7 ms·

It is shockingly easy to convince workers that rights are bad for them. The same thing happens at many blue collar jobs.

omeid2 7y ago
More generally, it is shockingly easy to frame an issue with disinformation to misguide the general public. The only solution to this is better education that teaches critical thinking rather than mechanical parroting-exams based system that is widespread today in majority of the world.
- d-sc 7y ago
  It’s not even that. I’ve seen plenty of people who are very good at critical thinking have views that to me seem nonsensical.
  - enriquto 7y ago
    really? I thought that intelligent people always agree on everything!
  - omeid2 7y ago
    Cognitive Dissonance is a real thing. I think those nonsensical views are largely possible to hold because they're commonly held and not that they have any merit. Unfortunately we are extremely susceptible to conformity and social proof. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2F_7B_-FI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2F_7B_-FI4
  - homonculus1 7y ago
    Is it off-topic of me to ask for examples out of pure curiosity?
  - sampleinajar 7y ago
    Fair enough. Critical thinking is a way to think about a problem that does not guarantee similar conclusions, nor does it imply that it can used effectively for all problems.
- RomanBob 7y ago
  >The only solution to this is better education that teaches critical thinking The underlying assumption here is that everybody is capable of anything if only they were given the right 'education'.
  - nothrabannosir 7y ago
    Or, more charitably: "everybody is capable of improving anything if only they were given more education than they are now."
    - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
      "everybody is capable of improving anything if only they were given more education than they are now and cared enough to study" Is probably more accurate. You can bring a horse to water but you can't make them drink. It's impossible to know but it may be that those who are willing to be educated already have been and those who are left are willfully ignorant or have low enough intelligence that education isn't possible. As society becomes more complex, greater and greater numbers of people will be unable to successfully interact with it. What we do with them is a unsolved problem.
  - omeid2 7y ago
    "Everyone is capable of anything" is a bit of a stretch, but as general rule critical thinking is not improbable for majority of the people. That is, I believe with better education we can have a substantially larger number of people who are capable of critical thinking and can navigate through trickery and misinformation at a basic level.
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      Even under assumptions of universal inherent capability, the dirty truth is that we simply don't know how to reliably teach critical thinking en masse. That's nominally what college is for, but the universalization of college admissions has exposed the fact that the difference between a degreed and non-degreed worker had more to do with the input population to colleges than any direct effect of a college education. This is an unsolved problem, and a really important one in the modern cognitive economy, which is why theories about inherent cognitive capability have gained so much purchase recently. For my part, I think these theories are plausible, but also think that their implications are significant enough that I don't want to be too hasty and buy into them until I've been convinced that we've exhausted the possibility that thinking can be taught.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >The only solution to this is better education that teaches critical thinking rather than mechanical parroting-exams based system that is widespread today in majority of the world. As long as... a) The politicians find it easier to manipulate dumb voters and realize that voters with good critical thinking skills are more capable of calling out their BS. and b) The bureaucrats deciding what gets taught in public school are ultimately accountable to people appointed by and accountable to politicians and c) Most of the voting public gets a public school education. ...we will never have a general public with good critical thinking skills. Now, before anyone puts words in my mouth, no there isn't some grand conspiracy to keep the proles stupid, it just so happens that there's a disincentive to making them smart and making them smart takes resources so obviously there's no will to get it done. You'd be surprised how much good stuff the government doesn't do is attributable to this incentive structure.
wutbrodo 7y ago
This is a pretty disgusting level of paternalist condescension towards workers that's unfortunately all too common in these discussions. Believe it or not, not all blue-collar workers are stupid ignorami who don't understand what labor regulations means for them. As the article says: > Plenty of drivers said they understood Uber’s and Lyft’s political messaging. And some drivers who spoke to Recode made an articulate case for why they want to remain independent contractors. (A poll of 1,200 drivers by independent blog The Rideshare Guy last year showed that about 76 percent of respondents wanted to remain independent contractors rather than become employees.) That isn't to say that there isn't an issue with deceiving workers: Uber and Lyft hardly have a reputation for ethical business practices, and I wouldn't be surprised if their messaging was intentionally unclear here. On top of that, it's possible that restrictions on labor can be positive and I'm not ruling out any degree of labor paternalism as valuable to society. But your reductionist framing of blue-collar workers as simpletons who couldn't possibly disagree with you about _the way their own lives and employment should work_ is despicable. And frankly, the doublespeak involved in labeling restrictions on labor relationships as rights (and thus obviously and unambiguously positive) says much more about your ignorance than theirs.