Cultivating optimism is the first step. Optimism is irrational, you can just choose to have it (of course thinking about good things that have happened helps). Optimism is the precondition for doing good.
So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
I had a lot of optimism as a teenager in the 80s. And maybe even more during Obama's presidency. Then 2016, 2020, 2024-2026 hit, and I'm at like -89% for optimism.
I mostly agree with what you said, but disagree on one point:
> Optimism is the precondition for doing good.
It is still possible to do good when things are bleak and there is no possible way out - just because doing good is the right thing[1]. Optimism helps a lot for morale, but is not a precondition.
1. e.g. the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine.
> the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine
Optimism doesn't necessarily mean hope. It can mean belief in an afterlife. An end to a suffering. Or gratitude for having someone else in a terrible moment.
I think OP is correct. You can't have good without optimism. Your point, which is also correct, is you can do good without hope.
The philosophical definition just opens up bigger cans of worms that can't be adequately addressed in an HN thread, and have been debated for thousands of years: what is "good"? Perhaps we need a moral framework to answer that, but then, what are morals? "You can't have good without optimism" is a declaration that has to be contextualized, and is far from universal.
I suspect answers couched in terms of individualism will always sound inadequate to questions that are inherently collectivist, such as why people do things "for the greater good" detrimental to their own well-being.
That is an argument of the pessimists and enemies of the good.
Pessimism is clearly irrational: Look at the world we live in; look what humanity has achieved since the Enlightenment, and in the last century - freedom, peace, and prosperity have swept the world. Diseases are wiped out, we visit the moon and (robotically) other planets, the Internet, etc. etc. etc.
To be pessimistic about our ability to build a better world is bizarre.
Pessimism and optimism are philosophical perspectives (dispositions) and do not necessarily have anything do with doing good or doing bad. Why do you think optimism only precipitates good things? Surely you can imagine a situation (or many) where thinking more positively about a situation than the data warrants leads to bad outcomes?
None of your examples above tie directly to an optimistic disposition. How could you possibly know the disposition of the thousands of humans involved in those endeavors? You are letting your personal disposition color your view of the world (as we all do) and mistaking this for some sort of absolute truth.
> So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
The problem is, that way of thinking is just like the "co2 footprint" - individualise responsibility from where it belongs (=the government) to individual people, and let's be real, outside of the very last action item many people don't have the time and/or the money.
At some point, we (as in: virtually all Western nations) have to acknowledge that our governments are utter dogshit and demand better. Optimism requires trust in that what you work for doesn't get senselessly destroyed the next election cycle.
Okay but also we all still live in democracies, and people are fairly obviously getting what they vote for a lot of the time.
Extrrnalising that to "the government" is to pretend you had no say, or to collectively try and pretend everyone else is with you & which they observably are not.
Edit: and before anyone responds with to me with a quip about money and corporations - money in politics buys advertising and campaigning. It doesn't buy votes directly, and when it does that's corruption and what's done about that is still largely on you the voter to set your priorities at the ballot box.
Unless I missed something the Microsoft underwater data center was basically a publicity stunt.
Anyone who thinks it makes sense to blast data centers into space has never seen how big and heavy they are, or thought about their immense power consumption, much less the challenge of radiating away that much waste heat into space.
Well the thing is that it seemed to have been successful beyond all expectations despite being that? They had fewer failures due to the controlled atmosphere, great cooling that took no extra power, and low latency due to being close to offshore backbones. And I presume you don't really need to pay for the land you're using cause it's not really on land. Can one buy water?
Space is pretty ridicolous, but underwater might genuinely be a good fit in certain areas.
Hot saltwater is the worst substance on earth, excepting, maybe, hydrofluoric acid. You really don't want to cool things with ocean water over an extended period of time. And filtering/purifying it takes vast amounts of power (e.g. reverse osmosis).
I was listening to a Darknet Diaries episode where Maxie Reynolds seems to make it work: https://subseacloud.com/ I don't know how profitable they are, and I doubt this is scalable enough, but it can work as a business.
Intel went through a phase in the 2010’s of buying gobs of companies with fancy tech and utterly failing to integrate those acquisitions.
And even more fundamental, Intel rested on its laurels of having good hardware and got bit hard in the end. Something similar seems to be happening at Apple.
Why on earth do they want water from the national forest when the massive Columbia River is right there!? Is it too expensive to treat the river water? /s
Literature on doing things was much more practical. There was a culture of things being repairable. There was a pride in one’s work. Check this out if you don’t believe me: http://vintagemachinery.org/pubs/1617/30720.pdf
The rise of the publicly traded corporation run by fiduciary duty has, in my opinion, squeezed out repairability, pride, and workmanship for marginal financial gains.
