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A comment on Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week. Parent comment

Re:Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one... by 7952 on Monday December 05, 2016 @05:18PM (#13110268)
A trouble I have with HN is the casual assumption that a subject actually has an objective truth that can be debated. Often we just don't agree on the basics of what is actually important in a philosophical sense. So every fact is just a proxy for a particular world view. It is better to question the underlying assumptions than the facts themselves. We don't need to do this with technology or buisness because we already share the same sort of world view.

You see this kind of problem on debates about climate change. Once people learn about environment and ecology they tend to assume that humans have an unavoidable impact on the planet. Climate change "deniers" simply have a different intuition. All the science in the world is not going to change that. Which is why it is political, and not objective.

Really the entire point of politics is to debate things that lack definitive truth. Of course that is probably true of anything that is discussed on a forum to a lesser or greater extent. Otherwise the answer would already be on Wikipedia.

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Re:Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one... by tripzilch on Monday December 05, 2016 @06:27PM (#13110872)
I also often see this when someone argues that a certain action by a company isn't ethical--which has no objective truth, but that makes the debate only more fruitful, IMO--and someone else then replies that this company has every (legal) right to act this way, which has more of an objective truth by most standards, but isn't very interesting at all if you don't live in the same jurisdiction, nor has it much relevance to whether the action was "right" (in the ethical sense) or not.

But then, I guess, that person has every right to conflate moral and legal rights ... so sue me? :)

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Re:Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one... by 7952 on Tuesday December 06, 2016 @12:31PM (#13116441)
Yes, I have lost count of the rants against "natural products". People develop these buying habits in response to an inabilty to hold complete information about a product. So you have to have shortcuts based on your world view. For every organic lover there is someone slurping Soylant.
[ Parent | on HN ]