Why I don't discuss politics with friends
(shwin.co)527 points by shw1n 16 days ago
527 points by shw1n 16 days ago
I do worry about seeing more of these posts, as a way of SV people - who bare a substantial burden of guilt for enabling the collective mess we’re in because the ad-tech/algorithm dollars were nice - collectively distancing themselves from facing said guilt.
No idea is this particular person is especially part of the problem, I’m just talking about general vibes.
One thing I definitely don't do anymore is discuss politics with any friends or family ONLINE.
It's just not worth it. Publish or tweet something if you have something to say and want to reach a lot of people. Talking to ONE person and risking your relationship has a lousy cost/benefit ratio.
How do you avoid the pain of someone expressing a particularly hurtful political opinion (i.e. entire class of ppl should die) if you don't filter relationships by political beliefs?
I generally keep people's political opinions at arms length, as some relationships are worth the pain or lack of depth. But it has caused unforseen pain at times, and hurts when relations from different spheres interact negatively.
By interacting with the positive aspects of the person and ignoring or disengaging from the political opinions I don't like. If they want to kill jews or whatever, they have the right to that opinion, doesn't bother me so long as I'm not obliged to partake. I might engage the view but if neither of us are benefitting from the conversation there is no point in continuing down that particular path.
Hmm, sounds about right. I still feel like being around people when they express such radical beliefs reflects poorly on me and hurts me in some unexplainable way.
When challenging such beliefs I find some are hyperbole or a side effect of group-think. Rarely are they genuine, but when they are it's the most worrying. And that's usually when I stop engaging that line of thought.
That sounds so bleak.
What’s the endgame to this approach? Seems to me, folks with genocidal thoughts and feelings would find more positive reinforcement amongst themselves and less negative reinforcement everywhere else. Not great for the “genocide is bad” theory.
This paints a very binary picture. Either you are in or out. Part of this tribe, or this other tribe (ignorantly or not). The article seems to imply that people can't have opinions on political policies unless they are fully informed on not only global affairs but also philosophy and psychology.
I think reality is different - I don't think there are any absolutes that require "knowledge" of e.g. philosophy to get the "right" answer in politics. Instead the right answer (at least in western democracies) is what the people want, even if they are not fully informed.
I view it very much akin to trial by jury - there are highly informed and experienced judges, barristers, solicitors etc but ultimately it is down to the laymen in the jury to make a decision that they see as just. They might reach the "wrong" decision from the perspective of people who are fully informed on the legal processes and the law of the land etc, but that doesn't matter because it is the jury that makes the decision.
So it is for the electorate too.
I have no experience of voting in the US but it appears that a two-party system really stokes the "us Vs them" vibes. The only alternative you have is to totally switch sides. At least in European democracies there is often a plurality of parties to vote for. I've personally moved between the main 3 parties (and there are probably at least another 1 or 2 other minority parties that have different trajectories...) in the UK as my personal situation has changed over the years, and I think that is a very normal thing here.
I would note that trial by jury means a jury of your peers is being forced to become informed on a subject [if parties are arguing the facts of the case in good faith].
They are then rendering a judgement [in good faith].
On the facts of the case yes. But they are not expected to become experts in case law or legal precedent and history and philosophy etc.
When I have had to do jury service we have explicitly been told not to research anything about the case outside of the court room. Everything the jury bases their decisions on should only be what was discussed in the court room, and on your own lived experience.
Agreed, this article feels like ego stroking. Especially with language like "truth seeking". It creates this fantasy that there is this level of consciousness that we can evolve to where we achieve complete knowledge of all subjects. There is a reason we have a democracy with multiple groups and multiple departments. Because no one person has all the answers or is right. We all bring our unique experiences and expertise together to create a better whole. At least that's the idea.
People do not change opinions because someone told them to. It has to be a result of a narrative with personal experiences. Which is why FAFO is still a big thing.
Hence, any effort trying to convince friends that blue is not green it is not gonna work. Sorry.
I guess the dots should be described as "average of all views"
PG explains it better here: https://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html
Cut a "rationalist centrist moderate" and a fascist who doesn't want to get cancelled because he still needs VC funding and Linkedin connections bleeds.
US politics has been increasingly polarized into positions congruent with facts and policy and our traditional ideals, and positions associated with a general stance of grievance, with an insistent selfishness, with anti-empathy, anti-intellectualism, with "palingenetic ultranationalism". This has been a test of your ideals, of your humanity. It wasn't very hard.
Yes, there is often a lot of nuanced truth in the middle of any argument. But less now, in politics, than in a long, long time. Only a very particular sort of person walks into a liberated Auschwitz and starts shouting "Both sides are too extreme and I'm better than them!" from the rooftops.
Speaking as somebody who spent a lot of time there: A lot of the tropes in the "rationalist" community are inherently conservative-pointing, and it's a general prerequisite for participating there that you have a coherent base of progressive terminal ideals and an attitude suited towards introspection and iteration of your beliefs. Because otherwise you go from zero to Nietzschean ubermensch to Nazi ubermensch to Musk/Thiel brownshirt in no time, having weaponized everything present there to support your priors and idly expand your confidence.
I think there should be a new rule that any time someone writes an article bragging about how he's† a badass independent thinker just like Paul Graham and Eliezer Yudkowsky, he must in the same article identify his major disagreements with Paul Graham and Elizer Yudkowsky. Because to me the authors of these articles seem exactly as tribal as mainstream political and religious groups, they just care about different things. Yeah, I shouldn't be able to guess your views on sex from your views on taxes, but I also shouldn't be able to guess your views on wokeness from your views on AI safety. Yet I can make both predictions with about equal accuracy.
† I have yet to see an article like this written by a woman.
Political discussions for me are like programming. I enjoy them because I like finding bugs in people's logic like I do in programming.
I find a lot of people's political arguments wouldn't compile because of basic logic errors, and I try to point this out. But not many people are interested in this kind of analysis, they instead prefer the tribalist point-scoring like the OP mentions.
I dream of a world where political debates can be syntax-checked. I'm sure you could do it with AI today.
But in the end its all about feelings.
I can't describe how many times I will just go along with someone's passionate ranting on something I disagree with and egg them along because its makes them happy. This is tribalism. I will disagree with the group, and if you saw me you'd think I was the strongest supporter, but I actually vehemently disagree with everything.
There are very few people it's worth having a real discussion with these days.
I don't change my opinion of people for what they think, but it's very rare to find people who reciprocate this.
“Should” statements are different from “is” statements - I would not expect them to compile.
Excellent post.
It wasn’t always like this. I remember when you could be pro-gun and pro-environment—and still have thoughtful, respectful conversations with people who held different beliefs.
Today, if you’re not fully aligned with every talking point of a political party, you’re instantly labeled either a fascist or a communist. And sometimes it borders on absurd: the moment party leadership shifts its stance, the whole tribe flips with it. It wasn’t that long ago that Republicans staunchly opposed tariffs. Now? They’re all in.
My question is: What changed? When did we become so tribal—and why?
From what I've seen, tribalism is core to innate human nature. It's always been there, and until human nature can be edited like a spreadsheet, it always will be.
What's changed now is how visible it's become and how much easier it is to mass organize people and split up into echo chambers that favor a specific viewpoint.
Before, people were not well organized. The internet has been a revolution in spreading views and allowing like minded people to hang out together. Turns out that's not always for the best. But there's no going back. It's only going to get worse until something happens that unites people more than it divides them.
Large scale divergence in the two human moralities: social morality (rules for people around us to protect the community, largely coded liberal) and personal morality (moral intuitions for how to keep you and your immediate family safe). The two have become at odds with each other so everyone feels intensely and uncompromisingly threatened by those who ascribe more to the other, leading to two groups that can no longer even 'treat with the enemy' much less collaborate on their mutual preservation. This was aided along by a whole lot of largely unchecked fearmongering because it turns out that that sells views, clicks, and ratings.
(and possibly also a general dumbification of everything due to bad education combined with lowering social standards for who is allowed to have a public voice and be take seriously; confusingly thus was one of the points of a standard of decorum, because it served as a filter on who was intelligent enough to be a thought leader.)
IMO it was technology allowing more viewpoints to be expressed. First with more than 3 TV stations, then of course the internet. Before that transition, everyone was mostly part of one tribe, because mass media was mostly homogeneous. After, it was increasingly easy to find tribes that fit your exact viewpoints, and reject other sources of information
> It wasn’t that long ago that Republicans staunchly opposed tariffs. Now? They’re all in.
Which Republicans are we talking? The old guard that held leadership positions for decades, making the decisions while most of the public weren't invested? Or the new guard that hijacked the Republican party after the population started getting invested after recent events?
Every "conservative" I know is in favor of protectionism, and tariffs are a strong manifestation of that. Don't conflate the get-what-you-get leadership, and the disenfranchised voterbase for having been the same people.
Both Regan and George H.W. Bush were anti tariffs and pro free market. I believe the change happened with Trump. Good interview about that is here [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/12/19/nx-s1-5215953/how-the-gop-wen...
