First, I'm not sure what politics versus math reading has to do with the topic at hand - namely, car headlights. Second, you're complaining about downvotes. Third, you're complaints sound like "kids get off my lawn". So yeah... that's why you're getting downvoted.
To more directly engage with your point, politics isn't just an exercise in group think. It has very real consequences for many people - consider the number of deaths per capita in Germany versus that of Sweeden. The difference in response is one partly of politics and resulted in unnecessary deaths.
What didn't land for you, maybe for more people, was that documentaries, classical and jazz, etc. are not as appreciated because they require some effort to understand and thereby appreciate. That was my point about wishing a textbook would top the bestsellers list and not yet another book shilling apocalyptic hypotheticals about Donald Trump that the author always has some magical cure for. It's like self-help politics, but The Secret is "impeach Donald Trump", every time. It's easy. It's low brow after the first dozen books, as it only intends to satisfy helpless aggression in readers. And while it's nothing new, I wish people were as enthralled with a book teaching math or chemistry or accounting. You know, stuff that's useful to people.
If someone wants to write a book about the process of governance, that's one thing. But if it's another pseudo-analysis-by-way-of-emotion book, it's disingenuous to suggest an anti-Trump political commentary is any more useful today than anything written by Ann Coulter.
> I've been here off and on for almost 9 years.
But it's flagged / dead.
Anyway. I'm not a Wrongthink Troll. Just a guy, probably more like you than not in most ways... that has a low tolerance for self-aggrandizing behavior. The tone of the post I replied to just rubbed me the wrong way.
I apologize for the unconstructive nature of my comment. I should have said nothing. Now I just feel like the Tone Police... And nobody likes that.
Comments get rethreaded and killed at the drop of a hat as well. The buried comment was a non-mainstream opinion, so not welcome here. We have a flag on the profile screen to see hidden posts and they are often the best posts that point out when something makes no sense, but just happen to be worded slightly rude to someone else's point of view.
It's definitely not a place for free thought and people voting up discussable viewpoints they don't happen to agree with. You should just take it as a heavily curated slice of SV echochamber that you can examine, but not modify.
Disingenuous headlines are a huge problem and are part of "spin" (aka marketing or propaganda effort).
All available research -- plus tons of anecdotal experience on /. or HN or reddit -- shows that people never read the links that are posted, and, if they did click the link, probably won't read 100% of it. Most people share links without reading articles as well.
The headline is what generates the controversy, and should reflect the actual or original content of the piece. I am okay with mods changing headlines to reflect that. I have no doubt this is a SV echo chamber -- but it's a news aggregator run by Y-combinator, what the hell did you expect?
See also: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nosacredcows/2018/09/study-con...
https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/how-people-read-online-...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-we-do...
http://thesciencepost.com/study-70-of-facebook-commenters-on...
It's also a good reason documentaries, classical and jazz music, and non-fiction books in all but self-help and cookbooks sell poor. I'd love to see a huge textbook covering pre-Calc through intros to harder topics like Real Analysis and Stochastics top the bestsellers for 22 weeks. But instead, people are buying the 5,431st political commentary about how we'll never recover from Trump unless we do everything the author says.