Figure 3a[1] is kind of weird. Most of the variables are seen trending up, but there's also a trend where many of them dip in the the middle? What made people less liberal around the 90s?
I don't really know if it explains why America became "less liberal" in that period, but it is also the period when the Republican party took back control of Congress in the 1994 election, which is known as the "Republican Revolution". It is also the period when Republicans controlled a majority of state legislatures and governorships. They did so by adopting a national strategy for the entire party, regardless of state, and this probably intensified some conservatism. When some state elections might have been localized, independents could choose either party depending on local context and issues. It used to be common to have a state with democratic senators and a republican governor, and vice versa. When the state elections are all "nationalized" as it were, you get intensification of political sides. In many respects, America is still in that situation.
You are also seeing backlash to Bill Clinton and his attempts at healthcare reform (this would come again during Barak Obama's term and the rise of Tea-party style conservatism against health-care reform and the ensuing spiral into present day conservatism).
I don't understand how that's evidence of Astroturfing. Someone gave a name to a widely held sentiment (keep the government out of my life), someone formed or attempted to form a party around this?
> You are also seeing backlash to Bill Clinton and his attempts at healthcare reform (this would come again during Barak Obama's term and the rise of Tea-party style conservatism against health-care reform and the ensuing spiral into present day conservatism).
I do not see it as having to do with healthcare reform, but rather having to do with the wealth transfer necessary to facilitate the healthcare reform. For decades, the progress of certain socioeconomic classes had stalled, even by the 90s. Those classes could see those above them pulling away, but at least they had the comfort of knowing they were not at the bottom.
However, the wealth redistribution required for healthcare reform would bring those below them up to their level, or at least remove the veneer of not being near the bottom and no longer being in the same world as those making gains, which is apparently not a preferable situation.
In summary, I am pointing to the increasing wealth/income gap and relative movement of various socioeconomic tribes, perhaps inevitable due to technology and the consequences of its economies of scale. As long as the pie is getting bigger, and everyone is getting a bigger slice proportional to the size of their original slice, there is less strife (except at the bottom). Once the sizes of the slices start moving down relative to others’, there starts to be a retreat to tribal affiliations to fight against it.
It was probably just the death throws of American culture. People realized the direction things were headed and realized how terrible it would be. Then those people were punished and silenced and now everyone just goes along with it all, no matter the cost or consequences.
I know we've had anecdotal conversations here about declining technical literacy with the increase of tablet / smartphone use, but this figure is striking
Which doesn't even make sense. Some smartphones have the same specs as laptops and you can do, essentially, everything you could on a laptop or desktop on your smartphone. There's more reasons to include the smartphone in the category of computer than not to.
Architecturally they’re still very different from traditional desktops/laptops. SoCs are a main distinguishing feature and that pervades a lot of the low-level SW design where you actually basically have a non-transferable OS installation hard coded to the device instead of a traditional HAL letting you easily swap out a processor without much difficulty. For a very long time the control model was flipped as well and your baseband (cellular modem) CPU was actually the primary CPU with the OS running on the more restricted “application processor” (I think most or all designs have corrected this error these days, but certainly this was true in 2013).
These differences of course are superficial and your phone could be used as a computer. It’s an arbitrary category like most categorizations that we make. I think the important distinction is that smart devices are largely content consumption devices vs computers being relegated to content creation. For example, would you say that someone who’s used a SmartTV has used a computer just because the specs are largely the same?
I think you should fully expect computer use to decline over time because most people consume rather than create content.
..except that no one uses a smartphone the way you (used to[1]) use a laptop or smartphone.
[1] I find the overlap goes the other way: I'm using a laptop to write this, but I could have done so with my phone. Laptops and desktops are being used like smartphones.
That's even more reason to not have separate categories from my perspective. Either way you're using the devices for the same tasks, there's no reason to separate them.
One distinguishing feature is that a computer typically lets you install arbitrary software and you're the "administrator" of the machine. On a smartphone the administrator is the phone manufacturer.
As I said, the categorization is completely arbitrary and depends on how you choose to draw the lines, but neither categorization is right/wrong.
