alt Hacker NewsWhy I don't discuss politics with friends
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I don’t talk politics much when I’m first getting to know someone because our country is so polarized that they automatically assume you are one of two extreme groups. Most people’s political beliefs are similar to religious beliefs, they have them because their parents/community had those beliefs or they attend a certain church(MSNBC, Fox News, etc.) that consistently reinforces their beliefs instead of encouraging critical thought about their positions. This also leads to overly moralizing political affiliation, you’re “one of them” and “a bad person”, not a thinking person whose beliefs can be changed with facts/discussion.
I think the solution is tolerance. Whatever your politics are they don’t typically affect me personally. I have a few friends that are far further right than Ben Shapiro and a couple that are far more left than Bernie Sanders and want literal Communism. They range from extreme authoritarian to extreme libertarian or various flavors of anarchist. Some want to ban guns entirely and some want personal ownership of bazookas. Diversity! I often enjoy hearing their thoughts and we have all been able to change each others’ minds on a few issues. People’s minds do change, but it’s a slow process.
That said, politics is a burden to me in some relationships. It’s hard to have a calm rational discussion when my family member says “The muslims are walking across the Gulf of Mexico and setting up terror cells in Texas”. They actually believe we’re experiencing terrorist attacks and its just not being reported. I guess my limit for a comfortable discussion is some level of contact with reality.
The author believes he is better than his friends and probably irritates friends when talking politics but can rationalize his way out of the problem while still blaming his friends.
What a jerk.
Because you gonna lose them if you don’t agree
Left/Right: First thing - add more axes. The most used standard example from politics or economics is liberalism/libertarism (not diving into the subtleties of definitions, their history, usage in different parts of the world, etc.). Look for more such axes, leave the political conceptual world behind.
After that, try Principal Component Analysis and look, what remains from these dimensions and the labels describing them. Think up names for the Eigenvectors / new axes. Investigate further. For example, look where people are concentrating in this high-dimensional space.
I can not be friends with someone that votes for ppl that try to literally erase me.
If these ppl come into power i have to leave my country and i would rather not have to do it.
I disagree strongly with this. This is how we get into the state of political divisiveness that we are currently in. Discussing politics has always been a verboten topic with many families and friends, and now we are here where we think not talking about it is healthy.
Not discussing politics with friends is really indicative of the friendships you have. This is really an article about someone who has failed to discuss politics with "friends." As someone who routinely talks politics with friends (and we do NOT all agree with each other), it's a healthy experience. One where you can get a better understanding of people and their beliefs.
Stay in your bubble. But let's not pretend it's healthy or good.
No compromise with fascism!
I discuss politics with my communist friend, as an anarcho-capitalist. It never leads to a fight.
I think curiosity and a desire to learn goes a long way.
Sharing my views here because they don't seem to be reflected in the comments yet.
I agree that politics are overwhelmingly tribal and resemble religion a lot (the "you believe in god, right?" analogy hits home).
I also used to be strictly anti-religious because religions tell lies and are anti-intellectual. I was against tribalism and in favor of rigorous debates on every topic.
I gradually changed my views though, and this happened not because I started to deny science but rather because I tried to apply it to deeper levels of reasoning. Basically I stopped seeing systems of beliefs (be it politics or religions) as independent entities of their own but rather as derivatives of the [ever changing] environment.
I now think that stable systems of beliefs exist not because they are true or false, or good or evil, but because in the past they helped their bearers to survive. The ones that failed at that task ceased to exist themselves because beliefs can't live outside of people's heads. That's the ultimate and objective test, provided by the nature itself. I don't think you can get more scientific in your ranking of beliefs.
Based on this I came to respect both Christianity and Islam because they did such a good job at that. I still dislike Islam though: it's against my tribe, but more on that below. My point here is that you can respect your adversaires and recognize they are good at something. E.g even now Islam is better at maintaining its numbers than some other cultures.
Within this framework tribalism is not bad but likely necessary. I think that the approach of "we are the good tribe, we see ourselves as different from other tribes, we want our tribe to survive, if necessary by exterminating other tribes" results in more stable societies than "we are rigorous intellectuals who can't agree on anything". It's beneficial for everyone to have a rigorous faction within the society but I doubt that this faction can survive on their own.
