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Reading the comments in this thread and I am amazed at the sudden pro-authoritarian shift seen on HN lately, what's going on?

Miner49er 6y ago
The whole internet has slowly been shifting that way it seems. During the Anonymous era and Snowden leak era HN and the internet seemed much more anti-authoritarian.
pas 6y ago
The sudden outpour of the wisdom of ~30 day old accounts.
wnevets 6y ago
tech people aren't immune to the hyper divisiveness taking place around the world. Once "your team" decides it no longer wants to respect freedom of the press or election results then you must follow suit. Gotta make sure your team wins, right?
- austincheney 6y ago
  Some people don’t play on a team.
  - centimeter 6y ago
    Then you're probably following a losing strategy. "Team" doesn't have to mean "generic normie political party"; there are other team dynamics at play. In any case, if you haven't partitioned the political space into allies and enemies along at least a few planes, you're probably going to get taken advantage of (at the very least).
    - austincheney 6y ago
      I am fine with being an individual with original opinions but I can empathize with insecure people who band together for reassurance.
      - centimeter 6y ago
        If you're not attuned enough to figure out why political alliances are worthwhile, your opinions probably aren't that original. It's not a matter of "reassurance" - it's about economies of scale. If the best explanation you can come up with for why a bunch of people exhibit a behavior you don't is "they have a personality flaw", this is very strong evidence that you don't actually have a good grasp of people's motivations.
        austincheney 6y ago
        Strength in numbers is a compensation for insecurity. > If the best explanation you can come up with for why a bunch of people exhibit a behavior you don't is "they have a personality flaw" Conformity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity
        centimeter 6y ago
        Why do you think people who are undoubtedly smarter and more original than you are also buy into political "teams"? If "conformity" is your best answer, then once again, this demonstrates you don't really grasp what's going on.
        austincheney 6y ago
        Read the Wikipedia link. It answers your question.
        centimeter 6y ago
        This is not meant as an insult to you, but just as a warning that you should keep this in mind when you’re analyzing your own decision making; you are pretty clearly neither smart nor original. It’s very unlikely you are actually ever going to have any valuable original thoughts, at least in the way you seem to think you do. I’m sure you’ll appreciate this since your profile is all about “radical honestly”. Taking Dalio seriously is another sign of a hopeless midwit with an inflated sense of intelligence.
  - lallysingh 6y ago
    That's another team.
    - bobthebuilders 6y ago
      > Some people don’t play on a team.
    - echelon 6y ago
      That's not a team! I'll work with anyone (within reason) to build a better tomorrow.
    - usefulcat 6y ago
      "We're all individuals!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbzSif78qQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbzSif78qQ
      - webmaven 6y ago
        "I'm not."
  - wnevets 6y ago
    Some people like to think they don't belong to a team. They're usually part of the enlightened centerist both sides are bad team.
    - dagav 6y ago
      That's just what people who belong to a team think. It's actually possible to think for yourself
      - wnevets 6y ago
        everyone loves to believe they think for their self, especially those who belong to teams and it is everyone else who are sheep(le).
        dagav 6y ago
        Well if you question your beliefs then you can arrive at your first principles, and then you can start questioning things people tell you by ensuring that you understand them as derived from your first principles. That's called thinking for yourself and one benefit of doing so is that when other people tell me I'm not thinking for myself, I know that they're wrong because I know that I have direct access to the truth. People who don't think for themselves rely on others for access to the truth.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    Sure, some don't, but most do (at least unconsciously), that's just how people behave. Some people consciously try to avoid "playing on a team" with various degrees of success, but it's a bit unnatural and actually quite hard to do.
    - austincheney 6y ago
      I agree. Originality is a rare and measurable personality index.
postalrat 6y ago
Examples?
ehejsbbejsk 6y ago
I see a lot of “libertarians” on HN and SV in general. Edit: Ok now I am getting downvoted because I called them libertarians when they’re libertarians.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pitaj 6y ago
  They call themselves "libertarians" while being, in fact, quite authoritarian. Libertarians support criminal justice reform, including reducing the power of police.
  - ehejsbbejsk 6y ago
    Libertarianism changed a great deal in America in the past 20 years. It’s not what it used to be and has been usurped by the right wing and corporate types.
fwsgonzo 6y ago
There is a lot of right-wing content rabbit holes to fall into. Most people aren't inherently looking to understand what others are going through. It can make you think that others are lazy or ungrateful, and that events, even if they span the whole country - in every state and major city, that these events are just overblown. Which they obviously are not.
mrlala 6y ago
No idea but I agree. Part of me thinks it's 'intellectual elites' here that simply can't fathom not working at a FAANG job making 250k+ and don't understand the problems most people have. And if you aren't working at one of those you must be the ultra silicon valley entrepreneur trying to do the next big thing because money. Probably downvoted for this but whatever, I think it's the truth. When I first was on this site a few years ago I thought it was a cool forum for geeks, but it's just not that at all really.
- giantg2 6y ago
  "...forum for geeks..." I think human nature of having opinions and diversity of opinions exist in all groups, no matter how we categorize/stereotype them.
- Miraste 6y ago
  HN has never been a forum for geeks. Y Combinator is an investment company focused on profit, like any other. It and (much of) the HN readership extract that profit from technology, but the money ultimately supersedes the tech. This is worth remembering when reading HN threads on regulation or open source software.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
mattacular 6y ago
HN is pretty conservative on average.
- centimeter 6y ago
  If you think this, you live in an extremely progressive bubble.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  It's mostly technology workers, who tend to be largely liberal. Are you sure it's conservative?
  - war1025 6y ago
    I would guess it's actually that HN has members who aren't from the major tech metros, and people outside of those areas tend to be more conservative (in a relative sense at the very least). For many, this would be the main place they ever come across those people, which would make it seem unusually conservative.
    - Steltek 6y ago