Maybe when it comes to the baseband processor the user isn't the admin, I definitely would agree there. But on most android devices you can absolutely swap out the user space OS, I think this at least gives more control than the situation you describe, although from my understanding iOS is where the user isn't the admin. Android devices also let you install and run arbitrary software from what I'm aware
Cool. That’s still not functionality available out of the box (if I recall correctly that’s true for sideloading even on Android). You could try to tease that out but it’ll be low single digit percentage of Android users.
In other words, nitpicking pedantry, but nothing that should meaningfully shift the overall numbers. Same reason that you wouldn’t expect to include SmartTVs on this even though they’re all running Android.
Yep! And it's getting more and more - technically cell phones are computers, but at the same time so are Tv's and such!
So, it's more of the same, computer use is dwindling and so is general computer literacy. e.g. Ask what a file is, or a directory and majority of iphone users have no idea! Permissions too!
I find it so exciting, I read about this a while back, e.g. 2015, for user experiences and literacy and back then were reports that the entry curve for computers has been removed via cell phones (iphones, androids, e.g. general smartphones.) that daily computing difficulties do not present themselves as they used too (and they still exist.) from virus, malware, to sorting files, organization, search, and general software competency like excel and such.
But ask about social media apps and how they work - and there you go (which, ironically suffer the same issues on purpose, how do you sort information, organize new content or higher fruitful content, etc.)
There's also the fun part of addiction and dopamine feedback loops, but I'm getting a bit off the track here. :)
Can you elaborate on your excitement? Your username seems to imply enjoyment of, interest in these complexities while your statement seems to indicate excitement that others are not getting exposed to these complexities. There is benefit to yourself (and the technically literate) because you/they can truly understand and change something versus be stymied (so, "employable").
Well, the good thing about the current software ecosystem is that end users don't need to understand access control policies in order to safely operate their devices. In otherwords, the barrier to correctly using a general computing device is MUCH lower.
As someone that grew up with Win 95, this is a revolution in the way computing works. In the era I entered into computing, to use a computer really did often require at least a little knowledge of DOS or the commandline. Absolutely it required you to know how files and folders worked.
Viruses were super common and super easy to catch as we started entering the internet era. So part of correctly operating a computer involved picking and maintaining the right AV software.
That's a barrier that has kept people out of computing in general.
Now, everyone's grandma is on facebook (for better or worse). Everyone knows how to use a search engine. Even those that don't know how to use a search engine, know how to do "Siri: What is the capital of Kansas?". Knowledge is hyper accessible. (This also exposes new epistemological issues. How can we verify something is true when it requires hours of research, even with the internet?)
Oh, I agree, there is no excitement at the idea of more ignorant users but excitement that there was a giant blowback - instead of devices, end user computing augmenting technical experience, it instead did the opposite.
It is not a benefit, but just the realization curve that the more you make things easy, it can appear to be a step forward but instead become many steps back.
The whole reason I entered into this field, was because I could not get my computer to work, or that I didn't understand it - probably both, and it drove me to overcome those barriers. I was of course a kid, and the computer itself has entertained me and gave me decision paths that I would've never known possible without it.
It really is sad, those experiences seem gone to the sands of time and if a device doesn't work properly, then it's not per se the customer or audience, but an user experience flaw.
> Ask what a file is, or a directory and majority of iphone users have no idea! Permissions too!
I have bad news for you if you think normal computer users were mostly good at understanding or explaining these things in the 90s or 2000s or whatever.
That could be just another way of saying 'normal' computer users were not really 'computer literate' during those times. Having lived through them myself, I wouldn't argue.
That said, I think the the term 'computer literate' is much less defined than 'literate', so using the term is a good way to start an argument.
Yeah, I just disagree with "iPhones are making people unable to use computers well" concerns, whatever the definition of "computer literate".
My experience has been that outside of enthusiast or professional tech circles, and those directly adjacent, knowing stuff like where to expect a USB disk to appear when it's plugged in, or that you can cut/copy/paste files, what you can and can't drag-n-drop, where to expect common actions to show up in menus, the concept of UI focus and how it basically works in practice, and so on, places you in the (lower end of) top-tier of computer users, and pretty much always has. People, in general, have never understood how to use a computer well. We've had the term "power user" for folks who halfway know how to use a computer for decades now, because even most people who work with a desktop every day do not know that, and it's not like that was different pre-smartphone.
Either simple, ordinary GUI computer use is actually much harder than we (on a site like this) think, or the UIs and metaphors we use are flat-out awful and need to be re-thought from the ground up (what might that look like? Well, iOS has tried...). Or some combination of the two.