And besides, expecting the majority of population to debate everything is just unrealistic. It takes a lot of time and energy and I feel that most of people would rather spend that energy at work and with their families. Kind of like of people just "side" with the Apple or Android tribes, instead of building their own OS from sources. You see the phone as an utility, not as a goal. You just pick the one that works well for others, along with its benefits and inevitably with its flaws too. The grave consequences of picking a bad system of beliefs (and more importantly not changing it when the environment changes) are of course much different from that of a phone, but you can still describe both within the same framework, just very far away on the same scale.
Oh man yeah, you're vibing and all of a sudden "you like who?!!!"
If you can afford to not discuss politics with friends these days, you are in an incredibly privileged position.
I don't enjoy discussing Vim vs Emacs, or Windows vs Linux, or Star Trek vs Star Wars, or the weather. Some people get way too enthusiastic about it, to the point of religious fanaticism, but in the end it doesn't really matter either way. I don't really care about the tribes, and in most cases nothing productive is going to come out of the discussion. If my friends are on the other "team", I can happily agree to disagree.
I also wouldn't enjoy discussing whether the room should be filled with air or neurotoxin - but I can't afford not to. I'm sure the pro-neurotoxin people would be very nice to hang out with if we set our differences aside. Except for, you know, the whole "filling the room with neurotoxin" thing. If their side wins, it's going to seriously ruin my day. I don't really care about the how or the why or their tribes, the thing that matters is that they are trying to fill the room with neurotoxin. If I were to hang out with friends, it is quite important to know whether I could trust them with the air handling equipment.
If you can afford not discussing politics, you're essentially saying that politics don't impact you. They are nothing more than a mild inconvenience, and friendships are too valuable to set aside over something as trivial as that. To you politics are nothing more than the weather: you might need to cancel your weekend hike because of heavy rain, but oh well.
A lot of people don't have that luxury. For a lot of people, politics are literally a matter of life and death. Ignoring it isn't an option.
The first step “become truth-seeking”, is problematic because the truth that can be found is often just opinion or propaganda, disguised as truth.
Many a conspiracy believer will tell you they already have the truth (unlike unenlightened you).
Better is to remain inquiring and skeptical in forming conclusions or beliefs.
Discussing politics with friends and relatives is what makes you a moderate overall.
Otherwise you will grow up inside an echo chamber, far away from reality.
People talking about politics IRL makes you understand and reason other points of views. If you can't tolerate others views, then you are clearly a radical.
> It's not that the average person is any less tribal up there, but because Silicon Valley contains such a high concentration of people testing ideas in the world, it selects for people that must regularly re-evaluate their biases or fail.
Is this true?
(US Centric opinion comment) in the wake of moving away from religions to more secular societies, it's shocking how much folks have simply switched from religions like Christianity et. al. to Republican or Democrat or Left or Right etc.
What I'd consider healthy exploratory debate is now treated like heresy punishable by metaphorical death.(eg cancellation)
That's why I often stay my tongue and let people believe I'm on their side. Frankly it's not worth the consequences and I'll let them live in their delusions because giving feedback is too dangerous nowadays.
I would have agreed with this article before Trump took office a 2nd time. I liked to think of myself as not belonging to a tribe, a moderate who didn't buy the propaganda from either side. But now I've seen what the Trump 2.0 looks like, and I've become convinced we're headed toward autocracy with a mix of techno-feudalism and Christian nationalism.
I don't think you can maintain moderate views on that sort of situation without becoming complicit. Yes, Elon is up to no good. Trump is not the sort of person that should have this kind of power. Putin turned Russia into an autocracy. It's happened in other countries as well. There is a playbook for this, and the Trump administration is following their version of it. We don't have to go back to WW2 to make comparisons. Putin is not a good person, and Trump admires him.
The problem with the reasonable independent thinker is that they are relatively powerless against autocratic takeover. You need to join a side that is resisting. Assuming you value democracy and it's institutions.
well played .. I mean posted
I completely disagree with this. A friend is someone who I can disagree politically with and still be friends with. I extend the tribe to political views that aren't too extreme (fascists, extreme populists, violent revolutionary socialists, islamists...), so 90% of the people I can probably be friends with or have family relations with. And it has happened probably about 1-2 times in my lifetime that I even e.g. un-friended someone on social media because of views that I wouldn't tolerate because they fell outside the "normal politics tribe".
