💾 Archived View for dioskouroi.xyz › thread › 24991178 captured on 2020-11-07 at 00:37:09. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
________________________________________________________________________________
The author makes a typical assumption: that people actually want things to be better. Quite often people make their situation worse despite being made aware of the consequences. On some level, even if they can't/won't articulate it, that's what they want.
As I've gotten older (currently in my early 30s), my experience has been that most people are resentful and jealous under the surface, and they want to take out that resentment and jealousy on the world in some manner. Particularly in hard-hit and neglected areas of the country where 99% of the motivated and capable people who might have been inclined to help your optimistic vision moved out long ago.
That doesn't mean there's nothing to be done or that every neglected suburb/small town is irredeemable, but I'd be careful not to apply social optimism too generally. No amount of optimism or energy will allow you to grow crops in a salted field, you can only directly help those who want to be helped. Spend your energy where it's most productive.
That said the author is correct in that leading by example, not being a dick about it, and fixing peoples' problems is about the only tool available with any hope of earning the respect of those who disagree with you. So if you have the time, money, skill and energy it's worth at least a few tries before declaring an area beyond repair. :)
(Original author here)
Fight vs. flight. How do you decide? I'm just a bit older than you (36 currently) and haven't figured it out yet.
Like, if I think the politics somewhere are a dumpster fire, or to use your analogy, growing crops in a salted field, how do I pick the battles I'll fight, vs. the ones where it's best to let go?
Offhand, I tend to think it's worth fighting for when the thing is very important to you personally, it's something only you can do (whether by dint of identity, skills, whatever), or the benefits are large. Probably not worth it when you don't have the patience (might take ten years but you only want to put in 5), the other side is too entrenched, or the upside isn't worth it. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
> when the thing is very important to you
Your preferences will change over time. When I was younger, I had an intense desire to provide some grand public good. Now I regret those wasted years, and all I want to do is take pleasant walks around my neighborhood with my dog, and maybe play soccer in the park.
Most of us, almost tautologically, are similar to each other. Ask some older people what their preferences are and you'll have a reasonable idea of what you'll be like at their age. Sure, there will be generational differences, but the shift in yourself will be comparable to the shift that other people went through.
I shouldn't say I regret those "wasted" years. I regret them only to the extent I regret not having won the lottery, which is to say almost not at all. However, I want to caution against committing to a decision that might limit your options in the future. In particular, the choice of where to live has a dramatic effect on your career, your friends, and your family.
In your blog post, you mention that you are doing all this in Homewood, IL which, while declining a bit from the time when you grew up, is still a pretty nice place. With a commuter train connection to one of the largest business districts in the US, there are still tons of ambitious and motivated people around you. Your local high school is shared with the much wealthier city next to you, etc.
I don't think the person writing the comment was imagining this kind of city. Good luck reversing the decline of the South Suburbs. It will take a lot of work. The largest problem, in my opinion, are the oppressive property taxes (municipal consolidation is probably the only solution). Do you really think that someone can live comfortably down there for $20-30k per year? Or are you talking in terms of founders that have plenty of capital and only need $20-30k in living costs? I really don't think it's that cheap...
Much bigger conversation I'm happy to have off-thread (email me). I agree with everything you've said.
I own an apartment building and the rent on a 1BR close to downtown is $875/month. Mind you, this is 2 blocks from a commuter rail station in a reasonable building that includes water and parking, in a city with a great park district, good schools, and plenty to do.
I didn't say you're living high on the hog--you're getting by. The household median income in Homewood is 57k. It's no Palo Alto, just a relatively modest town with reasonable local government and people who seem to care a lot. I like this.
Illinois is clearly on a fiscal crash course. I have no doubt about that and now that the fair tax was defeated at the ballot box, it's going to accelerate the insolvency. The state needs to get its pension obligations in line with its funding levels. Obviously that's going to take a decade. But I'm pretty convinced that this state's strengths (Chicago, great universities, lots of competent local governments) could make it bounce back. Especially seeing the direction a lot of other states like California are going, or San Francisco, a city that can't seem to balance its $13 billion annual budget after it increase 50% in the last 5-10 years. Any idiot can run Palo Alto, where the median household income is $140k. It takes a lot more to make a city with about 60% less income function.
Yeah it's hard to develop a general criteria. There are also situations where you may be making a lot of invisible progress, and what appears to be a hopeless situation for years hits a breakthrough and suddenly huge progress is made overnight because people were actually listening to some degree. So trying to map everything out ahead of time can be a fool's errand when you have no objective measures of progress.
If the goal is to avoid sunk cost fallacies, I'd say the answer is same as anywhere, budgeting. Develop some general, convenient (very important they're convenient, otherwise you won't track them) metrics, so that way you have at least a general idea of how much time, money, sleep, even vague things like energy level, stress and opportunity costs can be tracked to some degree. That way you have some quantifiable measure of how many resources you're sinking into a project and if it's worth it (ie I was abnormally stressed out directly due to this effort for 137 days last year, is it worth another 137 days of abnormal stress? Or from an opportunity cost perspective I could have spent those 50 hours playing with my kids, would that have been a better investment?)
