The people in this community creates many tools and products that could help or hurt a lot of people. As such, we should readily engage in political discussion so that we fully understand the impact we have.
Look at this thread for examples. Comparing ICE agents to Nuremberg, etc.
This platform (due to the vote-based sorting) and this community are not capable of discussing politics in any meaningful sense. It's just popular opinions drowning out unpopular ones. That's why discussing politics is and should be discouraged.
But not you, right?
- China-based campaign breached satellite, defense companies
- Canada legalises recreational cannabis use
- Lead: America's Real Criminal Element (2013)
- AT&T, Time Warner, and the Need for Neutrality
- GitHub and Medium take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts
We've never not discussed it. But by avoiding discussing party policy directly (which is really what the rule seems to be), we remove many identity issues which keep people from seeing policies objectively.
HN is far from perfect, but that rule makes it a hell of a lot more pleasant and productive than most places for discussing politics.
I honestly don't know of any place on the Internt suited for a productive political discussion. I'd join such a space in a heartbeat. Given how politics is both complicated and universally triggers all the bugs in human minds, such a place would have to both structurally and culturally support discovery, fact-checking and moderation that ensures only good-intended, honest people participate.
(Regardless, borderline politics happens here all the time - it's because whenever tech impacts something political, people will bring that up and discuss it. So your complaint here is invalid anyway.)
I'm even willing to dig in and help put something together. I wonder if an ask HN around:
- How people would like to interact with such a system.
- What it would need to have/do to be useful.
I mean is there even a good format for such a thing? Debates for example are explicitly two sided, but exploring a problem rarely is. You need to track what's been tried, why it might have failed, see if it's worth trying again, allow people to suggest amendments which might help.
There's so much there.
1) It would need to have good mechanisms for structuring knowledge and discovery (and deduplication) of previous points. Instead of time-based approach, where people read and respond to streams of comments, it should be easy to review past discussions and maybe add updates based on new information or situations that develop.
Structuring and discovery is hard. I spent some time on Kialo[0], which is a "debate platform" that encourages tree-structured arguments. For any stated problem, people post arguments for and against, and each of those arguments can be recursively subdivided into for and against points, ad infinitum. It's a cute concept, but my impression was that the tree structure isn't good enough fit for the problem - frequently, you'd find the same points repeated at many different levels. A point "X" can be found simultaneously as a top-level "against" argument, and as a support argument three levels deep inside a top-level "for" argument, etc. The experience reinforced my feelings that problem spaces tend to form cyclic graphs.
2) It would need to have some mechanisms to encourage proper discourse standards. Moderation is one of them, but also some structural things more focused than just free-form comment textbox.
3) Ultimately, the goal of a platform should be to flesh out the problem space. The result should be an explorable artifact. This would help keep people on the same page, as well as get new participants up to speed (and inform non-participants who just want a honest overview of a problem they're interested in).
I have no clue how such system should be built, but I'd love to see and play with any experiments in this space.
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I was actually thinking about it from a different direction.
Allow people to enter free text and then aggressively parse it out into a structure. Make the structure visible and then work with the structure. But allow the free text to stand as metadata.
Allow the person writing to highlight/markup blocks in the main text that support their argument.
The structure I was thinking of as a starting point was a list of clauses. You could then surface people stating a clause, saying that it's sometimes true or false, disagreeing with it, and detect it across the nodes in the graph making discovery a bit easier.
Or even taking a clause and using it as a starting point for a new discussion.
The other thing I think that's necessary is what kind of environment you foster. Something like changemyview[0][1] with the delta system [2] comes to mind. Simply speaking a person awards delta's when they've had their mind changed in any meaningful way by a person, and they're required to give a short explanation or statement about why they awarded it.
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- [0] https://changemyview.net/
- [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/
- [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem
Sure! Feel free to mail me (address in the profile).
I wouldn't say I have done a lot in this space - I am just interested in it, and try to pay attention to any new ways to structure discussions and thoughts that helps people reach agreement.
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Your concept is very interesting, and indeed a completely different direction than what I was thinking. You seem to want to start from making free-text comments more machine-understandable, so that they can be further analyzed and grouped with similar points from other people? This seems it could mesh with what I wrote in the previous comment - I want to get a graph of ideas, and you just suggested an approach to generating that graph.