And again, that's because I'm lucky enough to not live in the US. I'd unfriend a red hat on FB in a heartbeat. I'd probably break connections with a family member over it too. I'd have problems even having a professional relationship with my US colleagues if I had found out they had a red hat in a social media post. But I don't see the problem with this at all tbh.
From TFA:
> Being informed is tough. To have an informed view on any given issue, one needs to:
> Understand economics, game theory, philosophy, sales, business, military strategy, geopolitics, sociology, history, and more.
> Be able to understand and empathize with the various (and often opposing) groups involved in a topic.
> Detect and ignore their own bias.
> How can you prioritize limited resources with deadly consequences without understanding utilitarianism vs deontology (i.e. the trolley problem)?
> Understand China-US relations without understanding communism vs capitalism, the fear of tyranny vs the threat of invasion, or how and where computer chips are made? [etc.]
From Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" (1986):
> Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. [...] People are frequently impelled — whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others — to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.
TFA implicitly assumes that the only options are "belong to a political tribe where someone else is responsible for justifying your actions" or "become a perfect estimator and Effectively Altruistic so you can truthfully justify your actions" (the latter, coincidentally, indistinguishable to an outside observer from your joining the Gray Tribe). But surely he's omitting to discuss (and perhaps edging toward an example of) the Frankfurt option: "justify your own actions by coming up with some bullshit."
> The insidious nature of this question comes from the false representation as earnest, intellectual discourse. Many who ask it may truly believe they’re engaging earnestly, but their responses quickly reveal an angle more akin to religious police. ... Most vulnerable to this behavior are the intellectually honest + socially clueless, who engage in good faith, unaware of the pending social ambush.
My favorite thing about this enlightened centrist/individual thinker line to kick off with is it's almost universally used by people who have one or more abhorrent viewpoints in their back pocket, and the "social ambush" described here would be much better phrased as, well, disclosing what that is and just saving us all some time. I personally am deeply curious what beliefs Ashwin has been ambushed about.
If you have thoughts on how tax brackets should be constructed, or whether we should move to flat taxation, whether highway budgets should include beatification or whether that should be up to municipalities, what zoning restrictions are used for a given area, all that type of what should be politics, neither myself nor anyone I know would "ambush" you for those beliefs. Discussing and rounding out those kinds of issues is the foundation of how a Democracy works. We have to discuss them, and you should have opinions on at least a few of them, and you should share them! That's how it works. And for what it's worth, I can't fathom a situation I would ambush anyone over those sorts of issues. I might disagree, and I might ask for elaboration or perhaps suggest alternatives to what you want to do, but I wouldn't shame you for them.
If on the other hand you think horrible things that for some insane reason have gotten traction lately, like that putting tariffs on foreign goods is somehow going to bring back American manufacturing (it isn't), that some of your fellow citizens who might be gay, trans, both, or something else shouldn't enjoy a full set of rights under the law for whatever cockamamie reason you'd like to cite (they should), that children should be re-introduced to the labor market to bolster the amount of cheap labor available (they shouldn't), that the government should be doing genital inspections on children who want to play sports to make sure no one's "cheating" (stupid, horrifying, illegal in several ways) and I could go on, then yeah, you probably will find yourself socially ambushed. And you should be. That's how shaming works. That's what we have done to one another for thousands of years when we behave anti-socially: if you act anti-social, you are not going to have an easy time being social. That's, again, just how that works.
I of course don't wish that fate on anyone, I have been spurned from communities and it sucks! But I did survive that process and a number of those experiences, awful as they were at the time, shaped me into a better person overall with a more internally consistent and defensible belief system than the one I was indoctrinated into as a child.
And yeah, a lot of this is also just "political tribalism sucks!" Cosigned, 100%.
This article is this xkcd in article form:
When you say people are "tribal," while as a fact perhaps has some truth, you're essentially saying you don't believe in democracy--which is a common sentiment these days. It ironically is a thought terminating cliche evidentiary of a bias; it necessarily implies you can ignore people's political instincts and impulses which requires a particular disposition (bias) towards others around you.