[EDIT] My point about the definition of "computer literate" hardly mattering is that I think you have to stretch it so far that it becomes useless before you manage to capture most computer users, since at least when they became common in offices. You have to put the bar practically on the floor before most users will pass it. I don't (entirely) blame users for that, to be clear, and think it has a lot to do with fundamental mistakes in how our profession and industry build & present UIs to ordinary folks who don't want to devote half their brain to understanding how computers work. It has very little to do with iPhones.
That probably indicates that many computer users prior to 2013 were using computers to get at certain key functions like chat rooms, IM, online videos, games, etc. Now that they don't have to use "computers" to get those things, they don't.
If you strip away that residue I would suspect that the number of true computer literate people has increased steadily since the PC revolution.
Most people start becoming computer literate to do stuff, after that they can keep digging to understand more. If a tablet/smartphone/XBox just works then why bother with a PC?
As such, I think computer literacy has probably dropped over the last 9 years as fewer people get started. Which in general isn’t a bad thing compare the number of people who know how to do even basic car repair in 2022 vs 1960.
I feel phones are an inferior input device and their broad adoption at the expense of full computers (with keyboard/mouse) is a shame.
Phones "just work" but phone screens are too small and touch keyboards too imprecise to do any long-form typing on it. I think the adoption of the phone as the most popular interface for the web has made the quality of software interfaces decline, and has made things like forums less mainstream, both of which are a shame.
Yes, I'd bet that outside the office, the vast majority of "computer use" between say, 1998 and 2013 was for email and web browsing. That functionality moved to the smart phone, leaving mostly gamers and the computer literate as the remaining users.
I thought this section was quite interesting. Seems like there is little movement on some of the hottest political topics.
> Conspicuously missing from the top of the list are several issues central to political polarization and partisan sorting (Baldassarri and Park 2020). Abortion ranked 237th overall, gun ownership ranked 124th, gun regulation 251st, help for the poor 167th and 229th (two forms of the question), and health care ranked 149th, 150th, and 227th (asked three ways). Their low rankings are not an artifact. Change and conflict are separate. Future research will have to decide if lack of change promotes conflict or conflict stunts change, but from these results we can say that the liberal drift of Americans’ identities and attitudes, especially as reflected in cohort replacement, left several hot issues unmoved.
Makes sense to me. Identity is strengthened in opposition. People double-down when feelings are hot. I think part of the success of marijuana and gay marriage's rapid change in opinion is people were exposed to it through media (e.g. tv shows) but weren't forced to make some decision about where they stand on the issue during that time
It's weird though. I would say I shifted right recently after seeing homeless everywhere, crime in front of my face in many places I go, my laundry smelling like MJ at a public laundromat. I wouldn't stop gays from marrying at all, but there are a lot of issues that make me feel like democrats have been pulled into some weird pro-crime or anti-society movement.
It's all falling apart and I feel like democrats have been asking for it and continue to do so.
Most of us don't even know that's happening, the news would rather report on Biden's new cat.
The idea that public prosecutors won't prosecute misdemeanors and stealing a bunch of stuff is a misdemeanor and so theft is essentially legal would sound mad to most - if we knew. But most people haven't updated on the American left going crazy over the last ten years and mostly just live in an old world where the left-aligned media was less openly partisan and more sane, professional and trustworthy.
I think its a problem of people being forced to be on Red Team or Blue Team.
Both Red Team and Blue Team are dissatisfied with increases in crime, with more homelessness, etc.
Red Team has a narrative that policing has softened, that district attorney's offices have stopped prosecuting street crimes or let people out too early, that we have lost order.
Blue Team has a narrative that these crimes and homelessness problems need to be addressed through social safety nets, fixing income inequality or housing scarcity, etc. Basically focus on upstream changes rather than the street-level stuff. And also has a separate concern about police brutality or corruption.
A rational actor can likely see that there are merits to all of the above concerns and ideas. A rational actor could perhaps find a pragmatic answer that attempts to solve for all of these concerns, expresses empathy for each of these intersecting problems, and builds consensus.
But we are just full tribal, anti-working-across-the-aisle, full argue against strawmen versions of the other tribe, so that can't happen anymore.
Combine our current lack of the principle of charity with our two party system and we're fucked.