Fundamentally however the reason I keep thinking about that graph is that I keep wanting it. I wander into a complex nested discussion online which seems interesting and just want to see it visualised. Select statements and see who's making them. Focus on a part of the discussion one step at a time. Find commonalities and differences marked up.
EDIT: I sent that email I mentioned, not sure if you've seen it =)...
Heavy moderation is the key here.
What else are all the posts about Facebook/Uber/Net Neutrality/Security about? These are primarily moral issues that relate to tech, not tech itself. Most commenters here regularly engage in these conversations, as they should. But not allowing for other conversations to veer into the discussion of politics and morality isn't realistic. We need to be having those conversations more and more as tech becomes a part of the world.
The original post in this thread is 100% correct. You can't just isolate tech.
You must mean political lecturing, because 'discussion' implies more than one side, which means hearing from more than one side, which means not censoring or aggressively punishing voices apart from one side, which means "giving a platform to hate". Where 'hate' is one them magical words that is taken literally and figuratively at the same time, whichever is tactically convenient.
Not every discussion needs to be adversarial or black and white. Discussions can be constructive with all members on the same side talking about ideas .
Most development discussions that happen daily are just that, constructive with people throwing ideas around.
For example if we are discussing the best design pattern in a c++ API , and someone comes in and says "let's rewrite in basic" , when they're shut down, that is not shutting down a discussion, because that is not a constructive view point.
Similarly in politics, not everyone's opinion or view is valid or adds to the discussion. Being dismissed with reason is not the same as being disregarded and barred from discussion. It's simply saying, come back with something that adds to it rather than subtracts.
If you constantly find yourself left out of a discussion maybe consider your approach or your view points. Not every view needs to be considered by others, and either the way it's presented or the view itself may not be worth considering.
As it stands, my opinion is that separating children from their families seeking asylum is morally reprehensible. I'm willing to discuss immigration reform, but I think anyone arguing for the detainment of children is not adding anything of value to the discussion or humanity and is worthy of being disregarded with reason. Just like I would for someone who told me to rewrite a c++ codebase in basic.
I think it is a sensible policy.
Can you articulate why you think it is any worse than child services putting a kid into foster care when the parents go to jail for any other crime?
Illegally immigrating to the US is a serious crime but you can't jail the kids for the crimes of the parents.
The best option is to detain the kids until a relative can get them.
We have been detaining kids trying to illegally cross the border for over a decade now - if you have a better solution then voice it.
In the first instance it is a misdemeanor offence.
I don't think that's actually what people object to though. Remember the big (bogus) claim on social media that ICE had lost 1475 children who'd been seized from their parents? That was about unaccompanied kids who'd been united with family members. The entire thrust of that complaint is that it was some kind of Nazi-esque atrocity that ICE weren't totally controlling and tracking those kids.
Fundamentally, I think the objection is to two things: Trump being president, and the border being controlled. The only politically acceptable position right now is for every person to cross the Mexican border with a kid to be let through, and even that might not be enough because Trump.
I'd hope normal foster care in the US looks slightly better, and is better communicated (assuming the reports about ICE not telling parents what they are doing with their children are accurate). E.g. normally I'd expect incarcerated parents to still know about the whereabouts of their children, being allowed to communicate with them, ... unless there's strong reasons to forbid this.
While I think it's at least an interesting question if it is strictly necessary to separate families, I'd guess that if the process appeared less horrific there'd be a lot less of an outcry.
From what I've read, it also appears that the vast majority cases are first-time entries, which only is a misdemeanor in the US? While it makes some sense to "keep" people somewhere in this case (can't just let them go with a fine like you'd do for a traffic offense), it seems less than clear to me that this has to be to the same "standards" as people being jailed for serious crimes, and regular access to the children can't be possible. (And to be clear, I'd generally argue for such policies, not just in the case of immigrants)
It seems clear to me they should be - it's a clear deterrent against a serious problem.
> I'd guess that if the process appeared less horrific
I agree - the optics don't look good. But part of me thinks they shouldn't look good and this will quickly lead to fewer people trying to illegally enter the country.
America is now a majority-minority country in many cities. If this had happened 25 years ago, it wouldn't have made the news, and nobody would really care about who Microsoft worked with unless it affected white christians, who were viewed as the stand-in for a typical "American."