      As a theory, Y Combinator, thus HN, is strongly aligned with startups which, in less hip circles, are "small businesses". Small business tends conservative because regulation disproportionately impacts them (eg. regulatory capture). It would certainly be nicer if more regulation created a level playing field and actually prevented anti-competitive practices. To counter balance the above blatant and unfair stereotyping above, I'll add some devil's advocate too: "change the world" type leaders might also be more idealistic and would vote progressive anyway, even if it's not good business sense.
      - tremon 6y ago
        small business tends conservative because regulation disproportionately impacts them That doesn't make sense. If someone feels unduly burdened by the status quo, why would they vote to preserve it?
sneak 6y ago
Not to get too meta, but I think rich people and SV have always tended toward authoritarian; it's not like rich people get hassled by the cops that often. Recall also that SV got its start by selling tech to the military[1]. It's not something sudden. You have to remember that HN is by and of a very specific part of wider society. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Views_on_race_and_eugenics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Views_on_race... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Military_technology_roots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Military_techno...
- dang 6y ago
  That's not a true statement about HN. Less than 10% of the community is in SV—it's all over the world and has tons of different "very specific parts of wider society". That's one reason why people argue so much about this stuff. If you think the HN community is SV-friendly or even startup-friendly, it may surprise you that many people in those communities feel like it's exactly the other way around.
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
    Thank you dang for this statistics. No wonder people find these SV extreme ideas weird and even weirder when they try to blame it on 'russian bots' etc. So deep in bubble that they can even grasp the idea what world is out there outside of these SV local ideas.
  - sneak 6y ago
    > That's not a true statement about HN. I wrote "HN is by and of a very specific part of wider society". (I can see how "by" could be interpreted to mean the community, but I meant the authors/operators.) Are there any poor people who work on or for YC or HN? Genuinely curious; I assume that YC's staff and most everyone involved in maintaining and running both this site and YC in general is relatively prosperous, at least compared to the median in the US. I'm sure that a website of this level of traffic receives all manner of visitors and participants, but I was specifically referring to the people who created and run it, and set the rules and general expectations of tone/topic on it. (I'm not calling you authoritarian, just "of SV" and not-poor.) [edit: Also maybe I'm wrong and that the ratio of participants vs authors/operators is so vast that the operators play no part in setting the tone beyond the rules (and of course your hard work), in which case my conclusion should be dismissed and the question about why it seems to skew authoritarian should be reopened.]
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
It's just that recent issues have made controversial policing issues much more salient. Speaking for myself, I've always thought that riots are very bad and the police should use extreme force to shut them down - I just never really ended up talking about it until recently, because it was never a tremendously interesting or relevant topic. In general, it's important to remember that any consensus you see on an Internet forum is implicitly selected for people who care enough to talk about the issue.
- outworlder 6y ago
  "Extreme force"? Do you realize what you are asking for?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I've got a pretty clear idea, yes. I think people who go around wrecking stores, setting fires, etc. ought to be forcibly dispersed, using tear gas and riot shields and such if they won't leave. (This will unfortunately have to be my last comment on the matter, so sorry in advance for the lack of response - I've been instructed by the mods in the past not to discuss this topic at any length.)
Mc_Big_G 6y ago
It's been like this for a few years now. I see part of the problem being people who are suddenly rich through high salaries or exits that also suddenly become Republican and don't care about anything but taxes. i.e. civil rights, freedom of the press, etc...
tristor 6y ago
I don't see a pro-authoritarian bent in the comments in this thread. What I see a lot of is people pointing out that the definition of "journalist" is very very loose in 2020, and that has an effect on the arrest stats. Many many many people have watched with their own eyes, live on video, what's been going on through the course of this year. We've seen CNN and ABC reporters shot with rubber bullets and accosted on live TV, but we've also seen a lot of "journalists" throwing rocks and molotov cocktails on live stream and doing other criminal acts. There is a healthy and natural cynicism and suspicion of what appears to be a lop-sided reporting of the occurrences during the protests and riots in 2020. That suspicion may benefit people who are pro-authoritarian because they can play on it, but it doesn't necessarily mean those who are suspicious are pro-authoritarian themselves. The article does a lot to try to explain what it /doesn't/ classify as a journalist, but never says what it does classify as a journalist. Those definitions are central to the point of the whether or not these stats are actually meaningful in any bigger sense than to say "well duh, of course more people were arrested during a year of protest and riots".
- caycep 6y ago
  This may dovetail into some of Ben Thompson's stratechery posts into what actually is journalism in this day and age of zero friction and marginal costs to publish/disseminate information...the traditional definitions themselves are changing
- spookybones 6y ago
  I haven’t seen anyone alleging to be a journalist throwing rocks and molotov cocktails. Can you verify this? If this is something we’ve all seen a lot of, then somehow I missed it.
- muststopmyths 6y ago
  > but we've also seen a lot of "journalists" throwing rocks and molotov cocktails on live stream and doing other criminal acts. Have we ? Would you like to point out more than 0 ? Since it's "a lot".
- bjourne 6y ago
  > but we've also seen a lot of "journalists" throwing rocks and molotov cocktails on live stream and doing other criminal acts. I'd like to see some evidence of that happening on scale. If there is no such evidence, I think, perhaps, your comment proves the parent's point.
kthxbye123 6y ago
I think there's a lot of reasons. Part of it is that, as the power of the tech industry has grown, journalists have become more active in exposing how it abuses that power to make the country, and the world, a worse and more degrading place to live in, and people on HN don't like being reminded of how they contribute to that. There's also a ton of people who are just reflexively hostile to the idea that society is systematically unjust and exceptionally hostile to the idea that they benefit from the ways in which it is unjust, and as mainstream journalism has been largely sympathetic to these ideas, they are in turn reflexively hostile to mainstream journalism.
bfgoodrich 6y ago
