[MereInterest]

Thank you for posting this, both for the support against his disagreeable position and for the reminder that engaging with people isn't always the best option. Sometimes I start by wanting to make sure that an abhorrent viewpoint has at least a visible reply, so that any readers don't see the comment as evidence of a community consensus. But that leads to me getting emotionally invested in an argument, trying to address whatever tangential non-arguments get pulled back in.

Partly, the interface of Hacker News or any vote-based commenting system makes it hard to track comments overall. I can look up comment trees relative to my own posts, but that doesn't show me that the user "ilovepitchdecks" has been arguing along the same lines with multiple other people in sibling comments. Their viewpoint isn't in any way a community consensus, and is being soundly addressed by the community, but that wasn't readily visible just from one thread.

All in all, a bit of a ramble, but I wanted to say thank you for posting this and that sometimes I need to just downvote and move on.

[ilovepitchdecks]

Well, your motivation is my motivation too, we just happen to have a different idea of what is 'abhorrent'. I'm just tired of seeing these kinds of political comments go unchallenged. It was my interest in tech that made me come on HN (I don't know about you) and I didn't expect to see so much one-sided political rhetoric here.

Who exactly is part of this 'community' you speak of? This site is on the public internet and open for anyone to join. I don't remember being asked to accept some political ideology when registering.

And this is exactly the problem with consensus: There never is one. Just because nobody speaks up, doesn't mean everyone agrees with you. Nor should they. I have been to those kinds of meetings where the majority of people don't voice a dissenting opinion or, in fact, any opinion at all. To interpret silence as agreement is just bad faith.

In fact, your narrow definition of 'community' is elitist and closely mirrors its use in the mainstream press (such as in 'international community', which just means 'the West').

[MereInterest]

So, this is against my better judgment, but I'll try to give a bit more description. You sound earnest here, and heck, you remind me a bit of myself from 15 years ago. That said, I want to focus entirely on the meta argument. I don't think there's any use in going further on the argument itself. To caricature our positions, at the end of this conversation, you can still think of me as a liberal communist who wants to tax away all of John Galt's hard-earned money, and I can still think of you as an idealist libertarian who thinks their lottery ticket into capitalism will pay off. But hopefully we'll be able to have better conversations in the future.

Many of your arguments are insufficiently defined. You make a statement, and then force others to assume what you meant from it in order to have any further conversation. When people do, you instead say that there was a different intended interpretation. For example, in the thread between you and me, the ambiguity of what you meant by time and effort earning money. Or, in your thread with "teddyh", your ambiguity about what you would like done to government.

In other cases, you ask questions that have obvious follow-ups or obvious follow-ups. They don't function as rhetorical questions, because the obvious follow-up works against the point you are making. Instead, they come across with the impression that you are deliberately wasting somebody's time by requiring somebody else to give the bare background information on a topic. For example, when you ask "If there are indeed 'low-effort, high-income' jobs, why isn't everybody doing them?". To me, the obvious follow-up is that there are structural imbalances that allow access to those jobs only to subsets of the population. We can talk about what those structural imbalances are and how they manifest, but needing to first establish that different people have different opportunities available to them is one step removed. That is what makes people feel that you are arguing in bad faith, because it makes the argument be on something that had been taken as given when entering the conversation.

Another part is that it is just so damn hard to tell the difference between earnest people and trolls. I know people personally who have your views. Heck, I had pretty close to your views for a while after reading Terry Goodkind's "Faith of the Fallen". But this is also the internet, where I don't know people other than by the few words in an individual comment, or a single comment thread. And depending on how far off somebody's views are from the Overton window of any particular forum, they can easily be the troll positions taken in order to rile up a crowd for their own amusement. Some people become desensitized to these attempts, and then assume that anybody with those views is automatically a troll. (See also, Brandolini's Law.)

I do honestly hope that you are sincere, and that this helps you to better express and examine your views in the future. It's hard to have conversation in a text-only medium, both because it is asynchronous communication, and because it doesn't have the side channel information of tone or facial expressions. Hopefully in the future, we can have more productive conversations and both come away the better for them.

[eecc]

You're welcome. I chose to earmark my dissent precisely for the same reason you ch engaged. I'm pretty done with the "silent majority" argument, but otoh I cannot drown myself in every quicksand :)

have a good one...