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  The GP didn't say this is exclusive to blue collar worker; they only used blue collar as an example. It is shockingly easy to convince any kind of workers to go against their own best interest, whether it comes to unions or employment regulations. E.g., I know plenty of white-collar workers in my country who believe they're being robbed by their country because their employers have to also pay for their socialized health insurance, naively assuming that if that was not the case, they could actually pocket that money.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    Sure that's fair, but that only expands the circle of condescension, which is perhaps _slightly_ better because it weakens the element of class snobbery. The notion that anyone who disagrees with you is an idiot who doesn't understand what's good for them as well as you understand what's good for them is what I'm pushing back against. The very phrase "voting against their own interests" is dripping with condescension and the presumption that you understand their lives better than they do. It's the same justification used for every historical and current violation of freedom in the social sphere: gay conversion therapy, the drug war, mores around gender roles, etc etc. The fact that economic constraints don't evoke the same immediate reaction as social ones doesn't mean that economic policy can't have an immense impact on people's lives, and cause or alleviate immense suffering. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not some extremist hyper-individualist believer in Homo Economicus, and I think there's plenty of scope for paternalism in policy. I think that it's entirely possible to talk to a specific person about their policy beliefs and come away with the view that they don't understand what's going on and are voting against their own interests. I just think that a little humility is in order when making assumptions about other people's lives and struggles a d choices, and applying this approach en masse with blanket statements like the GP comment (and your own, to a lesser degree) is a lot more likely to be ignorant of the realities of the variety and complexity of these people's lives.
jnty 7y ago
This isn't exclusive to blue collar jobs. Software engineers seem positively allergic to unions!
- specialist 7y ago
  Apropos of nothing, I belatedly realized that all my libertarian minded friends (geeks of an age) are often simultaneously fans of both Ayn Rand and game theory, two notions largely in mutual opposition.
fergie 7y ago
The same thing happens at many white collar software engineering jobs. How many people on HN are in a union?
- pessimizer 7y ago
  Because it's very easy to get turkeys to vote for Christmas. Turkeys have no idea why you like Christmas or what you're planning for Christmas, they just know what you're telling them. Tell them that turkeys are the most important things on Christmas and it would be entirely spoiled without them, and promise them a handful of feed right now as a reward for voting for it. You don't even have to lie.
- systemtest 7y ago
  What would be the benefit of being in a union as a software engineer? I never felt that I needed one.
  - darpa_escapee 7y ago
    A few years ago Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay all successfully kept engineer pay down through anti-poaching agreements[1]. Unions provide checks and balances against that type of abuse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
  - sp332 7y ago
    You could eliminate open-plan office spaces.
Frondo 7y ago
The same thing happens at technical jobs, too. In the programming world, how many people are convinced that white-collar desk labor is qualitatively different from assembly line work, such that unions apply to factories but would never apply to a bunch of coders in an office building? I grew up hearing that programmers are professionals and individuals and we can all negotiate for maximal pay, and of course that's poppycock. The vast, vast majority of programmers would be well-served with a guild or union at their workplace, because most are simple laborers trading their time for dollars; exactly the same boat as people building cars or wiring buildings. Everyone cites the rock star making bank -- you are probably not it, and even if you're on the upper tier, a union could get you a larger slice of that company pie, and could get you more of a say in how the workplace is run (no more crunch time? more schedule flexibility? more time off? more opportunities for mentoring or being mentored? pick how you want your workplace improved...). The thing is, technical workers were headed down the path of considering themselves labor until IBM brought in union-busters that crafted this propaganda of "the nature of the work means we're more like engineers or doctors or lawyers and THEY'RE not unionized" (ignoring that they're all members of professional guilds). So, thank IBM that we're only now, decades later, starting to see labor organizing in tech fields, and here, only in the most abusive of fields (video game development); thank IBM and our desire to see ourselves as somehow above the guys who built the buildings we're in.
- Frondo 7y ago
  Here's a short read about why it'd benefit nearly everyone reading this here to unionize... https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2018/05/31/why-95-percent-of-software-engineers-lose-nothing-by-unionizing/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2018/05/31/why-95-perce...