People were always tribal. You just call out a group to be evil. And it takes just a little bit of propaganda and people will ignore any rational arguments and start harassing a group.
Witch-hunts (last conviction in Europe was 1944), jews, communists, americans, non-americans, all sorts of religious groups, ... history is full of that.
One thing that changed recently is that nowadays propaganda is very organized and well funded. I also think there was a pretty calm period for a few decades (but only in certain regions of the planet). In the cold war period the tribes were very fixed and the evil was always far away, so locally not much happened.
I've noticed this too, on average people are incapable of holding a moral position through to the end.
- Bad parenting is bad, we should have a permit for it --> are you ready to get denied the right to try having kids?
- Thou shalt not kill --> except those really bad people I don't like!
- Stealing is bad --> except when you're "starving"
Our perception of good and evil are multifaceted, with most of it happening in our background cognition.
There is a strange "mirror" stopping people from exchanging once a rift has opened. Someone else posited that it might be a fight or flight reaction.
I posit that our cognition is based on negation, and thus the shape of our tool impact our results.
Ah, another apt time to mention one of my favorite papers, Michael Huemer's In Praise of Passivity. https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm
Basically it argues the most moral thing in a democracy is to do nothing at all. You simply can never make a truly well informed decision over such a complex system, not even with several lifetimes of dedicated work towards it.
Generally speaking I don't take anyone's political opinion seriously unless they have read and have a cogent response to this paper. I'll gladly just let them yap away and think I agree with them, regardless of my actual views. It's sort of like not taking philosophers seriously unless they've considered the question of solipsism first.
Don't make yourself out to be the grandstander here, that's my job. Politics is so hard and so complicated that your expected contribution is almost certainly net negative, so take that time and energy and apply it to things you actually have a hope of reliably improving. The true cowardice is spending 6 hours a day spinning your wheels instead of getting to work on things that actually work.
An example inspired from the paper: I'm sure medieval surgeons felt they were doing God's work, putting in 12 hour days incising people with razors, and yet without a basic understanding of germ theory they almost certainly make many people much worse off. For a more recent example, did you know that less than 50 years ago it was believed infants didn't need to be anesthetized when modern surgeons operated upon them, despite showing extreme pain responses?
Politics is many orders of magnitude more complex than both germ theory and anesthesiology, and yet people somehow feel they need to study it systematically even less. It's not hard to summon a litany of state sponsored actions which would make Genghis Khan blush, and yet, for each one of those actions, some group of people thought it was such an obviously good idea it simply had to be done.
> It's sort of like not taking philosophers seriously unless they've considered the question of solipsism first.
Solipsism only makes sense if you completely reject the concept of objective reality. It's mostly sophistry. The lack of being able to prove that reality exists beyond your own perceptions is not sufficient to prove that it does not, nor to make that assertion. See also "Simulation Theory".
I really resonated with this blog article, and ended up reaching out to Ashwin on LinkedIn to connect. This is probably the most concise and clear description I've read of the problem, and I think sometimes recognizing the problem and really understanding is the first step to turning things around.
Like Ashwin, I don't believe that this is "fixable", in so much that humanity as a whole has a tendency towards tribalism that's innate to being human, and this is part of what allowed societies and civilizations to form, as much as it carries the downsides of interrupting reasoning and creating the conditions for warfare. Rather, I try to seek out people who are able to reason and have discussions.
I definitely appreciated reading this, as it felt very relatable in a way that most things do not.
The article misses one pretty huge thing: up until maybe 10-15 years ago, politics was - mostly - differences around theories of economy, where both sides had valuable arguments for and against them. Out of that, you could cut compromises and work bi-partisan.
Now? It's by far not among differences in economic policies any more. The differences are much more fundamental: the rights of LGBT people to exist, the rights of women to have a life outside of breeding children, minorities having the same rights as the majority. The questions that form the divide are binary in nature, not a spectrum any more. When differences become existential in nature, reconciliation is impossible - either you grant the universal freedoms to everyone or you do not.
> I think there are two main reasons, the first being the sheer intellectual difficulty of crafting an informed political view leads people to tribalism out of convenience.
What's the difference between tribalism and deferring to experts on complex subjects, e.g. climate change? I have a deep skepticism of people who think they can personally reason through any complex topic from first principles. It shows a lack of humility and self-awareness. Nobody has the time to build that kind of expertise in every domain, and there is wisdom in deferring to the hard won experience of others. But the type to think they can reason through everything seems like the type to call this "tribal politics."
> as I like to say, "I'm tribal against tribalists" :)
Buddy if you can sum up your entire political philosophy as disdain for outgroups I don’t think you’ve quite achieved the liberation from the karmic wheel of suffering that is partisan politics that you wrote so many words about
> And even with all this knowledge, can you empathize with both sides of common issues -- the poor renter vs struggling landlord? The tired worker vs underwater business owner? Rich vs poor, immigrant vs legacy, parent vs child -- the list goes on
To me having just two sides is a uniquely American way of thinking.
Between the renter and landlord there's the homeowner, between the tired worker and business owner there's the public sector/NGO/huge corporation worker/freelancer, rich and poor are relative terms which lie on a scale anyway.
Conflicts that actually have only two parties involved are rare and the very first thing one should do to be able to talk politics, is give up on the notion.
I was predicting within the first 500 words that the author was someone who symphatized with Rationalism. But how could this be? How could someone’s approach to rationality, so-called, be so correlated with their approach to politics?[1] Couldn’t people of many different backgrounds come to the same conclusion and my guess just have a small chance of being right?[2] Is it because of tribalism? No. The philosophy leads to a cluster of opinions. Just following its internal logic.
Apply that to other people and you’ll see how the article might be wrong.
[1] It’s not just the approach. There are a dozen things that are stated axiomatically which are not.
[2] Okay, okay. Being this website there is a SC bias already.
I enjoy debating politics in the way that others enjoy playing chess or a friendly game of bowling. But when the other party gets wrapped around the axle, I don't debate with them anymore. Unfortunately, most seem to be in the latter camp.
One thing I didn't see mentioned, and maybe this is part of being tribal, but politics is often not about the positions you take, but about the game theory of how you stay in power, and convince a group of people about the positions you take.
One thing I hate about the trump administration, and maybe all politics is fundamentally like this, is you can't really disagree with them. You can't really disagree with them because it's really hard to figure out what position they're taking. I find it makes discussing things with family really difficult. I can intellectually agree that "A nation should protect it's borders" and have a nuanced perspective on how much immigration is the right amount, but then I'm never going to square that with what the politicians are actually doing, right? We can't have a nuanced conversation with what the right immigration policy is, when the administration is deporting people without due process, or when the current administration says the problem with immigration is that Joe Biden let judges run wild in 2019.
I personally think this is the right approach, where you can assign probabilities to the unknowns (the "thinking in bets" section)
Because then the discussions/research switch toward data and evidence, with the results downstream of those
Overall when people can agree "I understand stance 1 if the data says X, or stance 2 if the data says Y", and then all the energy goes into the data analysis, I consider that a successful conversation
I strongly disagree with most of this post.
Politics dictates so much of daily life, at every level, that it's important to be able to have conversations about it. It's frankly self-righteous to see yourself as the one person with nuanced opinions in a crowd of simpletons, and while I do think that politics in many liberal democracies has become more polarized, you'll never restore nuanced debate or good-faith disagreement in political discussions by just avoiding the topic.
I'm not advocating for politics being the only thing you talk about with your friends, but if you and your friends are able to have useful discussions about the impact of some policies over others, can have constructive disagreements over reasonable political discourse, and can identify larger problematic trends in politics, a lot of good can come of that.
Ideally, one should select friends that are respectful of other's opinions. Certainly, one shouldn't keep someone close who isn't.
But with family and acquaintances, it's not worth getting into. Except when someone isn't being respectful. Then I will certainly speak up and ask why they aren't respecting someone's right to think for themselves.
I don't have a problem with my dad's view that taxes should be low or that we should be responsible with the environment. I don't have a problem with his view that over-regulation is a danger. I don't have a problem with my dad's opinion that capitalism is great, even with my disagreement.
I have a problem with the fact that my dad votes for people who do not do those things, and then gets upset when people point that out to him.
He told me that "I think people just need to have more patience with each other and accept our differences" as a moral to a story he told about being a manager to trans and non-binary folks. IMO it's 100% the right take, and he holds no negative feelings for any trans people or nonbinary people.
Then he votes for the anti-trans candidate.
How do you square that circle?
The reality is that I know my dad's voting history (we have talked about politics) and my dad is not an idealist or a pragmatist or conservative or liberal.
My dad is a populist.
Doesn't a lot of it come down to having to choose between only two parties?
It's unlikely that most people will agree with all the positions of a party, so they choose the one who most closely aligns with their highest priority issues.