HN has always been pretty far to the right. There is a strong Trump contingent. A huge "law and order" (but not when disrupting when laws are "ridiculous and dumb") contingent. On HNs it is normal to denigrate the "MSM" while cheering on some blogger and his completely unsubstantiated claims. Attacks on the press, because there's a strong Trump contingent here that have an issue with reality and fact having an "anti-Trump bias", are cheered on. It isn't surprising at all.
centimeter 6y ago
Being anti-"journalist" isn't the same as being pro-authoritarian. 99% of institutional journalists are sockpuppets for prog neoliberal authoritarianism. I can think of a single-digit number of well-known journalists who I actually respect and generally expect to provide useful/unbiased information. This isn't a left/right authoritarian/libertarian thing - anti-corpo-journalist sentiment is pretty widely shared across the spectrum.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  Being in favour of, or okay with, journalists being arrested for doing journalism is _intensely_ authoritarian, whether you agree with them or not. Especially if you disagree with them, really.
  - jimmygrapes 6y ago
    I believe your phrase "for doing journalism" is what the debate is truly about here. We would have to have information about the full context of each of the journalist's and police's actions to make a justifiable judgement. As others have mentioned, the majority of arrests may have occurred as a result of strong misunderstandings of "freedom of the press"
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Genuinely curious, but why do you think those arrests would have peaked this year of all years otherwise?
  - centimeter 6y ago
    I think it's wrong to arrest journalists for doing journalism, but I don't really care about legally punishing "journalists" doing "journalism", where "journalism" is targeted violent harassment, slander, vandalism, etc.
astura 6y ago
It's truly scary times we live in... It feels like the entire word has developed an authorization bend. The United States has a sitting president who is attempting a self-coup with the majority of the legislatures in his party supporting it, or at least not condemning it. It's just... shocking.
- thegrim33 6y ago
  You make your claims as if it was fact and yet it isn't. Millions of people in the United States think you're completely brainwashed. The same way as somebody a few years ago that was freaking out that Obama was building work camps to force all gun owners into. For somebody outside of your echo chamber your viewpoints sound ridiculous.
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
    It repeats for Americans over and over like a tape. The outrages literally copy themselves just switching sides. It's very hard to even discuss these matters with Americans since they have both picked their favorite football team and hold onto their dogmas just middle age church.
  - grumio 6y ago
    The sitting president and his allies are actively trying to bypass millions of votes by asking state legislatures to appoint electors against the state's voters' will. That's a fact. Well, they did until that didn't work. Then they tried to throw out the electoral votes of four swing states. Trying to bypass an election like this is indeed a coup-attempt! I've got sources and everything! I've put a few sources below but I'm sure you can find more. These attempts to throw out millions of votes is not normal. DeSantis urged Pennsylvania and Michigan residents to call state lawmakers and urge them to intervene. “Under Article 2 of the Constitution, presidential electors are done by the legislatures and the schemes they create and the framework. And if there’s departure from that, if they’re not following the law, if they’re ignoring law, then they can provide remedies as well,” he said. https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-legislature-pennsylvania-b199b2debc87fbb20612a48835bc0dba https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-tr... Texas, supported by President Trump, tried to sue Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, claiming fraud, without evidence. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/11/945617913/supreme-court-shuts-door-on-trump-election-prospects https://www.npr.org/2020/12/11/945617913/supreme-court-shuts... "After waiting over a year to challenge Act 77, and engaging in procedural gamesmanship along the way, they come to this Court with unclean hands and ask it to disenfranchise an entire state," they wrote. "They make that request without any acknowledgment of the staggering upheaval, turmoil, and acrimony it would unleash." --SCOTUS https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/944230517/supreme-court-rejects-gop-bid-to-reverse-pennsylvania-election-results https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/944230517/supreme-court-rejec...
outworlder 6y ago
We try to reason about the world. When the world appears to be unjust and we feel powerless to change, we (humans) tend to fabricate justifications for the actions of others. So that we feel better about themselves and we can move on thinking bad things won't happen to us. This is how you see someone getting beaten during an arrest and people are like "but this guy was once arrested for such and such". The assumption being, since they are "bad" people, that's the reason why bad things happen to them. And, therefore, that won't happen to "me". This requires one to ignore the fact that force wasn't called for. In this particular thread you see that: "they must have been doing other things rather than just filming" – while we have seen multiple, documented, instances of people doing precisely nothing. We also see "No True Scotsman": "What exactly is the definition of a journalist?". Which would be fine if we were just trying to understand the methodology, but not "these weren't actually journalists, therefore, they shouldn't count and everything is normal".
- sneak 6y ago
  It's a tough reality check for a lot of people who grow up in the US, thinking it's a free country with equal protection of the law, when they realize that there are at least two tiers of protected overclasses (wealthy landowners, and the police) to which only subsets of the law applies in practice (to say nothing of the underclasses who are routinely beaten, robbed, and killed, with no consequences for the attackers). It's not a small adjustment in one's worldview, and it's normal and common for people who have benefitted from the false narrative to want to cling to it and reject contradictory evidence, as you pointed out.
  - thegrim33 6y ago