I fear it won’t have been worth it in the long run. Shame short term incentives run the show.
In art one often follows impulses. Art is about expression after all.
Plus, if these were really AI creations new copies can be printed. Unless the human “co-creator” did something like paint on the work after printing, not much has been damaged.
What if there was a way for the “silent majority” (or something like it) to discuss political issues free of the impetus to polarization? Surely that would be a lot better than echo chambers.
Hackernews style apoliticism strikes me as wanting to chameleon to whatever side is perceived as winning the political game. I think it’s a nihilistic stance.
We need to be able to be political without the zealotry. Politics, of all things, is not a zero sum game.
All my social media feeds are filled with political rage bait. Yes, tech is political, and yes, techies implicitly take sides; but I really don't need another source for all the political headlines of the day.
That is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about escaping that.
I’m frustrated with how narrow of view people here are taking on politics.
Partisan politics has grown into a nasty oppositional quagmire.
But, Politics in general is defined as “The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs.” From a duck duck go search. That is pretty broad.
Open your minds! There is more out there than you think.
But Hacker News is full of "hackers" and computer science grads. Why would you expect to find nuanced discussion of governing here? I don't come to Hacker News for discussion of surgical procedures either because the surgeons are not on here.
This might be heresy, but a CS background doesn't make you an expert on government, governance, or politics. Just as politicians seem woefully uninformed on computer science topics. So a political discussion on Hacker News will naturally lean towards popular conceptions of politics: that is partisanship, slogans, and the other stuff that makes social media politics so toxic. "The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation" is not going to enter the picture.
I guess I’m making the mistake of assuming others have taken a similar intellectual path as I have.
I’m an Elecrical and Computer Engineer (ECE) by schooling. But I did pay attention in my mandatory liberal arts class. I took a Political Philosophy course, and a 400 level History of US Foreign Policy, where I was the only non-history major.
People inevitably opine on government/politics. And because of that I think they should delve deeper. I think that delving deeper and having civil conversation are how we escape the toxic mess media currently dishes out.
I think the danger with political discussion is that the expression of an idea is as important as the idea itself. This means that to have a productive political discussion you either need:
1. Very very high verbal skills so that each person can communicate their idea in a way that doesn't leave (much) room for interpretation or a bad-faith reading.
2. A community that "steelmans" each-other's ideas and consistently chooses the best-faith interpretation of what the other person is saying.
(1) is impossible in a forum that accepts folks from a range of backgrounds and abilities. (2) is generally impossible in a public forum on the internet. Even if everyone on Hacker News stuck to this principle, outsiders would not. You'd get posts on reddit about how "Hacker News is a haven for Nazis". Or posts on X about how "Communists are invading the tech community" and ultimately a lot of bad press for Y Combinator that I'm sure they'd rather not have.
Failure of 1&2 is why there are flame wars yes, but I thought the motto on here is often "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
> (1) is impossible in a forum that accepts folks from a range of backgrounds and abilities.
This by itself doesn't account for why there is significantly
less low-value political comments on here than reddit, to which (1) also technically applies. For (2), taking the best-faith interpretation is already in the HN guidelines. I'm also guessing that the mods let many flagged politically posts by users stay flagged because from experience they "know" which posts will trigger flame wars or low-value comments from the community because of the "past performance predicts future performance" thing. (ie, the unsaid thing is they don't trust the community to obey 1&2 on those posts due to past track record).
I for one would love to read past discussions of historic political events as they happen live from a community that includes industrialists of the past and their well-paid or high-skilled employees as well as people from academia in related fields. So why limit posterity's ability to do the same?
> I guess I’m making the mistake of assuming others have taken a similar intellectual path as I have.
Oh, come on. I know a lot of people who are highly educated and intelligent but fall for the same outrage bait as everyone else... we're bombarded with so much political talking points that we don't carefully consider every headline, verify every source, and then publish nuanced takes on social media where the stories change every hour.
The bottom line is that, with all respect, I absolutely don't care about the political hot takes of people on HN. And I'm sure they don't care about mine. I know where to go when I want to talk politics. If I want measured takes from scholars, I can read their columns or blogs. If I want to argue, I'll do it with family and real-world friends.
I agree, but I don't know of a better place to discuss current events on the internet. I can at least expect that the people are educated and intelligent (relative to the average internet user) and there's a cultural of thoughtful discussion.
