Item — HN Reader

This essay also likely influenced the "what are things appropriate for HN":

    I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.

    ...

    Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.

    Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.

3 comments

> Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.

Well, even Republicans accepted that an insurrection was a bad thing:

> There is nothing patriotic about what is occurring on Capitol Hill. This is 3rd world style anti-American anarchy.

* https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1346909901478522880

* https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/marco-rubio-2021-tweets-...

Are insurrections, now five years later, a good thing?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...

> Well, even Republicans accepted that an insurrection was a bad thing:

Just not THIS insurrection?

https://www.whitehouse.gov/j6/

Rubio thought that the insurrection was bad when it happened (see his tweet), but now… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Typical paulg overgeneralization from his bubble. Just because many political opinions are legitimately debatable doesn’t mean that every opinion about every topic you call political is equally valid. That’s just silly.

I don’t see Paul acting like every opinion is equally valid when it directly affects something he cares about. He seems to happily participate in “useless” political discussions when he has a strong opinion.

My read of it isn't about if it's legitimately debatable, but if it's productively discussable (in an online setting).

Topics about someone's identity aren't things that one can easily change - and certainly not from text on a screen from some stranger on the internet.

Discussions about things that are core to someone's identity (in that setting) aren't useful.

Religion and politics in that context extend beyond one's claims about a soul or which end of the political spectrum is more soulless. Asking about how to maintain an F150 in /r/fuckcars is similarly not going to be a useful discussion since the identity of the people in that subreddit is in conflict about something that is quite legitimately discussable.

Keeping one's identity small (and topical to the subject matter at hand) given that it isn't in conflict with one's identity makes for a place that is much easier to moderate and keep a civil discussion.

One can discuss the impact of Section 174 or ZIRP without invoking politics. However, once politics (or religion) is involved in a comment everything downthread of it becomes more difficult to moderate.

So it's not the "ignoring politics" that's at issue - many topics in today's world are intimately intermingled with politics. However, discussing that politics directly makes this an environment that people tend to not want to participate in.

Turn on showdead and look at the comments in this post to see the types of things people don't want to participate in... and how much worse the site would be if those were acceptable topics.

There are many places where one can discuss those topics. Not every site has to be all things for all people. This one is thankfully one of the places where discussion on politics and the related identities doesn't happen.

I don't know what site you're thinking of that avoids politics...maybe lobste.rs? Here are some of today's top HN stories that I would certainly categorize as "discussion on politics".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550912 - European Commission issues call for evidence on open source (356 points)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550777 - Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success (198 points)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46547303 - Iran Protest Map (170 points)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544625 - The Trump Administration Says It's Illegal to Record Videos of ICE (65 points)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46546188 - Texas first state to end American bar association oversight of law school (63 points)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818 (and the related links) would be the long form authoritative answer on that.

There is a difference between discussing politics and political discussions. Things done by political bodies that have impact can be reasonably discussed.

Yes, DanG has written a lengthy, nuanced piece on the subject, because he has to deal with the reality that there is in fact no bright line between discussing politics and political discussion.

PaulG simply asserted that "no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid". Which is neither true, nor useful.

Also, some of us are amenable to changing our opinions when presented with strong evidence/arguments. I suppose the larger questions ("what do we want society to be like", "which values are most important to us") tend to be baked into ourselves so there's a limit to how much someone will change. However, there's examples of people leaving cults etc. and dramatically changing their opinions and personality.

Indeed, some discussion topics are more about being confident than being right, since there's no objective way to determine the latter.

"Until we know we are wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right." - Kathryn Schulz