Doing so would be as ridiculous as arguing that you find same-sex couples alienating/offensive/triggering because they tread on your precious sensibilities as an anti-LGBT person. In that scenario, you should feel alienated, because that is the primary societal force that will pressure you into recanting being an anti-LGBT person. Intellectuals are alienating you because they want you to get rid of the rest of your bad opinions, not just the select few you have already shed, before you can take your place at the table.
I suppose I fall in the a republican camp so i'll bite.
College is too expensive for what it gives. You gain a ton in maturity, soft skill building but unless you're in a STEM major, the material does not prepare you for the real world. Depending on what my kid wants to study, I will not be encouraging college.
So much journalism is so insanely biased. I respectfully disagree to anyone who thinks Biden is treated the same as Trump was.
I don't deny covid's existence at all. I took it very seriously in the beginning of the pandemic. But as more data came out, I realized it wasn't a big deal for my age group. I later got covid and only lost sense smell/taste for 4 days. Didn't feel the need to miss any work (remote job).
I don't like the boomer-esque decisions some of these republicans make in regards to tech security, abortion, or cannabis but I guess I have to side with that over freedom reducing laws, excessive money printing, and increased taxes
You're probably completely unaware that the excessive money printing (quantitative easing) you seemingly blame on democrats was proposed and initially implemented by by a Bush appointee (Bernanke) and then more recently and more famously done by a Trump appointee (Powell), both in cases where the alternative would've been a global financial catastrophe not seen since the great depression.
Excessive money printing that also happened under an R admin? Freedom reducing laws like laws that limit the freedom to access a safe abortion? Or laws that limit the freedom to vote? What freedoms specifically?
Increased taxes for who? Taxes were massively cut for wealthy people a couple years ago and the only proposal to raise them that got any traction recently didn’t even raise them back to the previous level - still a net cut.
Also, Covid is a big deal for the families of the 600k dead from it directly and the unknown number indirectly due to inability to access medical services. Just because it didn’t affect you personally doesn’t mean it’s not a real problem.
I took it seriously as well, realized it probably wouldn’t kill me, but still followed precautions so as to avoid hurting others who would most likely have died or gotten seriously ill. I feel like that’s a pretty minimum requirement for a functioning society - compassion for others, who are not in your exact situation.
All fair points on the money printing parts. I am well aware Trump printed trillions as well. I wasn't a fan then and not now.
state laws != federal laws. I am pro-choice but I think allowing states to make decisions for their own is good and the system is working as intended. I want states to have more freedom to legislate what their constituents want than a giant federal government making decisions for the whole nation.
The taxes proposed in the infrastructure bill are egregious. For the first time in my entire life I will make a decent amount of money this year and will bump right into top bracket. Giving the government over 50% is insane.
I never said covid wasn't a big deal, or that is wasn't a problem. Again, I said I took it seriously. But to have any sort of lockdowns/mandates at this point are not cool. Or make me choose between a job or some unnecessary medical treatment. the goal posts on vaccine metrics or herd immunity are constantly moved. No one talks about natural immunity. Biden has used excessively divisive language emboldening people who are pro vaccine to accost those who haven't received the vaccine.
You will get taxed 50% on the amount you make over X is what you mean, not that your total tax rate will be 50% - if that were actually the case. The top bracket is $400k for an individual and the Build Back Better or whatever it’s called act proposes to raise that tax rate to 39.6% I believe. I’m curious where you’re getting 50% from.
Vaccine mandates are a pretty normal requirement at a lot of places. I worked in healthcare - flu shots were mandatory with very rare exceptions. When I was a kid I had to have MMR, polio, whooping cough, etc, vaccines to be able to enroll in school. This sudden “but muh freedom” crap doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny when the same party saying vaccines should be optional because it is a personal medical choice is the same group saying other medical procedures (that are potentially necessary) should be banned (abortion, in case that wasn’t clear) - even though they are also personal medical choices and nobody is trying to even mandate them.
Ah good point. I forgot about states with income taxes. But I still think the “50% of my income” number is wrong - he either doesn’t understand how tax brackets work is being willfully misleading to make his argument look better.
>I've seen recently is the Pew poll which shows that in the space of 2 years Republican attitudes about higher education saw a 20-point swing such that that most Republican voters now believe college is net detrimental to society.
I am not quite sure how much of this is anti-science as opposed to anti-college.
Colleges, not science or education in general, have been at the heart of the culture war, especially in the US, and have been viewed by many - not just right/Republicans, but centrists and moderates as well - recently as problematic when it comes to things like mandatory overreaching PC culture, title IX kangaroo courts and "rape classes", safe spaces (and racial segregation of dorms to provide such safe spaces, for example), coddling of students, college educational quality and how it correlates with college profits (including minor scandals of celeb parents bribing their kids into good schools), racial bias in admissions, speech codes, left-leaning faculty, etc, etc, etc... The list of areas that people receive as "problematic" is long.
I am not here to judge all these accusations on merit, just wanted to point out that they exist in the wider public debate (no matter the level of truth to them), and this is what may have swung the polls a lot more than a general anti-science stance.
Conservatives say that about college not necessarily because they have a disdain for education and learning, but because they think colleges have become a breeding ground for a dangerous type of bourgeois identity politics. I'm not taking any sides here just pointing out that the justification for rejecting higher education may not be coming from an anti-science perspective. That said, Parsons appears to be an idiot.
I don’t observe that to be generally true. Each party has its favorite science facts to deny. Republicans tend to invent controversies in climate science and evolution in order to misstate the types of uncertainties that exist in those fields. Democrats, increasingly, like to deny the basic reality of embryonic development and sex in humans, that can be found in any basic biology textbook.
The left has its fair share of growing anti-science sentiment. I agree it's quite a bit worse with Republicans but it is growing in both directions, which is a concern. People pick their science a la carte as long as it confirms what they want.
- Denial of the science of sex differences
- Denial of the science of intelligence differences, the relevance of intelligence in life outcomes and how heritable it is
- Belief without evidence that black/white racial differences in outcome are completely due to racism and not partly due to a byproduct of cultural differences
- Anti-nuclear sentiment that wildly exaggerates the risks of nuclear power
- Historical revisionism (e.g 1619 project and NYT begrudgingly making stealth edits)
Then (as it was already well known and evident) you have a deeper problem with a faulty political system, that creates monstrous overgrowths of mental patterns begging for votes instead of progressive ("look-up-to") models.
Telling example: "We believe in self-determination" // "There are unclaimed votes available in those anti-abortionist tribes" // "Ok then, we take them". This should be a joke, not an event. There is a systemic issue.
> Denial of the science of intelligence differences, the relevance of intelligence in life outcomes and how heritable it is.
> Belief without evidence that black/white racial differences in outcome are completely due to modern systemic racism and not partly due to a byproduct of cultural differences
I think what you're describing is that a lot of liberals and leftists are opposed to the use of science to justify what they would probably consider racist beliefs. They might point to the use of scientific racism in the past as a reason not to repeat such mistakes. They might also question the intentions of the (disproportionately white) people who tend to focus obsessively on these issues to the exclusion of many others.
Most of my friends are politically and socially liberal, whereas I'm liberal on some issues, conservative on others, and have a decent number of views that are hard to categorize on a liberal/conservative spectrum.
One thing I've noticed about the friends who are dyed in the wool liberals is that they seem to be more susceptible than average to pseudoscientific practices such as reiki, crystals, homeopathy, etc.
And that jives, I think, with historical trends. Go back 100 years and G.K. Chesterton was chiding the liberal upper-class socialites who were taken in with this stuff.
Of course, my own observations are just anecdotal, but I would be curious to know if anyone else has noticed it.
Yes, there's a niche part of the left - the new age/hippie types, very high in openness and very low in conscientiousness - that is profoundly anti-science (or perhaps just ignorant of it). They tend to buy into woo-woo of all sorts and buy into science denialism around GMOs and synthetic pesticides. They would also never accept the tentative evidence that marijuana damages the brains of teenagers.
I wonder how much of this trend of distrusting colleges which looks like anti intellectualism is actually based on the wide conservative perception (whether true or not, the perception is certainly there) that conservative voices and ideas are increasing squelched in universities. Or treated with contempt. It engenders a distrust of those "ivory tower" people.
I wonder if this is what has polluted and spilled over into other areas so it has influenced a general anti intellectual / elitism sentiment that gets in the way of critical thinking and science.
well, a lot of these people could not afford college, so they send a ton of their time dismantling the system that they feel has rejected them. but, like you implied, it comes from a failed governments action on making college obtainable and desirable to the average blue collar worker. i’ve lived in the bible belt before, college was actually not talked about and then later on discouraged there, when i finally got out of that headspace and decided to go to college, a lot of people who were younger than i was who were attending college kind of treated me like i was a second class citizen and not serious about my life for waiting this long to get into college, yet i spent most of my time doing jobs to service white collar persons. jobs that otherwise would have not been done if everyone decided to go to college. so, i don’t know. the stereo type has to be broken both ways, because there is a growing intolerance that is dividing america even more so than when i was a kid. i am now living in a state with the most amount of college educated people in the us, and i still run into people who are extremely disconnected from the average american to the point where they look down on them with their rhetoric, i do not think that is healthy at all and like i said, it has become a social disease of sorts. but all of this starts at the top, with leaders that you mentioned and quite frankly, a decent portion of democrats as well.
College is a net detriment to society. The business model of colleges is 'lie to young people and then saddle them with thousands of dollars in crushing debt for questionably valuable degrees'.
The growth in the cost of college hasn't improved standards, but rather it served to fatten administration departments at colleges.
Additionally, quality is dropping severely. I've seen it first hand. I can't count on two hands the amount of new grads from "quality" schools with their shiny CS degrees who cannot write code. Not leetcode, just any code. They can't solve business problems at all. It's like they learned to pass tests. That's CS, which still has some value. What about useless degrees like Political Science or Gender Studies? Those are outright scams given the results. The victims are young people.
How can you say this about Republicans when Democrats and their increasingly radical dogma include such blatant anti-science as: any distinction between men and women is imaginary, that vaccines are better than naturally acquired immunity, that skin color determines virtue, that speech is violence, that COVID is more dangerous to a child than forced isolation, that an unborn child is not alive, etc. etc. etc.
You're damn right people are going to be skeptical of higher education when they indoctrinate in the anti scientific cult of leftism. People are starting to smell the rotting corpse of common sense and rest assured there will be a societal reboot soon enough.
What distinctions between men and women are being denied that you feel need to be made?
Have you done any work to asses your biases along these fronts? What makes you think that the immunity after getting infected from covid is better than getting vaccinated and not getting sick at all? I know I don't personally have the time to be sick, I have a family to feed.
For one thing, the argument on the left that gender and sex are not the same and a biological man can become a biological woman is currently scientifically impossible. Men and women are fundamentally distinguished by DNA. Even with genital mutilation surgery and hormone therapy you are only changing about 0.01% of what makes and man and a woman different as every chromosome in that person's body is the same biological sex they had at birth. Setting aside any political or subjective "reality" they are trying to push on to others.
I did have an attitude reboot. I used to not care. But with the demolition of the cultural norms I grew up with my attitude went from "I don't really care" to "enough is enough and I need to start speaking up."
What part of my comment indicates I am playing the victim?
Interesting framing. Democrats seem to have taken “Science” to be a new type of religion. “Trust the science”, has been a catch phrase for the last 18 months.
Science is fundamentally about skepticism, and democratic politicians/the media have commandeered its meaning to push their agenda.
Many Covid-19 policy decisions based on “science” are not actually based on sound science, and it doesn’t seem like democratic politicians have any interest in addressing this.
Here are a few examples of highly questionable policies:
Mask mandates when everyone is vaccinated, school closures, gym closures, exemptions for wearing a mask when eating indoors.
Most worryingly, it seems like academics are scared to publish data that contradicts the mainstream progressive narrative, because they may have their career canceled.
You don't do do science by being skeptical of things. You do it by asking questions and by developing experiments that can test the hypothesis within ethical bounds. How do you start to make these experiments where the outcomes could lead to an increase in deaths?
You are 100% right, I'm sick and tired of these damn Republicans first it was an unnecessary war then it was discriminating against blacks, not to mention the open collusion with foreign powers to get their person in the White House, now they are actually killing people with their stupid illterate anit-vacc stances, enough is enough I say. We need to do something about these dangerous people that subscribe to dangerous ideals.
I think we should start tracking them. Maybe we could force them to attend re-education, it would be a pain to implement and enforce on a wide societal level but maybe we could concentrate them in some sort of camp or something. I think this would be a good solution we could finally be rid of these dangerous ideas, and the people who hold them.
Satire? I am offended, this is a real solution I'd dare say a final solution to the dangers of misinformation and people who think that they should be able to do what they want because of "freedumb".
I think at very least we should mark people who are unvaccinated so that other people can know to stay away from them since we shouldn't make innocent people suffer because they are too evil to do the decent thing. Maybe we could make them all wear brightly colored armbands or something so everyone knows who the dangerous individuals in society are.
As an immigrant from a country where we generally believe that science made the US what it is, it's unbelievable the stance the Republican party has taken with regards to science. To the extent that under Trump, there was an overt push to "take science out of the EPA". How is that even acceptable in a country like this?
The goal of most politicians from either party is to pit Americans against each other instead of against the corrupt system. This way the politicians and the actual ruling class (billionaires and corporations) can keep their power all while making it seem like the other team is the true enemy. Unfortunately Americans are buying it hook, line and sinker.
I really recommend giving it a full read. The gist is that higher education is very, very clearly biased against particular groups. "Net detriment" is loaded, but "unfairly biased against us" is a not only reasonable, but demonstrably true conclusion. Negative reactions are warranted.
Please do not take HN threads into flamewar, including partisan flamewar. We got intense flamewar hell as a direct result of what you posted, and that's not what this site is for—regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.
You might want to update the guidelines (or your reaction to these types of situations) to be consistent, dang.
> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
This scenario clearly meets those criteria.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
The OP specifically said he wanted to have an intellectual discussion about how anti-intellectuality has recently become a prevalent issue among a particular political party, something of interest and concern to all people, regardless of country or political affiliation. I can't think of a more extenuating circumstance, especially with the disturbing historical precedents we've seen in the last century around this issue, but it's disappointing to see that you disagree.