    These are pretty outrageous claims you're making, and you'll notice that the people making such claims never have evidence to back it up. Your viewpoints are grounded in thousands of other people in the same echo chamber as you repeating the same claims as a cultural weapon to gain political power, but there's never anything backing it up. I don't care how many people you've convinced to hold these beliefs, it doesn't make it true. You say that I want to reject contradictory evidence, but you never provide the contradictory evidence. Having a bunch of people convinced that the police are evil isn't contradictory evidence. Having people repeat your viewpoint isn't proof that the viewpoint is correct. For an extraordinary claim you need extraordinary evidence. For something like your anti-police sentiment (which is funny because now all of the sudden nearly all police are evil, in all states, all counties, no matter the gender or race breakdown of the police, no matter what city/county/state/department laws and procedures are, all of the sudden police are all just evil? That's curious isn't it?) it isn't backed up by evidence. You can link to videos alleging "police brutality" but none of them that I've ever been linked to show such a thing. Of course mistakes are made, when there's millions of interactions between citizens and police every day, a one in a million or even one in a billion mistake still happens, humans aren't perfect. But for the claims you're making there should be extraordinary evidence, and there isn't any. Now, somebody else in the world will read your comment and in some part incorporate it into their viewpoint, and repeat it elsewhere, just propagating the idea further.
dang 6y ago
This is the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22%20objecti%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... Internet comments get provoked by seeing something one objects to. When the thread is new, the only things to object to are the article and the title, so comments come from people objecting to those. Such posts tend to be reflexive and shallow because those are the fastest reactions to feel and the quickest to write. Mostly they are made from pre-existing thoughts and pent-up energy; there hasn't been time yet to absorb (let's call it) the fiber of a story—the specific information, the diffs, the curious bits. Thus they tend to be generic and angry, and usually are just triggered by some surface detail. Not good, but here we are. Then there's a second wave of commenters who post objections to the objections. Those usually get upvoted, and that is how we so often end up with a "I can't believe these comments" or "WTF HN" comment at the top of a thread. It's a mechanical process which has nothing specifically to do with either the content or the community. The community is simply large enough that for literally any $X there are sufficient readers who will reflexively object to $X. We're all full of reflexive reactions, just to different things. Is that what we want here? No, but it's important to diagnose it correctly. The objections-to-the-objections wave (and yes, there are third waves too, and on it goes) can be just as reflexive and shallow as the original posts. The quality of these comments doesn't come from the content or the specific views being expressed—it's about what level of (let's say) the nervous system is producing them. If it's a fast, reflexive, cached reaction, that's not interesting. It can't be, because by definition it's about something else—something one has seen or felt or argued about before—while interest means being interested in this, what's new about it. For that one needs to access a slower, reflective mode (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Responses of interest are slower to appear and seem to come literally from slower processes in the body. It takes time to process new information and for a new response to form. New responses are interesting and produce richer waves of conversation, as people have new responses to those in turn. We could call that the curiosity dynamic and that's what we're going for here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
throw_a_say 6y ago
It would be interesting to see if it was a recent shift, my feeling is that is not that recent, but I could easily be wrong. A sibling comment mentions that tech is not immune to the divisiveness that is happening to at the moment, and I think that's right. I also think that tech, or just humans in general, are not immune to being self-interested. Once you have a 100k+ salary and potential for more in the future in the USA, it's not in your interest to support social unrest or anything that upsets the status quo. I imagine this does subside a bit once you get real security in your life ( some significant property, savings, strong network, etc ) but there is a large gap between being secure enough to be comfortable in your own life and being comfortable enough that your own interests are secondary. This _definitely_ does not apply to all people and all situations, but I think it is an effect, it's typically framed as "as you get older you get more right-wing" but I don't think it's anything related to age particularly and more to do with where you are on the ladder.
honkycat 6y ago
It is known as brigading. They see a post critical of police and the right wing people come in and do a bunch of posts to obscure the fact that BLM and the police accountability movement is extremely popular. It is 100% planned and engineered. They know their talking points. They know what to point to in response to police accountability discussions. Change the subject to talk about random looters instead of the 99% of protestors who peacefully assemble and then are brutalized night over night.
grumio 6y ago
Same. I've been seeing more "the boot is justified unless proven otherwise, and no I don't need to provide a source; and if it is proven otherwise, I've already lost interest and moved on." and less "innocent until proven guilty." Obviously there's some of both and always has been, but I feel the same as you do. I remember when a website counting how many days James Clapper has avoided a prison sentence after he gave a false statement was big on the front page a while back. Just the other day there was a thread about experts identifying an illegal toxin used on protestors in Portland while LE illegally blocks access to storm drains so that further evidence of it cannot be collected. Both threads pertain to law enforcement overstepping their bounds with impunity and secrecy. The toxic gas one was flagged off the front page despite 125 upvotes in a short time. https://futurehuman.medium.com/scientists-identified-a-green-poisonous-gas-used-by-federal-agents-on-portland-protesters-5b56ac20a624 https://futurehuman.medium.com/scientists-identified-a-green...
duxup 6y ago
I see more interest in parsing the numbers beyond just 'arrests'. I think it is worth looking into what kind of arrests these are and the nature of them.
suifbwish 6y ago
Pretty simple. Most of us have jobs, follow the law and do not recommend others break it either.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  Except when it comes to things that directly benefit them ofc (i.e piracy)
  - suifbwish 6y ago
    Honestly piracy is something that most people with jobs don’t have time for. Keeping up with where to get what is a chore. Netflix and Spotify do it for me thanks
- AshWolfy 6y ago
  first they came for the socialists
oh_sigh 6y ago
No shift - it's just that most people espouse their convictions with an unstated parenthetical that those convictions only apply when it furthers the power ambitions for them or their allies. Not much else explains e.g. how Julian Assange's rep has changed in the past 10 years. I'm sure if anyone responds to this, it will be to tell me why Julian's case is actually different and now he's dangerous for democracy...but sorry, no, his case isn't different. You're just a hypocrite.
findthewords 6y ago
If you subscribe to the debt cycle theory by Ray Dalio [1], late cycles see a rise of inequality, populism and finally authoritarianism. (I am skeptical.) [1 ]https://www.valuewalk.com/2019/05/ray-dalio-late-long-term-debt-cycle/ https://www.valuewalk.com/2019/05/ray-dalio-late-long-term-d...