Also set some hard budget ceilings and very stiff criteria (like at least an 80% chance of meaningful progress, whatever that means specifically for the situation) for going over them. That way you don't feel trapped by the ceiling, but it still holds you accountable.
Of course it's all on the individual to maintain the metrics and stick to the budget, but I'd argue if you don't have the discipline to do even that you might want to question your ability to execute any plans for more complex community development :)
You do realize your argument is just as easily applied to every disadvantaged/disenfranchised population, right? "You just can't help those people..."
I'd rephrase as "you just can't help SOME people".
There are disadvantaged/disenfranchised communities that are that way primarily due to circumstances beyond their control (ie local large employer closed/left town) and would/will pick themselves up given the opportunity and perhaps the right leadership.
There are also plenty of disadvantaged/disenfranchised communities that are so pathological and broken every person in town could win the lottery and the community would still be in abject poverty a year later.
If you're going to try your hand at community development you have to determine which mixture of those camps your community is. It's difficult to discern, but too often the question of "what are the social/cultural issues preventing the community from moving forward, and how might those be addressed?" gets dismissed because the people who get into community development have a messiah complex and can't imagine how these poor victims they're saving might have contributed to their own circumstances. When talking about communities of color the question is often dismissed as racist. The result is superficial, overly-idealistic solutions that almost always fail.
"A man's got to know his limitations."
There's a big difference between "You just can't help those people" and "_I_ can't help those people."
I accept that to a certain extent, but it's a slippy slope to 'why should I pay taxes to try to help those people'
It can be. But that can also be confused with "you're sucking up a great deal of tax money, but what you're doing isn't actually helping".
So the covid forced return of the young urban professionals will be the savior of all the places they hail from?
As someone who grew up in one of the kinds of places these people retire to when they're old and gray I have some serious doubts that they are going to do anything other than tell everyone else "you're doing it wrong".
I choose to live in an area of the country people seem to move to only if they have no other opportunities as youth, or are old enough to not worry about opportunities via retirement. It's cheap here, is what I'm saying.
And many, many young people are moving back and have 'discovered' farming, forestry, and gardening. They treat it like they've discovered some long forgotten relic of an ancient past.
We do those things already. The difference is, nobody in their 80's, and nobody struggling with a family farm is making an instagram about it.
Maybe I'm getting old, and maybe I'm getting crotchety. But, if one more 20-30 year old tells me how I should be growing crops and how crop rotation works, without letting me interject that I've been doing this for longer than they've been alive, and have a current, operating partnership with the local University co-op for soil/water/native wildlife conservation projects, I'll scream.
We've all been there. As a younger person, you know everything! The old farts don't know what it's like. I can't believe they haven't tried this new thing! As an older person, we're like why do you keep insisting on doing it the wrong way thinking it is a new way to only discover there was nothing wrong with the old way.
But this is different. This isn't 'new way' in this case. This is solidly - 'old way' and 'you're already doing it, but let me tell you how I know so much more than you'.
I've lived long enough to understand that young people want new and exciting. I tried to convince my 90+ year old grandfather to invest in hemp farming in the early 90's. I get it. But, again, this is different.
There's a level of arrogance. There's a level of - you're over 45, so you can't possibly understand the internet and what's available. And there is a steadfast refusal to listen to other opinions and ideas, unless they're explicitly endorsed by glam farmers or celebrities on instagram.
I know that all sounds so crotchety and old, but it's the truth. This isn't just 'new is better'. This is 'I am better'. It's different.
Which is it? Try to work through official public channels, and you’re just telling people they’re doing it wrong. Take action yourself and you’re usurping power that rightly belongs to the community. Do nothing and you’re a miserly transient failing to care about or invest in your community. Stay away and you’re an uppity, entitled elite who thinks you’re too good for the place.
The locals are going to resent you no matter what, so maybe just do what you want.
It is....hard to take this article seriously when it compares the Chinese cultural revolution’s forced resettlement of millions of people to white collar workers moving out of Silicon Valley voluntarily because they CAN work remotely and WANT to save money. Even as an interesting anecdote/analogy to open the article with. The lack of perspective is a bit mind boggling to me. Like, the former fucked up quite literally an entire generation of people.
We did it because Silicon Valley instilled in us a bias for action, and gave us the skills, and connections, to get it done
but then
Don’t be obnoxious. Listen as much as you talk. Don’t be a blowhard.
Q: How much are the 'bias for action' and 'skills' relevant, compared with having connections and - just possibly - _money_ ?
I was thinking the same thing... lack of capital is perhaps the main reason that people in poorly maintained suburbs aren't buying buildings to start bakeries and daycares, rather than a lack of initiative...