Today, black and hispanic and queer opinions do matter. When their concerns are taken seriously for the first time, those unaffected by it like to mope about how "everything is now political". Everything is now political because you're not allowed to sweep shit under the rug anymore and pretend it doesn't impact "real" Americans.
Most people do not want to see atrocities, and when they are brought to their attention they provoke a visceral reaction that demands justice. This is partly why white populism is now a bigger thing; we've crossed a sort of rubicon where you can't ignore issues anymore: they're real, and you either come out against them or you double-down on being evil. There's no more indifference in a world where everyone now counts and has the political power to make it so.
"The United States does not grant asylum in its diplomatic premises abroad. Under U.S. law, the United States considers asylum only for aliens who are physically present in the United States."
So I guess it's understandable that some people might believe they have to be physically present in the United States to be apply for asylum
False.
"To obtain asylum through the affirmative asylum process you must be physically present in the United States. You may apply for asylum status regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status."
"A defensive application for asylum occurs when you request asylum as a defense against removal from the U.S. For asylum processing to be defensive, you must be in removal proceedings in immigration court with the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)."
https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/refugees-asylum/asylum/ob...
Political asylum is for someone already in the United States, and protects an individual from removal to a country of feared persecution.
In either case the problem is people entering the country illegally versus legally and how to handle them in a way that doesn't create a queue of 600,000+ asylum seekers (which is what we have now). Think about that number given that I'm sure many of you know what limits we put on the number of legal immigrants each year.
For those who may argue for open borders I recommend studying the field of cultural pluralism. We're talking about a risk versus reward scenario where the risk is the existing culture being required to accommodate (replaced by) the incoming culture rather than the incoming culture assimilating to the existing culture and both changing at a manageable/stable rate. This is a function of two things most notably, the desire to assimilate to the culture and fit in, and the rate at which newcomers are allowed. The studies have shown it takes on average six years for a person who wants to assimilate to the culture to do so completely (this is from the field of cultural pluralism studies). From other studies about tipping points I can say that at most 25% can be allowed because that's all that's needed for a major shift and displacement of an existing culture, and that would be the number of people that are a part of a culture versus total immigrants (so unassimilated must remain below 25% at any given time).
Make of that you will, but as far as I can tell those are the major variables and numbers that need to be carefully considered and measured when it comes to the diversity, qualifications, and numbers of those we choose to allow emigrate legally and the criteria for the limitations we and other nations implement and control through the law. The reality is without significantly affecting an existing culture, meaning changing it at a rate faster than the resident population can accommodate reasonably without causing widespread problems/disruption for them or those coming here.
That's what I used to strongly believe then this weekend I listened to a Malcolm Gladwell podcast (yeah, I know, I know) and he made me think about it a bit differently.
Back when the border was super porous, immigration was more circular and cyclical. People would come into the US, work for a season, then go home. When the border became difficult and expensive to cross, people would cross the border and then stay.
There's an argument that can be made that a zero tolerance policy has created the current situation.
According to who?
I don't think that's true at all. I think immigration is the most important policy to get right.
Where is your judgment for importance coming from? What's your reasoning for making it such a huge priority? In a country with over 300M people, how is this relatively small amount of people having this vast of an effect? What is it affecting?
In terms of public opinion, consider this: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.asp...
I wish there was a ranked system to see more than the single importance, but the point being that very few see it as a high priority issue.
I don't have specific data for this claim, but I think it's also safe to say the issue is a polarizing one: the group who sees it as the #1 issue thinks its a huge problem while many others see it as almost nothing. The disconnect there is exactly why I led with those questions above.
I'd be interested in your answers to your own question. What are the day to day effects you face every day versus a much more liberal or a much more stringent immigration policy?
It's the key reason one of the richest states has some of the worst public schooling in the country.
It impacts hundreds of thousands of school kids and ensures they end up with a worse education.
I wish the techies who didn't care about the negative impacts had to send their kids to these schools.
Public schools are mostly funded by local taxes, yes? How exactly does this come into play?
All of this is still to say that you think your kid going to a slightly worse school is worth messing up all these lives so horrifically?