Perhaps trans policy is just a lower priority issue for your dad. His voting may be illogical based on your priorities, but may be the rational choice based on his ranking of issues.
> Then he votes for the anti-trans candidate.
> How do you square that circle?
I don't know your dad, maybe he doesn't see that candidate as "anti-trans"?
If you think that some group has unfair benefits you can vouch for stripping those benefits without seeing yourself as "anti". Your drive is not hatred but fairness. You can be misguided but that's a different question.
If you think church must pay taxes, it doesn't make you anti-church. If you want to reduce police funding it doesn't make you anti-police. If you want stricter control of guns that doesn't make you anti-guns.
The whole "anti" split is indeed a sing of the tribalism which in US takes a binary form. You're either with us or against us.
> Politics dictates so much of daily life, at every level,
That’s weird because you can live life of total ignorance of what’s happening in the news. Lobbying and marketing make you think things are important that aren’t.
> That’s weird because you can live life of total ignorance of what’s happening in the news.
Being unaware of politics, just like being unaware of biology or physics, doesn't reduce or disprove the degree to which it impacts your life, it just recuces your understanding.
Of course, but I think people tend to overestimate the amount politics, especially federal politics actually impact their lives.
Spending hours a day worrying and reading about cancer risk and fatalities increases your understanding, but it certainly isn't healthy or proportional.
Only if you believe PR and material published by NGOs is equivalent to political understanding.
It’s a nice thought. But it’s kind of like thinking you will become an athlete by watching ESPN talk shows. Or maybe even hoping to learn about physics by watching the Big Bang theory. You might pick up some new words, but It’s two levels removed from the real thing.
You can drive a car blindfolded, too, in ignorance of the wall you're driving into; that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
A marginal understanding of what's happening in the world around you helps you navigate it better.
I don't think I ever make the only-nuanced-opinion claim, the claim I'm making here is many people don't want to have useful discussions, they just want to proselytize
I actually say there are reasons to persevere and encourage debate if it's not just trying to "win":
"However, one reason to persevere is to find the 1% of people that also want to see the world as it is. Aka, finding your own community of anti-tribalists."
"Few things give me greater joy than a discovery-ridden conversation with smart friends, and this is only enhanced if I learn something I previously believed to be true is actually wrong. Seriously, come prove some core belief I have as wrong and you will quite literally make my week."
To have an informed view on any given issue, one needs to:
1. understand economics, game theory, philosophy, sales, business, military strategy, geopolitics, sociology, history, and more
2. be able to understand and empathize with the various (and often opposing) groups involved in a topic
3. detect and ignore their own bias
1) is a lot of work. Just finding out what's going on is hard. Partly because news-gathering organizations are far more thinly staffed than they used to be. There aren't enough reporters out there digging, which is hard work. There are too many pundits and influencers blithering. Read the output of some news outlet, cross out "opinion" items and stories based on press releases or press conferences, and there's not much left. The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the New York Times, and Reuters still have people who dig for facts. Beyond that, reporters are thin on the ground. If you can only read one thing, read the Economist for a year. Each week they cover some country in detail, and over a year, most of the world gets a close look. (Although at the moment, their China coverage is weak, because their reporters were kicked out of China for doing too much digging.)
Background is necessary. Many pundits seem to lack much of a sense of history. Currently, understanding the runups to WWI and WWII is very useful. Understand what Putin is talking about when he references Catherine the Great and Peter the Great. Geography matters. Look at Ukraine in Google Earth and see that most of the current fighting is over flat farmland and small towns, much like Iowa. Look at Taiwan and realize how narrow and exposed an island it is. There's no room to retreat after an invasion, unlike Ukraine.
As for empathy, there's a huge split in America between the areas above and below 700 people per square mile. Above 1,500 per square mile, almost always blue. Below 400 per square mile, almost always red.[1] This effect dwarfs race, religion, ideology, or income level. It's very striking and not well recognized in public discourse. There's a minimum viable population density below which small towns stop working as self-supporting entities. (On the ground, this shows up as empty storefronts on Main Street and a closed high school.)
On bias, there are many people in the US whose lot has been slowly getting worse for decades now. That's the underlying source of most US political problems.
[1] https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/national/national-pol...
I can agree with parts of this article, but I believe it's missing a large part of the puzzle.
The author implicitly assumes that the constraints of our society are fixed and that it's therefore possible to determine which political systems are objectively better or worse. We should be doing that research (like astronomers trying to determine how the universe works) instead of religiously supporting ideological positions.
I fundamentally disagree with that assumption. I think we behave the way we do in large part due to the ideological principles we were raised with. This can be confirmed by observing various closed-off societies sometimes operating on principles that seem completely bonkers to most of us.
If you teach people capitalism/socialism, you build a capitalistic/socialistic system. It's impossible to live inside that system and objectively determine whether it's good or bad, let alone better or worse than other systems.
So in that context, I believe following an ideology is _not_ the opposite of thinking for yourself, as the author puts it. It is a conscious decision based on morality. You decide what your values are and you find a political option that aligns with them.
To be clear, that's still a very imperfect decision to make, many things can go wrong from that point on and I believe this is where the author is correct in many ways. We should reason about it constantly to make sure we're actually doing what we want to be doing and not just blindly repeating things.
That seems overly reductive.
> It's impossible to live inside that system and objectively determine whether it's good or bad, let alone better or worse than other systems.
I mean, if someone says "Let's pollute the rivers!" and another person says "Let's not pollute the rivers!", that's a pretty clear cut objectively good and bad position. Or "Let's put people in prison if they jaywalk.", etc.
That's not to say there are no positions that have a clear cut good or bad outcome that can be measured beforehand. For example, putting a tax on sugary drinks. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but you have no way of being sure beforehand, because you can't A/B test reality and the complexity of the system is such that you can't accurately predict human behavior at a large scale.
But the existence of positions that don't have a clear answer that can be determined ahead of time doesn't mean there's no objective way to determine whether it's good or bad, just that we don't have the tooling to do so at this point in time.
Great examples!
Polluting vs. not polluting sounds super straightforward, but then you look outside and we often pollute rivers, so it's clearly not that simple.
Personally, I'm fully with you on not polluting. But that immediately puts us in an ideological position - we value preserving the environment and staying healthy.
A neo-liberal might come along and say we're wasting economic potential. Keeping the river clean means not building a factory near it. If the products from that factory and the jobs it provides offset the negative effects, they'll argue we _should_ pollute the river.
Same with taxing sugary drinks - uncertain results aren't the issue. The issue is we have different opinions on how much a government should be able to regulate certain aspects of life in the pursuit of improving public health.
Even if you have reliable statistical data from countries that implemented such a policy, some people will argue their freedom to drink whatever they want is what's important here and your bean-counting of medical expenses is completely missing the point.
The article is titled Why I don't discuss politics with friends but it doesn't explain the why? Unless I missed it. It seems to just talk about the challenges.
Why don't you discuss politics with friends? Are you worried about loss of friends? Do the conversations ruin your day? Do you feel alienated?
Depending on the why, there's different points I'd argue for or against the reasoning. Without that piece, it's kind of hard to discuss the premise of the article without just guessing its implications.
This sentence was intended as that answer, but I guess it wasn't clear enough:
"And this is fundamentally why I don't discuss politics with friends.
It's not that I don't want or am scared of opposing views (in fact the opposite is true[8]), but rather because of how common others’ desire to "remain in the bubble" is."
I actually am willing to risk alienation to find people that enjoy this sort of discussion-based discovery as much as I do, but found most people I encounter don't actually want that -- so I try and respect what seems to be the average opinion.
I think one of biggest problems the American voter has is two fold: 1. We have turned politicians into celebrities/heroes. ALL politicians are just like most of us: they are flawed and incomplete individuals who desperately try to hide their flaws. (Under normal circumstances, this isn't so bad. However, to be an elected official with all that power, it's fraud at the very least.
2. Once elected, we refuse to hold the politicians we elected to almost any accountability. (This is very hard to do, no doubt, because of the way the laws have been manipulated to stop this very accountability.)
As for religion in politics: I'm a devoted Christian who is sane enough to know that not everyone will believe the same as I do. I have one vote on election day, to manipulate other people's vote by having my candidate changing laws to thwart the constitution is theft and immoral. (As difficult as it is to say, Christians today should read 2 Peter Ch2, taking it to heart. Stop only glossing over the cheerful faith verses and start reading the one's that call for accountability.)
I agree that "tribalism" exists. I'd add that sometimes political disagreements are actually differences in morality. And there is no way you can persuade someone to change their moral beliefs. Everyone accepts their moral beliefs as "axioms". But I still believe it's worth discussing politics in order to learn what kind of person someone is and their morality.
I always try to stay informed, rationalize well and always try to find arguments for both sides of a theory. I act like a detective in search of the truth or a mathematician confronted with a new conjecture or theory. I try to dig until I can see whether the theory has solid chances to be true or not. I try to make the process as fast as possible, because I don't like to procrastinate or lose time. Most of the time is fine if I know something has 60% chances of being true and I don't need 99.99% because I can back off and review the theory if I am wrong.