You are trampling curiosity in the name of avoiding trampling curiosity.
I don't think that's true. We can see in the comments that there was almost no useful discussion. It just immediately devolved into personal attacks with tons of upvotes.
(Things like this are probably better suited to email. Dan’s team is quite responsive.)
My feeling is that Dan’s decision here is conclusive proof that HN’s mod team is unbiased. I was genuinely concerned that this thread wouldn’t be penalized, because it was political flamewar dressed up as intellectual conversation. It was delightful to see HN’s spirit shine through in spite of political divisions.
Curiosity is a fragile thing. The original comment was entirely ineffective at fostering curiosity, and it’s interesting to analyze why. I think framing has a lot to do with it. There was no attempt made at asking questions, for example. Asking questions in earnest is the hallmark of curiosity.
I don’t think that broadcasting personal feelings to a wide audience was necessary to foster curiosity, either. Quite the opposite: it detracts from the discussion. It’s tricky to express feelings in a way that isn’t divisive, and it’s important for HN comments to become more substantive as the topic becomes more heated.
And you’d be hard-pressed to disagree that the topic became heated, I think. It was a lot match in a gas-filled room, and the explosive subthread was an entirely predictable, deterministic outcome.
Your comment is a bit too polemical for me not to feel that ideological passion is driving it, but I can see where you're coming from, because the GP wasn't really written in the flamewar style. Its tone wasn't flamebait. Nonetheless, the content was. It was the sort of comment that feels perfectly objective and neutral to people who already agree with it—but only to those.
There's one non-obvious link in the moderation logic here, which might help to explain a bit. We don't really moderate comments—we moderate subthreads [1]. In this case I was swayed by the fact that the subthread was 350 posts of especially-wretched flamewar hell.
I often put it this way: the value of an HN comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). This is a weird idea at first—it was to me, at least—because how can I be responsible for what other people do? But when the genre is conversation, and it's relatively predictable how people will react, it's my (i.e. each of our) responsibility not to do things that will predictably generate poor conversation. Conversation is a dance [2]. We need to take the other into account, regardless of how right we are or feel we are. It's not really about being right; there are more important things.
For those of us who tend to think of ourselves as atoms, this is hard to learn, especially because internet posts feel like atomic operations. They're not, though—they're molecular, and the threads are the molecules. To be a good atom, you need to take into account what ions are floating nearby and thus what molecules are likely to form out of what you post. It's not that hard to know this—the dynamics are relatively predictable.
Journalism has been degrading its own reputation through supplanting the standard journalistic integrity with biases.
Science is in the middle of a crisis of integrity where 'publish or die' and intradepartment funding incetives push academics to pursue publications of a certain flavor, not to mention the standard of 'how was this result p-hackes' many must have to read.
this isnt a republican issue, this is a governor behaving with a survivalist mindset and abdicating any real leadership by forcing a hammer on a whistleblower.
also, is it so difficult to see how a 20 yr old will question the value of a 200k education? Ever see that Columbia School of Journalism piece? observe the data on climbing tuiting prices? I treasure my education, but have trouble explaining the true value when younger people simply see an increasingly diminishing return on that investment.
The Church, as an institution, is dying. In their death throes they are basically doing everything they can to turn back the clock on society to a time they played an important role in dictating how we live. Every societal problem we have today is a result of Christian, Muslim and Jewish religions preaching their versions of ignorance and intolerance, every single Saturday and Sunday to millions and millions of Americans across the country.
Economic conservatives hate ignorance too - you need math skills to count your profits and to best gauge how to screw over your minimum wage employees, an accurate sense of history and economics in order to best manipulate markets and legal skills to avoid IRS and SEC penalties. They are just as frustrated with general stupidity as the rest of us.
But religious conservatives? They're fucking insane. They really, really, really believe what the Church tells them, and the shit the Church says is truly, truly, batshit crazy and has been for millennia. I personally know of people who truly worry about the "mark of the beast" from the COVID vaccination because that's what their Church says. In 2021 this should not be possible.
Until the secular American people realize who the real enemy is and go after the Church and all its leaders, in real, concrete ways, we're going to spend the rest of our lives dealing with this shit.
Still cracks me up to know that the "mark of the beast" is just a rudimentary hash folks in the bronze age used to communicate semi-secret names, in, for example, love letters.
What's funny about the fact that there was a numerical encoding system for names/words in the first century AD? It's kinda cool, actually. Also, the "mark of the beast" isn't the hash, it's a physical mark that contains "the name of the beast, or the number of his name."
The number of its name is generated similar to a hash. And it existed outside of and before the beast reference as a cultural trend. It’s seen multiple times in ancient writing.
It’s funny because it’s a reference to a common way to encode/obscure the name of someone, not literally a mark on the most evil person spawned from hell, and with all we know today people still believe it’s a physical mark that will identify evil or turn one towards evil. That shit is hilarious.
I agree that the number is generated like a hash, and that this "hashing algorithm" existed before Revelation was written. I don't think anyone disputes that.
The context, though, is: "[The second beast] causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark". That sounds like a literal mark to me, not just a hash function.
Yeah I think we are agreeing. I’m just saying it’s a funny interpretation that Revelations took of that technique to make it physical and believing that interpretation when there is prior art is also funny.
I believe there was also prior art for slave owners branding or tattooing slaves with their initials[0], so it is quite logical for the Book of Revelation to describe a Beast doing this to people who were enslaved to it.
Using a numeric hash of the name instead of the text form also makes sense, just like the way TLS certificates use hashes of the domain name (and other details).
I guess I just don't see the funny side because what is described in Revelation is reminiscent of both terrible abuses of the past and modern day infringements of rights.
Anti-intellectuallism is fully bipartisan at this point in time. Framing it as belonging to the other, the unenlightened side, is just tribalism and itself anti-intellectual.
This trend is increasingly prevalent in both parties. If we are to solve anything, one has to first recognize the reality of the situation and stop getting lured in by us vs them.
Since the student loans became impossible to bankrupt, the college prices have risen disproportionally to the income. The average time it takes to pay it off is twenty years.
High level of debt makes people more risk-averse to changing jobs, starting a business, or even having children. I believe that the greedy bloated system of higher education is responsible for many personal tragedies.
The Post-Dispatch needs to act to force the State Police investigation forward, or the whole incident will shortly be forgotten, except for the allegations. Perhaps a daily column with updates on it. Perhaps a libel case?
I agree, I know it's a high bar but doesn't this fit the purpose of libel laws?
"Under United States law, libel generally requires five key elements: the plaintiff must prove that the information was published, the plaintiff was directly or indirectly identified, the remarks were defamatory towards the plaintiff's reputation, the published information is false, and that the defendant is at fault."
Seems to fit all of these. I imagine there is some protection because these words are coming from a PAC but the governor has said the same stuff in news conferences.
I don't see this mentioned anywhere but the HTML page the journalist visited is public so there's no CFAA/DMCA violation there. Once the HTML page (data) is cached by the journalist's browser, they're free to do anything they want with the data. The journalist ran "his hacker tools" against his own computer which is also not a crime.
Like others, I'm sad to see such a technically illiterate response when there should at least be advisors capable of explaining this. I also agree the journalist is unlikely to be convicted but we really don't need to muddy the fairly clear scope of computer crimes per the above laws.
Journalists reporting on security vulnerabilities in public systems getting sued for copyright violations would be novel, especially when the actual data involved (SSNs) is not data covered by copyright protections for the owners of those public systems.
Accessing public pages is exactly what weev was tried for. He found you could iterate the id argument on a public url to expose email addresses. He was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison
Everyone here is doing exactly what this attack on the journalist was designed to do. It is deflecting attention from the incompetent grift machine running the technology systems in Missouri.
If anything, this response demands worldwide attention on the state run systems and contracts paying to build and maintain them. Expect statewide incompetence paid at top dollar to contractors who aren't paid as much as the contract stipulates.
I presume (and hope) given the high profile of the case the reporter will have some pretty heavyweight legal representation. While being involved in a lengthy, politically charged legal proceeding sucks, I don’t see how that ends well for the governor?
So what's the lesson here? Never report a critical security problem and hope a nefarious person or group doesn't find it later?
I realize this guy is just at it for political reasons.. but I don't think it can be overstated how much of a negative all of this is on society. Even if this reporter never gets convicted of anything it could leave trauma that will make others second guess 'doing the right thing'.
His twitter account is in a funny state now. He got a lot of negative comments back when initially announcing this. Then doubled-down and sent another tweet about how it was more than just "view-source" (it wasn't.)
Then, he started tweeting/re-tweeting unrelated stuff to try and bury it, but people kept replying to those and re-raising the issue.
Does he care though? It is all about outrage, diverting attention from actual issues, hogging TV time. We are talking about it, Twitter is talking about it... Mission accomplished for him, no?
Maybe? He's looking stupid for at least some part of the state population, so it's costing him some amount of votes. And losing in court would be another round of that.
I'm afraid he's looking stupid to the people that would never vote for him. Ditto for losing in court; the voters he's courting don't trust the courts because they didn't support Trump's election bs
This is a decent article, but it would’ve been so much better if it clearly explained how easy it is to see the “HTML source code”.
If the article said “anyone who right clicks the web page in Chrome and selects view source could see social security numbers” it would clarify things for the majority of the population that doesn’t know what “HTML source code” is.
I got sent to the principal's office (years ago...) for opening a command line and trying to ping a printer that said it was offline but was sitting right next to my station and looked happy. Most people are probably like my former teacher, who will wind up on a jury.
I served in the Georgia legislature during a portion of a similar story. Without a doubt, the calculations throughout the story were political not technical.
In the Georgia version, the technical details of the exposed information in the Secretary of State's office were facepalmingly simple (misconfigured apache directives) yet the story dragged on politically for years.
Quickly, a hired security researcher for a corporate client found all registered voters info and instructional pdfs with credentials for the elections system publicly indexed by google. They responsibly disclosed. The apache configuration was updated to "use encryption" (moved from http to https) but still left the info indexed by google over https vs. http. Eventually, this information became public.
The state attempted to prosecute the security researcher but found no state statutes they could use. They then used this incident as a base to create a bill to criminalize the security researcher's actions.
As a state rep, I worked very hard to push back on a bad bill spawned by the incident that would've criminalized responsible disclosure.
Only due to bi-partisan efforts from technically versed people were we able to get the Governor at the time to veto the bill.
It reminds me of this story in Iowa, where pentesters were arrested and charged with felonies for breaking into a courthouse they were hired to infiltrate:
I'm not an expert in this area, but was interested in that story when it happened. Reading commentary from others in the industry suggested that they were, at best, naive in their handling of that contract. Yes charging them was a political act to save face, but they put themselves in that position through ignorance. Quite a different situation from a reporter and responsible disclosure in my opinion.
The other giant thread here made it more directly partisan, this just sounds crazy though. On what rational grounds do you attempt to prosecute or make such things illegal? Is it simply trying to save immediate expenditure of money in a myopic fashion? Or is it more akin to they don't believe it's the state's responsibility to put that data online in the first place so f-it-all-to-hell and everything around it? My constituents don't understand this so I'm just going to oppose my opponents actions, regardless?
In your opinion, is there a way to fix this sort of thing? It feels like we're watching it writ large with the January 6 committee.
> In your opinion, is there a way to fix this sort of thing?
Yes, it requires patient, reasonable, intelligent people operating in good faith to sacrifice personal comfort, etc. and get involved in politics.
Politics is literally a zero-sum game when it comes to voting as it is currently structured in most of the United States.*
But when people with the above characteristics get involved, it literally moderates the extremism that we decry. No matter the level (local, state, or federal), whether you decide to run for office, helps others run for office, get involved with a party, or find a particular issue, being involved makes a difference. You may not be able to easily quantify, but it does make an impact. You may also be bringing a critical perspective in short supply to the political process too.
> On what rational grounds do you attempt to prosecute or make such things illegal?
I heard four reasons for the 2017-2018 SB 315 bill.
1. To ensure the next time someone shared a vulnerability that made the state look bad, that a D.A. would have the choice to bring a criminal case (which would obviously color perception of the story).
2. To bring the law into parity with Federal criminal statutes.
3. To give the Attorney General a "tough on cyber crime" campaign plank.
4. The banks were asking for help prosecuting criminals.
For further context, voter rolls were already public information and can be acquired via a request to the SoS office.
The larger red flags were the default usernames and passwords in the instructional pdfs for the election systems.
Both of these symptoms (and more) spoke to a woefully underfunded or poorly run office w/r/t to IT.
Getting more funds to have properly, well-secured systems takes political capital and there's not a lot of return of that type of political capital expenditure.
The current SoS has an engineering background and I've been seeing much better public facing systems put in place during their tenure.
*. Please, please, please can we get approval based voting?
Heh, understanding apache configuration files just made me facepalm harder and wasn't really critical to seeing the impact on the cybersecurity industry if people aren't able to responsibly disclose.
The important thing was to take the time, speak to the bill's author, speak to my colleagues, build a coalition of lobbyists from industry (big companies, startups, etc.), and not stop fighting the bill even after it passed the legislature.
It would seem to me that, in theory, it is OK to discover a security flaw by accident, but it’s not OK to be proactively looking for flaws, even out of curiosity, or try to exploit them for any purpose, however innocuous, unless you are a designated security specialist.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 342 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting
I am sure the OP's suggestion was in good faith, just that they weren't aware of some of the history and potential repercussions.
The commenter's point is that these "tests" can be designed to be difficult for one race/community, but easy for another, thus preventing them from holding an office.
It's great to have high standards for public office, but it's the voters who should hold their elected officials to those, not an arbitrary test imposed by the government.
That means that the Governor is either persisting despite knowing better, or is remaining deliberately ignorant despite the expertise at his disposal. Either way, this is at least somewhat intentional.
I suspect it's a mix of both.
You don't have to be malicious to be incompetent.
But you're assuming the Governor would pass the basic test that even shows that he is competent at listening to other competent people.
It is up to voters to evaluate their chosen candidates for their qualities and qualifications for the job. The biggest problem right now is that too many vote on party lines instead of for candidates based on their qualities.
> History is littered with examples of eugenics programs, but that doesn't mean we should ban eugenics.