Miner49er 6y ago

The whole internet has slowly been shifting that way it seems. During the Anonymous era and Snowden leak era HN and the internet seemed much more anti-authoritarian.

pas 6y ago

The sudden outpour of the wisdom of ~30 day old accounts.

wnevets 6y ago

tech people aren't immune to the hyper divisiveness taking place around the world. Once "your team" decides it no longer wants to respect freedom of the press or election results then you must follow suit. Gotta make sure your team wins, right?

austincheney 6y ago
Some people don’t play on a team.
- centimeter 6y ago
  Then you're probably following a losing strategy. "Team" doesn't have to mean "generic normie political party"; there are other team dynamics at play. In any case, if you haven't partitioned the political space into allies and enemies along at least a few planes, you're probably going to get taken advantage of (at the very least).
  - austincheney 6y ago
    I am fine with being an individual with original opinions but I can empathize with insecure people who band together for reassurance.
    - centimeter 6y ago
      If you're not attuned enough to figure out why political alliances are worthwhile, your opinions probably aren't that original. It's not a matter of "reassurance" - it's about economies of scale. If the best explanation you can come up with for why a bunch of people exhibit a behavior you don't is "they have a personality flaw", this is very strong evidence that you don't actually have a good grasp of people's motivations.
      - austincheney 6y ago
        Strength in numbers is a compensation for insecurity. > If the best explanation you can come up with for why a bunch of people exhibit a behavior you don't is "they have a personality flaw" Conformity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity
        centimeter 6y ago
        Why do you think people who are undoubtedly smarter and more original than you are also buy into political "teams"? If "conformity" is your best answer, then once again, this demonstrates you don't really grasp what's going on.
        austincheney 6y ago
        Read the Wikipedia link. It answers your question.
        centimeter 6y ago
        This is not meant as an insult to you, but just as a warning that you should keep this in mind when you’re analyzing your own decision making; you are pretty clearly neither smart nor original. It’s very unlikely you are actually ever going to have any valuable original thoughts, at least in the way you seem to think you do. I’m sure you’ll appreciate this since your profile is all about “radical honestly”. Taking Dalio seriously is another sign of a hopeless midwit with an inflated sense of intelligence.
- lallysingh 6y ago
  That's another team.
  - bobthebuilders 6y ago
    > Some people don’t play on a team.
  - echelon 6y ago
    That's not a team! I'll work with anyone (within reason) to build a better tomorrow.
  - usefulcat 6y ago
    "We're all individuals!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbzSif78qQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbzSif78qQ
    - webmaven 6y ago
      "I'm not."
- wnevets 6y ago
  Some people like to think they don't belong to a team. They're usually part of the enlightened centerist both sides are bad team.
  - dagav 6y ago
    That's just what people who belong to a team think. It's actually possible to think for yourself
    - wnevets 6y ago
      everyone loves to believe they think for their self, especially those who belong to teams and it is everyone else who are sheep(le).
      - dagav 6y ago
        Well if you question your beliefs then you can arrive at your first principles, and then you can start questioning things people tell you by ensuring that you understand them as derived from your first principles. That's called thinking for yourself and one benefit of doing so is that when other people tell me I'm not thinking for myself, I know that they're wrong because I know that I have direct access to the truth. People who don't think for themselves rely on others for access to the truth.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  Sure, some don't, but most do (at least unconsciously), that's just how people behave. Some people consciously try to avoid "playing on a team" with various degrees of success, but it's a bit unnatural and actually quite hard to do.
  - austincheney 6y ago
    I agree. Originality is a rare and measurable personality index.

postalrat 6y ago

Examples?

ehejsbbejsk 6y ago

I see a lot of “libertarians” on HN and SV in general. Edit: Ok now I am getting downvoted because I called them libertarians when they’re libertarians.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pitaj 6y ago
They call themselves "libertarians" while being, in fact, quite authoritarian. Libertarians support criminal justice reform, including reducing the power of police.
- ehejsbbejsk 6y ago
  Libertarianism changed a great deal in America in the past 20 years. It’s not what it used to be and has been usurped by the right wing and corporate types.

fwsgonzo 6y ago

There is a lot of right-wing content rabbit holes to fall into. Most people aren't inherently looking to understand what others are going through. It can make you think that others are lazy or ungrateful, and that events, even if they span the whole country - in every state and major city, that these events are just overblown. Which they obviously are not.

mrlala 6y ago

No idea but I agree. Part of me thinks it's 'intellectual elites' here that simply can't fathom not working at a FAANG job making 250k+ and don't understand the problems most people have. And if you aren't working at one of those you must be the ultra silicon valley entrepreneur trying to do the next big thing because money. Probably downvoted for this but whatever, I think it's the truth. When I first was on this site a few years ago I thought it was a cool forum for geeks, but it's just not that at all really.

giantg2 6y ago
"...forum for geeks..." I think human nature of having opinions and diversity of opinions exist in all groups, no matter how we categorize/stereotype them.
Miraste 6y ago
HN has never been a forum for geeks. Y Combinator is an investment company focused on profit, like any other. It and (much of) the HN readership extract that profit from technology, but the money ultimately supersedes the tech. This is worth remembering when reading HN threads on regulation or open source software.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

mattacular 6y ago

HN is pretty conservative on average.