(Author here). I've been surprised that that's generally not the case.
Cities spend money on all sorts of things -- their own tax revenues, as well as grants from higher levels of govenment (state and local). If you look at the incentive structures of most local governments, their leadership wants to be seen as "doing something". This usually translates into big, tangible projects, particularly "infrastructure", that's "large" and that ordinary people can understand: bridges, malls, stadiums, etc.
Coming from venture tech, these projects are mind-bogglingly expensive. Even a mid-size office building costs millions to construct. 10-20 stories, big underground garages, easily into $xx or even $100 million, or more. These aren't pie-in-the-sky numbers, my wife is a practicing San Francisco architect. It costs $60-70 million to build a 200-unit "affordable" apartment building with ground-floor retail. That's like 5-10 mid-sized series As. Just to build a damn building.
Point being, in my conversations with the city government, they all sort of know there's something going pretty right in these coastal cities -- many places would kill to have the tax base and jobs of a place like Austin, or San Francisco -- they really just don't know _how_ to facilitate that. So much city government is wrapped up in tangible infrastructure like business parks, highways, and shopping centers when the things I most need, as someone building a technology company, is a nice, walkable downtown, easy-to-lease commercial real estate (not landlords that require 10-year terms, 20 years of operating history, and AAA credit), a reasonably responsive government, fast broadband, a few decent coffeeshops and restaurants, and nice people. None of these things are especially expensive and given how dysfunctional a lot of the coastal cities have become, it's not hard for a lot of places to provide. They just need to know _how_.
> they all sort of know there's something going pretty right in these coastal cities [..]
and yet
> given how dysfunctional a lot of the coastal cities have become [...]
(Genuine) Q: Are you saying other places should, or shouldn't, attempt to copy the coastal cities?
EDIT: For full disclosure, should add that we happen to live in a small town with abnormally high tax revenue compared to the rest of this region - and indeed this country - due to the taxation arrangements in this part of the world. _Lots_ of money to go round, sounds good? Certainly we have local amenities that other towns nearby would kill for. Yet town local politics sucks, over-engineering is rife, and money is regularly wasted. It's blessing and curse in equal measures.
I think you’re spot on about government spending, but I was referring to the buying a building and funding a bakery. Very cool ventures and I’m glad you undertook them, but being able to get together with a group of peers and buy a building To fix up is what I thought the big limitation is for most people in the burbs.
> It costs $60-70 million to build a 200-unit "affordable" apartment building with ground-floor retail. That's like 5-10 mid-sized series As. Just to build a damn building.
At $200k a head, that $60M would provide 300 employees with a year of runway. The building will house 300 people for over 30 years. Which is a better investment for society?
I can feel the incredible arrogance of this post from here. "I, who came from the source of half the problems we're in, am smarter and better because I am from the Valley. I will fix everywhere else's problems because I am optimistic about it!"
Yea, this was hard to read and was oozing with SV elitism and savior complex. I live in the suburbs in the Midwest. I work in tech. My company builds open source technology used by millions of developers around the world. My neighbors work at leading health care technology companies or startups.
We did all of this on our own. In fact, many of us here in tech have scars from being discounted outright by SV investors simply based on location. Show some respect and humility for what we've built here on our own, without your seemingly necessary support, or you'll find this movement backfire.
Well, he did also say:
> Don’t be obnoxious. Listen as much as you talk. Don’t be a blowhard.
Might I recommend helping out by working on connectivity projects, even to the extent of starting a local ISP? Internet access in many parts of the U.S. is pretty bad, and improving it would open up many new opportunities for remote work, remote learning, and tele-health. Due to the pandemic there is increased availability of funding for these types of projects, even to the extent that for example some health-care providers are considering funding or directly running a local ISP _just_ to support their tele-health customers, because otherwise they are totally cut off from their patients.
If you're interested in talking more about this check out my profile, I run a website about this kind of thing.
I remember an ISP in Berlin - something 15 year ago - that would deploy their own WiFi routers to provide service and support their own radio backbone. Forgot the name though...
?
I was nodding along until the author talked about taking issues that are rightfully the government's responsibility into their own hands. This is exactly the wrong thing to do -- to usurp power from those who rightfully wield it, whether they wield it well or poorly. This is like Uber doing the government a favor by taking over the responsibility of public transit. Sure you might get where you're going, but you've undermined the democratic institutions that allowed everyone to participate and privatized a portion of the public realm.
This is one of the things the author gets right. The people who already live in these places have a different idea of what is and isn't the government's responsibility.
I think democracy is perfectly compatible with usurping power from those who wield it poorly. It would be great if the government solved these problems, but I don't think it's my place to tell someone to just sit there and take it when the government doesn't solve those problems.
That's pretty much the definition of fascism there.
So like, if the mailman refuses to deliver mail, it’s fascism if I personally deliver my letters and those of my neighbors if they want me to?