To which I'd argue we should absolutely ban eugenics because of the history of eugenics. Just like we should ban arbitrary political entry testing because of the history of exactly that.
I'm not making an "apples Vs. oranges" comparison, I'm making an "apples vs. historical apples" one.
I'm looking at it from "test results should be public, anyone qualifies to run."
That wasn't an argument I made though. I asked:
> Who gets to set the test?
Which gets to the core of the point. The current requirements are fixed in legal stone and nobody gets to alter them. They aren't being [ab]used for political advantage.
People on here are proposing arbitrary ability tests that [someone] gets to create and alter using [some] undefined methodology.
You combine that with the history of ability-based testing (which, incidentally none of the existing requirements are) and it leaves a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.
In the US, VoteSmart [0] and others have tried to do this with position surveys for years, but most politicians would prefer not to answer.
[0] https://justfacts.votesmart.org/
Edit: I don't even know why for some reason I forgot (probably because it comes without saying): basic wits.
And, seeing that somebody really calls is an "odd idea": no, there absolutely should be requirements. Getting the appropriate measurements, reliably and feasibly, that is difficult. Yet, still duly. Duty, in the same intensity that suggests that thing holding office should be flung into space.
> No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
The information you provided is a further alarm bell about the dire needs we have about vetting people in the current, desperate, worn out world. Normal social interaction as a way to fine tune the individual, the traditional selection way, shows to be ineffective today.
--
¹Oddly, in a world in which the concept of "identification" is increasingly spread, "curiously and consistently" I have not yet heard the expression "X identifies as a moral (and/or dignified, intelligent, sophisticated, compassionate, judicious, reliable...) agent". The concept of "identification" seems to be restricted to tribal matters (and, still notably, "earthly" criteria). These two interlinked factors are very telling about the issues in today's society.
Alternatively you could pick the person who's decisions have most often turned out to be good* ones, and hope that they continue making good* decisions.
* For whatever you think is good.
The idea that a journalist is "attacking" by finding an issue worth bringing up _must_ be cognitive dissonance, right? Otherwise all investigation would be a form of assault? Either someone with an IQ below 80 became governor or this is purely a strategic response.
Strategy being? This prosecution will never hold up in court, and we all think the governor is an idiot. So the accomplished goal seems clear: Everyone is now saying this governors name.
This situation is arguably the reason we have the first amendment: so the government can’t bully you into silence and submission when you’ve embarrassed them. When they’ve embarrassed themselves, really.
The only _known_ effect is that this becomes a hot story and we're all outraged one way or the other.
The only 100% proof-positive result is that we all now know who Gov Parsons is.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fauci-lied-knowingly-willf...
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The disclosure by the reporter was fair. The reporter waited to disclose the story until the department of education reviewed the matter. I don't see a court convicting from that fact, this is all for show on reelection.
What I'd like to see is Parson respond to community questions in a townhall and be held accountable for his words. Namely, can we see the line item breakdown of how we got to $50 million? That is _five_ times the cost it took to build Missouri's great Arch..
Having said that, this situation in particular really tests my willingness to assume good faith on the part of the governor and his body of advisors. Is he legitimately without a single person close to him that could inform him of how misguided this line of aggression is, and how fortunate it was that the individual who identified the security problem acted in such a helpful manner? On top of that he assigned the Missouri State Highway Patrol to investigate, because given his perceived severity of the situation that's the best agency at his disposal? It all just seems bananas.
I try not to assume that totally inane actions from elected officials are exclusively the result of political calculus, and I suppose I don't have any evidence to assume that's the case here either. But I'm at a loss as to how this situation could blossom into something so ridiculous.
It's been eye opening to see and recognize such people on the internet over the past 10 years or so. It's been a lot more scary to be able to recognize the same character flaw in real people I'm physically around.
It's not all narcissism though; it can be difficult to reason with deeply ingrained belief systems when there is a lack of critical thinking and challenges to the Id and ego, not to mention innate tribalism.
EDIT: Agree with the deleted comment that The Narcissist's Prayer could also be The CEO's Prayer, based on the personality type the C suite attracts [3].
[1] https://smile.amazon.com/Narcissist-You-Know-Narcissists-All... (The Narcissist You Know: Defending Yourself Against Extreme Narcissists in an All-About-Me Age)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28880280
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-ma... (1 in 5 business leaders may have psychopathic tendencies—here’s why, according to a psychology professor)
History has seen this before. It doesn't end well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrerprinzip
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/14/...
> First, let me get this Donald Trump issue out of the way: If you’re thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician.
I would not be surprised if that is the case. Or if he does have such a person he is only hearing what he wants to hear.
I don't believe that there is any other reason here.
He knows perfectly well who is to blame, but he's using the situation opportunistically to further his own career.
The issue isn't just that he's objectively and morally wrong, it's that most voters don't see through the grandstanding.
All they see - and all they want to see - is a rich old white dude punching down at some college-educated kid who thinks he's clever enough to have an opinion.
It's not obvious a jury will parse this any differently.
Although I'd hope someone like the EFF would turn up with some heavy hitter experts to add some friction to the self-serving bad take.
This is why it's hard to do politics. While everyone is fact-checking and getting outraged about the reality the political game is being played on a different level with different rules - by people who are often quite good at winning it.
I think having "fact checkers" and "experts" debunk his claims will ultimately gain him support among his constituents. There's a sharp trend towards anti-expert, anti-intellectual sentiment that has assisted him throughout the pandemic, and there's no reason that I can see to believe that it won't serve him equally as well on this issue. We'll see, but I think this movement isn't something that will die out with the pandemic, but something that we will see permeate other areas of discourse.
They see, they just don't care, as we can see from a sibling subthread on this story.
As long as he keeps fighting on their side of the culture war, it doesn't matter what sort of crazy, destructive, or corrupt things he does.
So why would he change his mind? There's nothing to gain.
Should we assume that elected officials have software engineers on staff or on call? Or assume staffers with software engineering background exist.. in traditionally low-pay positions ("elected official liaison" or "advisor")
?
The fact that one approach was chosen over the other suggests where is more to the reason.
For the topic to continue to get attention, it has to be rage inducing.
The alternative here would be to claim that the state was going to crack down and prosecute those in charge of building/managing the web site in question. Almost as ridiculous, but without the benefit of pursuing "the media".
To any technical or even semi-technical person, the facts of this case are laughable. The Governor thinks that he can steamroll this case through, and is betting that most will not understand the underlying technical details and give into the fear mongering "hacking" narrative.
But the thing is, as soon as this goes to court, there is a 100% chance the EFF or another organization is going to step in. Once the defense can explain the layperson exactly what happened here, the governor is going to go from "protecting the people from hackers" to "dumbass trying to cover his own ass".
The Governor and his cabinet clearly think they have this one in the bag, but I think the EFF or another org is going to step in and hand his ass to him in court.
but then again, Trump often lies about his losses in courts, claims they were wins, and gets applause from his audience. the GOP is a counter-majoritarian party, which makes counterfactual statements inevitable.
It's not useful to use a ridiculous situation like this as confirmation of your political beliefs.
... In the eyes of those 12 people on the jury.
I think by this point it's very clear he's acting in bad-faith to try and cover himself from the fallout.
This is one of the least ridiculous things Republicans have done in the last few years.
It doesn't surprise me that he'd want to make hay with this - he can promote himself, damage his political enemies, and look tough to his base, which (generally speaking) doesn't consist of professional technologists.
(if you want evidence of his antipathy to Missouri's cities, look no further than covid vaccine distribution - St. Louis had maybe one single site, but rural areas had more vaccines than they could use. My elderly parents had to drive for hours to get to one of those underused sites because there simply weren't any vaccines to be found in the metro area.)
I lived in SoCal at the time and had to do the same thing. I drove about an hour and a half into the desert to get it when my name came up, and I lived in the city of San Diego.
The salient difference probably being demand (likely high in SD) versus malicious or apathetic political will.
I had to do the same thing and drive out to Julien. I live in San Diego too.
This Governor has the DOMINANCE!
At this point, it's all about getting on Trump's radar in order to secure his VP nomination in 2024. I totally believe that's what's going on here - political posturing.
There is the (originally nautical?) term "tack" which means "A direction or course of action, especially a new one.", and it's hard to separate those similar sounding/meaning/looking words.
That's newspaper-covering-their-ass-speak. No serious person believes there's no coordination, however indirect, between candidates and their PACs.
It's like watching someone navigate a glass maze that you can't see. The whole time you're wondering why they're taking such a circuitous path. They look like a crazy person to you, but it's because they're avoiding obstacles you can't see.
The reason we have two separate realities is that most of "reality" at the political level comes to voters by way of media. Almost none of us have directly witnessed, say George Floyd protests, abortions, industrial pollution, inner city gang violence, etc. Instead, we learn of these things through the news and social media.
But those in the US have become increasingly polarized. The picture of the world you get from watching Fox News or your Facebook feed if you have conservative friends shows an entirely different world than what someone watching CNN and the politics subreddit sees.
For politicians, winning elections is central. It is the source of all of their power. They know that the way to win elections is to get people on their side to show up and vote. Losing votes from the other side is essentially irrelevant — they weren't going to vote for them anyway. Politicians are fighting apathy, not the opposing party.
So almost all of their public behavior serves to make them appear good to their camp when viewed through that camp's media lens. The way it appears to the other side doesn't matter one bit because it won't significantly affect elections.
Once you understand this, Parson's behavior makes perfect sense. He got caught looking like a dumbass leaking SSNs so he has to do ("do" in the sense of some visible political behavior, not in the sense of solving the actual problem) something. If he frames it as the liberal press are evil hackers, then Fox News is happy to carry that narrative for him. His voters will see that narrative, be satisfied that it fits their worldview, and continue to support him.
The fact that his narrative is nonsense doesn't matter. No one likely to vote for him will ever see that, and those that do see it weren't going to vote for him either. Actually fixing the problem also isn't particularly relevant. Conservative media just wants him to win so won't run bad press if he doesn't fix it, so there's little incentive.
Every year, the US looks more like China Mieville's "The City and the City".
This is called "perversion".
> Once you understand this, ...'s behavior makes [it]
an accomplice and an entity of abysmal value.
--
Back to the elephant in the room: journalism was there to determine facts, reality. Outside narratives, facts exist, sometimes clear. It's like in judicial matters: advocatus dei and advocatus diaboli are there to attain to truth in a dialectic manner, proposed and implemented to exhaust the thinkable reasons involved - never there you meet the lunacy of "serving the client's interest". The disconnection to facts you indicate would be a horrible disease.
There are definitely plenty of journalists doing just that, which is why you and I are reading about this.
The problem is that roughly half the US electorate is not tuning in to those journalists, but they still have the vote.
> The disconnection to facts you indicate would be a horrible disease.
It is a horrible disease and the US is suffering mightily for it.
I've said it elsewhere and I'll repeat it here. People like Parsons who climb to positions of power think of security in terms of power, not technology. It's a sort of security-because-I-say-so mindset, which is more like what technologists would probably call "classified information". For a person of that mindset, calling it "secure" means that accessing it at all is a security violation, unless that person has clearance.
From the point of view of a person who sees security as "it's sensitive information because someone says so" accessing it without clearance is punishable, and I think that's where Parson and his ilk are working.
Even if Parson has someone close enough to him to explain the difference between security by technical means and security by declaration, the governor could still conclude, from his mindset, that a violation occurred because of the sensitive nature of the information.
As far as I know, neither Missouri nor any other state has anything like US federal-level information classification laws, for which a person can be found in violation and prosecuted even if they didn't have to overcome any technical security measures to access the information. But that doesn't seem to deter Parson from acting like there's an actual breach of law, according to his understanding. But someone could, possibly, reach the governor through explaining that there's no state law about sensitive information, and perhaps he would back down, although it might motivate him to push for laws that would look more like security clearance regulations.
"X broke the law" isn't a fact in this narrow sense; rather it's an inference drawn from a set of facts.
e.g. (Volokh) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
/not-a-lawyer
There are lots of things about the US I would change (socialized healthcare being the obvious thing in my mind), but I don't think that we should delude ourselves by saying that the US is beyond redeemable.
I will agree that the acceptance of conspiratorial thinking in conservative circles is especially harmful (I wrote more detail about that in a sister thread), but you don't have to look very far in European history to find them electing demagogues too.
I know it's commonplace to wail on the USA because of all the shite that seems to be getting shittier but there is _so much_ goodness in the USA.
The systems are a bit broken. The constitution needs modernization, access to and application of the laws need to be made measuably fair, and the economic model requires reformulation. Racism, sexism, and perverse idolatry need to be educated out of the standard models of discourse. But.
The USA is still a paradigm of democratic republicanism. It's still full of amazing humans, many of whom work hard to improve other people's lives. It is seething with debate, invests hugely in technology, and still reacts quickly to changes of circumstances. It's fucked, but not irredeemably so.
Mainly it needs to focus on education and healthcare, especially by removing pernicious, profit-seeking, short-term motivations.
Also, stop voting Retardicans.
To be fair, Demoticrats are a pretty shoddy bunch of disorganised and intellectually confused herd of kittens, but they at least _try_ to improve the lot of other humans. The Retardicans are big business first and all else after, with a whole heap of contempt for thought on the side.
This is what newspapers are supposed to do innit?
I also am incapable of understanding how this could be twisted into even vaguely being described as hacking. That’s like if I called myself a hacker for opening up the dev tools in my browser.
Actually, that might explain a lot of things.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/08/19/the-gro...
This world needs a lot more new plumbers than new liberal arts majors. It is the society's fault that people feel compelled to go to college having little chance to make anything out of it.
I think the anti-college popularity ties directly to the incredible cost of it in the USA, not that its necessarily a bad thing.
You must not live in any major U.S. coastal city. Plumbers and other skilled tradespeople are in extremely high demand right now.
Its not just the trades, in my state, we have had an epidemic of retirements since 2008 for teachers, nurses, and police officers.
yet the programs that are required to get your licenses don't accept any more applicants per year than they did 15 years ago. The gatekeeping has to stop, or at least be increased to allow the market to actually meet demand. But the groups benefiting from that mismatch in demand have no reason to increase capacity.
This is broadly not true in most US cities. Skilled tradespeople who are insured, licensed, and bonded have major backlogs of work - especially electricians, but also plumbers, carpenters, etc.