omeid2 7y ago

More generally, it is shockingly easy to frame an issue with disinformation to misguide the general public. The only solution to this is better education that teaches critical thinking rather than mechanical parroting-exams based system that is widespread today in majority of the world.

d-sc 7y ago
It’s not even that. I’ve seen plenty of people who are very good at critical thinking have views that to me seem nonsensical.
- enriquto 7y ago
  really? I thought that intelligent people always agree on everything!
- omeid2 7y ago
  Cognitive Dissonance is a real thing. I think those nonsensical views are largely possible to hold because they're commonly held and not that they have any merit. Unfortunately we are extremely susceptible to conformity and social proof. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2F_7B_-FI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2F_7B_-FI4
- homonculus1 7y ago
  Is it off-topic of me to ask for examples out of pure curiosity?
- sampleinajar 7y ago
  Fair enough. Critical thinking is a way to think about a problem that does not guarantee similar conclusions, nor does it imply that it can used effectively for all problems.
RomanBob 7y ago
>The only solution to this is better education that teaches critical thinking The underlying assumption here is that everybody is capable of anything if only they were given the right 'education'.
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  Or, more charitably: "everybody is capable of improving anything if only they were given more education than they are now."
  - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
    "everybody is capable of improving anything if only they were given more education than they are now and cared enough to study" Is probably more accurate. You can bring a horse to water but you can't make them drink. It's impossible to know but it may be that those who are willing to be educated already have been and those who are left are willfully ignorant or have low enough intelligence that education isn't possible. As society becomes more complex, greater and greater numbers of people will be unable to successfully interact with it. What we do with them is a unsolved problem.
- omeid2 7y ago
  "Everyone is capable of anything" is a bit of a stretch, but as general rule critical thinking is not improbable for majority of the people. That is, I believe with better education we can have a substantially larger number of people who are capable of critical thinking and can navigate through trickery and misinformation at a basic level.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    Even under assumptions of universal inherent capability, the dirty truth is that we simply don't know how to reliably teach critical thinking en masse. That's nominally what college is for, but the universalization of college admissions has exposed the fact that the difference between a degreed and non-degreed worker had more to do with the input population to colleges than any direct effect of a college education. This is an unsolved problem, and a really important one in the modern cognitive economy, which is why theories about inherent cognitive capability have gained so much purchase recently. For my part, I think these theories are plausible, but also think that their implications are significant enough that I don't want to be too hasty and buy into them until I've been convinced that we've exhausted the possibility that thinking can be taught.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>The only solution to this is better education that teaches critical thinking rather than mechanical parroting-exams based system that is widespread today in majority of the world. As long as... a) The politicians find it easier to manipulate dumb voters and realize that voters with good critical thinking skills are more capable of calling out their BS. and b) The bureaucrats deciding what gets taught in public school are ultimately accountable to people appointed by and accountable to politicians and c) Most of the voting public gets a public school education. ...we will never have a general public with good critical thinking skills. Now, before anyone puts words in my mouth, no there isn't some grand conspiracy to keep the proles stupid, it just so happens that there's a disincentive to making them smart and making them smart takes resources so obviously there's no will to get it done. You'd be surprised how much good stuff the government doesn't do is attributable to this incentive structure.