Every Reddit thread I see on politics these days is just... rabid seething. At this point they remind me of how my elderly far-right relatives posted on Facebook circa 2010. I broadly agree with them (orange man bad) but there's so much misinformation and sloppy thinking that it's useless. There are probably some smaller and more thoughtful political subreddits out there, but if so I haven't found them
EDIT: Now that I think about it some more, I disagree with your sentiment that we should leave the politicking to the politicians. Democracy requires a population that has some idea of what's going on. I think discussion and disagreement is a great way to sharpen one's thinking
A near-total ban on the whole thing is easier to implement and enforce than trying to make online discussions of politics not suck, when their natural state seems to be to suck big time.
Is it impossible to maintain a civilized discussion of hot topic political issues? No. But it's not a solved problem, or anywhere near. I respect the "keep the incendiary stuff off the front page" policy.
"No Politics on the front page" is itself a highly politically charged policy: One that favors the status quo and favors hiding wrongdoing. I wish HN users who want "no politics" would admit that they are just asking for a different kind of political bias from the site.
That seems analogous to the "atheism is a religion" fallacy. No, not wanting to see politics in one very specific location is clearly not a political stance.
Where does "politics" end, then? What about articles pointing out a tech company's ethical wrongdoing? Or about their legal troubles? How about the technology behind war fighting drones? Or software's role in mass surveillance, war crimes and ethnic cleansing? Are these all off limits because they are inherently political? By banning these and similar topics, HN's purpose becomes more and more about whitewashing the industry and less and less about honest discussion.
I wish HN users who want HN to be about politics would be honest about simply wanting HN to be a political echo chamber of their preferred flavor, instead of hiding behind the flimsy excuses like "everything is political actually".
Every place on the internet where discussion on politics is "encouraged" is a heavy handed echo chamber. I think people wanting to discuss politics here specifically want to engage in a reasonably unbiased moderated venue, and people not wanting to discuss politics either want to focus on hacker news (very reasonable) or keep their politics over at [echo chamber X/Y/Z] (bad for society by isolating people in self reinforcing bubbles and not engaging outside of them). I don't envy Dan's or Tom's job, but am thankful for the balance they strike.
Does your same argument not also apply to people who want HN to be 'non-political'? Since just from your post history recently I can see that you've leapt into some particularly political posts of your own [1] [2]. I'm particularly open about what I believe and post in, but usually people that say they want something non-political actually indicates that they precisely want an echo chamber.
I don’t think people actually want yet another echo chamber. Anyone who has been exercising even a modicum of critical thinking sees where echo chambers lead.
I think a forum where bad faith polarizers are downvoted and good faith open minded discussion is rewarded would go a long ways.
Do you understand the magnitude of the thing are you asking for?
Trying to maintain a civilized discussion about modern politics is like walking a tightrope. You can say "anyone who knows what a tightrope is sees that falling off it would be bad", and it's true, but, does saying that mean that you'll avoid the fall? The failure mode is extremely obvious but not at all easy to avoid.
If you don't have an intuition of "partisan politics are inherently corrosive to human minds", I suggest you get one. It's not impossible to have a civilized discussion of politics, but it is unlikely and unnatural and unstable. It's very, very, very hard to set up and maintain an environment like this in practice.
> I wish HN users who want "no politics" would admit that they are just asking for a different kind of political bias from the site.
You're asking for them to admit something that isn't true. There's nothing political about recognizing that political discussions are a complete shitshow and wanting them to not crowd out everything else.
I wonder if the push for "no politics" is actually a consistent principle, or if it's just a reaction to how much the current news cycle challenges the community's comfort zone.
Someone should look at the flagging rates for political threads from 2012, 2018, and today. It would show whether our definition of a "distraction" is based on content quality, or if the appetite for "apoliticism" fluctuates depending on which side of the aisle holds the megaphone.
Has anyone done a sentiment analysis on flagging patterns versus administrative shifts? I suspect the "politics is a mind-killer" argument is a lot more popular when the headlines don't align with the reader's own worldview.
It seems to me you think of politics as being the politics of the sensationalist 24 hour news cycle. Sure, that is a mind killer.
But I encourage you to take a look at politics as a broader thing. Read some academic, foundational political philosophy works. Politics in its broad sense is inescapable. Better to know it and be an active participant than to leave it up to others.
You start by allowing "politics as a broader thing", flash forward a year, then you notice that at any given time, at least 20% of the frontpage is occupied by people screeching their throats raw with some incendiary hyper-partisan rhetoric.
The failure mode is rather obvious, and also extremely hard to avoid in practice.
"If putting rat poison in the burgers would cause people to die, what does this say about the quality of the burgers?"