Edit: To be clear, the example of Uber was used as someone usurping, which doesn’t exactly accord with how I think about usurpation. To usurp to me is to claim the moral authority of the government. But in this sense, it seems to be used to describe providing services that could be provided by the government. Usurpation in the sense of claiming to be the government is bad. Usurpation in the sense of providing services the government won’t is good.
I don't think that's actually true.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism
> 1: a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
> 2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control early instances of army fascism and brutality
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fascism
> a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
> the philosophy, principles, or methods of fascism.
> a political movement that employs the principles and methods of fascism, especially the one established by Mussolini in Italy 1922–43.
The "usurping power" part sounds a bit scary if interpreted too literally, but realistically, I think /u/ksdale had something in mind more along the lines of ~if the government has a long track record of fucking up initiatives, a better response than sitting there and taking it is getting off your ass and do something about it. That was my interpretation, and to me that sounds like a pretty decent idea, although surely risky in some scenarios depending how one goes about it.
The government has an exclusive right to run mass transit?
Moving out of a city because the author wanted to save money and live with their parents is not a forced migration. The places lived still exist, and will exist long after. The mental gymnastics are stunning.
No one "strip mined" this guy into a comfy six figure job.
When I went from being an evangelical christian studying theology to an atheist a whole world of conversations opened up to me. I could suddenly talk to people of almost any faith about their religion which had been hard before. But only as long as they held their faith kind of loosely as a cultural or philosophical mantle.
But I could no longer have the same kind of conversations that I used to with my old theology friends who were all still Biblical literalists. Not that every conversation devoloved into argument nor that I was even particularly insistent on my new view. But after some amount of talking we'd hit a disagreement and quickly find the root of that disagreement was some basic belief we held about the universe. Something as atheological as why people are philanderers comes down to whether you believe in evolution via natural selection or original sin.
And that is where America is politically today. There are fundamental facts and values we disagree about. I find writing like this to be incredibly patronizing. As if people aren't already having polite discussions about politics. As if people are voting and do not know what they are for and against. The funny part too is that we are at a point where that is least true. Voter's knowledge of their party's policies is at an all time high.
It's hard to accept that we just fundamentally disagree. But that is the fact. Eventually, one side is going to win or we'll remain deadlocked and muddle on with some hybrid policies from both sides. But the polite conversation over the pot roast isn't going to convince Nana that fetuses don't have souls. That's not a simple difference of opinion it's a difference of faith.
There's so many other things that need attention, and I am coming to think our inability to set aside our conflicting basic beliefs is a big part of the problem. Like, Nana, Ok- you and I disagree about whether fetuses have souls. But can we talk about some other incredibly important but less emotionally charged issues for a minute, where we might be able to find agreement and do something good?
I point to Colorado 2013 and Colorado 2019.
- In 2012, the Democrats got full control & went after guns. They were recalled & lost control. Little was accomplished.
- In 2018, the Democrats took back full control. Polis went after instituting publicly-funded full-day kindergarten. This was a real accomplishment for everyone.
Basically, if I was a political candidate, my platform would be a ceasefire on the most high-profile wedge issues for the duration of my term!
We have at least two new Republican members of the House of Representatives who belong to a cult which believes that every Democrat is involved in a human trafficking operation that kidnaps nearly a million children a year, tortures them to death, and uses their bodies to generate a secret drug that they're all addicted to.
The "leader" of this cult, who our new House members have pledged loyalty to, is a pseudonymous poster on a message board that's otherwise used mainly for child pornography, who they believe is sent from a secret arm of the government and is also a time traveller and possibly an angel of God.
What common ground do you expect the Dems should find with them?
I think the parent is trying to say that you don't get very far if you always focus on the point of conflict? So in this case, out of all the Republicans, you wouldn't start with these two.
It's a fairly common occurrence to read like this here on HN. What's much less common is curiosity about whether the claims are actually/precisely true.
You have made several extraordinary claims about the state of reality in your comment - do you happen to have extraordinary evidence to accompany these claims? Another way of putting it might be: what is the source of your knowledge on these specific matters?
The rep-elects are Marjorie Taylor Greene[0] and Lauren Boebert[1].
The conspiracy theory cult I'm talking about is qanon[2].
If you're asking me to prove that Democrats are _not_ kidnapping children by the hundreds of thousands through a nationwide network of caves and tunnels, I don't really think I'm the person you need to talk to.
edit: yeah checked the post history and you're a qanon apologist. Find something better to do with your life.
[0]:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/03/qanon-marjor...
[1]:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/01/who-is-laure...
[2]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon
From your original comment....
> We have at least two new Republican members of the House of Representatives who belong to a cult which believes that every Democrat is involved in a human trafficking operation that kidnaps nearly a million children a year, tortures them to death, and uses their bodies to generate a secret drug that they're all addicted to.
