5 ms·

It's the libertarian mindset. It is more hyper-vigilant and suspicious than the liberal mindset. You'll find that left-leaning people and right-leaning people h

by Aqueous 13y ago

It's the libertarian mindset. It is more hyper-vigilant and suspicious than the liberal mindset. You'll find that left-leaning people and right-leaning people have, at a very basic level, a different philosophy about other people. Left-leaning people are more trusting, right-leaning people are more suspicious. Left-leaning people want to help people out a little bit in a systematic way, right-leaning people want everyone to be self-reliant. There's something to be said for both views though. The problem is that everyone is right. You can't trust everyone but you have to trust someone. Terrorism is not the end of the world but it isn't a non-problem either. You can't let everyone sit around all day and not work but you also can't let them starve while working to death for low wages, either, or die of an illness they can't afford to treat. I think the fundamental lie of adversarial democracy is that we can't both be right at the same time. We are all a little bit right, but none of us can see that because we get hung up on relatively minor differences.

Doctor_Fegg 13y ago
Some of us are left-leaning hackers, thanks!
- Aqueous 13y ago
  Count me among you, but I'm also a rabid hoarder of BitCoins, so something in me must be a little libertarian.
  - MartinCron 13y ago
    Are you hoarding, prospecting, or investing?
    - Aqueous 13y ago
      Mostly hoarding/investing, but some times I put me prospecting goggles on and head out for the BitCoin hills!
- lukifer 13y ago
  Some of us are left-leaning libertarians [1]; equally suspicious of the the concentrated power of the state and the concentrated power of private capital and corporations. Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. (Curiously, the reverse is also true, and I suspect that's what OP is reacting to.) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1rK4PsP0zY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1rK4PsP0zY
  - VLM 13y ago
    "concentrated power of private capital and corporations." I'm in your boat, you can't have a free market if one side has all the goods and all the power. "Let them eat cake" is a better recipe for a revolution than for a free and prosperous market. WRT revolution, observing an epic fail and discussing it doesn't include supporting or enjoying it.
w_t_payne 13y ago
One side trusts individuals to make the right decision; the other trusts bureaucratic systems to make the right decision. Both sides can get it wrong.
- msandford 13y ago
  I personally don't like the idea of engineering society. But it seems that it's fashionable these days to do so. In my opinion if you're going to do that you would want to engineer the most robust society possible. Ultimately the best way to have a robust society is for everyone to be 100% self-sufficient. It's like process isolation; if there are problems with one process it doesn't bleed over into other ones. That's not terribly efficient from an economic perspective. But as far as robustness goes it's excellent. Specialization in society is more efficient at the expense of robustness. If you're a wine-maker and people suddenly develop a taste for beer you're SOL until you re-train as a brewer. That's a non-trivial process. But so long as wine remains in demand it's far more efficient for there to be only a few thousand (or 10's of thousands or whatever) wineries than 100 million or more. And the wine produced will likely be of higher quality. Many of the questions we're dealing with today are where exactly to strike the balance between robustness and efficiency. During a boom everyone is gung-ho about specialization, as the downturn sets in people are more focused on self-reliance. Ultimately like you said there's truth to both sides otherwise society would have shifted entirely one way or the other. Personally I'd like to see a more robust society as that means that downturns hurt the country as a whole less, and those individuals that are hurt are also hurt less. Yes it's at the expense of growth but as we've seen in the housing and higher ed markets, growth isn't a panacea.
  - w_t_payne 13y ago
    Thank you for the comment. That is a really very interesting analysis, and a nice way of looking at things. I can see that specialisation implies fragility and an increased downside risk-exposure to volatility; but I am less convinced that self-sufficiency can be equated with generality. Surely we also need to consider flexibility / transient-specialisation? Furthermore, there are (presumably) lots of ways to be fragile, so there may be some other implications not considered here. ... (perhaps if I sleep on this for a few days I might think of something). A relevant application domain for this analytical approach: The explosive growth in the rate of production of information and data, combined with the equally explosive growth in it's availability and dissemination combines positively with the world's currently increasing population of educated, involved, and connected individuals. These factors are trending upwards together, inevitably resulting in a dramatic increase in the volume and complexity of available information; posing new challenges for organisation, analysis, digestion and action -- all of which seems (perhaps) to presage a dramatic increase in intellectual specialisation. In simpler terms: Given that we have access to more information than we know what to do with, a key competitive differentiator is and will continue to be how organized we are at selecting & processing that information.
jerf 13y ago
"It's the libertarian mindset. It is more hyper-vigilant and suspicious than the liberal mindset." This explains, for instance, why the liberals encode everything in an endlessly proliferating set of laws that are never complete, while libertarians seek to trust people to function like adults in an adult world. Ahem. I'll accept that the left values society and the right values self-reliance. But I think your problem is thinking libertarianism is "Right". It's not. It's "not-Left", but it's not "Right" either. The left wants the government to be everyone's Mommy; the right wants the government to be everyone's Daddy; populists want the government to be everyone's God; libertarians want everyone to act like adults.
VLM 13y ago
"You'll find that left-leaning people and right-leaning people have, at a very basic level, a different philosophy about other people" Left vs Right is also a popular divide and conquer strategy. Not terribly hard to find something to distract them about other than real issues. I don't agree with the argument, but the best one line summary of how the divide and conquer does its division is given the classic Reagan quote "trust, but verify" the mainstream right left distinction simplifies down to which side of the comma gets emphasized. Its surprising how well those three words and a comma, can enforce the distraction, err, summarize the difference, or whatever.
jotm 13y ago
Left or right, 'cause there's no middle...

by Aqueous 13y ago

Doctor_Fegg 13y ago

Some of us are left-leaning hackers, thanks!

