Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012) • Hacker News Board

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#161

Post by brokenkebab » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 9:59 PM UTC

onethought wrote: post #15

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking b) and running with it, education is, in my opinion, the silver bullet for a number of societies ills. It's very interesting to note how higher education in the US has such a high barrier to entry that it actively discourages outsiders. It feels as if the Australian Government wants to move in the same direction, and / or have already been doing so for a few years. Education has its own benefits to society as…

True, if you are on the right (political spectrum) you do not want to encourage higher education, it shifts people to the left, as analytical thinking starts undoing idealism. US is a good example of this, with most universities having more left communities around them. Perhaps it is an intentional long play by the Right in Australia to pursue this kind of minimisation of education

In Soviet Union, and I believe generally in socialist block, in its final times most young highly educated people were visibly right-leaning.

Probably it's fair to say education may give feelings of better understanding of things (whether it justified or not is a separate topic), and when it is not translated into higher social, and economic positions it naturally leads to growing hostility towards current system. Will it take a right, or left form, or something you cannot reliably put in this spectrum - is the issue if present conditions.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#162

Post by mrfusion » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 10:01 PM UTC

DaniloDias wrote: post #151

mrfusion wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most educated people I know seem the most partisan right now and most likely to parrot main stream media talking points. It’s making me question my assumptions about education. On the other hand Im just one data point.

The behavior that helped the most educated succeed was being informed. It’s not surprising that they maintain that pattern and in so doing, parrot mainstream media. Most people have limited experience in managing information that they consider authoritative which turns out to be wrong. I think the best example of authoritative misinformation for 2020 is Anthony Fauci’s guidance that masks don’t help until they do. I’…

You raise a great point. Trust in authorities is a very powerful mental shortcut. You don’t have to research anything. Go with the mainstream and you’ll always be right.

Until that shortcut goes horribly wrong.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#163

Post by root_axis » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 10:04 PM UTC

datenarsch wrote: post #153

root_axis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get it. It just seems silly to favor a candidate based on who rejects them. If policies on opposite sides of the political spectrum are interchangeable then why care at all who gets elected? At least voting for a 3rd party one can be said to be contributing to a cause closest to one's ideal, but being favorable to anyone who the mainstream doesn't approve of just seems like flawed logic.

The establishment/mainstream is the real enemy of the people. It totally makes sense to support anyone who you think could realistically challenge and destroy the status quo.

What if the person that destroys the status quo is worse? Is your argument that nothing could be worse than the status quo?

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#164

Post by tamaharbor » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #72

anewaccount2021 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I would expect a technocratic forum like HN to suggest. America's most poverty stricken regions have had public education for nearly a century with almost no meaningful improvement in prospects. Tell me how rural poverty in West Viriginia is reduced by giving people humanities degrees. Better educated voters? Who cares, the poor have no representation of merit anyway; their choices are to vote for one pa…

Public education in the US is awful and lags nearly the entire developed world. Humanities degrees are not terribly useful, but boiling all education down to humanities degrees is a blatant strawman that signals a lot about your willingness to have a nuanced discussion. I think it's fairly self evident that investment in the future is what improves the future and education is probably the most important and significa…

Stupid people of every race, color, or party are the major problem. And covid lockdowns have made education just more ineffective.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#165

Post by alisonatwork » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 10:10 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #163

datenarsch wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The establishment/mainstream is the real enemy of the people. It totally makes sense to support anyone who you think could realistically challenge and destroy the status quo.

What if the person that destroys the status quo is worse? Is your argument that nothing could be worse than the status quo?

A useful example might be to look at the fallout of the various protests during Arab Spring, and how it led to both more liberal and less liberal outcomes.

Anti-establishmentarianism can bring together people of different political persuasions who all want to dismantle parts of the current system. What comes after that is a new battle, and that one may end up fought along more traditionally ideological lines.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#166

Post by BurningFrog » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 10:11 PM UTC

andrew_ wrote: post #67

inglor_cz wrote: post #2

Turchin's two main ideas are intriguing. a) 50 years is enough for "institutional memory" to go out of the window. This may change with longevity breakthroughs, but 50 years is currently enough for a complete generation exchange, so the new leaders have no memory of the previous upheaval and will make the same mistakes again. Or at least the same kind of mistakes, details are always different. b) elite overproduction…

Within the professions that make up "tech" 10 years is enough time for institutional memory to go out the window.