A cult is a collection of people, each of whom possesses their own brain. Can you explain how you seem to think you have insight into the contents of all of these brains? It is perhaps worth noting that racists also make claims similar to yours.
> The "leader" of this cult...is a pseudonymous poster on a message board...
This is a rumour. A _conspiracy theory_. Who the "leader" of QAnon is, _is unknown_ to anyone except the individual or organization who started it.
> ...who our new House members have pledged loyalty to...
Do you have a citation for this, or is this more mind reading?
> ...on a message board that's otherwise used mainly for child pornography
Do you have a citation for this claim?
> ...who they believe is sent from a secret arm of the government and is also a time traveller and possibly an angel of God.
Again, how is it that you know the beliefs of other people?
> What common ground do you expect the Dems should find with them?
I'm quite a fan of the anti-war and anti-child-trafficking parts. There are likely others, I'm not overly familiar with the movement. The conspiracy communities I frequent tend to think QAnon is a joke, if not a psy op.
From your last comment...
> If you're asking me to prove that Democrats are not kidnapping children by the hundreds of thousands through a nationwide network of caves and tunnels, I don't really think I'm the person you need to talk to.
No, I am not asking you that. What I am asking you is contained within the text I wrote. What's interesting about conversations such as these is the irony - here you are mocking a group of people, basically on an epistemic basis. And yet, observe the quality of your epistemology...observe how easily you've fallen for the clever tricks that media persuasion + human consciousness plays on you:
- perceptions of ability to read minds (of people you've never met, or observed)
- general omniscience (knowing what something "is", without sufficient evidence, _and being completely oblivious to it_)
- an inability to skilfully distinguish between people's actual beliefs (contained within the text I wrote), and your _imagination_ about their beliefs
- etc
The ironic part is that these are some of the very same shortcomings shared by the most gullible people in conspiracy communities, _and yet you mock them_.
> yeah checked the post history and you're a qanon apologist.
Again, there is a difference between perception of reality, and reality itself. On one hand this may seem like a trite observation, but I believe it plays a _much_ bigger role in society than people perceive (in no small part because hardly anyone has ever really put any effort into understanding it in depth). At the very least, I think it's something that each person should have at least a basic understanding of, due to benefits like reduction of delusional thinking.
> Find something better to do with your life.
You have no way of knowing what I do with my life, or the relative or absolute value of it to myself or others. But let me take a wild guess: your _perception of_ the situation is _veeeeeery_ different, is it not? Do you not have a fairly high resolution perception of who I am, what I do, the impact of that on the world, etc? As a thought experiment, I encourage you to ponder how all of this knowledge (specific knowledge about me, but also of others) _got into your mind_. What is the lineage [1] of this information? I believe that if you are able to exert enough control over your mind to do perform this experiment with some decent skill, you may discover some interesting new ideas.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_lineage
EDIT: Also, I would appreciate it if you do not tell me or others what to do. Authoritarianism doesn't have a great track record, and it's also rather rude.
Not reading a word of this reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
Ah yes, the trusty gish gallop rhetorical defence.
_If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table._
That's fine, I suspect you read enough that a seed is now in your brain. Continue to hold strong beliefs for which you have no evidence _just like conspiracy theorists_, it's your life. :)
I regret using a culture war issue as my example because this is the exact opposite of my point. Even things far afield of the culture war are coming down to basic beliefs. Look at something as obviously beneficial and technocratic as Obama's Net Neutrality rules. No one disagrees that a neutral web is better but those got torn down because people fundamentally believe the government is incompetent and can't be trusted with regulation.
Look at Obamacare. Most health policy wonks see it as a pretty tame attempt to fix some issues with insurance and most people support mandatory coverage for preexisiting conditions. But it's been constantly on the defensive as government interference in free markets despite attempts in it to create a more transparent insurance market.
My wealthy suburb of Seattle attempted to block light rail despite desperate need for transit essentially because they basically don't like and don't want public transit. They don't see it as a social good.
People who want drug policy changes have tried to pass every reform you can think of and by and large it hasn't really mattered how minor or radical it is. The rhetoric against reform is the same whether we're talking about recreation marijuana, safe injection sites or decriminalization. There is a segment that believe using anything other than the boot of the law upon offenders is enabling and will degrade society. And there is a segment of society that believe drug abuse isn't a moral flaw but a health concern. Again, that's a belief stemming out of values and nothing else.
To your example, there are many places where public day care would be extremely controversial because people just don't believe in taxes nor the government taking care of kids. They are already often skeptical of public schools. Frankly, the main difference between Colorado in 2012 and 2018 is probably more to do with demographic shifts than how "radial" the policy is.
In a nutshell I'm saying, all of it, everything comes down to these basic beliefs. There can be no conversation about what the government do if one side believes the government should be trusted with nothing. There can be no conversation about what we should do with tax dollars if one side believes there should be no taxes. There can be no conversation about how to reform drug policy if one side only believes in strict punishment.