I know what social scientists say about tribalism but interpretation of those kinds of research is not meant for individuals you know personally. Individuals are not distributions, they're people. That is, they have agency, with a right to their own opinions that ought to be engaged with seriously and sincerely. Some people may not think too deeply and just hone to a particular opinion just by fiat. In my life, that really isn't anywhere near "most" people I come in contact with or talk to as the article puts it. Most people in my life just don't think too deeply about these things, that's it. It's a lot less mundane than "people are sheeple" and more like "people don't care" or at least "people only really care about X" where X might be something like their own job or life.
Right wingers love inventing new ways to say the same tired bs. Tbf I stopped reading somewhere between “wither the struggling landlord” and “demonstrating consistency in your worldview makes you a sheep” but did I really need to see any more?
Oh, the irony of saying "Understand China-US relations without understanding communism vs capitalism", which clearly betrays how little they understand historical Marxist communism, and how far away modern China is from it (not to mention how far it's moved since Maoism).
Not to mention there's a ton of work in psychology already covering much of what the author writes about.
The author sounds like a pseudo-intellectual who thinks they can logic their way to human understanding through first principles, instead of doing any real work to understand the literature. Sadly, this is real common on HN.
Frankly it sounds like someone who voted for Trump and wants to avoid having people criticize him for it, dressing up his "stop picking on me" schtick with pseudo-intellectual rationalizations.
You can't ignore politics when it's actively destroying your country - it's just not possible, and trying to ignore it is not the moral or ethical choice.
We must distinguish between policy and principle.
In a society where there is agreement on basic principles, public debates will focus mainly on policy. Policy, while less abstract than principle, is in a certain sense less tractable in a manner analogous to how mathematical proofs are more abstract yet more tractable than verifying empirical claims, like knowing whether there are an infinite number of primes versus whether there's a teapot orbiting the earth.
Good policy requires a more conspicuous application of prudential judgement, which entails the integration of information and opinion of varying trustworthiness to make a best effort decision, which is something a person must learn and develop.
But one thing that is characteristic about our political predicament is not disagreement over policy per se, but the reasons for our disagreement. Two people sharing the same principles can still disagree about policy, and because they share the same principles, a debate over policy is manageable, because the basic parameters circumscribe the debated subject matter. However, if you look closely to the policy disagreements we're seeing, it is clear people are talking past one another. Something deeper, unspoken, is at issue. That is because the agreement on matters of principle is shrinking. This is why some view today's disagreement in terms of religious warfare, because in a sense it is.
As I've written many times in comments on HN, "religion" is effectively just a synonym for "worldview". Many people have ad hoc and incoherent or strangely specific or even parochial intuitions of what religion is, but understood as a bona fide or coherent category, it is essentially just another word for worldview. Everyone has one, however implicit, so it isn't a question of whether you "have a religion", but which. You may not realize that you are subject to a worldview, just as the proverbial fish that has never left the ocean doesn't know what water is, but it's there influencing your decisions and the course of your life.
In the US and much of the West, this has generally meant liberalism. And we're all liberals. The right and the left? Both liberal. The conflict between them is less Hindu vs. Muslim and more Pharisee vs. Sadducee. But as time progresses, as the internal tensions of liberalism unfold within the human psyche and within society across time, as liberalism crashes in slow motion because of this dynamic, as the proverbial idols enter their twilight, the conflict can only deepen. And it won't be a left-right split per se.
Some miscellaneous remarks...
1. The author makes similar observations w.r.t. religion. For example, he notes that "[d]espite organized religion dropping in attendance, religious patterns of behavior are still everywhere, just adapted to a secular world." Absolutely. And this includes Silicon Valley ideology, which is just a variation of Americanism. You see plenty of "religious patterns of behavior" in SV (though I sense we are past the heyday of peak salvific SV eschatology; maybe it just has a different character now, unvarnished and naked).
2. The author's view of religion is nonetheless tendentious and rooted in stereotype and trope. For example, the history of martyrdom in the Catholic Church alone demonstrates that "going along to get along" or mob mentality are opposed to the Christian view of truth above all else. God Himself is taken to be the Truth, and Christ the incarnation of the Logos. The authentic Christian ethic, despite the dishwater often passing as Christianity, is morally austere in this regard, hence preferring to die for the truth (literally, as in "red martyrdom", or by suffering injustice, so-called "white martyrdom") than to betray it. Lying is categorically impermissible. Life is to be found only in the truth; only spiritual death is to be found in lies. Better for the body to die than the soul to die.
