[drewcrawford]

While I agree with you, I think looking at this through the lens of only "hey look some irrational muggles" belies the fact that hackers do the EXACT SAME THING.

Web vs native? Vi vs emacs? Tabs vs spaces? PHP vs... everybody else? TDD vs anti-TDD? Git vs Mercurial?

I mean sure there are statistics and facts to back these views but there are also statistics and facts behind which sports team is the best or whether the debt ceiling is bad. There's no meaningful difference.

[shubb]

I guess my point is, the difference between sports and politics is that sports don't really matter. Neither do the other things you list.

TDD vs Anti-TDD for a self driving car. That matters. The engineer that decides that based on an online argument is going to jail when someone dies.

Is mental illness real or should people just pull themselves together? Well we can banter about that, but if you are a psychologist deciding whether to release a patient from protective custody, you better follow evidence based best practice or you are in big trouble when they jump onto a freeway.

That last example is kinda important - when we talk about politics, it feels like it is just banter. Like we don't have to have nuanced, well formed opinions because who cares what we think anyway. We only have one tiny little vote right?

But democracy is driven by the average. And if the average views politics as the same as an internet flamewar (which is what you said right?) then democracy says that politics becomes an internet flamewar. And... well, what I'm saying is, oh look, it kinda has.

You know, poor Americans die about 20 years younger than average ones. I'm not saying that is your fault, and I'm not saying the solution is mandatory health insurance or glorious revolution. I'm just saying it's kinda fucked up. And I'm saying the real issues don't seem to get debated. Not really. Because... the public want a flamewar.

See, America needs to do something about it's debt levels. Probably. And the answer to that is probably years of slow deficit reductions, best done when the economy is growing (accepting it will take a chunk out of that growth). And America probably needs to do something about it's poor, because things are becoming less equal, and if you go for a walk around Mexico City late at night looking swag, you will find out that isn't a situation you want to have. But the solution to that is hard an slow and boring and probably involves scaling back this free trade thing a bit.

But the conversation about debt is either continue borrowing like crazy or massively scale back, both of which mean doom, so neither of which happen. The answer to the poor problem is too nuanced to be discussed, except in terms of rage against the rich or people on SSI depending on your team of choice.

I dunno, that was sort of my point. I think it tailed off toward the end...

[drewcrawford]

> the difference between sports and politics is that sports don't really matter

I have some news for you. The sports industry is something like $400bn. If the Lakers have a bad night or whatever, it matters.

You may not understand why moving players around a field matters, but it seems to me that this is roughly the same sort of ignorance that would be behind the view that pushing pixels around a screen "doesn't matter". The fact that X is a hundred billion dollar industry is primate facie evidence that it is important. You may not want it to matter but this is a different thing than determining whether or not it actually does.

I guess what I'm trying to get across is that there is a certain sentiment of "silly other people, stop being bad!" that easily occurs in these conversations. The TDD debate sounds important for cars but .001% of engineers are working on the self-driving cars. Most software is mundane and these debates are 99.9% academic and are even had in the abstract without affecting any tangible software at all! In many ways, the hacker arguments are far more tribal and less practical than anything going on in sports or politics.