I mean I don't disagree. We could get past this with social reforms AND better police funding. I mean that's what would have happened when I was a kid. Compromise and both red and blue get something they want.
the problem with studies like this, and what makes it useless practically, is that right at the outset it's premised on the liberal-conservative dichotomy, a made-up linearization of the complex sociopolitical positions of complex sociopolitical beings. that's about as meaningful as tarot cards or horoscopes for understanding said sociopolitical beings. it's performative and coercive rather than expository and informative.
when we break out of such dichotomies, we realize that people hold all sorts of views, and each and every person is a bundle of contradictions, pride, and ambition, all mixing together in strange and unpredictable ways to form our sociopolitical environment. there is literally no true 'liberal' or 'conservative' out in the world. these are constructed poles of a false dichotomy.
and as such, this is junk food for people who want to believe they're better/smarter/nicer/whateverer than those 'other' people, and for the powerful, this kind of dichotomization collapses complexity to simplify their work of holding and expanding power, principally as a distraction from those machinations.
As a non-supernatural tarot practitioner, binary political labels are objectively worse than tarot. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I came to tarot by way of procedural narrative generation. In that vein, tarot is a fantastic way of providing a space to temporarily reframe psycho-social conflict and construct compelling narratives within a consistent framework of narrative-semiotic objects.
I'm more than willing to admit this is likely a minority opinion, but it has helped me in re-examining things like perceived intentions, what is the true conflict, how would I feel about particular outcomes in a way that checks my gut instinct to reactively reach for the most convenient answer or one that makes me feel the best.
No, not at all. It's a small group itself within a niche community, so I don't expect anyone outside of maybe 50 people to have ran across that particular framing. :)
Not a surprise that political climate is getting more liberal since mainstream media is largely run and controlled by liberal think tanks and lobbyists. As such, they're able to promote and espouse liberal ideology and wokism into the minds of the majority.
Mainstream media is run and controlled by advertisers.
As education increasingly becomes the political dividing line in America, liberal politics are where the valuable ad dollars are.
Edit: upon reflection, I would be remiss to not also advance the fact that the mainstream media is inescapably caught up within Twitter and it’s discourse. As much as Twitter “is not real life” and it is not representative of Americans views as a whole, it is representative of an outsized fraction of elite media attention.
I made no statements about what the HN community believes. Only that mainstream media is driven by monetary incentives, which I don’t believe is a very controversial statement.
As for my opinions on what the hacker news community believes. We know that certain demographics skew certain ways politically, empirically. It’s not surprising given the demographics of HN that certain beliefs are predominant here. That has little to do with money, at least not in the way it does for media products.
After I turning on Fox News any time during the 2010s and running into the plethora of “cash 4 gold ads”, it’s hard to see how that argument can hold water.
Liberals will always control culture absent government censorship. The strong correlation between openness to new experience and liberal political views is all that's needed to figure that out.
(Using liberal in the American sense here)
The forefront of culture is what's new and exciting. You have to actually be willing to try it out though. It's inherently not conservative.
Edit: the sibling's post about ad dollars is a fantastic point as well.
I think a point you missed here though is that in a lot of countries "culture" doesn't control media - industry and commerce do. America has an extremely strong media tradition that isn't based in economic news - but in other parts of the world (and you can observe it in America by looking at WSJ for instance) a fair number of media sources will emerge from the fact that business folks need to know a wide breadth of business news - the political and opinion branches these news sources tend to grow into will almost without fail lean toward preserving the businesses status quo which generally aligns with the conservative side of the political compass. An interesting counter example toward that general lean is Victorian England where the conservative business community was traditionally oriented towards land exploitation and the industrial business concerns ended up joining with the more liberal block in opposition.
One thing I find irksome is all these ideas are put under the general category of "liberal" when really it's a bunch of leftist ideas with a few neo-liberal/centrist concepts thrown in for good measure. Credit where credit is due.
America has several prominent news organizations including one extremely well funded and staunchly conservative one, one pretty darn liberal one, and another one I'd argue is more pro-establishment than either liberal or conservative. So I don't think it's fair to argue there is overt government favoritism that is blocking out voices on either side - it seems to me that each time the majority control switches hands one side or the other of the media will greatly benefit from the preferential treatment given to it by the majority.