I'm going to nitpick here a bit because I think it demonstrates a larger point.
Net neutrality is far from a "technocratic" issue. In many countries, media companies like facebook or Netflix do partnerships with mobile phone operators where the two agree that use of Netflix doesn't count against a user's quota. Netflix wins because they get more customer use, the operator creates a more compelling offering, and the customer wins because they get a better deal. This is called zero-rating and it flies in the face of net neutrality. There's also the fundamental issue of ownership - if someone owns the cables, why can't they set the rules? Especially in situations where ISPs can compete? And really, do you want yet another set of regulations set in stone, by a body like the FCC, that's vulnerable to regulatory capture in how it interprets and enforces net neutrality? Can you even define "net neutrality" in terms clear enough for a regulator to enforce?
Point being, it's not just about basic beliefs. There are substantive policy disagreements that don't arise purely from social differences. Sure, there are some people who just don't like transit. Maybe others think it's wasteful. Did you see New York spent 2.5 _billion dollars_ to build less than two miles of subway recently? Reasonable people can disagree on whether that was a good use of money.
[1]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
I never said those fundamental beliefs were baseless. Just that generally people aren't viewing these things as trade-offs. You believe the government shouldn't be trusted with regulation and that it wastes too much money when doing transit. That's fine.
You can site examples that validate those basic beliefs and I'm sure someone could site some that invalidate them. But whether you think those examples are an exception or the rule largely comes down to your values.
Is this true of absolutely everyone, no. The Cato Institute produced a health plan similar to Obamacare after all. Yes, there is a small group of policy wonkish people that get off on this stuff but I don't think it's the majority.
Edit: btw if my point seems to dismiss people's opinions I mean exactly the opposite.
IMO posts like this say "if we could just sit down, we could see eye to eye and find compromise". But I think what they really think is, "if we could just talk, I could resolve their information deficit and they'd come my way a little". I think that's condescending honestly and underestimates how much people believe they have thought their beliefs through, how much evidence they believe thwy have observed and how invested they are in those beliefs.
> To your example, there are many places where public day care would be extremely controversial because people just don't believe in taxes nor the government taking care of kids. They are already often skeptical of public schools. Frankly, the main difference between Colorado in 2012 and 2018 is probably more to do with demographic shifts than how "radial" the policy is.
> In a nutshell I'm saying, all of it, everything comes down to these basic beliefs. There can be no conversation about what the government do if one side believes the government should be trusted with nothing. There can be no conversation about what we should do with tax dollars if one side believes there should be no taxes. There can be no conversation about how to reform drug policy if one side only believes in strict punishment.
I wonder how true memes like this really are. Indeed, various statistics and observations of what people _literally say_ can easily lead one to form this sort of conclusion, without being terribly unreasonable. _However_....if one had the means of sitting down with literally each individual in these groups for a very long, non-combative heart to heart discussion, would one find that the heuristic estimates of them are _completely bang on_, or might there be some noteworthy differential between how we perceive people to be, and how they really are (or _could be_ after some high quality discussion)?
Good point. A lot of this is my personal impression from lots of political conversations. But there are a few known interesting facts.
1 People know their party's policy positions more than any other time in modern history
2 Legislators vote more along their party lines than at any point in history
3 People split ticket and switch votes less than any time
One partially confounding fact to my thesis here is that
4 People "identify" less with a party than at any time in history
I sometimes wonder if there is an unseen fundamental problem (or many problems) hiding somewhere that we don't realize exists, and as a result we end up attributing the cause of our problems to what may often be red herrings.
After all, many far more reasonable approaches (incremental improvements, _at least_) to many things are usually fairly obvious, and I suspect most people wouldn't _really_ be opposed to it (if one was to sit down and have a serious conversation about it that truly addresses their nuanced concerns)...and yet, decade after decade we seem to make little forward progress (or at least, "not enough" - see: BLM), while a collective _feeling_ of confident, "righteous" frustration and rage with those "on" "the other side" (on both sides) builds.
The whole thing seems rather paradoxical, which to me is _suggestive_ that we may indeed be missing something important in our system analysis.
Can you think of an important national issue that is not emotionally charged and would be considered a win by most? I can't. Democrats lost control in 2012 because of healthcare reform (which probably had just as big an impact on Colorado than the local gun reforms). Pandemic prevention and economic relief are out. Climate change, no chance. Free school certainly isn't a unifying issue, even if it worked in Colorado.
To be honest, it just seems like you personally value education funding over gun control, and you're assuming most other people feel the same way while ignoring the broader national context of what was happening to the Democratic party in 2012 and 2018.
Also, what does "ceasefire" mean? If most people were ok with the status quo, it wouldn't be a major issue.
_Can you think of..._
A steady 70%+ agree our infrastructure needs a lot of work. We don't agree on how to get there yet, but at least we have a shared goal.