Aqueous 13y ago
Count me among you, but I'm also a rabid hoarder of BitCoins, so something in me must be a little libertarian.
- MartinCron 13y ago
  Are you hoarding, prospecting, or investing?
  - Aqueous 13y ago
    Mostly hoarding/investing, but some times I put me prospecting goggles on and head out for the BitCoin hills!
lukifer 13y ago
Some of us are left-leaning libertarians [1]; equally suspicious of the the concentrated power of the state and the concentrated power of private capital and corporations. Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. (Curiously, the reverse is also true, and I suspect that's what OP is reacting to.) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1rK4PsP0zY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1rK4PsP0zY
- VLM 13y ago
  "concentrated power of private capital and corporations." I'm in your boat, you can't have a free market if one side has all the goods and all the power. "Let them eat cake" is a better recipe for a revolution than for a free and prosperous market. WRT revolution, observing an epic fail and discussing it doesn't include supporting or enjoying it.

w_t_payne 13y ago

One side trusts individuals to make the right decision; the other trusts bureaucratic systems to make the right decision. Both sides can get it wrong.

msandford 13y ago
I personally don't like the idea of engineering society. But it seems that it's fashionable these days to do so. In my opinion if you're going to do that you would want to engineer the most robust society possible. Ultimately the best way to have a robust society is for everyone to be 100% self-sufficient. It's like process isolation; if there are problems with one process it doesn't bleed over into other ones. That's not terribly efficient from an economic perspective. But as far as robustness goes it's excellent. Specialization in society is more efficient at the expense of robustness. If you're a wine-maker and people suddenly develop a taste for beer you're SOL until you re-train as a brewer. That's a non-trivial process. But so long as wine remains in demand it's far more efficient for there to be only a few thousand (or 10's of thousands or whatever) wineries than 100 million or more. And the wine produced will likely be of higher quality. Many of the questions we're dealing with today are where exactly to strike the balance between robustness and efficiency. During a boom everyone is gung-ho about specialization, as the downturn sets in people are more focused on self-reliance. Ultimately like you said there's truth to both sides otherwise society would have shifted entirely one way or the other. Personally I'd like to see a more robust society as that means that downturns hurt the country as a whole less, and those individuals that are hurt are also hurt less. Yes it's at the expense of growth but as we've seen in the housing and higher ed markets, growth isn't a panacea.
- w_t_payne 13y ago
  Thank you for the comment. That is a really very interesting analysis, and a nice way of looking at things. I can see that specialisation implies fragility and an increased downside risk-exposure to volatility; but I am less convinced that self-sufficiency can be equated with generality. Surely we also need to consider flexibility / transient-specialisation? Furthermore, there are (presumably) lots of ways to be fragile, so there may be some other implications not considered here. ... (perhaps if I sleep on this for a few days I might think of something). A relevant application domain for this analytical approach: The explosive growth in the rate of production of information and data, combined with the equally explosive growth in it's availability and dissemination combines positively with the world's currently increasing population of educated, involved, and connected individuals. These factors are trending upwards together, inevitably resulting in a dramatic increase in the volume and complexity of available information; posing new challenges for organisation, analysis, digestion and action -- all of which seems (perhaps) to presage a dramatic increase in intellectual specialisation. In simpler terms: Given that we have access to more information than we know what to do with, a key competitive differentiator is and will continue to be how organized we are at selecting & processing that information.

jerf 13y ago

"It's the libertarian mindset. It is more hyper-vigilant and suspicious than the liberal mindset." This explains, for instance, why the liberals encode everything in an endlessly proliferating set of laws that are never complete, while libertarians seek to trust people to function like adults in an adult world. Ahem. I'll accept that the left values society and the right values self-reliance. But I think your problem is thinking libertarianism is "Right". It's not. It's "not-Left", but it's not "Right" either. The left wants the government to be everyone's Mommy; the right wants the government to be everyone's Daddy; populists want the government to be everyone's God; libertarians want everyone to act like adults.

VLM 13y ago

"You'll find that left-leaning people and right-leaning people have, at a very basic level, a different philosophy about other people" Left vs Right is also a popular divide and conquer strategy. Not terribly hard to find something to distract them about other than real issues. I don't agree with the argument, but the best one line summary of how the divide and conquer does its division is given the classic Reagan quote "trust, but verify" the mainstream right left distinction simplifies down to which side of the comma gets emphasized. Its surprising how well those three words and a comma, can enforce the distraction, err, summarize the difference, or whatever.

jotm 13y ago

Left or right, 'cause there's no middle...