If that doesn't sound incorrect to you then I think it's down to the market. If the market willed the conservative voices to have a larger audience the market would so deliver. And if everyone dislikes market driven news sources then how the heck did we ever manage to defund NPR and similar programs?
I think you are missing the point. We know that internet content and advertisement has largely replaced print and that most large tech corporations that profit from this business model lean liberal (Google, Facebook, etc.).
Wouldn't there be a bias on what ads get accepted in general? Especially when Facebook is largely human monitored and Google caters marketing to populous beliefs, with AI augmenting this effect?
"...most large tech corporations that profit from this business model lean liberal (Google, Facebook, etc.)."
I find this to be a rather bizarre statement. While internally, both companies (as well as the other tech companies) are populated with highly educated employees, who tend to lean liberal, their public corporate behavior is neither particularly liberal or conservative until they are publicly embarrassed.
(Facebook and Twitter were an important component of Trump's election campaign in both runs, and at least the former is a big part of the COVID-denialism movement, right?)
Companies hold different core values. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc all share(d) west coast left leaning values that shaped the internet so it was more open than society. The do not evil motto fit the times. Today these companies are much bigger and global but part of their culture is still intact.
Liberals in 2022 are more like conservatives in 1970/1980 when it comes to nudity, community and free speech.
A large number of companies, whether this seems ethical to you or not, still mostly follow the Friedman Doctrine[1] any political leanings they appear to have are adopted solely to increase their expected revenue. Some companies do violate this by altruistically acting to improve the world, but, honestly, these companies get a lot of crap from a lot of free-marketers for going against the natural market and "wasting resources on inefficiencies". A lot of companies may choose to support charities or offer employees volunteering hours, but these can also be viewed cynically as maneuvers to maximize PR and goodwill and avoid taxation.
At a really basic level I think it's important to remember that corporations are not people (not just in the citizens united manner) - anthropomorphizing them is dangerous since (except when wholly controlled by a single unimpeachable entity like a founder or single person business) their actions are dictated by consensus and consensus decision making is incompatible with human morality.
Not a surprise that political climate is getting more liberal since mainstream media is largely run and controlled by liberal think tanks and lobbyists
Erroneous! Erroneous on both counts!
The "liberal" party voted for the most centrist choice in their primary, and America picked him as their president. Americans today see Biden as more moderate than Obama, not more liberal [0]. I don't see how one can make the case America is getting more liberal when even the liberal party isn't.
The media is also absolutely not largely run and controlled by liberal think tanks and lobbyists. Nationally, Fox News dominates the ratings and had the top 3 rated cable news shows last year [1]. That doesn't even touch on SBG's well documented reach in key markets or conservative talk radio (which you can also find all over the top of the ratings lists [4]).
As such, they're able to promote and espouse liberal ideology and wokism into the minds of the majority.
It's hard to take such a claim at face value. On the one hand, conservatives like to play the victim against an undefined boogeyman, like we see here. On the other, conservatives are the ones wielding actual political power to enforce ideology through censoring educators and banning books [2], [3].
After the American Civil War, slavery became illegal. After WWII, antisemitism became verboten. After the Civil Rights movement, open racism had to be suppressed. After the AIDS epidemic, homosexuality entered the public sphere. Each of those steps represented a loss to conservatism. But they were not caused by some liberal conspiracy, rather the "better natures" of people (most people really do believe in things like fairness and justice, at least in the abstract) were forced to confront behaviors that were just conservatively accepted.
Showing law enforcement using firehoses, batons, and dogs on people seeking to register to vote is not inherently liberal or conservative. The response, however, was liberal.
I don't think this is the case. Sinclair Media, NewsCorp, and iHeartMedia (formally ClearChannel) are heavily conservative, very open about it, and dominate their respective fields: broadcast local television, cable television, and local radio. They are the largest, and most mainstream of all media companies. And there's plenty of crossover. Plenty of Fox News personalities have syndicated radio programs aired on iHeartMedia stations.
Yeah, NPR and CNN exist, but none of them draw near the audience of their conservative counterparts do.
It would be more accurate to say that conservative media is highly concentrated while liberal media tends to be much more diverse, but draws far fewer people.
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[ 77.9 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] thread[1] https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/326747190/nfab061...
You are also seeing backlash to Bill Clinton and his attempts at healthcare reform (this would come again during Barak Obama's term and the rise of Tea-party style conservatism against health-care reform and the ensuing spiral into present day conservatism).