I kinda doubt this. My mother wanted me to learn plumbing or to become an electrician because they were always in much more demand than supply and can effectively determine their own rates.
Most are self-employed. (UK).
Post-secondary education, regardless of the specific major a student chooses, does provide a significant benefit to society: especially in the early years, it teaches students how to think critically. Perhaps this skill could be taught earlier during secondary education, but at least in the U.S., it is not. And this skill is incredibly important for becoming an informed member of the electorate who can separate truth from bullshit.
Which is why both sides either denigrate college or treat it as some sort of tech jobs training.
Most colleges have done the opposite in recent years. They provide echo-chambers for emotionally-fueled pseudoscience.
I've seen this while spending time at Boston University, Harvard, Brown, and Columbia. It's frightening how little people are able to think or question anything once they've gone through the college system. They become frightened by and angry at truths that don't align with the narrative they've been taught.
I've spoken to dozens of people who've gone through the wringer and come out the other side realizing how detrimental college was to themselves and their peers intellectually.
What is the nature of this pseudo-science?
I believe it really stems from a belief that they are collectively special — that they're wiser, more moral, and more 'perfect' than their ancestors, their less-educated fellow citizens, and so on. They encourage people to become 'educated' on issues that they themselves aren't particularly educated in, aside from reading Instagram graphics. They seek to 'cancel' people who present other world views.
While most people I know have been through all that and eventually come to a place of humility after college, easily half of the students never did. They continue on, unfazed, with a radical belief in their own moral superiority.
I'm sorry for the length and vagueness of this — it's really incredibly hard to describe as it's so pervasive throughout everything, and generally it's something people only understand after going through the system. You've got me thinking of how to articulate it better!
I said that colleges are teaching the opposite of critical thinking, not that critical thinking was detrimental intellectually.
> considering they decided to attend a university.
They attended university because almost all came from an upper-middle-class background where there is no viable alternative according to their families. If you think they decided to attend university, you're speaking of different types of people — the only decision for them is which college to attend.
(My highlight)
I wish that were true, but it isn't always the case.
My counter-example is my ex-colleague who started her science PhD at the same time as me in the same research group as me waaaay back in the late 1990s.
Long and short of it, we each did our 3-ish years in the lab, she wrote up her thesis, I wrote up my thesis, we each had our oral exam around the same time. Her writing (her words) was "torn to shreds", she ended up back in the lab for several months doing more work and some serious rewriting, I got away with only a handful of typos to fix.
I blame our supervisor for this, but that's another story.
EDIT: (Follow-up Q) who exactly is supposed to be teaching critical thinking?
Resource constraints basically, and the removal of the degree from free market mechanics. I.e. guaranteed loans, not being able to discharge upon bankruptcy, etc.
You also don't need to go to college to get an education in what are historically liberal arts subjects (history, etc.) and in-person classroom lectures for those topics really should be few and far between and extremely academic.
I probably remember or know as much about history as a random undergrad history major does just because I read a lot and you can't remember everything.
Most of those classes aren't worth a lot of money. In fact you can take pretty much any class you would want to for free with open lectures too. I'd also argue that most liberal arts courses don't teach students how to think critically as a broad skillset. Usually the professor just has a narrative or point of view that they want to push and you can't really write contrary to that without an inordinate amount of research which begs the question "why bother?" when the whole point of being there is to get a degree with good grades to get a job. The whole cycle is screwed up.
I'd also say besides some class signaling stuff I can't really tell the difference between university graduates and non-graduates. Work output is the same in my experience.
Is this a thing only in the US? I went to university in Europe and there were 0 subjects that were unrelated to the (STEM) degree I chose. It was all 100% technical stuff.
For my math degree, I also had requirements in: psychology, philosophy, religion, science, writing, and foreign language.
Given the fact that the STEM subjects most in use by the HN crowd are the easiest to learn on your own I find it fascinating when people start bragging about all of the educational opportunities they avoided.
That may be true but the amount of assistance available through student loans and grants enables people to actually go. Without that, the people that feel compelled to go still wouldn't because they simply couldn't afford it.
Higher education in this country is a minefield of unintended consequences.
I strongly believe that one's best years can be after college. Our society fetishizes youth too much. I've grown more as a person in the few years following college than I did in the decade prior.
There's value in the arts, but I think it is overrepresented in universities.
Definitely relative to the available jobs in those fields.
Should college primarily function as job training? No, but unfortunately - for what it currently costs - it has to.
What would over-represented mean in this case? Here's a graph[1] of bachelors' degrees granted in various fields - the social science are grouped with history and are not particularly popular.
I'm personally somewhat mystified when people talk about degrees like they're ice cream flavors. I've met people with a wide variety of aptitude and interest and energy and while I think that anyone can get any degree, I do think we each individually have proclivities and talents. Even if I wanted to double the number of STEM majors, I suspect that many of the people who have chosen not to be STEM majors did that because they liked their chosen major better.
Edit: For what it is worth, I do think we could use many more people in the trades. I also think that people going to trade school should have the option to get the same "gen ed" college curriculum that people going to college get. It might help the idea that trade work is lesser (which, of course, it is not).
[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cta#4
Even some of the STEM classes were a waste of time, especially the Computer Science classes where the professor would grade people on attendance and random minutia.
I ended up just learning computer science on my own off of Wikipedia after I graduated since I couldn't get a decent hardware design job with my Electrical Engineering degree. It only took a couple of months, BTW, to get from the point where I was just playing around with JavaScript to where I could pass a coding interview laden with data structures and algorithms.
If I could go back in time for a day and talk to my former self, I'd tell him to just buy some used physics, math, and computer science textbooks, then spend six months couch surfing, partying, and studying on his own. Then he could go find a CS job and start making money right away
https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/19-25-july-2021/funding-...
Regardless, I disagree that it's a waste of a person's best years. Most work is some variation of drudgery, I think it's great young adults get to spend a few years learning about interesting topics and making new friends.
It'd be nice if America could do that and not saddle these youngsters with crippling debt (as other countries manage to do), but I wouldn't say that feature of the American education system invalidates the basic concept.
If you have any evidence to support this, I invite you to post it. Because according to the study below:
"Getting a Bachelor's degree adds another large increase in lifetime earnings. With median earnings of $56,700 ($27.26 per hour), or $2.3 million over a lifetime, Bachelor's degree holders earn 31 percent more than workers with an Associate's degree and 74 percent more than those with just a high school diploma."
But more importantly, college should NOT be job training. It should be a place to learn critical thinking, to experiment in a safe environment, and a place to learn what you even want to learn about. A college graduate should be able to learn what they need to learn, including pursuing a career in the trades.
I agree that we need more plumbers. But the idea that young adults -- in practice, working class and poor ones -- should be denied the opportunity to learn and grow and instead be offered trade school or nothing, is profoundly unfair.
This is not to say that we couldn't improve the status quo. We could make college less expensive or free, consolidate degrees (getting a law degree in 4 or 5 years of college rather than 4 years of college + 3 more of law school), etc. But a blanket statement that "college is net detrimental to society" seems ignorant even in the kindest light.
https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2011/c...
Are sociology majors measurably better at critical thinking than plumbers?
I kind of suspect a significant portion of the "college teaches critical thinking" meme is just something college educated people say to feel superior.
But maybe this isn’t causality, maybe people with better critical thinking are going to be more attracted to college
Similarly, critical thinking should be learned long before college age. If you're learning that during college, you've got a very late start.
Maybe that's not what you meant, but that's pretty much what you've written.
This might sound like I'm biased against the trades. I'm not! I think they're crucial, and I, along with about half the software engineers I know, often daydream about becoming a fine carpenter.
I'm also not biased against trade schools in particular. They provide an important service and are a pipeline to good union jobs. The criticisms I make at the top of this comment apply equally to students who go to a top music program like Juilliard or the Oberlin conservatory, as those graduates will tell you themselves. They go to learn music, not to broaden their horizons.
College costs on average $26K and $52K per year[1] according to my google skills. 4 years of college therefore amounts to roughly $100 to $200K, which in fairness you have to subtract from that initial $541K difference. Still a nice difference.
However, the parent poster mentioned plumbers. According to my google skills again, a plumber makes $55,160 on average, compared to the $56,700 bachelor average. That difference is rather small, and a bachelor probably is worse off than a plumber once you factor in cost of education.
[1] https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance...
[2] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/plumber/salary
The thing tho is that people who do not go to college quite often do not have $120K just laying around to invest for 30+ years. In fact a lot of people who go to college (or their parents) do not have that kind of money lying around either.
And let's not forget that the people who do go to college and get that additional $500K can invest that additional $500K as well. Not as a lump sum either, of course.
People forget that “real” work is not kind on the body.
Your vision is good, but its not reality.
Increase in earnings is a poor way to look at it, that is mainly from the credentialism that companies look for (which is horrible but it is what it is), and the networking that happens.
"This world needs a lot more new plumbers than new liberal arts majors"
This is a completely subjective and politically charged statement. I think the world needs more informed and educated critical thinkers. Its curious how the 90s led to a collapse in liberal arts departments and enrollments, and 20 years later we're now in an era of disinformation at massive scale.
1. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education...
In my opinion, if we listened to more socieologists instead of the Zuckerbergs and Bezoses of the world, we’d be much better off as a country.
Also, not a lot of actual "science" going on in Computer Science departments (meaning following the scientific method in the course of conducting research, as opposed to "here is a thing I built, isn't it neat?"), but that doesn't stop tech-inclined people from joining in droves. So I'm not sure what the "no science going on" criticism means. It's not like the scientific process is used when deploying technology solutions to problems. We just say "Here's a thing! Let's distribute this to as many people as possible!" without any forethought into what consequences will be.
To that last point, from my recollection of the late aughts, early 10s, it was sociologists who first identified that maybe Facebook and Instagram would be bad for society. Turns out they were right. Again.
Tony Blair's university pledge has failed, says his son
"Tony Blair's landmark target for half of school leavers to attend university is no longer fit for purpose, his son has said – claiming that the former prime minister agrees with him [..] critics have argued that it encouraged an unhealthy focus on higher education which led to a proliferation of pointless "Mickey Mouse" degrees and lured undergraduates into racking up large debts without a meaningful increase in their salary prospects."
> When it comes to their own experiences with higher education, an earlier Center survey found that the vast majority of college graduates (from both two- and four-year institutions) say college was useful for them in terms of helping them grow personally and intellectually (62% say it was very useful in this regard, 31% say it was somewhat useful). Large majorities also say it was useful in opening doors to job opportunities (53% say very useful, 29% say somewhat) and in helping them develop specific skills and knowledge that could be used in the workplace (49% very, 35% somewhat).
I think the cost of higher ed is an enormous societal problem which leads some to feel embittered towards the system as a whole for good reason. But it's important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater and to separate the ballooning cost from the education itself.
I don't mean to straw man you, so I'm not implying this is what you said, but a liberal arts education is extremely important! Where else do you learn that racism isn't just slurs, that a bus route can be racist, that a health policy can be racist? Where can you get introduced to writers of color, to works by people from all times and all races? Where can you get an in depth view into how art reflects society and society reflects art?
Even if you don't step into a classroom, college teaches so much by forcing students out of their hometown and out of the communities. One of the biggest issues with racism and discrimination and partisanship is that most people haven't met the other side. College is a way to meet the other side in one's formative years.
I'd argue that college is the single most liberalizing institution in people's lives. No other institution takes students, transports them into a (hopefully) diverse, intellectually stimulating center and teaches them about society.
That's not spin. That's exactly what the slave trade was.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/publisher-promises-rev...
I can't help but feel like you're confusing literal correctness with appropriateness. And while literal correctness is an easier judgement to make, there are many literally correct statements that absolutely miss the point. Saying that slaves were "workers" is one of them.
What do you mean "waste"? Just that they're building career capital instead of directly earning money? You've got your whole life to work, spending that time learning, meeting new people, and trying new things seems way less "wasteful" than just starting your career 4 years sooner. Plus it gives you time to figure out what you want to do, most 18-year-olds aren't really equipped to decide what they'll want to be doing when they're 50 and the value of starting a career sooner is greatly diminished if you just end up switching careers anyway.
> teaches them mainly, useless stuff
Meh, most knowledge is useless, but it's not always easy to determine which knowledge will be useful in advance. I thought my linguistics class was useless (though interesting) at the time, years later I went into data science, turns out linguistics is pretty important for NLP. Also, I think learning for the sake of learning is a Good Thing, even given that most knowledge is useless.
> barely breaks even in terms of lifetime earnings
Got a source for that? Cause last I checked, holders of even most "useless" degrees out-earn those with just a high school diploma by something like $15k/year, making them well worth it financially unless you pay the sticker price for a private or out-of-state school. For better or worse, there are a ton of decent jobs in the US that just require any college degree.
> and makes people bitter because they feel they are not valued by society the way they believe they should
I haven't seen that at all. I know people who are bitter because they have a ton of student debt and are struggling to pay it off, but I don't know anyone who expects to be put on a pedestal because they have a college degree, if anything they're bitter at their colleges and/or their high school guidance counselors. Also, those people are outliers in terms of their debt levels, the average new college graduate (among those who take out student loans) earns ~$55k and leaves with ~$30k in debt, which is very manageable almost everywhere in the US and probably puts them at a higher income (though with less wealth) than their peers who started plumbing apprenticeships at 18.
Or, you know, 3. Like most new vaccines. Except with this one, an exception was made because people were (are) dying by the millions, and because most of those 3 years is an observation period for rare and obscure side effects that take time to manifest. But do nevertheless happen. We did what we usually do in medicine: risk-benefit trade-off. The decision wasn't a close one, but that doesn't mean that being concerned about the risk is somehow absurd.
Point being: using charitable interpretations of your opponents' arguments does not make for brief and funny sound bites.
And another one on setting a timeline for getting out of Afghanistan
His administration wasn't very good at running a government, but they still had a couple wins
Not letting the other team get any wins will be known as The McConnell Strategy in the history books, as he has practiced a policy of complete obstruction while in the senate.
Absolutely right. He is Lucy with the football to the Democrats' Charlie Brown.
And he's just so damn good at it too.