That being said, I don't pick a party solely on what I believe is the truth. I also try to see whether my interests align well with that party.
As for discussing politics with friends, most of my experience is the same as the author's. I started having a dislike for very long lawyer-like discussions and arguments that lead nowhere. I kind of detect fast if my discussion partner is seeking the truth, he is proceeding with an archeology or detective like mindset and proceed accordingly.
This article seems to be saying that religions are tribal by nature because it's made up of humans, and humans are tribal by nature -- ok fair enough. But the subtext I'm getting is that people in religions are less self-aware of it than the author or the people they admire.
People being more interested in comfortable beliefs rather than true beliefs has always been a concern throughout Biblical history. But that doesn't mean it never went unchallenged.
For instance, regardless of what you think of the Bible, it's interesting that Isaiah has the following to say to Judah (emphasis mine) because it shows an ever-present problem with human nature.
For they are a rebellious people, lying children, children unwilling to hear the instruction of the Lord;
*who say to the seers, “Do not see,” and to the prophets, “Do not prophesy to us what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions”*
Lastly, on a personal note, as a human Christian, I think I have the same biases to groupthink as any other person because I am human. But because Christianity has a reputation, I have found that throughout my life, I've had to work harder to really test (not validate) my beliefs because I am constantly being challenged and, ironically, often ended up more informed about both my beliefs and my interlocutors' beliefs.
Actually I think people in traditional organized religions like Christianity are on the whole more self-aware than secular people who fall into the same religious behavior in random topics, because they acknowledge the "faith" component.
Sort of summarized by the sentence here:
"If someone is self-aware enough to consciously acknowledge their choice to remain in the bubble, that’s totally fair. I respect it like I’d respect anyone who chooses to participate in a more traditional religion. My issue is when this view is falsely passed off as an intellectually-driven one."
In my circle of family and friends, no one strays too far from the center, so I don't find it particularly difficult to navigate disagreement. We've gotten more carried away arguing about completely banal happenings. However, I sense not everyone else feels the same way.
What tends to happen at dinners or whatever is that some outspoken person (socially conservative on a pet issue) monopolizes conversation, and a couple of others keep mum because they don't like confrontation/arguing. The others don't care.
I am guilty of this in one particular case. I have a friend who describes himself as a classical Liberal, and when the subject comes up about pit bulls or the like, will say that "the problem is with the owners not the breed". What am I going to do, take out my crap phone and try to use data like a blunt instrument? I don't care enough to start an argument over it.
politics (and the truth itself) have always been tribal. People discussed things and disagreed in public and that's how they managed to slightly influence each other.
Avoiding to discuss politics is cowardly. It distances people from each other because they maintain a fake facade, and they express their true selves and beliefs only online.
Telling people they don't have political views, that they only belong to a tribe, is a great way to lose friends.
Like the author, I tend towards being a function that returns the opposite of what the other person believes, rather than having a fixed political opinion. Mostly I lack the confidence to claim that this way or that way is the Right Way To Do Things -- and I'm fascinated (and envious, and also appalled) by those who do.
But on this I differ:
>Seriously, come prove some core belief I have as wrong and you will quite literally make my week.
I don't think I believe this at all. It's certainly not true of myself -- I aspire to it, but my ego is much too fragile. I have spent much time and effort carefully checking the small set of core principles that I do feel justified in calling "correct", and the reason for that is precisely to avoid the unpleasant surprise of discovering that they are demonstrably wrong after all.
I have friends all over the political spectrum. I've read political philosophy ranging from Hegel, Marx, Foucault, Butler, Crenshaw, Gentile, Locke, Rawls, Friedman, Mises, Rand, ect.. I find myself actively engaging in political discussion frequently with these friends. The only friend I've stopped talking over politics were black block during the antifa riots. I viewed his actions as ultimately misguided and dangerous. I ultimately forgave him and now we are friends who actively debate policy in good faith.
It's easy to spot political tribalism - just reference the comments here. They ultimately misrepresent, and have never tried to understand, their opposition's political position. It's kind of sad because it allows them to be manipulated by propaganda and political powers much like my antifa friend.
> It's easy to spot political tribalism - just reference the comments here. They ultimately misrepresent, and have never tried to understand, their opposition's political position.
Can you explain the Trump administration's political aims this term? Because this sounds very much like both sides are the same, and I'm not seeing that at all with what Trump and Elon are trying to accomplish.
You should not discuss politics with friends.
You should however discuss politics with close friends -- they probably got close to you because you both share a worldview or they like hearing your worldview (even if it differs from yours).
Closeness means more sharing. That always comes with risks and rewards.
I lived in China in the early-2000s, and one of the things I noticed is that no one ever talked about any sort of politics. Never. It was weird at first, as political discussion is so ingrained in the culture (in the US). Even just regular smalltalk, like, "How's it going, Bob? / It'd be a lot better if the city council would pull their heads out of their asses and fix these potholes!" - there was nothing like that.
I asked a few local friends about it, and got two basic explanations:
1. What's the point? No one is empowered to change anything, so why bother talking about it at all?
2. You can get in big trouble for saying the wrong thing in public.
The weirder thing I noticed is that I kinda enjoyed it. It was nice to not hear a bunch of bitching about the government (not saying the government shouldn't be criticized - it should; just saying it was nice to be completely removed from it for a time).
Not sure if it's still like this in China; I haven't been there in years, but yeah, this was really strange to me when I lived there.
I do think that a scary thing is that if there's a descent into fascism, how many people will hardly notice, or maybe even enjoy it. There was a quote I heard on this American life recently, that went:
"Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it's not frightening. It is stultifying. It's boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water — because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies."
I have been in countries like that and I've found they were quite open to talking to me about it, since I was obviously a foreigner much less likely to snitch on them than even their family or friends. Buy a beer for someone in a dictatorial country and I pretty much guarantee you they will open up in private.
My personal strategies... 1. I try to be indirect on what I think and just describe why some people think one opinion versus another. So I try not to convince people. 2. I try to stick to "is this going to work?" Style arguments when I do state my opinion. I acknowledge when my preferred party does or says something I disagree with. 3. I avoid getting bogged down with "do you agree with x y z??" Controversies that may be anecdotal and I'm not opinionated or familiar with. So I try not to argue the outage of the day.
This generally keeps me from arguing with relatives and in-laws, and on this site. So usually I can discuss differences without things going crazy.
I actually ask my friends what they think and don't judge them for it. Everyone has some way to build up their belief and it's interesting to listen to these.
They often have horrible reasoning but I don't try to talk them out of it, just nod, polite comment, move on.
I often talk politics with friends, mostly because we all like to moan about the state of things.
Maybe this doesn't translate to the US, but in the UK (and the largely British friend-group I have here in Australia) in my bubble we don't tend to strongly identify with any political party or politician, rather we tend to look down at the self-serving and/or myopic weirdos in parliament and decry their short-sighted, uninformed policy-making whichever side they're on. And I'm not trying to claim some great enlightened intellectual position for myself here - I think it's probably more common than not.
That certainly isn’t a claim or a point in my post.
There are better and worse politicians and parties, certainly, and your vote and who gets power does matter. They certainly aren’t all as bad as each other but neither are any of them heroes or gods, and identifying strongly with a particular party is weird.
Tribalism really is the thing one has to individually overcome in order to gain some perspective, then maybe adhere to free thinking, before blooming as a free doer.
For me, it always was a voluntarily long and sinuous and silly and lonely path. It had to be.
An uncertain path as well, and one that was totally worth all the trouble it brought my way.
And as seducing as it is, the reality of crossing path with fellow free thinking/doing individuals always felt like falling for some other tribe.
Because in the end, that's what we do. While not following, we often become leaders of followers. How could it be otherwise is the only question left to answer.
This is a good stance, but with a caveat.
I do have friends who are able to have nuanced views about politics/economics/AI, and generally high-level vague things that concern the entire human civilization.
But I also have friends that can't have those nuanced views, and when you try to engage in good faith discussion with them, they resort to tribalism and are not interested in finding nuance through reasoning.
With those I don't have any discussions about it.
If you are a friend - try to be someone from the first category. Don't engage in tribalism with your friends if you value them (unless your whole group is a bunch of bullies, in which case do whatever).
If you can’t talk about politics with your friends, then they are not your friends.
Tacking onto this I think the more important variable for ease of conversation is the extent to which someone's sense of identity is tied to their political beliefs.
E.g. I'm moderately left but I'll still engage in healthy conversation with right-leaning friends and acquaintances because I like to understand where they're coming from. However I have some friends who I love dearly but know that despite their intelligence and how much I enjoy their company, they've become very tribal in their politics, so I don't bother engaging in political discussions with them beyond basic diplomatic contributions. Or posing questions that offer new perspectives. I still trust them and value their friendship though.