I do not see it as having to do with healthcare reform, but rather having to do with the wealth transfer necessary to facilitate the healthcare reform. For decades, the progress of certain socioeconomic classes had stalled, even by the 90s. Those classes could see those above them pulling away, but at least they had the comfort of knowing they were not at the bottom.
However, the wealth redistribution required for healthcare reform would bring those below them up to their level, or at least remove the veneer of not being near the bottom and no longer being in the same world as those making gains, which is apparently not a preferable situation.
In summary, I am pointing to the increasing wealth/income gap and relative movement of various socioeconomic tribes, perhaps inevitable due to technology and the consequences of its economies of scale. As long as the pie is getting bigger, and everyone is getting a bigger slice proportional to the size of their original slice, there is less strife (except at the bottom). Once the sizes of the slices start moving down relative to others’, there starts to be a retreat to tribal affiliations to fight against it.
And Rush Limbaugh's syndication on even FM stations plus the launch of Fox News in the mid 90s helped get that national message across.
https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/326747189/nfab061...
Computer use has actually declined since ~ 2013?! Wow. That's actually kind of sad.
These differences of course are superficial and your phone could be used as a computer. It’s an arbitrary category like most categorizations that we make. I think the important distinction is that smart devices are largely content consumption devices vs computers being relegated to content creation. For example, would you say that someone who’s used a SmartTV has used a computer just because the specs are largely the same?
I think you should fully expect computer use to decline over time because most people consume rather than create content.
[1] I find the overlap goes the other way: I'm using a laptop to write this, but I could have done so with my phone. Laptops and desktops are being used like smartphones.
As I said, the categorization is completely arbitrary and depends on how you choose to draw the lines, but neither categorization is right/wrong.
In other words, nitpicking pedantry, but nothing that should meaningfully shift the overall numbers. Same reason that you wouldn’t expect to include SmartTVs on this even though they’re all running Android.
So, it's more of the same, computer use is dwindling and so is general computer literacy. e.g. Ask what a file is, or a directory and majority of iphone users have no idea! Permissions too!
I find it so exciting, I read about this a while back, e.g. 2015, for user experiences and literacy and back then were reports that the entry curve for computers has been removed via cell phones (iphones, androids, e.g. general smartphones.) that daily computing difficulties do not present themselves as they used too (and they still exist.) from virus, malware, to sorting files, organization, search, and general software competency like excel and such.
But ask about social media apps and how they work - and there you go (which, ironically suffer the same issues on purpose, how do you sort information, organize new content or higher fruitful content, etc.)
There's also the fun part of addiction and dopamine feedback loops, but I'm getting a bit off the track here. :)
As someone that grew up with Win 95, this is a revolution in the way computing works. In the era I entered into computing, to use a computer really did often require at least a little knowledge of DOS or the commandline. Absolutely it required you to know how files and folders worked.
Viruses were super common and super easy to catch as we started entering the internet era. So part of correctly operating a computer involved picking and maintaining the right AV software.
That's a barrier that has kept people out of computing in general.
Now, everyone's grandma is on facebook (for better or worse). Everyone knows how to use a search engine. Even those that don't know how to use a search engine, know how to do "Siri: What is the capital of Kansas?". Knowledge is hyper accessible. (This also exposes new epistemological issues. How can we verify something is true when it requires hours of research, even with the internet?)
It is not a benefit, but just the realization curve that the more you make things easy, it can appear to be a step forward but instead become many steps back.
The whole reason I entered into this field, was because I could not get my computer to work, or that I didn't understand it - probably both, and it drove me to overcome those barriers. I was of course a kid, and the computer itself has entertained me and gave me decision paths that I would've never known possible without it.
It really is sad, those experiences seem gone to the sands of time and if a device doesn't work properly, then it's not per se the customer or audience, but an user experience flaw.
I have bad news for you if you think normal computer users were mostly good at understanding or explaining these things in the 90s or 2000s or whatever.
That said, I think the the term 'computer literate' is much less defined than 'literate', so using the term is a good way to start an argument.