I agree that most students who got to college don't make good use of the time or investment, but it is still a minority of people who even attempt college.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_302.60.a... https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=40
https://admissionsly.com/percentage-who-go-to-college/
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/14/fewer-kids-going-to-college-...
The class stratification in society is absolutely intense, if you're coming from a bad family you just need to get away from them as soon as you can. I made the mistake of not estranging myself from my own family much sooner. If I could change one thing about the way America works I'd eliminate the requirement for parental involvement when it comes to getting financial aid.
If your parents like to beat you up, you should be able to just walk out when you're 18 and get help to go to school. But that's not the system now. Aside from a small handful of exceptions which are painfully difficult to get, you're basically on your own. I think in Europe everyone just gets help to go to college so this isn't an issue there.
Nothing that anyone says politically right now matters. For proof, consider how many of your friends even remember that Afghanistan fell just two months ago - likely none if they’re like my friends. In fact, there’s a consequential NJ gubernatorial election coming up in the next month and no one’s talking about it. I love the peace and respite we’re getting from politics personally.
Anyways, to respond to you, Parson is in charge of a state that regularly has multiple cities top the US murder rate charts. Anything he says that makes you forget that fact, even temporarily, is a win for him.
A lot of the skepticism of higher ed is precisely because they have not been doing a good job teaching science and critical thinking.
I mean yes there is definitely criticism on higher ed and what value students are getting for the now extremely high price tag, but to say that this is what is the issue is definitely missing the point
It doesn't matter that you're probably right. It comes across as you posting this to make yourself feel good, and holy moly the sense of superiority from your camp needs a chill pill.
Parson is evil. I'll be doing my duty as a citizen and trying to vote him out of office. But none of this was anti-science, nor did it have anything to do with COVID, and you've brought up both.
There are plenty of trends happening on the "other side" which are also veritably nuts, so I don't find this to be a very compelling argument. The ad hominem doesn't help, either.
And now we’ve come full circle. Using “whataboutism” to avoid conversations about topics is a problem. Whether you’re using it to deflect to a different topic or using it as an excuse to avoid talking about a topic altogether. Someone could argue your comment is the latter and is just as harmful.
But I think most of that is a limitation of text/internet communication that people don’t consciously notice. It’s much easier to have nuance in an in-person conversation.
Well that’s certainly a dishonest premise.
It's simply a bad argument. I only brought up the "other side" to help analogize it, my apologies if it confused things.
To me it’s just painfully obvious you think very highly of yourself.
No one can have any nuanced opinion without all of their individuality being discarded and all weight being given to the party they vote for. It seems to me that the party they vote for is just an ephemeral label and really doesn't suffice in extrapolating much. We should stop contextualizing all conversations on the political affiliation of people.
This is a strawman. The parent was saying that in order to have an effect and convince people, you shouldnt alienate them. You can do this without lying or ignoring things that are happening. In fact, the people you're most likely able to convince are people in the middle and by alienating them you're actually causing the trend that you're denouncing.
> What does it say about your own values that they are so loosely held that you'd sacrifice them out of contempt like this?
This is just a straight ad hominem. I thought we were supposed to be above these sorts of things on hn.
The "other side" has ZERO capacity/will/desire to ACTUALLY engage in meaningful dialog , but sole goal is to "win" no matter what the cost.
There is no logical appeal that can sway the state-level propaganda and brainwashing that billions have been spent on over the last 40 years.
1. Respond one single way to events
2. Ignore events
There are lots of ways to express concern that are less alienating.
If you’re not actively working to dismantle the current Republican Party, we cannot be on the same side. I don’t mind alienating you; the masters tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
I've never heard this phrase before, but it equally applies to the situation where one thinks only they can wield a weapon. We can't assume that because we are "right," we have nothing to fear from the people who are "wrong" using our worst tactics against us. This is wrong whether it's one side "lying for Jesus," or the other side "censoring for freedom."
In the context of this thread, rising opposition on one side prompts a higher rise on the other side, in a vicious cycle. As parents are often heard to say, "I don't care who started it, I care who finishes it!"
It's a bit cliche to refer to STTNG for life advice, but a minor plot point of this episode influenced me quite a bit when I was a kid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_Worship_(Star_Trek:_The_N...
All the adults saw a problem, so they kept raising their shields higher and higher, but raising the shields was causing the problem in the first place. It took a kid to notice that the scale of the problem correlated with the scale of the adults' defensiveness. This was, obviously, a metaphor for any human interaction.
It's simply not possible to continually raise your defenses and offenses and end with a win-win, and when it comes to a roughly evenly divided society, win-lose is lose-lose.
This only works when both sides engage in good faith. That is not the case currently. We are better off excluding them than letting them abuse the process in bad faith like they always do.
The ones advancing this argument are always the ones with the least at stake.
There are hundreds of millions of nominally reasonable people who fall into opposite tribes just by happenstance. If you attack their tribe as a whole they'll stick to their tribes because of tribalism, but if you act reasonably, even if the tribal figureheads are acting in bad faith, the members of each tribe can be persuaded reasonably.
Every line in tribe B's media about how party A is destroying the world with its anti-X agenda is perfectly mirrored by a similar line in tribe A's media about how party B is destroying the world with its anti-Y agenda. "Excluding" doesn't cut off people you disagree with, it makes them stronger, by consolidating them further into their tribes and cementing their opinions ("fight makes right")! We can try to see things from the point of view of reasonable people on both sides, or we can fail as a pluralistic society.
I guess reality does have a well known liberal bias :)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X93u3anTco
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
It's actually a poignant, forward-thinking point about the malleability of "reality" and "facts" under empire, but predictably the third-way neolibs that still dominate the party failed to grasp that and first made a joke out of it, and then out of themselves as it was realized.
Of course it was in an intellectual climate where those words were charged with political meaning that made them salient enough to set up the joke. But to say it didn't original with Colbert would be to say that phrase itself was coined by a different person, and if it was, you could say who it was, and when and where. Otherwise it's just a confused detour into the weeds that lost track of the original question of attribution.
This is a huge detour, so to tie it back to the original thread, I think talks of "bias" are poisoned by a false assumption sides are equally estranged from scientific truth. It feels fair to make a both-sides argument, but it really just doesn't hold water under any serious examination especially when it comes to which party affiliation more systematically aligns with, responds to, and believes in scientific consensus.
It should be possible to hold these two different thoughts in your head at the same time without descending into angry incredulity at anyone offering clarification.
Colbert really did coin the term and it really is that simple. You seem to just want to take a question about where a quote came from and turn it into a broader conversation about the history of the 2000s, which is all well and good but.... it's just not an answer to what was being asked.
But you see how harmful it is to the site to do explicit political flamewar. Yours was the only non-aggressive reply out of five.
not deescalating.
On one side are the computer scientists and engineers who understand the nature of the problem. On the other side are ignorant and/or dishonest actors out to avoid being embarrassed.
It's all on you if you pick the wrong one out of loyalty to a political party.
There are a hell of a lot of computer scientists and engineers who vote republican, certainty not a majority but definitely a large enough minority you can't discount them. They just don't broadcast it for reasons that should be obvious to anyone reading these comments.
Conservatives tend to not speak up because the hyperbolic vitriol has gotten out of hand.
OTOH, tech conservatives tend to be more libertarian than socially conservative, so (massive generalization here) tend to prefer to work at work and do politics elsewhere.
"Celebrating" political positions is such a foreign concept to me that I dont even know where to begin with that. Left or right, I would probably avoid it.
Up until about 5 years ago I would agree that being even-handed on political matters is appropriate. But when one political party has gone completely mad with lust for power and has given up on science and rationality, how you vote is no longer just a political matter. The threat the Republican Party poses to the country and the world is existential.
And yes, there are crazies on the left, but no, they are nowhere near the threat posed by the GOP. The difference is several orders of magnitude.
Even now, the few who voted to impeach over Jan 6 are cowed and quiet. Mitt Romney just voted against the Manchin-approved compromise voting rights bill.
These cowards are all afraid of their shadows. It's an incredible, once-per-century show of absolute cowardice and submission to a strongman.
The US has a decent shot of going the way of Turkey, Hungary, and Venezuela. The elected GOP senators and congresspeople are 100% to blame. They are sad, sorry, craven and ineffectual people.
There needs to be another Forum that somewhere between Hacker News and reddit, moderated but with a relatively open set of subjects that include the impact technology has on society
Of course I have found that when pressed, those who hold this philosophy seem to picture themselves as the lords in this fantasy utopia. Maybe these are just power fantasies, but some of them seem very serious about it (Curtis Yarvin is probably the most notable of the bunch)
See Peter Thiel: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
The freedom he desires is the freedom to use his privilege to oppress others.
I would have called myself a libertarian back then but that was back when words meant things, or at least more than they do now. I stopped using the term when the fascists took it over.
It’s popular in some left leaning circles and particularly among people who did not live through that era to claim that libertarianism and cyberculture was always like this. It wasn’t. There was a mass conversion event around the early 20-teens that sort of coincided with Gamergate (not sure how important GG was but that was the era). I’d say a large proportion of an entire generation of younger “hacker” types were mass converted to fascism or neoreaction. Racism also made a massive comeback.
I still don’t fully understand it. The LessWrong orbit seems to be a major factor. I never found that whole circle particularly interesting, but a lot of people sure did.
Besides, at the end of the day, how different are the two sides? One party wants to prosecute a reporter who found a site vulnerability, and the other party wants to prosecute the man who exposed the world to the dragnet surveillance being conducted by the NSA.
One side is trying to prosecute a journalist who clicked view source and embarrassed an incompetent IT department. There was never any law broken under any remotely plausible legal theory.
The other side is trying to prosecute someone who violated their NDA to not disclose classified info. Now, you might think what he did was a net positive (I certainly do), but on the other hand it is objectively illegal. The DOJ could use their discretion and drop it, but they don't have to.
I'm pretty sure both parties want that. Any successful system will work to perpetuate itself.
Democrats and Republican leadership *want* the "good v evil" dichotomy of their party versus the other.
FTFY, unless you think Rs have any interest in dropping charges against Snowden. So even in your own examples, one party clearly has the upper hand, and it's not R.
A two party system has basically set this up to occur.
I can’t see that it could ever be changed, but it’s utterly toxic.
Which includes Republicans: https://twitter.com/tonylovasco/status/1448672694065668105
If you want to make scientific ignorance a political issue, we can discuss nuclear power, GMOs, unreasonable COVID restrictions, and plenty more.
If you want to discuss those things, it's worth first pointing out that the US had the worst Covid death toll of the G7 countries[0] and that red states had higher case and death rates than blue states[1].
Also, it's possible to accept the science of nuclear power and GMOs while still not trusting large corporations to exercise sufficient care and restraint when given control over nuclear material and life itself, especially when the government agencies ultimately responsible for regulating those technologies are half the time appointed by a party that doesn't believe in regulations or government.
[0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/us-death-rate-worse-brita...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/10/politics/covid-cases-deat...
Kansas City native here.
I vote democratic and agree with the comment you are replying to.
there is one data point that this isnt a partisan issue, but a rather non-partisan one involving an elected official.
Go Tom Brady, give the Buccs another win and put some dirt in Maholmes' eye.
Are we expected to just pretend like there's not this huge anti-science movement on the Right because your feelings might get hurt? Look at all the anti mask, anti vaccine rhetoric. This isn't ok.
Plenty of problems on the Left too, and we should talk about those too.
Every group of humans - indeed, thanks to the central limit theorem, every sufficiently large sampling - is going to be normally distributed and there are going to be folks on either side offset from the mean.
However, that doesn't indicate that the mean isn't interesting or worthwhile to discuss, and isn't representative of the group as a whole.
From a pure realpolitik standpoint, alienating voters who can be convinced to do the right thing is just foolishness.
Virginia currently has a Democrat legislature for the first time in two decades, and it's paired with a Democrat governor for the first time I can remember. Either there was a massive demographic churn or someone switched sides. (Anecdotally: I have family in Virginia, and a lot of lifelong GOP voters in my family looked at the party's double- and triple-down support of Trump and went "Whatever this party is, it's not my GOP").
put another way, I have a lot of republicans in my family. There is zero chance of any of them ever changing. It's absurd that we all would need to be concerned about speaking the truth of the GOP party for fear of "alienating" these people. This is a silencing tactic, plain and simple. The GOP takes no such steps to avoid losing potential D switchers.
In Virginia, more people voted for Biden in 2020 than Clinton in 2016, and for Trump in 2020 than Trump in 2016. Clearly higher turnout mattered, but whether the individual votes were switch-voters, new voters, voters who sat out 2016 showing up in 2020, voters who sat out in 2016 (but had a past history of voting one way) showing up for the other party's candidate in 2020 is much harder to assert.
Republicans are fostering anti-intellectualism which is (in fact) anti-science. From my perspective you'd be alienating yourself out of spite. This goes for Democrats or any political party.
Which side is worse is a matter of opinion. Personally I think they are both dangerous and won’t identify myself with either party as a result.
The result is that there is no point in leveling this accusation as part of a debate about something substantive, unless you just want to derail the conversation into a meaningless partisan bashing match.
What perspectives do you see coming from the Democrat side that have the same mortality rate as vaccine refusal? (Or are there indicators you give equal/greater significance than mortality?)
People commonly make this false equivalence, but as of 2021 it's fair to observe that it's just unequivocally false with respect to the question of respect for scientific consensus. If a lot of republicans disregard science (e.g. believe incorrect things about covid) and a few democrats do it (e.g. believing incorrect things about nuclear safety), people take these unequal examples and proceed claim it means both sides are the same, and believe that they are expressing a sophisticated position.
It's precisely this kind of illiteracy in the ability to assess the relative merits of differently weighted examples that makes the false equivalence possible. This which is why demands for substantiation are relevant and necessary.
I guess you’re arguing with ‘people’ then.
You might want to look into some of the other anti-science ideas strongly propagated by democrats. You don’t seem to have a good inventory. It’s not limited to minor false beliefs about nuclear safety. Consider the belief that there is no such thing as biological sex, for example.
I'm specifically and directly responding to your question of why we should be in the business of judging the relative merits of different claims, and I elaborated by explaining problems with false balance.
Edit, since I can't reply: parent commenter asked "What perspectives do you see coming from the Democrat side that have the same mortality rate as vaccine refusal? "and you replied "why is this question relevant" and I explained why. So I was indeed directly responding to you, despite your continued protestations to the contrary. Insisting that I wasn't being responsive to you is bordering on ridiculous.