But this is the difference between friends and acquaintances. My friends are more likely to share my views, but even if they didn’t talking about this stuff would not damage the friendship since it’s beyond ideology and more about shared sacrifice and loyalty.
Isn't that increased polarization largely driven by, you know, certain political actions? I find it strange to argue that both sides are evil nowadays. I'd say one is evil and the other is hypocritical and self-serving. The choice is still pretty clear.
Was going to comment the same thing. I try to avoid politics with co-workers and family because they are people that you are obligated, on some level, to interact with and have decent social cohesion. Friendships are entirely voluntary, so I can't begin to understand choosing to spend time with people that you can't honestly share your thoughts and feelings with, political or otherwise.
Who among us does not entertain the happy illusion that our genuine friends number more than is the reality?
Precisely. I make a clear distinction between my friends and my acquaintances. My friends would do anything for me, my acquaintances, not so much.
Author thinks they are the lone person stuck in the middle between two tribes, but actually they are part of a third tribe that fallaciously believes that it is possible to write better policy, if only we took the time to study reality more and listen to more people and apply more reason etc. In short, Author distinguishes between the two established tribes (in which people make a very limited emotional engagement with the issues) and their tribe (in which people make a stronger emotional engagement). This is a fallacy because:
* It is not reasonable to expect most people to make strong emotional investments into voting choices that have little direct effect on their lives, and indeed we have a representative democracy rather than a direct democracy to recognize that reality
* Reality is far, far more complicated than can be summarized in journalism or articles; many researchers spend their entire careers attempting to learn deeply about *one* area, let alone many areas; much pertinent information is non-public. Policies that are effective in one community are completely counter-productive in another. Believing that you are The Exception and that you Know The Right Way To Run The Country because you "do your research" is the height of hubris.
It’s super sad that the political establishment has managed to polarize people so much that a rational discussion about very important issues is not possible anymore for a lot of people. It’s a dream come true for unscrupulous politicians and oligarchs who can do whatever they want as long their propaganda is strong enough.
I think its a side-effect of depoliticization by neoliberal reform from the 80s onward in the western liberal democracies. Everything has already been privatized and financialized, technocratic decision making has taken over. People are increasingly hurt by this system, but there is no political conceptualization of where that hurt is coming from. So people are galvanized into impotent political camps where they can hysterically scream about gay people, abortion, immigrants, guns or whatever.
I would be very curious to know what people here even consider "rational debate", probably a bunch of centrist takes on gay people, abortion, immigrants, guns or whatever would be my guess.
Why I don't discuss politics with Hacker News (6,000 comments)
A tribe is a collective brain. That work when people put truth first (Christianity) As the root of our culture fade out, we tilt toward satanism instead (serving self) Thus the tribes and institutions can no longer be trusted, everything fall appart, everyone lie all the time to serve the current advantages.
I would say discard people and institutions that lie to you, shame them. We don't have the time and brain power to find the truth in every decision.
This article is what happens when you absolutely refuse to read anything from hundreds of years of political theory, and try to reinvent everything from first principles the way that self-proclaimed rationalists do. Very little reflection on why certain viewpoints often cluster together other than "it's tribalism, duh".
Welcome to the Bay Area!
The big issue is a lot of people will believe what they want to believe. Most folks are not scientists - they start by assuming their conclusions and will choose the soothing moral and emotional rhetoric over evidence.
Trying to see the world objectively puts you in a category of outliers. The people you become friends with due to proximity in everyday life will not be outliers.
Most people are unaware of how small that outlier group is.
Like there's an even bigger group of people who think they're scientific and unbiased and impartial but they actually aren't. That group is more likely the group you and I are in.
The group of actual objective people is so small that you may never meet a single person like this in your lifetime. That person may even be autistic.
Part of being scientific is realising that you can't be completely unbiased and impartial, but you can be thorough, systematic, rigorous and informed by evidence rather than soundbites.
Some questions don't have definite answers, it's the sophistication of the analysis that counts.
Wow, great article.
I’ve lost respect for so many people because they couldn’t temper their political views. I wish more articles of this kind were published.
A good discussion. I've personally thought of political adherence similar to football teams. Fans are fans. That's it.
Escaping that tribalism or fandom is important, but you need to hold fast to your own sense of morality along the way.
Applying your own sense of right/wrong to political arguments and policies is a useful way to cut through the noise and distraction that accompanies political discourse.
I feel pretty much the same, except the political situation here (central Europe) is pretty mild. I can't imagine being in the US right now.
For what it's worth, the situation in the US right now is largely fine. It's hard to appreciate what the reality on the ground is like if all one sees is the media (which stirs up trouble because that makes them money) or terminally online Doom posters (a lot of the commenters on any social media site). But for the average person, life is going on as normal. Some people like things the administration is doing and some dislike them, but most people don't feel the need to make it the central feature of their lives.
> Most people don't want to graduate from tribalism.
Even if you personally want to, others will still judge you based on it. And honestly, there's often enough people out there for you to pick a social circle that aligns with your own interests at least on fundamental issues.
As for the people that you don't choose to be around, e.g. at work, probably read the room first.
for the author, only the centrists, his own group, can display independent thinking.
he assigns all virtues of the world to his group while others seems to be barely more than glorified barbarians.
this is, at best, laughable... and honestly quite reductive and insulting.
this seems to stem from the classic idea of "if everybody was informed and intelligent as i am we would all agree", which i thought had already been disproven long ago. people have different base assumptions. cultures are real things... individual differences matter too.
he also treats ideologies as unified things which is historically false, meanwhile his personal particular set of idea is not an ideology but something akin to objective truth (for which he explicitly argues) or something adjacent to it. any semi-consistent (if that) set of ideas instantly becomes an ideology as soon as you share that set to a group. there are myriads of ideologies that pop-up and die every day... the ones with staying power obviously have accumulated some following but they are rarely all compassing; we have a word for those, cults.
but first thing first, change country and you will get entirely different "centrists" with an entirely different set of ideas. there is no reason there would not be (in his own terms) "accidental" leftists and "accidental" right--ists???
in a locked 2 party system like what you get in the united states, stuff will probably have a tendency to degenerate though. things are way more fluid in countries where you have more democratic choice. there is a lot of fear in the american mix, that doesn't work well with free-thinking.
> for the author, only the centrists, his own group, can display independent thinking.
Yeah it’s this.
It’s always funny to watch a centrist invent centrism and then declare that they alone have achieved the apotheosis of correct perfect opinions that breaks the shackles of being in a group, when in reality they’ve just joined the single largest political cohort of folks — people that don’t feel strongly enough about anything to begin to ponder the bare minimum effort it takes to affect literally any change (talking to other people about politics)
It is the same thing as watching other people do things and then “inventing” sitting around and doing nothing. That’s not an invention! Babies are born doing nothing!
In my experience the (now ancient) Sequences are not of much use in learning how to change your mind. With only a cursory background in psychology, his advice tends to consist of generic platitudes. Not much practical application.
I’d recommend a short course in mindfulness instead, at whatever point in the spectrum between science and mysticism you’re comfortable with.
I think you're right, it is harder to discuss politics as widely as we once did.
That said, what do you think of money changing what is left/right and group/individual? The outcome of Citizens United to allow obscured spending to create seeming grass roots efforts on any topic that the monied want very effectively moving opinions.
Author says SF Bay Area is truth seeking, but that's far from truth.
More like, it's truth seeking within its echo chamber.
I actively practice not discussing politics but intentionally being member of groups of different political affiliation.
I can only encourage everybody to do the same.
People usually know if you are a „filthy liberal“ or a „closet fascist“ anyways and my experience shows that just knowing you will draw them away from the political extremes.
> Often when someone asks "who did you vote for", what they're actually doing is verifying your adherence to group culture,
They are just checking to which group you belong, not verifying your adherence? It does not seem like a question you ask someone whose you know politics already.
But yes still is a problem
> Bay Area … finding a community of truth-seeking people
I don’t know if I would entirely classify the Bay Area as truth seeking people. It’s eclectic but it definitely felt just as polarizing as living in other parts of the country, but perhaps it’s better defined as moving to live with more like minded people.
I couldn't fathom not discussing politics with friends. Political life is an integral part of modern... well, life. And to the contrary, if there ever existed people you might have good faith conversations with, it should be your friends and family. If not, can you really call them so?
> 1. become truth-seeking
How does one even begin to do that? Looking at people I know who describe themselves as "truth-seeking", it seems that it is a one way ticket to Conspiracyland.
Tim Minchin said it well when he said to be hard on and critical of your own opinions. Among many other things :P
Yeah, I sort of have a counter-belief that, generally speaking the way to have the most.... Grounded understanding of everything is to be a bit dispassionate about whether or not you have the truth. Being truth seeking has probably a 80/20 chance of going conspiracy nut vs actually being honestly truth seeking. Especially if you're not trained or the subject isn't in your wheel house.
> A reader might fairly ask what my tribe is. I'm not sure.
Oh brother. Self-awareness about your political conditioning and biases should be step 1.