My experience has been that outside of enthusiast or professional tech circles, and those directly adjacent, knowing stuff like where to expect a USB disk to appear when it's plugged in, or that you can cut/copy/paste files, what you can and can't drag-n-drop, where to expect common actions to show up in menus, the concept of UI focus and how it basically works in practice, and so on, places you in the (lower end of) top-tier of computer users, and pretty much always has. People, in general, have never understood how to use a computer well. We've had the term "power user" for folks who halfway know how to use a computer for decades now, because even most people who work with a desktop every day do not know that, and it's not like that was different pre-smartphone.
Either simple, ordinary GUI computer use is actually much harder than we (on a site like this) think, or the UIs and metaphors we use are flat-out awful and need to be re-thought from the ground up (what might that look like? Well, iOS has tried...). Or some combination of the two.
[EDIT] My point about the definition of "computer literate" hardly mattering is that I think you have to stretch it so far that it becomes useless before you manage to capture most computer users, since at least when they became common in offices. You have to put the bar practically on the floor before most users will pass it. I don't (entirely) blame users for that, to be clear, and think it has a lot to do with fundamental mistakes in how our profession and industry build & present UIs to ordinary folks who don't want to devote half their brain to understanding how computers work. It has very little to do with iPhones.
If you strip away that residue I would suspect that the number of true computer literate people has increased steadily since the PC revolution.
As such, I think computer literacy has probably dropped over the last 9 years as fewer people get started. Which in general isn’t a bad thing compare the number of people who know how to do even basic car repair in 2022 vs 1960.
Phones "just work" but phone screens are too small and touch keyboards too imprecise to do any long-form typing on it. I think the adoption of the phone as the most popular interface for the web has made the quality of software interfaces decline, and has made things like forums less mainstream, both of which are a shame.
> Conspicuously missing from the top of the list are several issues central to political polarization and partisan sorting (Baldassarri and Park 2020). Abortion ranked 237th overall, gun ownership ranked 124th, gun regulation 251st, help for the poor 167th and 229th (two forms of the question), and health care ranked 149th, 150th, and 227th (asked three ways). Their low rankings are not an artifact. Change and conflict are separate. Future research will have to decide if lack of change promotes conflict or conflict stunts change, but from these results we can say that the liberal drift of Americans’ identities and attitudes, especially as reflected in cohort replacement, left several hot issues unmoved.
It's all falling apart and I feel like democrats have been asking for it and continue to do so.
The idea that public prosecutors won't prosecute misdemeanors and stealing a bunch of stuff is a misdemeanor and so theft is essentially legal would sound mad to most - if we knew. But most people haven't updated on the American left going crazy over the last ten years and mostly just live in an old world where the left-aligned media was less openly partisan and more sane, professional and trustworthy.
Both Red Team and Blue Team are dissatisfied with increases in crime, with more homelessness, etc.
Red Team has a narrative that policing has softened, that district attorney's offices have stopped prosecuting street crimes or let people out too early, that we have lost order.
Blue Team has a narrative that these crimes and homelessness problems need to be addressed through social safety nets, fixing income inequality or housing scarcity, etc. Basically focus on upstream changes rather than the street-level stuff. And also has a separate concern about police brutality or corruption.
A rational actor can likely see that there are merits to all of the above concerns and ideas. A rational actor could perhaps find a pragmatic answer that attempts to solve for all of these concerns, expresses empathy for each of these intersecting problems, and builds consensus.
But we are just full tribal, anti-working-across-the-aisle, full argue against strawmen versions of the other tribe, so that can't happen anymore.
Combine our current lack of the principle of charity with our two party system and we're fucked.
when we break out of such dichotomies, we realize that people hold all sorts of views, and each and every person is a bundle of contradictions, pride, and ambition, all mixing together in strange and unpredictable ways to form our sociopolitical environment. there is literally no true 'liberal' or 'conservative' out in the world. these are constructed poles of a false dichotomy.
and as such, this is junk food for people who want to believe they're better/smarter/nicer/whateverer than those 'other' people, and for the powerful, this kind of dichotomization collapses complexity to simplify their work of holding and expanding power, principally as a distraction from those machinations.
As a non-supernatural tarot practitioner, binary political labels are objectively worse than tarot. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I came to tarot by way of procedural narrative generation. In that vein, tarot is a fantastic way of providing a space to temporarily reframe psycho-social conflict and construct compelling narratives within a consistent framework of narrative-semiotic objects.
