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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are signs WAY before you need to "try to vote him out of office".

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.

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.

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.

(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 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.

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 :)

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.

[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.

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.

From a pure realpolitik standpoint, alienating voters who can be convinced to do the right thing is just foolishness.

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.

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.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

...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.

Evolution: "This is the way."

So again - you are generalizing and stereotyping.

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"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act_trials_of_Communist_...

> 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).

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 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 should be one among many institutions. When the government is the only institution (or has control over the other institutions) we are in a totalitarian state -- and that is a horrible place to be for human well-being.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

People forget that “real” work is not kind on the body.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For my math degree, I also had requirements in: psychology, philosophy, religion, science, writing, and foreign language.

Which is why both sides either denigrate college or treat it as some sort of tech jobs training.

(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?

"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...

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."

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.

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.

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-...

There's value in the arts, but I think it is overrepresented in universities.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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 think the anti-college popularity ties directly to the incredible cost of it in the USA, not that its necessarily a bad thing.

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.

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.

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).

- 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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-...

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

People respect Biden more than they respect Trump. This isn't Biden's fault, nor the fault of the people.

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?

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.

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 part of my comment indicates I am playing the victim?

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...

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.

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.

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.