The notion that religion is about group cohesion even at the expense of the truth is certainly not a feature of Catholicism, but a common human tendency that it attacks, even if individual Catholics or groups of Catholics behave otherwise (again, a common human tendency). There is no authentic unity or authentic love outside of the truth. You cannot love what you do not know, and a society united in a lie is deficient in unity to the degree that the "unity" is rooted in the lie.
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TL;DR: He doesn't discuss politics with his friends because he thinks he's more rational than them.
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HN is definitely a tribe of Biden and Harris. Any more conservative opinions expressed here are immediately met with downvotes.
Wild how this person starts off with 'I don't like collective thought and action' and lands in 'so I joined a gambling addicted cult using discrete math from high school and advocates for it with pop culture tropes'.
The audacity to discard millennia of history and philosophy with 'no one's got time for that' and substituting it with a crude gambling scheme is just astounding. QAnon for the well-off, a cognitive technique to get out of having to deal with systemic injustice because 'sometimes rentiers also feel bad so there is actually suffering on both sides'.
In a way it's similar to some forms of antisemitism, antisemitism as "der Sozialismus der dummen Kerle", noticing some superficial conditions but instead of following through to develop a worldview copping out and getting an obsession with a simple, consistently applied reasoning. The jews did you nasty because you're not one of them. You did a bad bet because you were controlled by your tribe, unlike me, the enlightened high schooler who isn't loyal to anyone but myself.
Like antisemitism it's the position of a loser refusing to join forces with other people to try and cause systemic change based on their common material interests. Yes, I see that the banks are exploiting us, but no, I won't join your 'tribe', instead I'm going to make tables detailing the ancestry of the bankers. Yes, I see that were going down the drain but instead of joining your movement to put pressure on people in power I'm going to spend the evening making a flowchart and cherry pick some statistics and then give money to a cult that agrees with this approach.
If you meet someone like this, you should absolutely engage with them on contemporary, political issues. As soon as you get them to agree that something is bad, tell them to come to a meeting, be it a union, dinner, protest, whatever. Insist, don't take a no for an answer. Make it a challenge, whatever it takes. If it doesn't work the first time, try again next time you meet. These people need help and empathy, and to be among people at least sometimes when they're away from their screens.
in my experience people who are on the political left are very rude and dismissive of any heterodox position as some moral sin
This is such a wild perspective to me. I can't imagine considering somebody a friend while simultaneously not feeling comfortable discussing politics with them.
The next time I need to describe my disdain for "rationalists", I'll just be able to link this blog post for being entirely vacuous while patting itself on the back
The problem with this view is it treats politics as having the same stakes for everyone.
When one side is arguing for the death of a group, or that women shouldn’t have rights and be kept as sex slaves, the stakes are much different.
You do not in fact have to be friends with fascists.
A lot of people are in a particular tribe because they literally cannot be in the other tribe because the other tribe sees them as subhuman, as people who should be deported, who should lose their rights, etc. A lot of them realize that they're in a tribe and don't particularly like it, but since the political system is set up in a way where you can't reasonably have more than two parties, they don't have a choice.
Basically, the author is making it seem like everyone other than a select few are tribal idiots, but that's a fundamental outcome of our political system. You can pick and choose your policies, but at the end of the day, you're voting for one of two parties.
I’ve got strict rules on not discussing politics generally and I would even pretend to not know about things or only barely and not having any position. I do jump deep into topic with strangers for fun or build up slowly. Never would I share political views with my workplace and partner, I give them the freedom to keep theirs believes without altering them with the “truth”, if people are simple let them be. I also let anybody have their position especially family members and would be much less eager to tell them more. It’s mostly a blessing not having went down the rabbit hole and I don’t want to tamper with it. I like to argue with the opposite extrem position for fun.
I'm not even sure what politics is anymore. I'm largely not on social media, so I am generally late to what's taboo or a hot button topic, like Tesla automobiles and SpaceX, or anything else connected to a billionaire.
In 2025, but before the Tesla burnings made the news, I was having some chitchat about possibly purchasing a Tesla as my next car, at which point, I got a tirade of anger mentioning words like "Nazi", "fascism" and so on. I was completely taken aback.
I realize we Americans are probably undergoing the results of some adversarial nation-state psychological operations[1], but we really need to chill out.
1. Coincidentally, most of my social media "usage" is identifying sock puppet accounts and their adversarial psyops campaigns.