centimeter 6y ago
If you think this, you live in an extremely progressive bubble.
saagarjha 6y ago
It's mostly technology workers, who tend to be largely liberal. Are you sure it's conservative?
- war1025 6y ago
  I would guess it's actually that HN has members who aren't from the major tech metros, and people outside of those areas tend to be more conservative (in a relative sense at the very least). For many, this would be the main place they ever come across those people, which would make it seem unusually conservative.
  - Steltek 6y ago
    As a theory, Y Combinator, thus HN, is strongly aligned with startups which, in less hip circles, are "small businesses". Small business tends conservative because regulation disproportionately impacts them (eg. regulatory capture). It would certainly be nicer if more regulation created a level playing field and actually prevented anti-competitive practices. To counter balance the above blatant and unfair stereotyping above, I'll add some devil's advocate too: "change the world" type leaders might also be more idealistic and would vote progressive anyway, even if it's not good business sense.
    - tremon 6y ago
      small business tends conservative because regulation disproportionately impacts them That doesn't make sense. If someone feels unduly burdened by the status quo, why would they vote to preserve it?

sneak 6y ago

Not to get too meta, but I think rich people and SV have always tended toward authoritarian; it's not like rich people get hassled by the cops that often. Recall also that SV got its start by selling tech to the military[1]. It's not something sudden. You have to remember that HN is by and of a very specific part of wider society. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Views_on_race_and_eugenics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Views_on_race... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Military_technology_roots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Military_techno...

dang 6y ago
That's not a true statement about HN. Less than 10% of the community is in SV—it's all over the world and has tons of different "very specific parts of wider society". That's one reason why people argue so much about this stuff. If you think the HN community is SV-friendly or even startup-friendly, it may surprise you that many people in those communities feel like it's exactly the other way around.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
  Thank you dang for this statistics. No wonder people find these SV extreme ideas weird and even weirder when they try to blame it on 'russian bots' etc. So deep in bubble that they can even grasp the idea what world is out there outside of these SV local ideas.
- sneak 6y ago
  > That's not a true statement about HN. I wrote "HN is by and of a very specific part of wider society". (I can see how "by" could be interpreted to mean the community, but I meant the authors/operators.) Are there any poor people who work on or for YC or HN? Genuinely curious; I assume that YC's staff and most everyone involved in maintaining and running both this site and YC in general is relatively prosperous, at least compared to the median in the US. I'm sure that a website of this level of traffic receives all manner of visitors and participants, but I was specifically referring to the people who created and run it, and set the rules and general expectations of tone/topic on it. (I'm not calling you authoritarian, just "of SV" and not-poor.) [edit: Also maybe I'm wrong and that the ratio of participants vs authors/operators is so vast that the operators play no part in setting the tone beyond the rules (and of course your hard work), in which case my conclusion should be dismissed and the question about why it seems to skew authoritarian should be reopened.]

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

It's just that recent issues have made controversial policing issues much more salient. Speaking for myself, I've always thought that riots are very bad and the police should use extreme force to shut them down - I just never really ended up talking about it until recently, because it was never a tremendously interesting or relevant topic. In general, it's important to remember that any consensus you see on an Internet forum is implicitly selected for people who care enough to talk about the issue.

outworlder 6y ago
"Extreme force"? Do you realize what you are asking for?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I've got a pretty clear idea, yes. I think people who go around wrecking stores, setting fires, etc. ought to be forcibly dispersed, using tear gas and riot shields and such if they won't leave. (This will unfortunately have to be my last comment on the matter, so sorry in advance for the lack of response - I've been instructed by the mods in the past not to discuss this topic at any length.)

Mc_Big_G 6y ago

It's been like this for a few years now. I see part of the problem being people who are suddenly rich through high salaries or exits that also suddenly become Republican and don't care about anything but taxes. i.e. civil rights, freedom of the press, etc...

tristor 6y ago

I don't see a pro-authoritarian bent in the comments in this thread. What I see a lot of is people pointing out that the definition of "journalist" is very very loose in 2020, and that has an effect on the arrest stats. Many many many people have watched with their own eyes, live on video, what's been going on through the course of this year. We've seen CNN and ABC reporters shot with rubber bullets and accosted on live TV, but we've also seen a lot of "journalists" throwing rocks and molotov cocktails on live stream and doing other criminal acts. There is a healthy and natural cynicism and suspicion of what appears to be a lop-sided reporting of the occurrences during the protests and riots in 2020. That suspicion may benefit people who are pro-authoritarian because they can play on it, but it doesn't necessarily mean those who are suspicious are pro-authoritarian themselves. The article does a lot to try to explain what it /doesn't/ classify as a journalist, but never says what it does classify as a journalist. Those definitions are central to the point of the whether or not these stats are actually meaningful in any bigger sense than to say "well duh, of course more people were arrested during a year of protest and riots".

caycep 6y ago
This may dovetail into some of Ben Thompson's stratechery posts into what actually is journalism in this day and age of zero friction and marginal costs to publish/disseminate information...the traditional definitions themselves are changing
spookybones 6y ago
I haven’t seen anyone alleging to be a journalist throwing rocks and molotov cocktails. Can you verify this? If this is something we’ve all seen a lot of, then somehow I missed it.
muststopmyths 6y ago
> but we've also seen a lot of "journalists" throwing rocks and molotov cocktails on live stream and doing other criminal acts. Have we ? Would you like to point out more than 0 ? Since it's "a lot".
bjourne 6y ago
> but we've also seen a lot of "journalists" throwing rocks and molotov cocktails on live stream and doing other criminal acts. I'd like to see some evidence of that happening on scale. If there is no such evidence, I think, perhaps, your comment proves the parent's point.

kthxbye123 6y ago

I think there's a lot of reasons. Part of it is that, as the power of the tech industry has grown, journalists have become more active in exposing how it abuses that power to make the country, and the world, a worse and more degrading place to live in, and people on HN don't like being reminded of how they contribute to that. There's also a ton of people who are just reflexively hostile to the idea that society is systematically unjust and exceptionally hostile to the idea that they benefit from the ways in which it is unjust, and as mainstream journalism has been largely sympathetic to these ideas, they are in turn reflexively hostile to mainstream journalism.