Very little.
I've been told most hackers are humans - not machines or some kind of alien species. So I fully expect hackers to have the flaws people tend to do.
Partisan politics have a nasty habit of capitalizing on human flaws, and bringing out the worst in people who engage deeply in them. Which, in online communities, can have a self-reinforcing effect.
And yet we are talking about partisan politics. Because it's the lowest common denominator of politics. Because it's the failure mode.
You can say "not all politics are actively toxic to human minds" and point at 18th century philosophical works all day long, but we both know that 18th century philosophical works were never the concern.
You are persistently referring to partisan politics in your comments. I am not.
I have repeatedly distanced myself from partisan politics in this discussion. I believe I have not made a single statement supporting partisan politics, much less a particular party, in this entire discussion. If you disagree, perhaps you can quote an example.
A 'near-total ban' would involve basically banning the entire site of HN, and also tends to expose the inherent hypocrisy in any platform attempting to be 'non-political'.
For example, HN had massive threads years ago dedicated to glazing everything Elon Musk did. Now, conveniently, any discussion of Elon Musk, Grok etc is now flagged and considered political as the winds have changed to be largely negative. Same goes for a lot of stuff people took for granted in tech, because now that stuff was made part of the system that makes our lives worse.
Tech and finance have wedded to each other and finance has lobbied for politics so hard.
So I don't think that tech and politics can be seperated from each other and this shows why.
Earlier, I don't think that appreciating Elon Musk was considered political for the most part (well I read his biography and I thought he was just interesting guy) but his recent acts on twitter (I refuse to call it X) etc. just show how bubbly even I or people who read his biography were.
After some new reports on him, I feel much more in disdain of man than not. My cousin still glazes Elon tho.
I feel like there is some dunning kruger effect at play here. I read his biography -> I feel smart -> I say Elon's smart previously on HN -> elon acts dumb as mouse with ketamine fueled addiction -> but I supported Elon earlier -> most people don't want internal contradictions so they will try to justify it -> Gets into glazing elon -> Flags people who give genuine criticism of the guy now -> gets to the far alt right
I feel like the problem is more so the extremism.
There are some real issues happening in the world and news is covering it but some hackernews users definitely flag anything that they find not fitting in their world order.
I just want to say that its okay to have internal contradiction because we are all human and we can evaluate people wrongly. Doesn't mean we have to stick with that.
I remember watching pirates of silicon valley when I was in middle school (it was in a pendrive connected to TV so whenever satellite connection got lost, I used to watch it), I even went ahead in school and gave a speech on steve jobs, next and everything so much so that the teacher (he was a teacher for such extra activities started calling me steve jobs)
Anyways, my point is that it was only later in life where I realized that althoguh steve jobs was a good businessman, how valuable steve wozniak and other underrated people are and how ethically questionable xerox's decision was and his personal life too...
I just want to say that there is a nuance about steve jobs as well, he was pretty rude to his employees.
Like I feel like there is just nuance to the whole situation that people forget in HN
Seconded. Another way of saying this is that avoiding politics benefits the status quo.
Since the status quo is inherently conservative, that has a stifling effect on innovation - which is inherently liberal. Which is ironic for a site dedicated to disruption. Hence the cognitive dissonance.
I try to entertain opposing viewpoints in all of my comments, even if I don't always agree with them. So while I find it most practical to live conservatively, that doesn't mean that I wish that for the world. It's important to remember that FDR - a liberal - was one of Reagan's heroes. I think that we can imagine a Star Trek style post-scarcity geopolitical reality without abandoning the ethos which got us this far.
Now, regardless of all that, I still think that HN has the best ranking algorithm around. So I would say that if it wants to get serious about getting back to meritocracy, funding real work on hard problems, setting a positive example through intellectual honesty, etc, then it should consider revising its flagging policy.
A proof of concept might be to move flagged posts below the fold past slot 31, rather than removing them completely. Then they could bubble back up on their own merit. Or maybe each flag costs 10 slots, something like that. And all flags should go through human review to prevent gaming, if they don't already.
I went on a date with a gal who told me about using LLMs to fluff up her work emails, and she was proud of it. I was aghast, imagining the game of telephone where a receiver drops the mail into an LLM for he TLDR. The date didn’t go well haha
I remember a time when users had a great deal more control over their computers. Big tech companies are the ones who used their power to take that control away. You, my friend are the insincere one.
If you’re young enough not to remember a time before forced automatic updates that break things, locked devices unable to run software other than that blessed by megacorps, etc. it would do you well to seek out a history lesson.
So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
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