> Consider the belief that there is no such thing as biological sex, for example.
I'm pretty comfortable dismissing this out of hand.
Edit: and I'm not missing the point, I understand the role you believe it plays in the logical structure of equating democrats to republicans. I understand that you're invoking the subject of gender and saying it's an example of Democrats being estranged from scientific consensus in a way that's comparable to Republicans being estranged from scientific consensus on covid. And it's at this point in the conversation where I'm no longer attempting to engage with you, and I instead direct my comments to others reading this thread on understanding what false equivalences look like.
I was initially focused on failures to accurately compare differently weighted examples. But there's a different category of false equivalence, where people confidently invoke a completely non-existent scientific consensus. The invocation of gender falls into that category.
That’s not a question I asked.
> and I elaborated by explaining problems with false balance.
Which is why this elaboration isn’t relevant.
>> Consider the belief that there is no such thing as biological sex, for example.
> I'm pretty comfortable dismissing this out of hand.
You seem to be missing the point that it is a common anti-science belief promoted by democrats.
As far as I can see you are just advocating for partisanship. That’s a common position to take, and you are welcome to it.
If you make that assertion, you can’t be upset when people ask for examples or evidence. It’s extremely relevant to the (as of yet) unsupported argument you made.
It really doesn’t seem clear what you think you are responding to.
Flawed opinions are not all of equal import. Representatives of a political party are not all of equal import. You have to actually evaluate the evidence and act accordingly, even if this puts you on the outs with friends, family, and co-workers.
This all being said, I think the prime driver of partisanship is not analyses of truth or impact but social connections. People are afraid to be exiled from the community they depend on -- their friends, family, co-workers, co-religionists, doctor, grocer, plumber, etc. Just as you can tell a lie more convincingly if you believe it, you can simulate partisan allegiance best by enacting it. If you are going to be ridden out of town on a rail if you are thought to have voted for a Democrat/Republican, then it isn't sufficient to say you voted as the mob prefers; you have to do it. The mob knows this. That's what the Second Amendment has come to be about: having guns to scare your neighbors over to your side. Better to be with the bully than against him.
I am assuming you have to vote or abstain from voting. Then your choice is whether you are trying to achieve changes in the world or achieve a certain self image. If you are trying to achieve changes in the world, and the decision is close, you throw your weight behind the better side. If you are trying to achieve a certain self image, you vote for your ideal candidate whatever is at stake and whatever the balance between the two candidates that have an actual chance of gaining power. Or you abstain and remain unsullied by whatever evil taints each candidate.
As for ‘the lesser of two evils’:
> You have to decide which party is actually telling more damaging lies, taking more damaging actions, or doing more good, and act accordingly.
This is you telling us we have to make that choice.
The "more damaging lies" part is just trying not to be too rosy-eyed about any particular party. Your choices are imperfect, but that's the world we live in.
ETA In case it was unclear, I think political behavior aimed at your self image is vanity and thus self-defeating. Even if your chief goal is thinking better of yourself or getting others to think better of you, forsaking a choice to do good for the world at large in the interest of your own vanity will not achieve your goal. If you want a better image, you should still choose better over worse, not pretty and pointless over ugly and effective.
When you vote, you are forced to make a choice between parties. Nothing forces you to identify with a side when it comes to discussing who is anti-science or not.
By the way: «voting [that thing] out» is not enough. That thing having held the office is a very horrible incident, and it must be made very clear to all those who were distracted.
(Actually, I always pegged Eric for a moderate/conservative Democrat, but wasn't surprised to see him play the game he played given that his defining characteristic was always his careerism/ambition. I even mentioned after one of those meals that he'd probably prefer to run as a Dem but will definitely be running on the GOP ticket because he cares more about power and prestige than anything else & anyone with a brain knew running as a Dem in any statewide race in Missouri was a dead end. Actually, totally independent of this conversation, Eric is actually a really interesting case study in coalition politics; his resignation was as much about him snubbing folks with appointments than his sex scandal per se. Anyways.)
My interactions with folks in MOGOP back then scared the hell out of me. I could see the party coalescing around a pretty dark sort of nihilism. And not even really in terms of policy per se. It's the individual people, divorced of their politics, that really made me scared. On a personal and individual level. The deeply concerning interactions and conversations I had with specific rising stars in MOGOP are actually one of the reasons I left the state.
I understand your attitude toward partisanship, I really do, and I've voted for Missouri Repbulicans in the past as well. But that state party is in a really dark place right now. A few good apples -- and they do exist -- don't really matter when party leadership are scary as fuck narcissistic nihilists.
(And, yeah, all politicians suck or whatever... but MOGOP is really something else. The rising stars from back then who are all either ascendant or in control now are not just gross politician types... they're genuinely just really scary human beings.)
...and that moreover, you might consider you are intentionally fed biased information to help reinforce your political stances and hyper-emotional content, because emotional voters are more loyal than thinking voters.
Think for yourself. Recognize the good in your opposition. Denounce the bad in your own. No political party (nor their associated media outlets) are above lying and public manipulation.
Invoking Godwins law, cause it seems apropos:
"As we say in Germany, if there's a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis"
> Invoking Godwins law, cause it seems apropos:
> "As we say in Germany, if there's a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis"
Is this in jest? Or are you truly suggesting that even conversing with someone who holds an opinion that differs from yours somehow makes you of the same opinion?
Are you truly suggesting the correct action to take with Nazi's is a discussion? Because there is a certain British PM that tried that approach back in the day....
the irrational is showing reasons? Yes. Somebody with a non fully compromised mind may be eavesdropping (note: it's a metaphor).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act_trials_of_Communist_...
So again - you are generalizing and stereotyping.
Evolution: "This is the way."
If you ignore facts it is impossible for a best solution to arise or for any answer to be accepted so a conversation cannot move on and has no end point, this drives a "You are the problem"/"You are attacking me" feeling.
But after 2020? There's no plausible deniability left. That the loser of the last election used imagined fraud as a basis to launch a coup attempt, and the subsequent attempted memory-holing and normalization of that event by the Republican party have changed everything. It's clear what they are doing now. Namely:
1) take away independent control of state election processes and install a partisan election process that will "determine" whether any particular election result is "fraudulent". The result of the Arizona audit by the "Cyber Ninjas" reveals the playbook:
- use the audit to kick up a cloud of dust (we are investigating reports of paper ballots from china containing Bamboo!)
- muddy the waters (we are definitely going to find fraud, it's astounding)
- find no fraud (The results show Biden won, but we have a list of concerns we will focus on instead of the actual count)
- declare there was fraud anyway (Trump's statement on the result: "We won on the Arizona forensic audit yesterday at a level that you wouldn’t believe. They had headlines that Biden wins in Arizona when they know it’s not true. He didn’t win in Arizona. He lost in Arizona based on the forensic audit.")
2) Use these fabricated claims of fraud to send your own choice of electors to the Congress to select the next President.
3) The Democrats will object, because of the obvious fraud
4) The process, being contested, will follow the Constitution and eventually a vote will go before the House, where each state delegation has 1 vote
5) Because Republicans control more state houses than Democrats, they can just choose whoever they want as President
6) Any court challenges will end up at a court stacked with Republicans, 3 of whom were appointed by Trump, 5 of whom were appointed to the court by Republican Presidents who lost the popular vote their first term in office.
That's how Democracy ends in America, and Republicans are setting up that exact scenario in 2024. If you wake up in November of that year and the person elected (read: appointed) lost both the popular vote AND the electoral college, well don't be surprised. That's the literal end of elections in America, and it's not hyperbolic at all. That's their stated plan: see the Eastman memo.
If you are voting for Republicans post 2020, you are voting against democracy. I'm sorry, there's no other way to put it. This whole effort is anti-democratic and against the rule of law. I mean, it's fine if you don't believe in democracy and want an American dictator in the style of Putin (complete with the associated corruption of the rule of law and the neutering of elections as a method of self governance), but just be honest about it.
Much of it likely comes down to (a) misinformation coming from news sources they trust, (b) lack of trust in institutions (perhaps for good reason), and perhaps most importantly (c) prioritizing moral values differently than you do.
I suspect (c) is at the root of much of the R-D split, with (a) and (b) being symptoms of it.
Many Republicans and Democrats have non-negotiable moral values they hold to, and they hold their noses as they elect leaders who give lip service to those values but have glaring problems elsewhere. Elections are more about who people don't want in office than who they do want.
I hope no one is seriously advocating for that position, so obviously the issue of "consistency" is more complicated.
An adult is able to weigh for themselves the risks and benefits of receiving a vaccine. A child is not able to weigh those risks and benefits, and it reasonable in general to have that decision made by their parents.
I suppose someone could say, to be consistent, that we should allow parents to decide for the child in his or her mother's womb how to weigh the risks and benefits of being aborted versus being born, but at least for a healthy child we would never accept that being born is a worse outcome than being dead.
So I think that protecting adults from unwanted vaccinations and protecting pre-birth children from being aborted can be a consistent stance, even though, I accept, the problem is much more complicated than even that.
Conversely, if someone becomes pregnant they can put the child up for adoption, and the state should make the father pay for that child's needs for the rest of their life. If the father knew that the mother was under the influence of drugs, he should also spend a large portion of his life in prison learning to care about other people.
As for the pregnancy idea, sure, in a perfect place with great social support, little stigmatizing of sex & adoption, and a legal system that can impose on the father (from flight or responsibility). I don’t see that anywhere, so how would we get there?
I never was taught that cold sores are a virus transmitted via saliva contact, including sharing a glass, ditto for mono. I was just told kissing or engaging in sexual behavior led to terminal illness or pregnancy. Also if one becomes pregnant there is strong pressure from parents on both sides to marry and raise the child despite a total lack of maturity or social or romantic connection. This is the experience of many Americans.
How do you define proper support for adoption? How can you measure that on a scale of that vs a scale from outlawing abortion to proper abortion? Also what is proper abortion?
A strong factor of oppression is a restriction on mobility. For a 15 year old girl, how does she ask for a ride to the next state? When I was 15 I felt shady riding my bike ten miles. We are almost certainly going to talk past each other. Good day to you.
I and almost all of my friends and family hold that "humans are created in the image of God, and thus their inalienable rights begin at conception. Therefore abortion at any stage is committing murder against the baby."
Not exactly context-dependent, unless I'm missing something. Perhaps you could elaborate?
The missing context is that your argument seek to protect the baby's life BEFORE birth , but after ... generally speaking the (R)/pro-life stance is pretty weak on social safety net, should the child have adequate (free!) health care, nutrition, etc.
Does that life "deserve" these things when they are only an infant? How about when they are 5-10 ... or 10-20 , or ANY age?
Passing laws to force women to give birth, but then systematically strip and reduce the social safety nets available seems highly context-dependent, and weakens greatly the belief that you "value life"
I don't know if I can generalize across Republicans, but as I understand it:
- humans naturally have both rights and responsibilities. Being human by itself grants inalienable rights, and as someone matures or is given positions of membership or authority they also incur further rights and responsibilities.
- Inalienable rights are to be protected by government. If it's not something that's naturally there and needs protecting, it's not an inalienable right. (Founding fathers summarized inalienable rights as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" - those can't be given by a government but they must be protected by all governments).
- By making a woman pregnant, a man has incurred the responsibility to protect and provide for that woman and her baby. If he fails to do so, she has every right to seek redress -- and doing so ought to be easy for her, since she and her baby have a right to his protection and provision.
This is the ideal. I know it's not the reality, but protecting inalienable rights and holding people to their responsibilities when redress is sought ought to be the first priorities of government. While they are important, social safety nets don't even appear in my belief system. If they exist, they ought to be a last resort, only to be relied upon if the father, the mother, their family, their community (church or another organization), or local non-profits are not able to provide. But the government would do even better to be holding the responsible people accountable instead of giving them a way out.
Nothing in my belief system assigns responsibility to the government for taking care of people. That should be the people's job via healthy non-government institutions (especially marriage, family, and community organizations). If people aren't getting taken care of, that's not the government's job to fix. It's the people's. It's literally MY job, and yours too. If the government is ever involved, it ought to be holding people responsible for taking care of one another, especially within families -- instead of giving them an easy way out of their duty.
So when I vote against your Democratic party policy, I'm not voting against the heart behind it. I'm saying "great ideas, but that is not the government's job. Go form an NGO to do that (that doesn't also promote abortion) and I will donate!" In the mean time, stop taxing me so you can give people an easy way out of their responsibilities! I take care of my responsibilities (myself, my wife, my kids). No one else has to do that - it's my job and I do it. God forbid the government should do that for me. I also give to my parents, my wife's parents, my church, including those in my church who are poor, several non-profits that take care of the poor and spread the good news of God's love, and poor people I run into -- I give away more than 20% of my net income. Please don't hear me saying "look how good I am" (far from it, there are many people who make less and give far more) but to hopefully to share how much I believe taking care of people is my job and yours, not the government's.
People should take care of their own responsibilities to the extent they are able. When they don't, the government should hold them accountable. When they can't, it should make it easy for other institutions to do their job and help the poor. People love one another better through giving voluntarily, not paying taxes so the government can "love" people.
Finally, institutions are the engines through which human visions are carried out and sustained across generations. Different institutions have different responsibilities. The government ...
Abortion isn't the only topic that people make a "moral" stance about, and in some ways it's the least interesting. It hinges on an arbitrary "It's alive!" moment that's not really debatable, so much as a gut feeling.
On second thought, it does illustrate the difficulty most people have in thinking about continua rather than binary variables. Aliveness is, to me, clearly not binary. The fetus is minimally alive at conception and becomes alive at birth, but during the pregnancy is neither fully alive nor fully not alive. Similarly, an adult with brain damage, in a coma, isn't quite dead, but is also not fully alive.
I think that if we discussed specific situations, nearly everyone would wind up agreeing with the continua. It's only in the abstract that they insist on their binary labels. That's been my experience, anyway. Everyone's ethics are parsimonious, until it's their friends, family, or themselves that are in consideration.
First, how ever cruel and wrong doing so may be, letting nature take its course isn't murder - it's something else altogether (sometimes morally defensible, sometimes not).