Being unaware of your (intellectual) tribe implies a lack of good-faith understanding about other tribes.
"What's water?" says the young fish.
I have to tell you and most people reading this is that you belong to a tribe of people who only think they are impartial and unbiased and reasoned thinkers, but they actually aren't.
The level of objectivity that we strive for is just really possible.
Adherence to tribal views is how you end up with the space shuttle Columbia crash.
To be honest, I enjoy discussing politics with my friends. They’re all pretty good at discussing it. We have lots of common interests otherwise so it’s easy to just step away and talk about other things in the group Slack instead.
Friendship is more of an ideal.
I don't converse about politics at all, because conversation is not generally amenable to anything other than some vague virtue signaling in all but the very best of circumstances. For instance, a basic rule of conversation is that unless you have a very good reason, once a conversation wanders away from a topic, you don't drag it back to the same topic. That's great for idly chatting and catching up with friends, and it's a rule for a good reason, but it's quite far from what any sort of thought or an interaction that might actually change my mind on some topic requires.
While I don't disagree that people are quite tribal, I would observe that determining that people are tribal based on conversations can be a bit misleading, because the conversational form is extremely biased towards expressing things that will be indistinguishable from "tribalism", since all you have time to do is basically to put a marker down on the broadest possible summary of your position before the conversation baton must move on. That is, even a hypothetical Vulcan who has gathered all the data, pondered the question deeply, and come to the only logical conclusion, is going to sound tribal in a conversation, because that's all a conversation can convey.[1] Sufficient information conveyance to actually demonstrate the deep pondering and examination of all the evidence is ipso facto a lecture, or at best, a Socratic dialog or an interview, neither of which is a conversation in this sense.
For better and worse (and rather a lot of each), this medium we're working in right now at least affords itself to complete thoughts. It has its own well-known pathologies, like the interminable flame wars descending off to the right endlessly as two people won't let something go, and many others, but at least it's possible to discuss serious matters in a format similar to this, based on writing in text that can be as long as it needs to be without anyone needing to interrupt to maintain basic social niceties. There's a reason the serious intellectual discourse has been happening in books and articles for centuries if not millennia now.
Note how conversationally gauche it would be for me to monopolize a conversation long enough to simply read this post, and by the standards of intellectual discourse this is a rather simple point.
[1]: In fact, most people will read the Vulcan as exceedingly tribal, because no amount of reciting snap counterarguments against the Vulcan's position will cause him/her to so much as budge an inch or even concede that "perhaps reasonable people could think that" or any other such concession. The snap counteragument was encountered a long time ago, and analyzed in the light of all the other data, and they have long ago come to their conclusions on it. If they can be moved, it will take a lot more. This is difficult to distinguish from a maximized tribalist in any reasonable period of time in a conversation.
I agree that conversation is generally not very productive as we often talk past each other.
I would recommend anyone that struggle to discuss divisive or controversial topics to learn and watch Street Epistemology [0], or Compassionate Epistemology [1]. It's comparable to a Socratic dialog.
The basic idea that I got out of it is to unwrap one, and only one, person's beliefs at the time, find their best reason for that belief and see if the reason holds if it was used to believe something else. Repeat with the next best if not. By hiding your opinion on a topic, it's a lot easier to explore someone else's as they shouldn't get defensive or combative.
There are a lot of videos of this kind of interview, my favorite channel: Cordial Curiosity[2].
[0] https://www.streetepistemology.com/ [1] https://compassionateepistemology.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/@CordialCuriosity
If you reduce politics to 'what politians do', sure, I avoid it too.
Even when I know that outside of the US, most of us have the same opinions on what the trump admin is doing (especially in the pen and paper RPG community, where not being transphobic is basically a requirement), I still hate comments and discussions about it, probably for the same reason than the author does.
I disagree with his axis though, I've read a lot, and I mean _a lot_ of books and the more I read, the more left I went. And I started almost tea-party libertarian, then liberal-libertarian (because logic, and my class) then I understood power and class and became original libertarian (think Emma Goldman).
But politics are much more than that, it's how society organize, and if you can't talk to everybody about your city evicting the parasites who mismanaged and eventually brought down the waterlines because you're afraid of 'groupthink', you are fucked.
Yeah I fully accept that there could be valid dots in the top left (or even top right) corners, just didn't include them to keep the chart's point simple and b/c it was also based on Paul Graham's article which made the same point
> But politics are much more than that, it's how society organize, and if you can't talk to everybody about your city evicting the parasites who mismanaged and eventually brought down the waterlines because you're afraid of 'groupthink', you are fucked.
Yeah I guess I differentiate between the individuals who could help you determine the truth of the mismanaging parasites vs the ones that just blindly support or hate them.
I do think you have as much top dots on the left, right and middle. Because the radical center peg themselves as 'reasonable', doesn't mean they don't have an ideology they follow blindly. TINA, the 'third way' and all this stuff is groupthink too.
Just observing the epidermic reactions to MMT, the strawmaning, and all the Schopenhauer playbook thrown at a new, Occam's razor compatible economic explanation of how money works is probably what made me doubt this 'reasonable' stance, and I'm now convinced that once you've been persuaded that _you_ and your group are the 'reasonable', you're in fact so entrenched in your beliefs you'll dismiss anything that shake your worldview as unreasonable and strawman it (the lessWrong community is the perfect, small-scale example).
The only dots you should find on top, outside of groupthink are the one who read, and wrote new concepts.
> Yeah I guess I differentiate between the individuals who could help you determine the truth of the mismanaging parasites vs the ones that just blindly support or hate them
The justice system found them guilty and they got fined, but if no one acted, they would have sold their water rights to a company with suspiciously the same executives and owners during bankruptcy. Political movement made the municipality sweep in during bankruptcy, claim the water rights as part of repayment, and now administer the water lines and cleaning stations (and the watchdog are happy with cleaner water, and we locals are happy with cheaper water).
When everybody ignore politics, you'll have the West Virginian 'Freedom Industry' turn into 'Lexycon LLC', and nobody will say anything, because 'it's political'.
The idea here is that some percentage of "the left" and "right"'s views are arbitrary, so the chances of someone independently coming up with a perfectly matching set to either side is low
Agreed re: the center can have an ideology, that's the bottom circle in the graph
I fully agree that any group can behave tribally, even the rationalists (which I'm not part of).
Also not advocating ignoring politics, I'm advocating for consciously acknowledging whether one wants to discover truth or remain in their bubble, and some methods for doing the former if desired.
B/c while inaction can harm, plenty of "actions" without understanding have led to horrible outcomes (e.g. Salem witch trials). This is what truth-seeking can avoid.
The stance of always taking the opposite because fuck tribalism makes it hard to identify what one’s actual values and opinions are.
Empathy for why people vote the way they do has to be balanced with empathy for those harmed by horrible voting decisions.
Honestly, I'm increasingly cynical that it's even possible. From what I've seen, it seems like people mostly crystalize their beliefs by 30 and then don't change their beliefs without some sort of immense personal suffering. And few who aren't affected by bigotry are going to go through that to change their mind. There are exceptions, but nowhere near enough to swing political trends.
I think Trump's idiotic economic policies will probably result in losing voters as they're harmed directly, but that's just more of people caring about themselves. It's not a fundamental change in people's beliefs about the homeless, lgbt people, racial minorities, etc.--if people aren't affected by how Trump harms those people, they aren't going to change how they feel about those people. And even a swing against Trump due to his economics harming voters won't matter if we don't even get to vote in 2028.
The only way I see anything changing is that the boomers die of old age. My own generation (millenials) are more compassionate, but have basically been hamstrung by an older generation that has kept all the money and power. And honestly, I'm not sure we'll do much better when the boomers die--we're cynical, and tired from living our entire adult lives in this bullshit, and on average just content if we can survive. Gen Z seems on average to have even more compassion than millenials, and some more nuanced understandings of how to treat our fellow humans well, and seem to still want something better for themselves, so my hope is on them.
I find this to be painfully true in the US. Most of the rational discussions I have about politics are with friends from other countries (Soviet Russia, China, Africa, etc).
I'm looking forward to going back to the days when political disagreements were more along the lines of 'I think __TAX__ should be x%, rather than x+y%'
But there IS this?
> [13] Not a reference to the book, which I haven’t read — this is just a phrase I use
Seems to me an unwillingness to cite / give proper attribution to Annie Duke and the book, which is super weird? At any rate I’d highly recommend the book.
> How can you prioritize limited resources with deadly consequences without understanding utilitarianism vs deontology (i.e. the trolly problem)?
Can you explain this to me?
People interested in this subject would be wise to pick up the book Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations by Amy Chua
The author gains a great insight into the social consequences of discussing politics with friends, but I think it might be part of something larger, a sort of intellectual signaling of meta-contrarianism.
At least in the countries where I live, debating politics is less about civic duty and being a citizen, and has become a substitute for sports; people prioritize their passions, and they are not concerned with getting the government to implement the policies it promised in the first place, but with defending a side.