I'm more than willing to admit this is likely a minority opinion, but it has helped me in re-examining things like perceived intentions, what is the true conflict, how would I feel about particular outcomes in a way that checks my gut instinct to reactively reach for the most convenient answer or one that makes me feel the best.
Edit: requesting Desktop site from mobile works. I guess they redirect mobile devices to a 403 screen? That is an interesting design decision...
As education increasingly becomes the political dividing line in America, liberal politics are where the valuable ad dollars are.
Edit: upon reflection, I would be remiss to not also advance the fact that the mainstream media is inescapably caught up within Twitter and it’s discourse. As much as Twitter “is not real life” and it is not representative of Americans views as a whole, it is representative of an outsized fraction of elite media attention.
Tbh I don’t really know what your point is.
Curious to learn more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30250026
As for my opinions on what the hacker news community believes. We know that certain demographics skew certain ways politically, empirically. It’s not surprising given the demographics of HN that certain beliefs are predominant here. That has little to do with money, at least not in the way it does for media products.
Advertisers are picked and closely vetted.
(Using liberal in the American sense here)
The forefront of culture is what's new and exciting. You have to actually be willing to try it out though. It's inherently not conservative.
Edit: the sibling's post about ad dollars is a fantastic point as well.
If that doesn't sound incorrect to you then I think it's down to the market. If the market willed the conservative voices to have a larger audience the market would so deliver. And if everyone dislikes market driven news sources then how the heck did we ever manage to defund NPR and similar programs?
Wouldn't there be a bias on what ads get accepted in general? Especially when Facebook is largely human monitored and Google caters marketing to populous beliefs, with AI augmenting this effect?
I find this to be a rather bizarre statement. While internally, both companies (as well as the other tech companies) are populated with highly educated employees, who tend to lean liberal, their public corporate behavior is neither particularly liberal or conservative until they are publicly embarrassed.
(Facebook and Twitter were an important component of Trump's election campaign in both runs, and at least the former is a big part of the COVID-denialism movement, right?)
1 - https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-union...
2 - https://www.wired.com/story/document-reveals-more-google-ant...
Liberals in 2022 are more like conservatives in 1970/1980 when it comes to nudity, community and free speech.
At a really basic level I think it's important to remember that corporations are not people (not just in the citizens united manner) - anthropomorphizing them is dangerous since (except when wholly controlled by a single unimpeachable entity like a founder or single person business) their actions are dictated by consensus and consensus decision making is incompatible with human morality.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
Erroneous! Erroneous on both counts!
The "liberal" party voted for the most centrist choice in their primary, and America picked him as their president. Americans today see Biden as more moderate than Obama, not more liberal [0]. I don't see how one can make the case America is getting more liberal when even the liberal party isn't.
The media is also absolutely not largely run and controlled by liberal think tanks and lobbyists. Nationally, Fox News dominates the ratings and had the top 3 rated cable news shows last year [1]. That doesn't even touch on SBG's well documented reach in key markets or conservative talk radio (which you can also find all over the top of the ratings lists [4]).
As such, they're able to promote and espouse liberal ideology and wokism into the minds of the majority.
It's hard to take such a claim at face value. On the one hand, conservatives like to play the victim against an undefined boogeyman, like we see here. On the other, conservatives are the ones wielding actual political power to enforce ideology through censoring educators and banning books [2], [3].
0 - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/100-days-american...
1 - https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/top-cable-news-shows-of-2021...
2 - https://www.businessinsider.com/virginia-school-board-member...
3 - https://www.wfft.com/news/education/indiana-teachers-push-ba...
4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-listened-to_radio...
After the American Civil War, slavery became illegal. After WWII, antisemitism became verboten. After the Civil Rights movement, open racism had to be suppressed. After the AIDS epidemic, homosexuality entered the public sphere. Each of those steps represented a loss to conservatism. But they were not caused by some liberal conspiracy, rather the "better natures" of people (most people really do believe in things like fairness and justice, at least in the abstract) were forced to confront behaviors that were just conservatively accepted.
Showing law enforcement using firehoses, batons, and dogs on people seeking to register to vote is not inherently liberal or conservative. The response, however, was liberal.
Yeah, NPR and CNN exist, but none of them draw near the audience of their conservative counterparts do.
It would be more accurate to say that conservative media is highly concentrated while liberal media tends to be much more diverse, but draws far fewer people.