IMO the fact you can't think of an issue is a sign of how the wedge issues concentrate attention on themselves.
_it just seems like you personally value education funding over gun control_
https://co.chalkbeat.org/2020/11/3/21548349/proposition-ee-c...
68% Yes on EE, while only 55% went for Biden.
"Ceasefire" means nobody is really satisfied with the status quo, but you agree to suspend the fighting for a while.
> Basically, if I was a political candidate, my platform would be a ceasefire on the most high-profile wedge issues for the duration of my term!
Except you'll find it very hard to get elected in the first place, which is why we don't have many politicians like that. The candidate "appropriately" far enough left or right will get hit by criticisms over the large stuff the other side, and people that would vote for them will discount those criticisms. Candidates in the middle that claim they don't want to deal with those issues will be hit from _both_ sides with criticisms, and their own side will consider them, and the other side will use it to exclude them.
If I run for office on a platform of avoiding abortion rights to instead focus on something else, my own side will say "He doesn't care about women's rights/the lives of children", and the other side will say "he _says_ he's not interesting in doing this, but he's stated his believe here and there, and _can you really trust him_?"
All that's _before_ you get to the fact that constituents are driven into a furor on these topics, and whether any change will really be made on them, they care about electing someone that will try, even if it's very unlikely anything will happen.
Finally, what do you do as a candidate that isn't focused on an issue when the other side tries to use that as a good time to push for change on that issue? Do you then devote time and effort to at least retaining the status quo? How different does that look (and how different _is it_) to focusing on that issue, allowing the other side to claim they were right that you were lying about not caring about the issue? Or if you do nothing, then your own side points out that you let this issue regress.
I think the whole adversarial nature of the two groups means that any candidate basically has to at least publicly present themselves as a crusader for the issues their respective groups favor. Anything else can and will be used against them aggressively. Candidates can only be as relaxed and aligned on an issue as their respective groups allow them to be, and lately that's _not at all_.
Completely agree. Buttigieg (Mayor Pete) talked about this a great deal in his book. As a gay man, he recounted working with Mike Pence (Trump's VP) while Pence was governor of Indiana and he was mayor of South Bend. Talk about two guys you wouldn't expect to get along.
The key, as you pointed out, as did Buttigieg, is to identify areas where there are shared problems you can work together to solve. There's something about local government that seems to encourage this, in my opinion. Maybe you think gay people are awful and I go the pride march every year. Guess what, the water main is still leaking, and building permits take too long. Maybe we can just focus on working together to solve real problems, and accept that there are a range of social issues where we probably won't ever agree? And that's just fine?
I think we used to know how to do this in the United States, but something changed.
> something changed
It's worth considering what changed. Demographics changed, but we've always had some kind of mixed cultures and ethnicities. The history of it has been an expansion of who gets to be the "majority". Like Rome redefining who is a citizen.
Maybe it's broadcast media, but there's been national publications since the founding of the US.
Looking back to Antiquity, our situation doesn't seem so abnormal. I think it's just the ebb and flow of how groups of people interact with each other.
It's amazing how old our problems are. By that I mean how much they come up throughout history.
- Who counts as a citizen
- Who has the land
- Who gets welfare/benefits
- Who is anathema
- Who mediates power (bureaucrats? nobility? monarch? people?)
It's like a laundry list of issues that bagged ancient Rome, enlightenment France and late Tsarist Russia.
EDIT: It blew my mind when I actually started to read up on the French Revolution and found that besides what to do with the Monarchy, the issue that really divided them was Universal Manhood Suffrage. For years I had been fed the vague notion that some quasi-social-utopian issues were at the heart of it. But they really just couldn't agree on whether all men should be allowed to vote.
"Don't study liberal arts. It's a huge waste of time."
"And especially not philosophy or psychology - only losers who can't cut it in STEM take those courses".
- Me, not all that many years ago
Idk, I feel like that's just conceding on the topic. The modern conservative is just a party of no. I want to do something, they say no. I move on to something else? That's just losing.
No, it's not losing, it's prioritizing.
Local issues still fall pray to this.
- law enforcement
- public transit
- property taxes
- building permits (i.e. regulation)
- zoning
- public employee pay/benefits
All redound to these basic beliefs and have the added problem of affecting people personally too.
how much time does the mayor of a state's #4 town by population spend "working with" with the Governor?
> Polis went after instituting publicly-funded full-day kindergarten. This was a real accomplishment for everyone.
No it wasn’t.
> When I went from being an evangelical christian studying theology to an atheist a whole world of conversations opened up to me. I could suddenly talk to people of almost any faith about their religion which had been hard before.
This is odd to me, in that the theologians I know talk to people about religion a _lot_, and seem to have no issues talking to people with different religions. That said, they're generally Catholic or agnostic, which might make the difference.