Second, your hypothetical situation is a well-covered case in situational ethics -- "whose life to save when not all can be saved". I know in this case many Catholic hospitals would save the baby and let the woman die -- so they can baptize the baby and save its soul (so they believe... correct me if I'm wrong). I disagree.
In my ethical framework, the woman's life is the one worth saving. Between the two of them, it will be more devastating/hurtful overall for her to die than the baby... not to mention devastation/hurt to those who love her. Therefore it is more loving to save her. And if the baby dies, I believe he/she goes to heaven (that's not justification for infanticide or abortion, just that based on scripture, I don't agree with the Catholic belief that the baby has to be delivered and baptized for him/her to receive salvation).
> It hinges on an arbitrary "It's alive!" moment that's not really debatable, so much as a gut feeling.
... except that science has pretty much established when a new organism begins for every other species. It's well known. People just don't want to accept the moral ramifications for human babies.
Consider someone on a ventilator who is otherwise a vegetable -- yes they're alive, and stabbing them would be murder. However, it's not necessarily murder to let nature take its course -- to let them die by unplugging the machine that's keeping them artificially alive.
I think it's your ethics (or perhaps your gut feeling, as you put it) that doesn't allow for a binary "alive or dead" state. But biology is pretty clear on when an organism is alive or not.
Yes there are edge cases when tissue lines are kept alive for years, or organ transplants are done... but no one disagrees about how alive or dead someone is in those cases. The point is whether a human fetus is an alive person - that's where the rubber hits the road ethically. And biologically there's certainly no question in that case. He/she is a human and he/she is alive -- that's the moral starting point. Anyone who says otherwise is equivocating to avoid the moral ramifications.
We disagree on the definition of murder. I suppose the law might call it negligent homicide. That sounds like a type of murder.
> biology is pretty clear on when an organism is alive or not.
It is not clear at all. Are viruses alive, for example? A human body is comprised of a variety of things that might be considered individual organisms if they lived outside the body. Are they alive, separately from the human they're a part of? How about a fetus? If it's not viable outside the womb, then how can it be alive as distinct from the mother? Does technology change that decision? If so, does aliveness change depending on access to technology?
If people won't be reasoned with, don't waste your time trying. On the upside, Mother Nature doesn't care what you believe - as hundreds of Americans, disproportionately Republicans, are learning every day at the moment.
But in the US that's a tacit Republican party position. Most senior Republicans have of course actually been vaccinated, but watch so many of them carefully choose their words to avoid endorsing vaccination. And the more junior Republicans, hungry for voter enthusiasm and maybe less scared of dying themselves, will outright say it, e.g. Lauren Boebert.
Result: Dead Republicans.
And I really don't have a partisan point here, it's usually Kang versus Kodos, it's just that the Republicans decided to go, as they say "full retard". You don't need to have a partisan dog in the game to know that the point of Democracy isn't who wins an election but the fact of peaceful transitions of power, and who did we see trying to prevent that peaceful transition of power in the US? Exactly.
They're essentially incapable of reason at this point.
What you're doing is called "pearl clutching", and is not adding in any constructive way to the conversation.
The way we got here is intentionally by using divisive rhetoric to ellicit "engagement". Traditionally, this has been used politically by identifying wedge issues with the explicit intention to divide people along belief borders.
This has been accelerated and amplified n-fold via social media. Engagement is a proxy for divisive rhetoric, as that is what algorithmically produces the most engagement, thereby triggering the reward function(s).
The cat's out of the bag. Its too late to go back and say "but what about the kids?" etc, (especially since there is so much overwhelming evidence that these themselves are simply rhetorical devices to push a particular argumnent or point of view).
We know these arguments are not in good faith, so why should we give them that due process and respect?
Cut the BS.
You can reply to that but I think I’ve said my part.
The person that replied to you showed you the gratitude of civilized disagreement and discussion. Then you got mad and unproductive.
I agree with every word of your first comment, but make no mistake about what happened here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It pains me what's happened to discourse in the last 10 years. I suspect social media has played a role. Many liberals and conservatives frequent these online partisan bubbles where they are exposed to the crazies of the other side (and only the crazies) while dodging the controversies that would make them question their own beliefs.
Surely, if there are foreign propaganda peddlers on social media, then the strategy they follow is not to aid one party or the other, but to pull from both sides until we collapse in the middle.
[0] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
>In 1995, then-Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey famously referred to Frank as "Barney Fag" in a press interview.
Don't act like the past was some civil utopia.
In any grouping of humans, there are bad actors and good actors. Using the bad actors to characterize the entire group, when they're a minority of that population is how you create stereotypes that break-down discourse. Empowering and encouraging the moderates in your opponents camp is is diplomacy 101. Insulting them empowers your enemies.
That's the same logic used to say all young black men are criminals, all young arab men are terrorists, all white farmers are racist, etc...
There are 2A Democrats out there that have to tolerate the insane (to them) things their representatives support.
This was pretty well documented at the time if you would like to read about it[0].
[0]https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/09/21/to-keep-and-bear...
This sounds contradictory to my understanding, related to the Black Panthers in California back in the 60s.
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The snowden leaks where in 2013 and the democratic administration and politicians definitely where not supportive of free press in that case. They were actively hostile against both domestic and foreign press.
There are signs WAY before you need to "try to vote him out of office".
this event is completely political and is made possible by the fact that one party alone has decided that facts don't matter - a whole team of said people rushed behind this governor to start a politcal campaign based on fact-free made up realities, which is now the common mode of action for the right wing. The GOP also happens to be a party that claims to be extremely upset about liberals supposedly trying to ban speech that "hurts their feelings". this is after all where the terms "snowflake" and "cancel culture" come from, and in fact was a campaign slogan by the Trump campaign called "fuck your feelings", which you would see emblazoned on shirts worn by what we would assume were previously congenial grandparents.
based on all of this, it would appear hypocritical for right wing voters to claim that speaking of these issues are "alientating". The grandparents wearing T shirts that said "fuck your feelings" was pretty alienating to see. Where were the right wing voices warning that liberals might feel "alienated" by that ? Does anyone on the right have the slightest concern for anyone not like them ? I've yet to see it.
You're alienating yourself by following reactionary impulses in response to true statements.
I'm also honesty not sure how true this theory of reaction is generally. I'm sure it's true for some, but in many cases it functions as a rhetorical strategy to put people on the defensive who are making legitimate criticisms.
>But none of this was anti-science, nor did it have anything to do with COVID, and you've brought up both.
It's anti-intellectual, and therefore a pertinent comparison, and they used the term anti intellectual and covered all the necessary bases. The cultural and social forces driving both are the same, and here, again, I feel like saying "don't talk about this because it alienates me" is just a rhetorical strategy to put people on the defensive without addressing the merits of what they are saying.
Throwing a temper tantrum when someone objectively mentions the ideology of a party - threatening to take your toys out of the sandbox - really doesn't help your case in the "superiority" department.
The reason things are so "partisan" is because of the political extremist actions and policies from your party.
Edit: it looks like you've been doing this quite a bit, as well as using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's against the guidelines and we ban accounts that do it. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
You're saying "you must woo me to do the right thing" and it's complete garbage (you've already admitted OP is "probably right"). If you're going to vote out of spite because people aren't "taking a chill pill" you can go pound sand. I'm tired of this "you didn't tell me in the perfect way, so I'm right and you're wrong" reductive nonsense.
Once the goalposts are moved back to the point where you're practically begging, they'll turn around and try to assert dominance by calling you weak for trying to reason with them like a perosn.
About that sense of superiority, it is relative to a pretty low bar, when people prioritize whether a person is on their side even over whether the person is right.
The clustering of inane views amongst a particular identifiable group of people is fascinating. And inane views happen on both sides. I find it super interesting to see how each side chooses which bonkers views they do, and how they line up.
Especially interesting is when they are not self consistent. For example, "my body, my rules," which is adopted by both sides in different contexts (abortion and vaccinations) both of which arguably are issues that involve personal choice but that also (again, arguably) affect the well being of others.
Finding the partisan alignments amongst these things is super interesting and should not be a third rail (meaning an untouchable topic) in discussions, imho.
1.) This is an attack against a type of security researcher. Attacks against researchers are always anti-science.
2.) You’ve admitted to feeling alienated by truth. You might want to think that over and ask yourself some questions. That’s genuinely sad.
3.) If the truth genuinely alienates you, I don’t care about you or your feelings.
that's blatantly untrue. If a researcher is malicious, attacking their person is not anti-science.
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It is a partisan issue though. Republicans across the United States are largely pushing to reject science and schooling and are increasingly pushing through laws and changes that make the populace dumber, and more easily controllable.
You know this is happening, yet you still voted for republicans in the past.
It's your own fault if you continue to do so even in the face of overwhelming evidence that this is destroying America.
Whether or not you feel alienated is no concern, your feelings don't matter here, and the fact that you are feeling alienated means you have the capacity to change, because the people that keep voting against intellectualism don't feel alienated, they feel emboldened when someone calls them out, they feel pride in knowing they are doing something "the left hates me for", even if that something is destroying America in the process.
You're the problem.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
You're blaming other people for something that is 100% under your control. If you don't want to accept the truth because you don't like the types of people who share it, that's just spite on your part.
I really do not understand how it is possible to separate Parson from Republican Party in Missouri? They very very much the same.
It is like saying that Gavin Newsom is something different than Democrats in California.
Of course it's anti-science. You don't think this governor has advisors that told him the reporter looked at source code that anyone can look at it and it's not hacking?
He's grandstanding for his constituency. Why? Because he knows his constituency won't understand nuance and won't hold him accountable, because he's attacking science, not guns.
Alienation is exactly the type of thing one should use to combat this. Rationally minded people in the (R) camp SHOULD feel alienated by their intellectual peers when they spew anti-intellectual rhetoric and pass/support anti-intellectual policies or willingly associate, without protest, with people or groups known for doing so. You can't flip the script and say you feel alienated by your intellectual peers (HN) for not jumping with you onto the anti-intellectual band-wagon and/or for calling systemic anti-intellectualism out for what it is. Doing so would be as ridiculous as arguing that you find same-sex couples alienating/offensive/triggering because they tread on your precious sensibilities as an anti-LGBT person. In that scenario, you should feel alienated, because that is the primary societal force that will pressure you into recanting being an anti-LGBT person. Intellectuals are alienating you because they want you to get rid of the rest of your bad opinions, not just the select few you have already shed, before you can take your place at the table.
College is too expensive for what it gives. You gain a ton in maturity, soft skill building but unless you're in a STEM major, the material does not prepare you for the real world. Depending on what my kid wants to study, I will not be encouraging college.
So much journalism is so insanely biased. I respectfully disagree to anyone who thinks Biden is treated the same as Trump was.
I don't deny covid's existence at all. I took it very seriously in the beginning of the pandemic. But as more data came out, I realized it wasn't a big deal for my age group. I later got covid and only lost sense smell/taste for 4 days. Didn't feel the need to miss any work (remote job).
I don't like the boomer-esque decisions some of these republicans make in regards to tech security, abortion, or cannabis but I guess I have to side with that over freedom reducing laws, excessive money printing, and increased taxes
People respect Biden more than they respect Trump. This isn't Biden's fault, nor the fault of the people.
Increased taxes for who? Taxes were massively cut for wealthy people a couple years ago and the only proposal to raise them that got any traction recently didn’t even raise them back to the previous level - still a net cut.
Also, Covid is a big deal for the families of the 600k dead from it directly and the unknown number indirectly due to inability to access medical services. Just because it didn’t affect you personally doesn’t mean it’s not a real problem.
I took it seriously as well, realized it probably wouldn’t kill me, but still followed precautions so as to avoid hurting others who would most likely have died or gotten seriously ill. I feel like that’s a pretty minimum requirement for a functioning society - compassion for others, who are not in your exact situation.
state laws != federal laws. I am pro-choice but I think allowing states to make decisions for their own is good and the system is working as intended. I want states to have more freedom to legislate what their constituents want than a giant federal government making decisions for the whole nation.
The taxes proposed in the infrastructure bill are egregious. For the first time in my entire life I will make a decent amount of money this year and will bump right into top bracket. Giving the government over 50% is insane.
I never said covid wasn't a big deal, or that is wasn't a problem. Again, I said I took it seriously. But to have any sort of lockdowns/mandates at this point are not cool. Or make me choose between a job or some unnecessary medical treatment. the goal posts on vaccine metrics or herd immunity are constantly moved. No one talks about natural immunity. Biden has used excessively divisive language emboldening people who are pro vaccine to accost those who haven't received the vaccine.
You know what goalpost doesn't move? Not having ICUs at full capacity with people who could have just taken two shots 6 months ago.
Vaccine mandates are a pretty normal requirement at a lot of places. I worked in healthcare - flu shots were mandatory with very rare exceptions. When I was a kid I had to have MMR, polio, whooping cough, etc, vaccines to be able to enroll in school. This sudden “but muh freedom” crap doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny when the same party saying vaccines should be optional because it is a personal medical choice is the same group saying other medical procedures (that are potentially necessary) should be banned (abortion, in case that wasn’t clear) - even though they are also personal medical choices and nobody is trying to even mandate them.
Bruh. You went to work while you were sick with covid?
Of course they are not. How could they be, considering the large difference in behavior towards journalists and the world in general?
I am not quite sure how much of this is anti-science as opposed to anti-college.
Colleges, not science or education in general, have been at the heart of the culture war, especially in the US, and have been viewed by many - not just right/Republicans, but centrists and moderates as well - recently as problematic when it comes to things like mandatory overreaching PC culture, title IX kangaroo courts and "rape classes", safe spaces (and racial segregation of dorms to provide such safe spaces, for example), coddling of students, college educational quality and how it correlates with college profits (including minor scandals of celeb parents bribing their kids into good schools), racial bias in admissions, speech codes, left-leaning faculty, etc, etc, etc... The list of areas that people receive as "problematic" is long.
I am not here to judge all these accusations on merit, just wanted to point out that they exist in the wider public debate (no matter the level of truth to them), and this is what may have swung the polls a lot more than a general anti-science stance.