I'm not saying let's take every single person that goes to the US or that we shouldn't enforce immigration laws. I'm just saying let's not make a Holocaust in its name, and these policies are literally starting to mirror those types of events. I don't see how any equation of such direct pain to such a large number of people can possibly be justified by small effects on masses. That's a central utilitarian flaw in thinking this was a good idea. That and not caring about the lives of those being harmed. There's a difference between allowing one to immigrate and treating them as human.
I think you have been mislead by the media - at worst it is applying the existing long standing detainment practice to another maybe 20% of cases.
> Do you have the stuff to show it's actually hundreds of thousands?
More than 20% of public school students in California are classified as English learners - aka don't speak English.
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sd/cb/cefelfacts.asp
These people are not evenly distributed among schools/classes so in some schools half your class might not speak English.
What impact do you think that has on education levels?
The idea that this is a minor issue and results in only a slightly worse education is ludicrous.
And education is not a minor issue - when my kids were younger probably 30% of my income went towards my kids education.
That's 30-40% fewer hours I could have worked if the public system was any good.
1. A single state is not representative of the entire country. Let's keep in mind this is probably the state hardest impacted along with Texas.
2. Of those English learners, what percentage are illegal immigrants realistically? What about citizens who speak Spanish primarily? In California, this is not uncommon.
3. How would you spend 30% of your income on education at the K-6 level (where 3/4ths of these students are)? That seems virtually impossible no matter the income bracket and way you count taxes. If you're paying for private school, you don't have this problem.
4. If this is indeed such a large group at many schools, then those programs listed on the item you linked should be effective in serving both large populations, yes? If they aren't is that really the fault of immigration or simply a failing of public schools, which is not inherently due to immigration.
5. All of this to say that your kid getting slightly less time in K-6 education (after that, the population of English learners is about 6% of the population, which doesn't even take into account English learners who are not illegal immigrants, so likely even as low as 3% or less) is worth this hardline immigration policy? In a class of 40 students, that's two maximum from 6 grade on. I don't see how you can justify that.
6. Again, this is the state hardest impacted. Because California public schools have 3% or lower English learners that are illegal immigrants in their public high schools and other states likely have far less, we separate families?
Yes that's why I said hundreds of thousands of kids are being negatively impacted and not millions of kids.
> All of this to say that your kid getting slightly less time in K-6 education
You mean an incredibly sub-par education for kids key formative years!
Why do you seek to downplay the issue? Why not seek to solve the issue - perhaps in other ways?
> I don't see how you can justify that.
It's an easy justification to make - you just don't care because you aren't personally impacted.
A couple of thousand kids temporarily separated from parents who are knowingly breaking the law in exchange for ensuring hundreds of thousands of kids get a proper education is an easy decision to make.
And that's only looking at a single issue!
> You mean an incredibly sub-par education for kids key formative years!
This just sounds like scapegoating. I think the subpar education of public schools is not caused by immigration. Public schooling needs massive changes, immigration or not.
> It's an easy justification to make - you just don't care because you aren't personally impacted.
No, I'm caring about the kids of illegal immigrants as well as kids in the US. I don't value people differently by nationality or the status of their parents. And I value severity over quantity generally when it comes to moral issues.
> Why not seek to solve the issue - perhaps in other ways?
Again, I'm all for solving it, but I don't see how this was justified at all. Mind you, we don't even have any tangible numbers on the effects of this policy.
How can you confidently say that?
All the evidence points to it being a key problem.
> And I value severity over quantity generally when it comes to moral issues.
How do you judge severity?
You seem to be using your feelings as the barometer. Reality is not so simple.
We know that a poor education significantly increases the likelihood you will get involved in crime, go to prison, live in poverty, etc.
So what do you think will happen when you screw up the education of hundreds of thousands of kids?
All of the studies on poor/insufficient teacher pay, the funneling of money away from public K-12 schools, the personal experiences of many around me, some from California public schools, broken incentives from pushes for standardized testing from administrations the past two decades. The list goes on. And now you're going to say that immigration is anything significant compared to all of that?
> All the evidence points to it being a key problem.
All the evidence I have been asking for and you have not given?
> You seem to be using your feelings as the barometer. Reality is not so simple.
I'm sorry but having empathy for others is not judging severity on feelings.
> We know that a poor education significantly increases the likelihood you will get involved in crime, go to prison, live in poverty, etc.
