I’ve since learned that overly online keyboard warriors are the least important people to convince. The most important people are on your local city council or state legislature. Furthermore, instead of wasting time with hard cases or elected officials who are dead-set against your ideas, you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles. This often means giving up on your own city or state, at least for the time being, and pursuing a “succeed anywhere” strategy instead.
We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin.
The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.
I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.
>but rather to everyone quietly reading comments
as someone who reads a lot but doesn't comment much you've got the topshelf content here consistently, its so obvious when someone has a clue or doesn't if you're in the same areas, very easy to fool others with confident assertions (cough airline issues on HN) but for someone in the industry it's not at all
funnily enough this comment about zoning which isn't your or my field but get the feeling it's on point, is such a massive problem in the western world which has built up over decades, lets just copy someone elses homework in my opinion, Asia gets this stuff right: <a href="https://devonzuegel.com/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning" rel="nofollow">https://devonzuegel.com/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin.
The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.
I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.
Grimburger · · focus · HN ↗
as someone who reads a lot but doesn't comment much you've got the topshelf content here consistently, its so obvious when someone has a clue or doesn't if you're in the same areas, very easy to fool others with confident assertions (cough airline issues on HN) but for someone in the industry it's not at all
funnily enough this comment about zoning which isn't your or my field but get the feeling it's on point, is such a massive problem in the western world which has built up over decades, lets just copy someone elses homework in my opinion, Asia gets this stuff right: <a href="https://devonzuegel.com/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning" rel="nofollow">https://devonzuegel.com/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning