Keep Your Identity Small (2009)
> "Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion."I agree that this is how people tend to see it. But it isn't really true. Like JavaScript or auto mechanics or animal husbandry, there is indeed a threshold of expertise for expressing a meaningful opinion.The value of somebody else's commentary on political issues is pretty much directly proportional to their understanding of the political system and their command of objective facts. This is true even if they subscribe to political ideals diametrically opposed to your own.Personally speaking, this is why I have been so sad about the political discussion on HN since SOPA and Snowden. I thought it might be one of those rare forums where empirical facts and "evidence-based" thinking prevailed -- but it really hasn't. People still seem mostly trapped in their private little jihads, just like they are in the youtube comments section.To me that's disappointing because government is something so fundamentally amenable to hacking, and the stakes are so incredibly high. The state of the art is so so sad and primitive, with so much low-hanging fruit. (The state of the art in governance, that is, at least if you accept at face value the objective of representing the interests of the electorate; the state of the art of getting elected is actually incredibly advanced, but rarely publicly talked about in earnest.)