bfgoodrich 6y ago

HN has always been pretty far to the right. There is a strong Trump contingent. A huge "law and order" (but not when disrupting when laws are "ridiculous and dumb") contingent. On HNs it is normal to denigrate the "MSM" while cheering on some blogger and his completely unsubstantiated claims. Attacks on the press, because there's a strong Trump contingent here that have an issue with reality and fact having an "anti-Trump bias", are cheered on. It isn't surprising at all.

centimeter 6y ago

Being anti-"journalist" isn't the same as being pro-authoritarian. 99% of institutional journalists are sockpuppets for prog neoliberal authoritarianism. I can think of a single-digit number of well-known journalists who I actually respect and generally expect to provide useful/unbiased information. This isn't a left/right authoritarian/libertarian thing - anti-corpo-journalist sentiment is pretty widely shared across the spectrum.

rsynnott 6y ago
Being in favour of, or okay with, journalists being arrested for doing journalism is _intensely_ authoritarian, whether you agree with them or not. Especially if you disagree with them, really.
- jimmygrapes 6y ago
  I believe your phrase "for doing journalism" is what the debate is truly about here. We would have to have information about the full context of each of the journalist's and police's actions to make a justifiable judgement. As others have mentioned, the majority of arrests may have occurred as a result of strong misunderstandings of "freedom of the press"
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Genuinely curious, but why do you think those arrests would have peaked this year of all years otherwise?
- centimeter 6y ago
  I think it's wrong to arrest journalists for doing journalism, but I don't really care about legally punishing "journalists" doing "journalism", where "journalism" is targeted violent harassment, slander, vandalism, etc.

astura 6y ago

It's truly scary times we live in... It feels like the entire word has developed an authorization bend. The United States has a sitting president who is attempting a self-coup with the majority of the legislatures in his party supporting it, or at least not condemning it. It's just... shocking.

thegrim33 6y ago
You make your claims as if it was fact and yet it isn't. Millions of people in the United States think you're completely brainwashed. The same way as somebody a few years ago that was freaking out that Obama was building work camps to force all gun owners into. For somebody outside of your echo chamber your viewpoints sound ridiculous.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
  It repeats for Americans over and over like a tape. The outrages literally copy themselves just switching sides. It's very hard to even discuss these matters with Americans since they have both picked their favorite football team and hold onto their dogmas just middle age church.
- grumio 6y ago
  The sitting president and his allies are actively trying to bypass millions of votes by asking state legislatures to appoint electors against the state's voters' will. That's a fact. Well, they did until that didn't work. Then they tried to throw out the electoral votes of four swing states. Trying to bypass an election like this is indeed a coup-attempt! I've got sources and everything! I've put a few sources below but I'm sure you can find more. These attempts to throw out millions of votes is not normal. DeSantis urged Pennsylvania and Michigan residents to call state lawmakers and urge them to intervene. “Under Article 2 of the Constitution, presidential electors are done by the legislatures and the schemes they create and the framework. And if there’s departure from that, if they’re not following the law, if they’re ignoring law, then they can provide remedies as well,” he said. https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-legislature-pennsylvania-b199b2debc87fbb20612a48835bc0dba https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-tr... Texas, supported by President Trump, tried to sue Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, claiming fraud, without evidence. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/11/945617913/supreme-court-shuts-door-on-trump-election-prospects https://www.npr.org/2020/12/11/945617913/supreme-court-shuts... "After waiting over a year to challenge Act 77, and engaging in procedural gamesmanship along the way, they come to this Court with unclean hands and ask it to disenfranchise an entire state," they wrote. "They make that request without any acknowledgment of the staggering upheaval, turmoil, and acrimony it would unleash." --SCOTUS https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/944230517/supreme-court-rejects-gop-bid-to-reverse-pennsylvania-election-results https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/944230517/supreme-court-rejec...

outworlder 6y ago

We try to reason about the world. When the world appears to be unjust and we feel powerless to change, we (humans) tend to fabricate justifications for the actions of others. So that we feel better about themselves and we can move on thinking bad things won't happen to us. This is how you see someone getting beaten during an arrest and people are like "but this guy was once arrested for such and such". The assumption being, since they are "bad" people, that's the reason why bad things happen to them. And, therefore, that won't happen to "me". This requires one to ignore the fact that force wasn't called for. In this particular thread you see that: "they must have been doing other things rather than just filming" – while we have seen multiple, documented, instances of people doing precisely nothing. We also see "No True Scotsman": "What exactly is the definition of a journalist?". Which would be fine if we were just trying to understand the methodology, but not "these weren't actually journalists, therefore, they shouldn't count and everything is normal".

sneak 6y ago
It's a tough reality check for a lot of people who grow up in the US, thinking it's a free country with equal protection of the law, when they realize that there are at least two tiers of protected overclasses (wealthy landowners, and the police) to which only subsets of the law applies in practice (to say nothing of the underclasses who are routinely beaten, robbed, and killed, with no consequences for the attackers). It's not a small adjustment in one's worldview, and it's normal and common for people who have benefitted from the false narrative to want to cling to it and reject contradictory evidence, as you pointed out.
- thegrim33 6y ago
  These are pretty outrageous claims you're making, and you'll notice that the people making such claims never have evidence to back it up. Your viewpoints are grounded in thousands of other people in the same echo chamber as you repeating the same claims as a cultural weapon to gain political power, but there's never anything backing it up. I don't care how many people you've convinced to hold these beliefs, it doesn't make it true. You say that I want to reject contradictory evidence, but you never provide the contradictory evidence. Having a bunch of people convinced that the police are evil isn't contradictory evidence. Having people repeat your viewpoint isn't proof that the viewpoint is correct. For an extraordinary claim you need extraordinary evidence. For something like your anti-police sentiment (which is funny because now all of the sudden nearly all police are evil, in all states, all counties, no matter the gender or race breakdown of the police, no matter what city/county/state/department laws and procedures are, all of the sudden police are all just evil? That's curious isn't it?) it isn't backed up by evidence. You can link to videos alleging "police brutality" but none of them that I've ever been linked to show such a thing. Of course mistakes are made, when there's millions of interactions between citizens and police every day, a one in a million or even one in a billion mistake still happens, humans aren't perfect. But for the claims you're making there should be extraordinary evidence, and there isn't any. Now, somebody else in the world will read your comment and in some part incorporate it into their viewpoint, and repeat it elsewhere, just propagating the idea further.