Are you saying most tech people only spend~10 years in the industry?

That's much less than what I would think.

But maybe I misunderstand. It happens regularly :)

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#167

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 10:14 PM UTC

gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #53

jsmcgd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's why an education has to be broad. A selective education can be tantamount to brainwashing/propaganda. Give the students as many perspectives and hope that they will do something sensible as they process the information; knowing that not all will, but most. I believe that the more perspectives you are aware of, the less likely you are to be dogmatic and extreme in your beliefs and actions. You will be r…

> Give the students as many perspectives and hope that they will do something sensible as they process the information I don’t know if you’ve gone to college recently but that was not my impression. It’s a woke monoculture. Discourse is gone.

[deleted]

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#168

Post by iguy » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #43

iguy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These examples are of technical education. German rocket scientists, and British blast-furnace wizards (to France). These things are important of course but seem orthogonal to political institutional memory. Scholars deeply steeped in Bismark's thoughts & mistakes, or in English constitutional law, didn't make these jumps.

> or in English constitutional law Carl Schmitt did in fact made the jump, and he's one of the most read constitutional law writers in the last century. Not sure if Max Weber would have done the same, most probably not (he was really versed in English constitutional law, his "Economy and Society" has lots of quotes to Maitland's "History of English Law"), but he didn't strike me as a fervent supporter of democracy ri…

These don't seem like the sort of jumps I had in mind. I meant the wholesale import of a school of knowledge to a new place. As happened for instance with the arrival of many modern sciences in the US; lots of fields where everybody's family tree goes back to germany.

The germans you mention were certainly well-informed about foreign traditions, but their knowledge didn't create a living continuation of these traditions where they ended up.

(The context is, since it's been a few hours, was a claim that education was a way to circumvent this 50-year institutional forgetting, which I took to mean national institutions. And the counter-claim is that many places have good education and terrible institutions, why haven't they imported this ersatz institutional memory? If it works for local preservation, why doesn't it work for international transplanting? And I don't completely know, but the successful international knowledge grafts seem to be technical subjects. )

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#169

Post by kodah » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 10:21 PM UTC

johngalt wrote: post #56

onethought wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, if you are on the right (political spectrum) you do not want to encourage higher education, it shifts people to the left, as analytical thinking starts undoing idealism. US is a good example of this, with most universities having more left communities around them. Perhaps it is an intentional long play by the Right in Australia to pursue this kind of minimisation of education

"education, it shifts people to the left, as analytical thinking starts undoing idealism." True; college students are noted for their lack of idealism. Conversely right leaning occupations such as veterans, oil rig workers and farmers always have their head in the clouds with high minded idealistic notions that don't work in the real world.

> Conversely right leaning occupations such as veterans, oil rig workers and farmers always have their head in the clouds with high minded idealistic notions that don't work in the real world.

Is this a joke?

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#170

Post by tsimionescu » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 10:25 PM UTC

onethought wrote: post #45

WatchDog wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think analytical thinking has anything to do with political leaning, I'd argue that the US higher education system particularly the humanities is a breeding ground of idealogues. I would say the tendency of education to lean left is largely due to left leaning people being more attracted to working in academia.

This is an umbrellas make it rain reverse causation. If you look outside the US the education level does correlate with the political spectrum. The higher educated the population the entire spectrum shifts left. See Northern Europe, Japan, Australia, Singapore, China, even political ideology (democracy vs socialism) doesn’t change this correlation

I can tell you that in the former Soviet bloc, higher education correlates very powerfully with leaning right.

I'd bet it's more likely that higher education correlates well with elitism, and that elitism happens to have a left-ish flavor in some countries and a right-ish flavor in others, simply by accident of history, not by some general rule.