- Denial of the science of sex differences
- Denial of the science of intelligence differences, the relevance of intelligence in life outcomes and how heritable it is
- Belief without evidence that black/white racial differences in outcome are completely due to racism and not partly due to a byproduct of cultural differences
- Anti-nuclear sentiment that wildly exaggerates the risks of nuclear power
- Historical revisionism (e.g 1619 project and NYT begrudgingly making stealth edits)
Telling example: "We believe in self-determination" // "There are unclaimed votes available in those anti-abortionist tribes" // "Ok then, we take them". This should be a joke, not an event. There is a systemic issue.
> Belief without evidence that black/white racial differences in outcome are completely due to modern systemic racism and not partly due to a byproduct of cultural differences
I think what you're describing is that a lot of liberals and leftists are opposed to the use of science to justify what they would probably consider racist beliefs. They might point to the use of scientific racism in the past as a reason not to repeat such mistakes. They might also question the intentions of the (disproportionately white) people who tend to focus obsessively on these issues to the exclusion of many others.
One thing I've noticed about the friends who are dyed in the wool liberals is that they seem to be more susceptible than average to pseudoscientific practices such as reiki, crystals, homeopathy, etc.
And that jives, I think, with historical trends. Go back 100 years and G.K. Chesterton was chiding the liberal upper-class socialites who were taken in with this stuff.
Of course, my own observations are just anecdotal, but I would be curious to know if anyone else has noticed it.
I wonder if this is what has polluted and spilled over into other areas so it has influenced a general anti intellectual / elitism sentiment that gets in the way of critical thinking and science.
The growth in the cost of college hasn't improved standards, but rather it served to fatten administration departments at colleges.
Additionally, quality is dropping severely. I've seen it first hand. I can't count on two hands the amount of new grads from "quality" schools with their shiny CS degrees who cannot write code. Not leetcode, just any code. They can't solve business problems at all. It's like they learned to pass tests. That's CS, which still has some value. What about useless degrees like Political Science or Gender Studies? Those are outright scams given the results. The victims are young people.
You're damn right people are going to be skeptical of higher education when they indoctrinate in the anti scientific cult of leftism. People are starting to smell the rotting corpse of common sense and rest assured there will be a societal reboot soon enough.
Have you done any work to asses your biases along these fronts? What makes you think that the immunity after getting infected from covid is better than getting vaccinated and not getting sick at all? I know I don't personally have the time to be sick, I have a family to feed.
For one thing, the argument on the left that gender and sex are not the same and a biological man can become a biological woman is currently scientifically impossible. Men and women are fundamentally distinguished by DNA. Even with genital mutilation surgery and hormone therapy you are only changing about 0.01% of what makes and man and a woman different as every chromosome in that person's body is the same biological sex they had at birth. Setting aside any political or subjective "reality" they are trying to push on to others.
Second, Pfizer scientists are on tape stating that antibodies gained through COVID infection are more robust than those gained from their vaccines. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/oct/5/project-veri...
What part of my comment indicates I am playing the victim?
Science is fundamentally about skepticism, and democratic politicians/the media have commandeered its meaning to push their agenda.
Many Covid-19 policy decisions based on “science” are not actually based on sound science, and it doesn’t seem like democratic politicians have any interest in addressing this.
Here are a few examples of highly questionable policies:
Mask mandates when everyone is vaccinated, school closures, gym closures, exemptions for wearing a mask when eating indoors.
Most worryingly, it seems like academics are scared to publish data that contradicts the mainstream progressive narrative, because they may have their career canceled.
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I think we should start tracking them. Maybe we could force them to attend re-education, it would be a pain to implement and enforce on a wide societal level but maybe we could concentrate them in some sort of camp or something. I think this would be a good solution we could finally be rid of these dangerous ideas, and the people who hold them.
I think at very least we should mark people who are unvaccinated so that other people can know to stay away from them since we shouldn't make innocent people suffer because they are too evil to do the decent thing. Maybe we could make them all wear brightly colored armbands or something so everyone knows who the dangerous individuals in society are.
There's a really good article written about this subject by Jose Duarte: http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/i-was-denied-admission-to-a-p...
I really recommend giving it a full read. The gist is that higher education is very, very clearly biased against particular groups. "Net detriment" is loaded, but "unfairly biased against us" is a not only reasonable, but demonstrably true conclusion. Negative reactions are warranted.
There's a real problem here within education.
It can't be both and the veil of ambiguity cannot continue, otherwise support for post-secondary institutions will continue in free-fall.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
This scenario clearly meets those criteria.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
The OP specifically said he wanted to have an intellectual discussion about how anti-intellectuality has recently become a prevalent issue among a particular political party, something of interest and concern to all people, regardless of country or political affiliation. I can't think of a more extenuating circumstance, especially with the disturbing historical precedents we've seen in the last century around this issue, but it's disappointing to see that you disagree.
You are trampling curiosity in the name of avoiding trampling curiosity.
My feeling is that Dan’s decision here is conclusive proof that HN’s mod team is unbiased. I was genuinely concerned that this thread wouldn’t be penalized, because it was political flamewar dressed up as intellectual conversation. It was delightful to see HN’s spirit shine through in spite of political divisions.
Curiosity is a fragile thing. The original comment was entirely ineffective at fostering curiosity, and it’s interesting to analyze why. I think framing has a lot to do with it. There was no attempt made at asking questions, for example. Asking questions in earnest is the hallmark of curiosity.
I don’t think that broadcasting personal feelings to a wide audience was necessary to foster curiosity, either. Quite the opposite: it detracts from the discussion. It’s tricky to express feelings in a way that isn’t divisive, and it’s important for HN comments to become more substantive as the topic becomes more heated.
And you’d be hard-pressed to disagree that the topic became heated, I think. It was a lot match in a gas-filled room, and the explosive subthread was an entirely predictable, deterministic outcome.
There's one non-obvious link in the moderation logic here, which might help to explain a bit. We don't really moderate comments—we moderate subthreads [1]. In this case I was swayed by the fact that the subthread was 350 posts of especially-wretched flamewar hell.
I often put it this way: the value of an HN comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). This is a weird idea at first—it was to me, at least—because how can I be responsible for what other people do? But when the genre is conversation, and it's relatively predictable how people will react, it's my (i.e. each of our) responsibility not to do things that will predictably generate poor conversation. Conversation is a dance [2]. We need to take the other into account, regardless of how right we are or feel we are. It's not really about being right; there are more important things.
For those of us who tend to think of ourselves as atoms, this is hard to learn, especially because internet posts feel like atomic operations. They're not, though—they're molecular, and the threads are the molecules. To be a good atom, you need to take into account what ions are floating nearby and thus what molecules are likely to form out of what you post. It's not that hard to know this—the dynamics are relatively predictable.
[1] Coincidentally I wrote about this yesterday, if anyone wants more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28932445
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162386
Journalism has been degrading its own reputation through supplanting the standard journalistic integrity with biases.
Science is in the middle of a crisis of integrity where 'publish or die' and intradepartment funding incetives push academics to pursue publications of a certain flavor, not to mention the standard of 'how was this result p-hackes' many must have to read.
this isnt a republican issue, this is a governor behaving with a survivalist mindset and abdicating any real leadership by forcing a hammer on a whistleblower.
also, is it so difficult to see how a 20 yr old will question the value of a 200k education? Ever see that Columbia School of Journalism piece? observe the data on climbing tuiting prices? I treasure my education, but have trouble explaining the true value when younger people simply see an increasingly diminishing return on that investment.
The Church, as an institution, is dying. In their death throes they are basically doing everything they can to turn back the clock on society to a time they played an important role in dictating how we live. Every societal problem we have today is a result of Christian, Muslim and Jewish religions preaching their versions of ignorance and intolerance, every single Saturday and Sunday to millions and millions of Americans across the country.
Economic conservatives hate ignorance too - you need math skills to count your profits and to best gauge how to screw over your minimum wage employees, an accurate sense of history and economics in order to best manipulate markets and legal skills to avoid IRS and SEC penalties. They are just as frustrated with general stupidity as the rest of us.
But religious conservatives? They're fucking insane. They really, really, really believe what the Church tells them, and the shit the Church says is truly, truly, batshit crazy and has been for millennia. I personally know of people who truly worry about the "mark of the beast" from the COVID vaccination because that's what their Church says. In 2021 this should not be possible.
Until the secular American people realize who the real enemy is and go after the Church and all its leaders, in real, concrete ways, we're going to spend the rest of our lives dealing with this shit.
It’s funny because it’s a reference to a common way to encode/obscure the name of someone, not literally a mark on the most evil person spawned from hell, and with all we know today people still believe it’s a physical mark that will identify evil or turn one towards evil. That shit is hilarious.
The context, though, is: "[The second beast] causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark". That sounds like a literal mark to me, not just a hash function.
Using a numeric hash of the name instead of the text form also makes sense, just like the way TLS certificates use hashes of the domain name (and other details).
I guess I just don't see the funny side because what is described in Revelation is reminiscent of both terrible abuses of the past and modern day infringements of rights.
[0] https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/article/tattoos-in-roman-world...
I nonetheless do still find it funny that people in the information age still believe in bronze age concepts used to describe the world.
This trend is increasingly prevalent in both parties. If we are to solve anything, one has to first recognize the reality of the situation and stop getting lured in by us vs them.
High level of debt makes people more risk-averse to changing jobs, starting a business, or even having children. I believe that the greedy bloated system of higher education is responsible for many personal tragedies.
"Under United States law, libel generally requires five key elements: the plaintiff must prove that the information was published, the plaintiff was directly or indirectly identified, the remarks were defamatory towards the plaintiff's reputation, the published information is false, and that the defendant is at fault."
Seems to fit all of these. I imagine there is some protection because these words are coming from a PAC but the governor has said the same stuff in news conferences.
Like others, I'm sad to see such a technically illiterate response when there should at least be advisors capable of explaining this. I also agree the journalist is unlikely to be convicted but we really don't need to muddy the fairly clear scope of computer crimes per the above laws.
Copyright could apply.
Perhaps you are trolling?
If anything, this response demands worldwide attention on the state run systems and contracts paying to build and maintain them. Expect statewide incompetence paid at top dollar to contractors who aren't paid as much as the contract stipulates.
FOIA all the way
I realize this guy is just at it for political reasons.. but I don't think it can be overstated how much of a negative all of this is on society. Even if this reporter never gets convicted of anything it could leave trauma that will make others second guess 'doing the right thing'.
Then, he started tweeting/re-tweeting unrelated stuff to try and bury it, but people kept replying to those and re-raising the issue.
I look forward to the ACLU handing him his ass.
Does he care though? It is all about outrage, diverting attention from actual issues, hogging TV time. We are talking about it, Twitter is talking about it... Mission accomplished for him, no?
If the article said “anyone who right clicks the web page in Chrome and selects view source could see social security numbers” it would clarify things for the majority of the population that doesn’t know what “HTML source code” is.
I got sent to the principal's office (years ago...) for opening a command line and trying to ping a printer that said it was offline but was sitting right next to my station and looked happy. Most people are probably like my former teacher, who will wind up on a jury.
In the Georgia version, the technical details of the exposed information in the Secretary of State's office were facepalmingly simple (misconfigured apache directives) yet the story dragged on politically for years.
Quickly, a hired security researcher for a corporate client found all registered voters info and instructional pdfs with credentials for the elections system publicly indexed by google. They responsibly disclosed. The apache configuration was updated to "use encryption" (moved from http to https) but still left the info indexed by google over https vs. http. Eventually, this information became public.
The state attempted to prosecute the security researcher but found no state statutes they could use. They then used this incident as a base to create a bill to criminalize the security researcher's actions.
As a state rep, I worked very hard to push back on a bad bill spawned by the incident that would've criminalized responsible disclosure.
Only due to bi-partisan efforts from technically versed people were we able to get the Governor at the time to veto the bill.
https://www.snopes.com/ap/2017/06/15/researcher-finds-georgi...
https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/comp...
It reminds me of this story in Iowa, where pentesters were arrested and charged with felonies for breaking into a courthouse they were hired to infiltrate:
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/59/
The other giant thread here made it more directly partisan, this just sounds crazy though. On what rational grounds do you attempt to prosecute or make such things illegal? Is it simply trying to save immediate expenditure of money in a myopic fashion? Or is it more akin to they don't believe it's the state's responsibility to put that data online in the first place so f-it-all-to-hell and everything around it? My constituents don't understand this so I'm just going to oppose my opponents actions, regardless?
In your opinion, is there a way to fix this sort of thing? It feels like we're watching it writ large with the January 6 committee.
> In your opinion, is there a way to fix this sort of thing?
Yes, it requires patient, reasonable, intelligent people operating in good faith to sacrifice personal comfort, etc. and get involved in politics.
Politics is literally a zero-sum game when it comes to voting as it is currently structured in most of the United States.*
But when people with the above characteristics get involved, it literally moderates the extremism that we decry. No matter the level (local, state, or federal), whether you decide to run for office, helps others run for office, get involved with a party, or find a particular issue, being involved makes a difference. You may not be able to easily quantify, but it does make an impact. You may also be bringing a critical perspective in short supply to the political process too.
> On what rational grounds do you attempt to prosecute or make such things illegal?
I heard four reasons for the 2017-2018 SB 315 bill.
1. To ensure the next time someone shared a vulnerability that made the state look bad, that a D.A. would have the choice to bring a criminal case (which would obviously color perception of the story). 2. To bring the law into parity with Federal criminal statutes. 3. To give the Attorney General a "tough on cyber crime" campaign plank. 4. The banks were asking for help prosecuting criminals.
Here's the final text of the bill that passed the legislature, https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/legislation/document/20172018/1.... The most relevant text are lines 12-14 and the subsection carve outs on line 16-20.
For further context, voter rolls were already public information and can be acquired via a request to the SoS office.
The larger red flags were the default usernames and passwords in the instructional pdfs for the election systems.
Both of these symptoms (and more) spoke to a woefully underfunded or poorly run office w/r/t to IT.
Getting more funds to have properly, well-secured systems takes political capital and there's not a lot of return of that type of political capital expenditure.
The current SoS has an engineering background and I've been seeing much better public facing systems put in place during their tenure.
*. Please, please, please can we get approval based voting?
The important thing was to take the time, speak to the bill's author, speak to my colleagues, build a coalition of lobbyists from industry (big companies, startups, etc.), and not stop fighting the bill even after it passed the legislature.