dang 6y ago

This is the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22%20objecti%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... Internet comments get provoked by seeing something one objects to. When the thread is new, the only things to object to are the article and the title, so comments come from people objecting to those. Such posts tend to be reflexive and shallow because those are the fastest reactions to feel and the quickest to write. Mostly they are made from pre-existing thoughts and pent-up energy; there hasn't been time yet to absorb (let's call it) the fiber of a story—the specific information, the diffs, the curious bits. Thus they tend to be generic and angry, and usually are just triggered by some surface detail. Not good, but here we are. Then there's a second wave of commenters who post objections to the objections. Those usually get upvoted, and that is how we so often end up with a "I can't believe these comments" or "WTF HN" comment at the top of a thread. It's a mechanical process which has nothing specifically to do with either the content or the community. The community is simply large enough that for literally any $X there are sufficient readers who will reflexively object to $X. We're all full of reflexive reactions, just to different things. Is that what we want here? No, but it's important to diagnose it correctly. The objections-to-the-objections wave (and yes, there are third waves too, and on it goes) can be just as reflexive and shallow as the original posts. The quality of these comments doesn't come from the content or the specific views being expressed—it's about what level of (let's say) the nervous system is producing them. If it's a fast, reflexive, cached reaction, that's not interesting. It can't be, because by definition it's about something else—something one has seen or felt or argued about before—while interest means being interested in this, what's new about it. For that one needs to access a slower, reflective mode (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Responses of interest are slower to appear and seem to come literally from slower processes in the body. It takes time to process new information and for a new response to form. New responses are interesting and produce richer waves of conversation, as people have new responses to those in turn. We could call that the curiosity dynamic and that's what we're going for here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

throw_a_say 6y ago

It would be interesting to see if it was a recent shift, my feeling is that is not that recent, but I could easily be wrong. A sibling comment mentions that tech is not immune to the divisiveness that is happening to at the moment, and I think that's right. I also think that tech, or just humans in general, are not immune to being self-interested. Once you have a 100k+ salary and potential for more in the future in the USA, it's not in your interest to support social unrest or anything that upsets the status quo. I imagine this does subside a bit once you get real security in your life ( some significant property, savings, strong network, etc ) but there is a large gap between being secure enough to be comfortable in your own life and being comfortable enough that your own interests are secondary. This _definitely_ does not apply to all people and all situations, but I think it is an effect, it's typically framed as "as you get older you get more right-wing" but I don't think it's anything related to age particularly and more to do with where you are on the ladder.

honkycat 6y ago

It is known as brigading. They see a post critical of police and the right wing people come in and do a bunch of posts to obscure the fact that BLM and the police accountability movement is extremely popular. It is 100% planned and engineered. They know their talking points. They know what to point to in response to police accountability discussions. Change the subject to talk about random looters instead of the 99% of protestors who peacefully assemble and then are brutalized night over night.

grumio 6y ago

Same. I've been seeing more "the boot is justified unless proven otherwise, and no I don't need to provide a source; and if it is proven otherwise, I've already lost interest and moved on." and less "innocent until proven guilty." Obviously there's some of both and always has been, but I feel the same as you do. I remember when a website counting how many days James Clapper has avoided a prison sentence after he gave a false statement was big on the front page a while back. Just the other day there was a thread about experts identifying an illegal toxin used on protestors in Portland while LE illegally blocks access to storm drains so that further evidence of it cannot be collected. Both threads pertain to law enforcement overstepping their bounds with impunity and secrecy. The toxic gas one was flagged off the front page despite 125 upvotes in a short time. https://futurehuman.medium.com/scientists-identified-a-green-poisonous-gas-used-by-federal-agents-on-portland-protesters-5b56ac20a624 https://futurehuman.medium.com/scientists-identified-a-green...

duxup 6y ago

I see more interest in parsing the numbers beyond just 'arrests'. I think it is worth looking into what kind of arrests these are and the nature of them.

suifbwish 6y ago

Pretty simple. Most of us have jobs, follow the law and do not recommend others break it either.

the_only_law 6y ago
Except when it comes to things that directly benefit them ofc (i.e piracy)
- suifbwish 6y ago
  Honestly piracy is something that most people with jobs don’t have time for. Keeping up with where to get what is a chore. Netflix and Spotify do it for me thanks
AshWolfy 6y ago
first they came for the socialists

oh_sigh 6y ago

No shift - it's just that most people espouse their convictions with an unstated parenthetical that those convictions only apply when it furthers the power ambitions for them or their allies. Not much else explains e.g. how Julian Assange's rep has changed in the past 10 years. I'm sure if anyone responds to this, it will be to tell me why Julian's case is actually different and now he's dangerous for democracy...but sorry, no, his case isn't different. You're just a hypocrite.

findthewords 6y ago

If you subscribe to the debt cycle theory by Ray Dalio [1], late cycles see a rise of inequality, populism and finally authoritarianism. (I am skeptical.) [1 ]https://www.valuewalk.com/2019/05/ray-dalio-late-long-term-debt-cycle/ https://www.valuewalk.com/2019/05/ray-dalio-late-long-term-d...