wutbrodo 7y ago

This is a pretty disgusting level of paternalist condescension towards workers that's unfortunately all too common in these discussions. Believe it or not, not all blue-collar workers are stupid ignorami who don't understand what labor regulations means for them. As the article says: > Plenty of drivers said they understood Uber’s and Lyft’s political messaging. And some drivers who spoke to Recode made an articulate case for why they want to remain independent contractors. (A poll of 1,200 drivers by independent blog The Rideshare Guy last year showed that about 76 percent of respondents wanted to remain independent contractors rather than become employees.) That isn't to say that there isn't an issue with deceiving workers: Uber and Lyft hardly have a reputation for ethical business practices, and I wouldn't be surprised if their messaging was intentionally unclear here. On top of that, it's possible that restrictions on labor can be positive and I'm not ruling out any degree of labor paternalism as valuable to society. But your reductionist framing of blue-collar workers as simpletons who couldn't possibly disagree with you about _the way their own lives and employment should work_ is despicable. And frankly, the doublespeak involved in labeling restrictions on labor relationships as rights (and thus obviously and unambiguously positive) says much more about your ignorance than theirs.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
The GP didn't say this is exclusive to blue collar worker; they only used blue collar as an example. It is shockingly easy to convince any kind of workers to go against their own best interest, whether it comes to unions or employment regulations. E.g., I know plenty of white-collar workers in my country who believe they're being robbed by their country because their employers have to also pay for their socialized health insurance, naively assuming that if that was not the case, they could actually pocket that money.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  Sure that's fair, but that only expands the circle of condescension, which is perhaps _slightly_ better because it weakens the element of class snobbery. The notion that anyone who disagrees with you is an idiot who doesn't understand what's good for them as well as you understand what's good for them is what I'm pushing back against. The very phrase "voting against their own interests" is dripping with condescension and the presumption that you understand their lives better than they do. It's the same justification used for every historical and current violation of freedom in the social sphere: gay conversion therapy, the drug war, mores around gender roles, etc etc. The fact that economic constraints don't evoke the same immediate reaction as social ones doesn't mean that economic policy can't have an immense impact on people's lives, and cause or alleviate immense suffering. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not some extremist hyper-individualist believer in Homo Economicus, and I think there's plenty of scope for paternalism in policy. I think that it's entirely possible to talk to a specific person about their policy beliefs and come away with the view that they don't understand what's going on and are voting against their own interests. I just think that a little humility is in order when making assumptions about other people's lives and struggles a d choices, and applying this approach en masse with blanket statements like the GP comment (and your own, to a lesser degree) is a lot more likely to be ignorant of the realities of the variety and complexity of these people's lives.

jnty 7y ago

This isn't exclusive to blue collar jobs. Software engineers seem positively allergic to unions!

specialist 7y ago
Apropos of nothing, I belatedly realized that all my libertarian minded friends (geeks of an age) are often simultaneously fans of both Ayn Rand and game theory, two notions largely in mutual opposition.

fergie 7y ago

The same thing happens at many white collar software engineering jobs. How many people on HN are in a union?

pessimizer 7y ago
Because it's very easy to get turkeys to vote for Christmas. Turkeys have no idea why you like Christmas or what you're planning for Christmas, they just know what you're telling them. Tell them that turkeys are the most important things on Christmas and it would be entirely spoiled without them, and promise them a handful of feed right now as a reward for voting for it. You don't even have to lie.
systemtest 7y ago
What would be the benefit of being in a union as a software engineer? I never felt that I needed one.
- darpa_escapee 7y ago
  A few years ago Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay all successfully kept engineer pay down through anti-poaching agreements[1]. Unions provide checks and balances against that type of abuse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- sp332 7y ago
  You could eliminate open-plan office spaces.

Frondo 7y ago

The same thing happens at technical jobs, too. In the programming world, how many people are convinced that white-collar desk labor is qualitatively different from assembly line work, such that unions apply to factories but would never apply to a bunch of coders in an office building? I grew up hearing that programmers are professionals and individuals and we can all negotiate for maximal pay, and of course that's poppycock. The vast, vast majority of programmers would be well-served with a guild or union at their workplace, because most are simple laborers trading their time for dollars; exactly the same boat as people building cars or wiring buildings. Everyone cites the rock star making bank -- you are probably not it, and even if you're on the upper tier, a union could get you a larger slice of that company pie, and could get you more of a say in how the workplace is run (no more crunch time? more schedule flexibility? more time off? more opportunities for mentoring or being mentored? pick how you want your workplace improved...). The thing is, technical workers were headed down the path of considering themselves labor until IBM brought in union-busters that crafted this propaganda of "the nature of the work means we're more like engineers or doctors or lawyers and THEY'RE not unionized" (ignoring that they're all members of professional guilds). So, thank IBM that we're only now, decades later, starting to see labor organizing in tech fields, and here, only in the most abusive of fields (video game development); thank IBM and our desire to see ourselves as somehow above the guys who built the buildings we're in.

Frondo 7y ago
Here's a short read about why it'd benefit nearly everyone reading this here to unionize... https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2018/05/31/why-95-percent-of-software-engineers-lose-nothing-by-unionizing/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2018/05/31/why-95-perce...