Yes and to be clear I'm using theologian loosley here to mean anyone doing deep study on spiritual matters not necessarily someone pursuing a formal education.
I will give an example. I can have a conversation with most Catholic theologians about the origins of the Bible for example. We can have a conversation about mistakes in translations, alternative books that might have been canon, the disparate beliefs of early Christians, etc.
With an evangelical Biblical literalist? Good luck. The very idea that the books of the Bible were chosen by a council of proto-Catholics might be enough to end that conversation.
Can you give us an idea of what kind of samples sizes you are dealing with here, and any adjustments you made for confounding variables and that sort of thing?
I would say this is true in the vast majority of cases, except where the parties involved are intellectually honest enough to really consider different views. I myself have contributed to other people changing their religious views, and my own personal views on things have drastically changed thanks to discussions with other people.
However, the key thing is that it's not something you can really aim for. If you're in a conversation where both sides are sincere, each sides will eventually learn something from the other and it may or may not happen to be religious or political or something else. But if you go up to a distant coworker, stranger, or someone like that, you're just going to be a bunch of statements that they reject from the get go. So aside from those few exceptions, you're right, people will just disagree and aren't really open to considering different beliefs.
You know one of those kind of conversations when you're having it for sure.
> I find writing like this to be incredibly patronizing. As if people aren't already having polite discussions about politics.
That's like saying it's patronizing to read someone saying "please don't speed" because there's plenty of people not speeding. There's also plenty of people that _are_ doing it, and it's those people that it's aimed at.
> And that is where America is politically today. There are fundamental facts and values we disagree about.
There is benefit in exploring what those are. Just because differences are reconcilable doesn't mean there isn't progress that can be made. There's world of difference in a conversation that is about how "you _don't care about_ children/women" and "we disagree on some fundamentals so can't come to a perfect solution, but perhaps some compromise on specifics is possible, even if neither of us is happy".
> As if people are voting and do not know what they are for and against. The funny part too is that we are at a point where that is least true. Voter's knowledge of their party's policies is at an all time high.
But that's only half of it, it's not always what your group is for or against, but what the other group is for or against. I would hazard a guess that voter's _accurate_ knowledge of the competing party's policies are is at an all time low. Sometimes it's not about what your party will do, as much as what you think they'll keep others from doing, if you honestly believe those others are going to "take all our guns" or the equivalent.
There are fundamental differences, but I don't think they are at the policy level, they are far down and _inform_ policies. I've found little at the political level that I fundamentally disagree with anyone. Usually it's a matter of one or both of us not having good data, and instead going on what we _think_ the data is and how policies should affect it. Nobody wants poor people to be in the streets starving and freezing and sometimes causing crime, but most people don't want to devote so much to that issue that others don't get attention or they can't live their own lives. We're not disagreeing on some help to those people, we're disagreeing on _how much help and how much money_, and the answer to that is highly dependent on what you think works, why you think people are in that situation, whether they can ever get out of it, etc. Those are beliefs, but I think most people would be willing to reassess what they believe based on data, so they aren't _fundamental_.
Do you have any examples of contemporary issues where an infusion of information has triggered a successful policy reassement and compromise? If not an active success then some areas where it's possible?
I'd love to believe this but years of following local, state and federal politics have disabused me of this notion. Especially watching the Obama administration try that approach over and over unsuccessfully.
I guess Maine comes to mind but it's small size and idiosyncratic politics don't bode well for expanding that model across the country.
> Do you have any examples of contemporary issues where an infusion of information has triggered a successful policy reassement and compromise? If not an active success then some areas where it's possible?
At a group level? No. At an individual level? Yes. The problems are presented by the nature of the groups competing for mindshare, and I don't know a good solution for that. That doesn't mean that we can't have substantive and productive conversations as individuals though, which is what I'm talking about here. It's important to accept that the other party may have data you haven't considered yourself though. This isn't a call to "show them why they're wrong" as much as a note that actual discussion requires an exchange of ideas and data and an acceptance that there may be things you don't know that can change your own mind as much as the mind of others.
> I'd love to believe this but years of following local, state and federal politics have disabused me of this notion. Especially watching the Obama administration try that approach over and over unsuccessfully.
I agree. It's a hard problem when scaled up. When scaled down though, I think it's still tractable.
Can't help but think he'll get along great with the local truck drivers.
It's "learn to code" all over again. What a tone-deaf article.
This is white-savior level condescension, which is fitting since Homewood has been trending towards majority-minority demographics for a few decades and may get there this census.
The irony isn't lost in seeing a bunch of HN comments criticizing an article as condescending, only to come in and condescend the OP. We can do better on HN discourse.
What a pile of entitled nonsense. "Down" to the suburbs? From "up" in the rarefied intellectual world of pointless internet companies, I suppose. People don't like this kind of condescension, with good reason. And how about that slab of concrete. What an achievement! The poor suburbanites must find it a true thing of wonder.