Yes, having non-native English speakers in your school will cause your life to be ruined. Of course. Again, we're going to have to disagree on the effects here. This isn't going anywhere. The retreat to "you're bringing feelings into this" says a lot.
Every item you listed applies to states doing a lot better on the education front than California.
> All the evidence I have been asking for and you have not given?
What evidence will convince you that a high proportion of non-English speakers likely has a serious influence on educational outcomes for a school?
Would a strong negative correlation between number of non-English speakers at a school and school performance convince you?
And then once you have been convinced what will convince you that the most just and moral approach is strict border security?
Somewhat, once also adjusted for funding per student, pay of teachers, all those other factors.
> And then once you have been convinced what will convince you that the most just and moral approach is strict border security?
There's a difference between strict and inhumane border security. You act as if we have to pick one. I don't think you'd ever convince me on that front because I can picture so many better options to this policy. There is no obligation or moral requirement that we cause this harm due to lack of any other options.
Edit: down voting this message won't discourage me to say it
I thought it's a great way to actually address the bigger problems in the world personally. Because most political involvement is precisely the opposite of effective helping.
Politics is arguing that climate change is a communist/leftist/whatever invention. Tech is launching a satellite letting us quantify the actual impact. Politics is talking that education is important (except it must be the right education). Tech is giving people access to it (all of it) for free. Politics is driven by conflicting ideologies, and mostly detached from reality. Tech culture used to stick to the real world. Dilution of that is what people complain when they lament tech mixing with politics.
(Yes, I'm probably older than average tech worker.)
The classic example is the building of the atom bomb. Sure some people may build a satellite, but far more will program things to show ads. The choice alone to work on the satellite and not the ads is both a moral and political decision. If you don't make the distinction, you're ignoring the underlying issue. And it's of course not as black and white as "make a satellite to get data for science" and "make ads".
You're right that tech can power change in a positive way, but it's much more about the choices we make in regards to what tech we work on. That's exactly my point. All tech is a tool that must be used with care.
My gripe isn't with US political climate though - it's the same thing everywhere, at every level. The same issues apply to New York and San Francisco, and to my hometown of Kraków. They apply to my country of birth, Poland, and they apply to every other country in Europe, and to EU. My problem is with the facet of politics that involves ingroup-outgroup mentality, appeals to emotion, following ideologies, and doing literally everything else except solving problems at hand. This is what I wanted to never see tech mixed up in.
You're very right that doing tech inherently involves a lot of moral choices about what to work on, how to work on it, and how to use the result.
You clearly care about the morality and would want to have political action based off it (in so that it was effective, etc). So given that, why is time spent on changing political mechanisms and enacting change using new technology any less important than the tech itself? In fact, why isn't it more important than the tech? I'm not trying to make the case for one side here, but more tease out that no matter the sad state of politics everywhere right now, it's still crucial to taking the tools to have any effect.
I can't say I know the specific path to change, but I think it's important we value the problem and not dismiss politics as a whole. I personally am interested and have stuff on my reading list for the role of technocratic government setups over democratic decisions for certain fields/areas of government like infrastructure. If you work and discuss ways to fix a political system you do a lot more than trying to stay out - who are you then leaving all those decisions to?
Going back to the original thread, you said this:
> I thought it's a great way to actually address the bigger problems in the world personally
If you ignore the political side, it doesn't matter if you invent the cure for cancer if all the politicians decide to burn your paper upon reading it.
I can't remember who said it, but I read once that developing technology is about giving politicians more options. The complicated incentive systems governing modern politics may not allow the rulers to solve some problem right now, but if you give them more options, then maybe one of them can be used. E.g. with climate change, there's no way politicians will just shut down coal plants and build nuclear ones instead. But dropping prices of renewables give them an option to achieve the same end goal more gradually.
Ultimately, my (current, always subject to change) view is that if you want to help effectively, you need to avoid touching the dysfunctional parts of modern politics as much as possible, lest they suck you in.
When you have more than one person, and they interact with each other, they need to deal with things like authority, rules, fairness etc - all of which are political. The reason why I wrote "three" is because it's the minimum at which you can have the majority forcing some authority or rules on the unwilling minority, which is when that politics becomes explicit.
It's nice to think of aspects of life that should be free from politics, but in reality that seems hard to achieve.