In Germany, we see on state broadcasts every single day discussions about how the USA is bad, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, how some war in a distant place is bad, and so on; and nothing related to local politics.
If you invite someone to go to the municipal legislative service to talk with someone about why we still have underinvestment in kindergartens, even with record revenue, while other groups of society are capitalizing on social benefits, nobody will show up.
Getting in front of a keyboard and brigading online to talk about federal elections and/or officials of other countries is cool: it gives you the latest scandal of the day, you can congregate with people of your chamber, it provides audience for podcasts, and it generates talking points that sound intellectually tasty.
At least for me, the politics that matter most are local politics; and this is the craziest thing: it's the kind of politics where you can do something as an individual, you will have someone to hear you out, and with some effort, you can make a real and direct difference for your community.
Maybe tribalism is ok in some respects, and maybe we should increase it.
For example, it would be fine if the people in the other tribe to do what they want - as long as when the taxes becomes too high, the beaurocracy stifling, the crime rampant, and they have to deal with issues they assumed other people would sacrifice for in order for them to feel good - as long as when it inevitably breaks down, they don't come to MY area learning nothing and try to replicate what they left.
That is a worldwide problem actually.
There is some good stuff here, but I generally disagree.
The difference for me is, I don't like everybody, and not everybody has to like me. That's okay, and it's not about disrespect, it's just that I like to surround myself with people who are thoughtful before they are opinionated.
If you know me, and you respect me, and I say something you think is crazy... if they first think you think is "Wait, I thought I respected him, but he's a bad person" instead of "Wait, I respect this person and they're saying something I disagree with. Am I wrong about that?", then, guess what, I'm not actually interested in having a deep relationship.
I studied philosophy in college and grad school. I had to "relearn" how to interact with people outside of the university setting for many of the reasons in this essay. However, upon reading the horrifying "how to win friends and influence people" way of interacting with normal people through flattery and shallow interaction, I thought fuck it, I just don't actually want to be close with people I can't have a real conversation with.
Not everyone gets to the right position right away, that's okay. I'm a strong small-"L" liberal, and I have friends that are conservatives, socialists, and even the occasional anarchist. The difference is that we're all still trying to figure it all out. We're not all pretending that "well if those people didn't exist then we'd have utopia already" because, well, all these system exist all over the earth and it ain't a utopia anywhere. We'll make our points, we'll needle each other in a friendly way, and we'll all say "fuck it, we're doing our best."
That doesn't mean I'm friendly with everyone (remember, I don't like everyone, and not everyone likes me), because there are plenty of political positions that pretty much require people to be unthoughtful. The views need to be consistent, and pretty much anything that end advocating substantial discrimination against certain people over other people isn't going to be internally consistent. Axioms are arbitrary, reason is not.
> "However, upon reading the horrifying 'how to win friends and influence people' way of interacting with normal people through flattery and shallow interaction"
Say what now? The book is littered with passages urging the reader to be sincere in interactions.
The book has you meta-analyze every aspect of your conversation. You're basically treating everyone with kid gloves all the time. Never tell someone they're wrong, go out of your way to praise people, treat everyone like the noble protagonist in their own story.
All of this is fine and dandy, and incredibly practical in practice, but it presupposes that you're talking to someone whose thinking processes are in opposition to any analytical thinking or self-critique.
I'm not saying the book isn't useful, my point is that the type of people for whom the book is effective are not the type of people I want to be close friends with.
To put it another way, my friend's parents are classic NIMBYs. If I want to hold their hand, and walk them to a place where they can see that their actions are harming the next generation, then, yes, Dale Carnegie's prescriptions are very effective. My point is I don't actually want to be close friends with anyone who needs their hand held just to see things from a different person's perspective.
I try to be kind, I try to be honest, I try to be upfront about who I am and what I stand for. I have made lots of close friends just by being willing to be patient with people who have different views from my own, without actually having to pretend I don't have any views at all. My friends are mature enough to understand that we are both smart people, and if I say something that puts them off, then we ought to be able to discuss it and learn from each other.
> "You're basically treating everyone with kid gloves all the time. Never tell someone they're wrong, go out of your way to praise people, treat everyone like the noble protagonist in their own story."
The book says that a person can deliver criticism and disagreement in ways that don't make the recipient defensive and that people respond positively when their accomplishments are recognized in a sincere and meaningful way. As for the last, that's simply the way most, if not all, people are; it's a failing that's almost universal.
It's about learning to be a person that is thoughtful to others and considerate of the foibles of humanity. I suppose a person could use it as a template for faking empathy and generally being manipulative but that's very much not what it suggests.
I mean, I'm not going to change your mind. I don't want to. I've read the book. I found it very helpful in a practical sense, while at the same time as finding it horrifying.
>that's simply the way most, if not all, people are; it's a failing that's almost universal.
Again, I don't disagree with you that this is a problem for the median person. My point is that, for the most part, I'm not really interested in being close friends with the median person. Friends in a sense? Sure. Chat at a bar? Sure. But not people I really talking about interesting things with. The median person isn't going to mesh very well with my personality.
The ivory tower was an isolated tower for a reason. Intellectuals were literally under threat of execution for the vast majority of human history. The underlying currents for that are basically reflected in the assumptions that Carnegie makes.
I want intellectual friends. I want be shown that I'm wrong. I learn something when I'm wrong. I understand that's not a common trait, but it's how I am, and how I want to be.
I'm not sure where I see we disagree?
I actually agree with everything you said, mostly just want people whose views are actually tribal and not open to discussion to acknowledge them as such, via:
"If someone is self-aware enough to consciously acknowledge their choice to remain in the bubble, that’s totally fair. I respect it like I’d respect anyone who chooses to participate in a more traditional religion. My issue is when this view is falsely passed off as an intellectually-driven one."
unless you're saying I shouldn't bother being polite and avoiding the convo at times, which I guess I disagree there
> 3. Most people don't want to graduate from tribes to views
I checked out of political conversations when I noticed I was teaching remedial civics over drinks and none of us were having fun. So I just sit back and watch people who just want to engage in reality tv style yelling confrontation.
A good friend of mine confessed that he doesn't argue to change other people's mind, he does it to change his own.
I noticed this with one of my friend, and have tried to inculcate this mode of thinking and behaviour - he really listens and asks insightful question instead of talking about his political views. It just stuck me one day that I was the talking, and I had no real idea of his political views because he was so agreeable.
"Unbiased" aggregators like Ground News, MSM, and the right blogosphere like Joe Rogan are doing their best to normalize dragging the Overton window to the right with haste. Progressives have a handful of obscure, disconnected, largely-unknown reputable sources with a wasteland of as many or more former progressives and once-promising journalist and journalist-adjacent personalities.
Well that’s an interesting title given he uprooted his family for political [adjacent] reasons
hey thanks for reading! I believe that's right
intentional moderate = they're trying to straddle the middle, meaning they adjust views based on political swings
unintentional moderate = they accidentally end up in the middle from the average of their views, for which some may be extreme left or right
is "becoming truth seeking" not some sort of religion - like the sports team - and the bay area is your tribe? Perhaps you were already suggesting this in your article and I've missed this - if so I apologise.
you seem to suggest that truth-seeking > tribalism, and we should pity the poor fools who are about tribalism. In this way, you're being tribalist against tribalism, no?
If ignorant tribalism brings people community and happiness, isn't that just as valid and commendable as truth-seeking?
Truth-seeking might provide a level of understanding of the world which is of value to your operating in life. It is not necessarily a sublime good of it's own right. Too much of it will alienate you from your mates.
I'd wager types like you might find on HN, Bay Area, could do with a little less seeking, in fact.
The Underground Man comes to mind, and presents the extreme of this spectrum. But then maybe he'd find mates in an area filled with other Underground Men?
haha yes I was wondering if someone would pick up on this, totally agree
I absolutely joke I am "tribal against tribalists", which to me is sorta like someone implying their greatest fear is fear itself.
I do mention it is a totally fair belief to have in that piece, and respect conscious decisions to value that like I respect people's decisions to follow more traditional religions, but only have issue when it's passed off as a truth-seeking value
Have not heard of the Underground Man, will check it out -- thanks for reading btw!
Additional point: Politics and Ideologies have long tail effects, which makes arguing over them often an exercise in futility. We're arguing over the next footstep in a race that's got infinity left to run.
Russia is/was a global powerhouse under (its version of) Communism.
The US reached (essentially) global domination under Capitalsm.
China is in line to be the next hegemony under an odd combination of Communism, Authoritarianism and (serving Western) Capitalism.
Little old Germany wasn't far from conquering the world under what began as some form of Socialism.
Any of the -isms can be argued against by mentioning -ism-subscribing regimes that have fallen. Where this falls down is that each regime has its own way of corrupting the ideals of the -ism to favour of those 'at the top' or 'with the power to decide'.
