I would love to be able to trust that a doctor knows more about my problem than I do, but every time I see one they clearly haven't even read the information I just told the nurse 15 minutes ago.
What if my grandmother was a bicycle? None of these change the fact that voting for a system to move resources from others to yourself is self serving.
You can debate whether it's justifiable or not, but it is self serving by definition.
Oh, I fully agree! Unfortunately many people reduce other people's inner thoughts to the boolean decision "if someone has below-average resources, their decision must be motivated by moving resources from others to themselves", because they assume the "homo economicus" model to apply to most individuals.
As my examples show, such a model breaks down for trivial cases. In the real world, people have much more complicated and layered reasons motivating their vote for any system. Though I'd like to ask anyone subscribing to the homo economicus view - what do you think about the position of people with above-average wealth who would vote for capitalism? Their choice is equally as self-serving, no?
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Btw, it's a bit rude to pattern-match a thought-terminating cliche followed by declaring your point of view to be objectively true.
You seem to be missing the point. The person you originally replied to said that those who vote for communism for their own personal gain are self serving. Let's call those people Group A.
You then listed a bunch of people who might vote for it for some non-self-serving reason, let's call them Group B.
Your comment implies that the existence of Group B makes Group A not-self-serving, when in fact it is as irrelevant to Group A's motives as my grandmother being a bicycle.
> Btw, it's a bit rude to pattern-match a thought-terminating cliche followed by declaring your point of view to be objectively true.
> If "assigning resources to everyone" is a net gain (IE the voter doesn't have resources), then yes it is self serving.
It is not possible to state more clearly that:
Voter has below-average resources -> voting for communism must be self-serving.
I have explained that this is wrong. To stick with your example, when you choose group A based on factor X and then broadly assign motivation Y to everyone in the group, you're creating a false narrative, because group A is a superset of the people you've described.
It's laughably naive to think that any significant number of people who vote for a system they think will personally benefit them are in fact doing so purely out of principle, and not at all because it will benefit them. However, as long as one such person exists, Group A is indeed a superset of self-serving people, and you are therefore correct in the most technical and irrelevant sense. Congratulations.
Man what the hell are you even talking about? Nearly every one of your comments in this thread has been some sort of non-sequitur or is replying to an argument that nobody made. Your only fully coherent comment was the one with the superset idea, which boils down to "you can't say people who vote for communism and stand to gain from it are self-serving, because one of them might happen to be a saint whose only concern is the common good".
I'm getting tired of having to direct the conversation back to the actual topic. It's okay to just bow out when you're wrong, you don't have to continuously derail a conversation with bullshit just because you're out of your depth. You're not fooling anyone with it.
Your only contribution to a conversation you admit to not understanding has been to stick your fingers into your ears and tell me how meaningless my point is. That's not "directing the conversation back to the actual topic" in any way.
It's fine to disagree with my position! But that's not what you're doing, you're declaring my thoughts meaningless and trying to push me out of the conversation. So why don't you just move on?
I said irrelevant, because your argument does not contradict the point that was being made. Your first comment was a list of scenarios that literally had nothing do with what you were replying to. And your "superset" comment was trying to shoot down a general observation about human behavior by pointing out that it isn't a mathematically rigorous model, as if it was ever intended or claimed to be. It is not my fault that nonsense and pedantry are irrelevant, but I'm sorry to inform you that they are.
> a conversation you admit to not understanding
I understand perfectly what you're saying. The source of my confusion is your insistence that it matters. It's like I told you that apples are edible and you keep insisting that they categorically aren't because some people don't like them, and also occasionally one of them might have a worm in it.
> trying to push me out of the conversation
My brother in Christ, all I want is for you to just stay in the conversation for once.
Anyway, this is pretty firmly in "playing chess with a pigeon" territory now. Have a good one.
I enjoy HN's brand of cynicism as much as the next guy, but this is ridiculous. Tobacco companies say that because governments require them to. They are not putting photos of diseased lungs on their cartons to "shock investors into buying their stock", whatever the hell that even means.
> Most open source fans are also hostile to copyrights existence and are openly IP abolitionists.
Open source licenses are only enforceable because of copyright law. How are you going to enforce GPL3 when you have no legal authority to say what people are allowed to do with your code?
A word of unsolicited advice: HNers are a prickly lot and will downvote without explanation because you stepped on some unknowable pet peeve of theirs that probably nobody else in the world shares. This happens all the time but you likely only notice when you happen to get downvoted before any upvotes and end up at 0 or -1. If your comment is reasonable, it will usually come back up.
But complaining about downvotes will certainly earn more of them.
I always blame it on the HN UI, especially on a touch device. The up/down vote arrow is a pretty small target and once you hit it, the arrows go away with no visual indication of which way you voted.
If you look close there is either a unvote or undown added to the line. However that is easy to miss. I've learned to always check that line on a touch device because there is no way to consistently hit the tiny arrow correctly (at least not for my body)
Don't forget the post score is a balance of up votes and down votes. This mean 2 down votes and 0 up votes registers the same (-1) as 10 down votes and 8 up votes (-1).
So there's no sense treating it like the community has forsaken you.
If the purpose of down votes is to guide discussion away from uninteresting or counterproductive paths, then it also scoops up divisive comments.
I suppose divisive comments are potentially disruptive if they are particularly flamey. But it seems like they deserve to be distinguished from more objectively negative comments. If the raw up/downs were exposed it would be interesting to experiment with this in the front end.
I'm pretty sure that downvotes from some users, perhaps those at a given karma threshold, count twice. I've seen quite a few posts that aren't otherwise attracting a lot of attention go straight from 1 to -1 more-or-less instantly, or from 3 back to 1.
It's also possible that they have experimented with fuzzing votes like Reddit does.
Either way, they don't seem inclined to disclose how it works behind the scenes. The Kremlinology of Hacker News is half the fun.
I quite often upvote comments I disagree with that have been downvoted for no apparent reason. Sometimes I vouch for flagged comments for the same reason too. That said, the last one I vouched for was flagged again and so were all the commentor's other comments.
> You can curtail the bandwagon effect by complaining.
I've observed the opposite--complaints are often more heavily downvoted than the original downvoted comment. The one I originally replied to is an example, at least at the moment.
So you agree with the person you're responding to, but you're attacking them for stating it with less melodrama than you would prefer? What a useless comment.
OP is right. There are too many people here in the comments who act surprised although it has been very clear what the Trump administration is trying to do. The cruelty is the point and they are not even trying to hide it.
In general, the more senior the employee, the more equity they have in the company.
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