3 ms·

Political comments suck. > 90% of them are just rehashed talking points and they quickly devolve into echo chambers for the dominant voting bloc. I'd much rat

Political comments suck. > 90% of them are just rehashed talking points and they quickly devolve into echo chambers for the dominant voting bloc. I'd much rather see an aggregator using something like an argument map.

emerged 6y ago
I've long been looking for a wikipedia for political stances. So you can sort of choose your own adventure going deep into the set of perspectives and why people choose them. Maybe building that would be impossible because the bias of curators would fill it with strawmen etc.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  You might be better off looking up the foundational texts for the various political philosophies. There's a lot of meaty and interesting stuff there. I'm partial to socialism, but reading the originals for liberalism, anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, etc is illuminating. People read (some of) this stuff in polisci degrees, but mostly they focus on quantitative micro stuff at the expense of the theories that motivate people. One thing polisci majors read is "Democracy in America" which was by a Frenchman taking a look at the new order post-revolution. As a socialist, I am partial to materialist views of history, and you can learn a lot by studying historical and scientific descriptions of the real conditions of societies. Usually they diverge quite significantly from whatever the ensconced and sheltered ruling class at the time likes to believe.
  - triplesec 6y ago
    An incomplete but useful list of classics might be the list following. You may wish to start with wikipedia entries on them, or other sources, but reading the texts themselves is useful! Plato: The Republic Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics; and Politics Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan John Locke: Two Treatises of Government Rousseau: The Social Contract Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws De Toqueville: Democracy in America Karl Marx: The Communist Manifesto; and Das Kapital. JS Mill: On Liberty (the classic Utilitarian Enlightenment work) John Rawls: A Theory of Justice (A hugely important work on rights and principles of political decisionmaking) Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State and Utopia (a right-wing / libertarian oriented response to Rawls) Michael Sandel: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (critique of liberalism and introducing communitarianism)
asdfman123 6y ago
/r/moderatepolitics on reddit is halfway decent. It's definitely liberal, but the way people discuss things is moderate, if that makes sense. It's not complete partisanship, and occasionally beliefs get questioned. Reddit and Hacker News both solve the problem of "how do you host a site to allow for political discussion?" To get good debate, you have to curate a social community by effective moderation. You see it on reddit all the time -- some communities are utter trash, and some are much better. It's a social problem, not a technological one.
- klenwell 6y ago
  A variation on this theme: make people frame their comments as falsifiable predictions. This is what Philip Tetlock advocates with his Superforecasting concept and sorta implemented here: https://www.gjopen.com/ https://www.gjopen.com/ The hitch: making good falsifiable or verifiable predictions is tough and time-consuming. Evaluating and judging them requires even more moderation. And let's face it: most online comments are not about advancing the public discourse. They're about getting a quick dopamine hit.
  - afarrell 6y ago
    Sometimes, it is about thinking-out-loud about an idea. That is to say, getting multiple dopamine hits as you type a long comment and imagine people on the internet being impressed by a comment you wouldn't be motivated enough to journal about.
    - chishaku 6y ago
      This is a really good point.
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    That also opens up the ability to weight comments from a given user based on their success in predicting political outcomes. If you have a high rate of success predicting outcomes, it's likely you have a good grasp on events in that broad category, and your comments are likely more valuable insights on-average.

emerged 6y ago

I've long been looking for a wikipedia for political stances. So you can sort of choose your own adventure going deep into the set of perspectives and why people choose them. Maybe building that would be impossible because the bias of curators would fill it with strawmen etc.

tehjoker 6y ago
You might be better off looking up the foundational texts for the various political philosophies. There's a lot of meaty and interesting stuff there. I'm partial to socialism, but reading the originals for liberalism, anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, etc is illuminating. People read (some of) this stuff in polisci degrees, but mostly they focus on quantitative micro stuff at the expense of the theories that motivate people. One thing polisci majors read is "Democracy in America" which was by a Frenchman taking a look at the new order post-revolution. As a socialist, I am partial to materialist views of history, and you can learn a lot by studying historical and scientific descriptions of the real conditions of societies. Usually they diverge quite significantly from whatever the ensconced and sheltered ruling class at the time likes to believe.
- triplesec 6y ago
  An incomplete but useful list of classics might be the list following. You may wish to start with wikipedia entries on them, or other sources, but reading the texts themselves is useful! Plato: The Republic Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics; and Politics Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan John Locke: Two Treatises of Government Rousseau: The Social Contract Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws De Toqueville: Democracy in America Karl Marx: The Communist Manifesto; and Das Kapital. JS Mill: On Liberty (the classic Utilitarian Enlightenment work) John Rawls: A Theory of Justice (A hugely important work on rights and principles of political decisionmaking) Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State and Utopia (a right-wing / libertarian oriented response to Rawls) Michael Sandel: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (critique of liberalism and introducing communitarianism)

asdfman123 6y ago

/r/moderatepolitics on reddit is halfway decent. It's definitely liberal, but the way people discuss things is moderate, if that makes sense. It's not complete partisanship, and occasionally beliefs get questioned. Reddit and Hacker News both solve the problem of "how do you host a site to allow for political discussion?" To get good debate, you have to curate a social community by effective moderation. You see it on reddit all the time -- some communities are utter trash, and some are much better. It's a social problem, not a technological one.

klenwell 6y ago
A variation on this theme: make people frame their comments as falsifiable predictions. This is what Philip Tetlock advocates with his Superforecasting concept and sorta implemented here: https://www.gjopen.com/ https://www.gjopen.com/ The hitch: making good falsifiable or verifiable predictions is tough and time-consuming. Evaluating and judging them requires even more moderation. And let's face it: most online comments are not about advancing the public discourse. They're about getting a quick dopamine hit.
- afarrell 6y ago
  Sometimes, it is about thinking-out-loud about an idea. That is to say, getting multiple dopamine hits as you type a long comment and imagine people on the internet being impressed by a comment you wouldn't be motivated enough to journal about.
  - chishaku 6y ago
    This is a really good point.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  That also opens up the ability to weight comments from a given user based on their success in predicting political outcomes. If you have a high rate of success predicting outcomes, it's likely you have a good grasp on events in that broad category, and your comments are likely more valuable insights on-average.