[crooked-v]

The problem is the "without too much cognitive dissonance" part. Lots of voters have completely dissonant views that they've never consciously considered in any way. Just by posting on HN, the people here are probably in the top 5% of conscious political awareness in the US.

[idiotsecant]

Let's not get too eager to pat ourselves on the back here. The typical HN denizen is very confident they are an expert in political analysis but they are also convinced they are an expert on renewable resources, plumbing, forestry, and literally ever top they come across. It's a disease frequently caught by software people, for whatever reason. They assume if they can write software they can do anything.

I have seen a huge amount of confidently staggeringly wrong political takes on HN. I'd say on par with any other platform.

[gopher_space]

> It's a disease frequently caught by software people, for whatever reason.

It's a disease spread by math and physics profs dismissing other domains, and weirdly prevalent in an industry solely concerned with gluing together different points of view. The poor kids that don't take common core seriously never pick up the conceptual framework everything depends from and are simply unable to reason about ideas that need to be connected together.

[BLKNSLVR]

That's a good point.

The secondary (and on from there) effects of most of their views are not considered, and so their views are not internally consistent at all.

Small government! (why do I have to wait so long for my support payment query to be answered?)

No immigration! (why can't I find someone to clean my house on the cheap?)