Trickle-down (voodoo, for Ferris Bueller fans) economics seems to raise its head regularly despite not having a great track record for an entire population. I think the reason is that its popular with the powerful, so its track record with the population at large is a feature not a bug.
Who is right? What does it mean to be right?
What are the Acceptance Critiera?
Everything is political, so have a nice time discussing the weather with your friends.
I can talk for hours of non-political things. And I’m not talking about sports or similar things.
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.
im a nuance enjoyer when it comes to politics too but i wouldnt say i know adequate amounts about economics, politics, game theory, etc. i might know slightly more about my preferred fields than the average person, but im still woefully incompetent. so im always hesitant to lay judgement. especially because politics is such a complex system. its difficult to make the probabilities the author speaks of unless you make a bunch of assumptions. which is terrible and miserable. things get even worse when you think about things at a global vs local political level, which are just completely different in dynamics.
i hate rationalists because it's like. you cant logically reason your way out of this one buddy. the system is far too complex for rationalism to work. sometimes its easier to just align with the groupthink and focus on other things you deem more important. hanging out with friends vs spending all day in your room teaching yourself about tribal relations in central africa so you can have your own unique opinions on us foreign policy.
I feel like "tribal relations in central Africa" is a defeatist exaggeration of the requisite nuance necessary to engage meaningfully with socioeconomic power dynamics in one's own society. It's an extremist viewpoint, and unworthy of a "nuance enjoyer."
Remember the Pareto Principle! The principal aspect of Central African Politics is probably, still, colonialism/imperialism and the game of Hungry, Hungry Hippos played between US/Russia/China.
Do you really need to grok the unique reactions to neo-colonialism in every affected African, South American, and Asian country to form a principled, independent outlook?
Timur Kuran writes about this idea (preference falsification) in "Private Truths, Public Lies".
He explains that its this idea that had kept the Soviet Union (this bad idea/system) from dying sooner. People thought it was the system of oppression but in reality it was people who hated the system showed approval. https://youtu.be/xzjqjU2FOwA?si=aTG0GnJKVDoK_-qb&t=819
"Accordingly, for all the hardships of life under communism, they remained politically submissive for years on end." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
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.
So you don't pay attention to national politics at all (not enough to be even a little bit aware of Elon Musk's very visible and loud 5 year long descent into Nazi ideology? really?) but you've analyzed things enough to determine that all of this was the result of a foreign psy-op. Right.
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.
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 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.
"Why I don't discuss politics with friends" implies that you don't discuss politics with friends. What you're saying here sounds quite different. It sounds like "I do discuss politics with friends, except when I encounter a signal that [etc.]".
On HN, your title should match what the article actually says ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" -https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
I think if we change the title to "When I don't discuss politics with friends", that would be more accurate given what you've written here.
Edit: I looked at the article and didn't see anything that particularly mitigated the title, so I've put it back to "Why" above.
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.
Agreed, cognition and philosophy are technologies, tools. They shape what we can extract from them.
Thus the problem is not political but philosophical, how would we decide what to do when we cant decide what is worth more. We are stuck in a local maximum, with Reality as the fitness function :p
I think humanity as a whole (not individual tribes) is quite good at getting out of local maxima in the past 2000 years.
Stable socioeconomic systems that in isolation could've existed for millennia are constantly getting crushed by their slightly more effective neighbors. When they're not crushed from the outside, they get consumed from within. In the end the better economy wins most of the time.
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.
"An extremist is someone who won't change their mind and won't change the subject"
Just ensure that emotions and Reddit aren't your source for political discussion - it's too easy to get pulled into an illogical extreme when you're listening to people PAID to polarize you.
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.
based on my travels to many parts of the world, yes. being mis-aligned with reality has very real, negative, consequences when building companies, and therefore people here are forced to be more truth-seeking.
(not all ofc - i would say this forcing function applies to < 1% of the population in SFBay, but that is still a far greater concentration than anywhere else i've seen).
i find similar truth-seeking-ness in long-term investors. cultures that are more short-term oriented, and who have less feedback from the market, seem to deviate away from truth-seeking because the forcing function becomes weak: you aren't quickly penalized for being wrong.
(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.
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%.
The assumption that social ambushes only occur for horrific beliefs is an amazingly naive take on humanity. By this logic it's implied that the women burned in the Salem witch trials must've done something to deserve it.
I've been ambushed for explaining: - to right-leaning folk that most migrants are seeking a better life - to left-leaning folk that securing a border is not a crazy idea - to right-leaning folk that subsidies to help restore agency to people who've had a rougher start and benefit everyone - to left-leaning folk that merely allocating money to an government agency does not necessarily mean anything beneficial happens
Not even taking a stand, just pointing out opposing points -- hardly an anti-social, horrible act
> The assumption that social ambushes only occur for horrific beliefs is an amazingly naive take on humanity. By this logic it's implied that the women burned in the Salem witch trials must've done something to deserve it.
That is an incredible leap in logic with far too many layers to properly litigate.
> I've been ambushed for explaining: - to right-leaning folk that most migrants are seeking a better life - to left-leaning folk that securing a border is not a crazy idea - to right-leaning folk that subsidies to help restore agency to people who've had a rougher start and benefit everyone - to left-leaning folk that merely allocating money to an government agency does not necessarily mean anything beneficial happens
I think you're wholely unaware of the concept of dog-whistles and their role in our modern politics.... I mean not even modern, those go back centuries.
In any case:
- You were probably ambushed for suggesting migrants are seeking a better life because many right leaning people are propagandized so heavily into thinking every migrant is a rapist felon drug selling child molester.
- You were probably ambushed for endorsing border security for the same reason, because it's become a dog-whistle for unhinged levels of racism and nationalism projected by the right. And while I don't endorse that level of over-correction on the part of whoever ambushed you, I also don't not-understand it. The dehumanizing rhetoric around immigrants is fucking disgusting and shameful, literally the stuff of Nazi's, and especially given the ongoing abuses by border patrol, the active deportations of people who've committed no crime due to administrative incompetence on their and other agency's parts, again, I'm not surprised people might be telling you to can it about needing more of that.
- Again, this is a ridiculous amount of propaganda going back to the 80's, where the Reagan campaigns created outright fiction about "welfare queens" (and again, more racism there as they were always implied to be black) that's led to decades of "welfare reform" which is better stated as "fucking over the poor for profit."
- And you likely got ambused about the last thing because.... it's wrong, and again, not only is it wrong, it's a hot button issue that's been, again, ruined by the Reagan administration who, along with their compatriots in the Thatcher administration and similar austerity administrations and politics worldwide, have systematically defunded uncountable numbers of public services, which leads to a degradation in those services, which leads to more justifications for more cuts, which leads to a death spiral which is why virtually no government agencies anywhere are effective anymore.
> Not even taking a stand, just pointing out opposing points -- hardly an anti-social, horrible act
And like, I get that you personally aren't advocating for these things, but what you are doing, unintentionally, is invoking bad faith rhetoric that is, at the risk of sounding dramatic, behind the political movement that is more or less responsible for the fact that nothing works anymore and every government on Earth is struggling. And for you, that's probably a minor, or perhaps major annoyance. For other people, it's life threatening. For certain groups of people, they may not only find the actions of border control and immigration courts abhorrent, they might well be the targets of those actions relatively soon.
To put it another way, you may not have strong feelings about zoning regulations or deciding where a sewage line goes in your town. However, if you say that to the person who's back yard is full of overflow sewage and it's causing their family to become ill and their home to be borderline unlivable, they're probably going to be quite pissed off with you because just because something isn't a critically important issue to you doesn't mean it isn't to someone else.
Context is important. I would encourage you the next time you feel so ambushed, instead of getting defensive and/or running away, ask questions. Why is this issue so important to this person? Why are they so upset with what you're saying? Is there another angle to this that you're unaware of?
Ironically this seems another perfect example of the tribalism the article is about, saying:
- the right-leaning folks were just propagandized - the left-leaning folks were justified
- that questioning this at all is indirectly responsible for breaking every government on earth
- assumed politics must not affect me, or that I must get defensive, run away, or not ask questions
The opposition always being assumed ignorant and the tribe always being justified is a perfect example of tribalism
> I think you're wholely unaware of the concept of dog-whistles and their role in our modern politics...
I'd think the opposite actually. If you bring up border security, then the conversation can go in one of two ways: a discussion of the actual policies of border security, or a conversation that hears the dog whistle and proceeds under the context that you fall into the tribe that uses that dog whistle. The latter is an ambush. The policies themselves still exist even outside of their historical context as dog whistles. The question is if can you have a conversation with someone that talks about the policies themselves or not
You're doing yourself a disservice by creating a false dichotomy of "things that are okay to discuss" (tax brackets, zoning) and "things that aren't" (tariffs, manditory genital inspections), when it's very unlikely that anyone will have the exact same bifurcation point as you.
And, I have to say, I thought it was pretty amusing that you appear to treat someone discussing tariffs with the same severity as someone discussing mandatory genital inspections.
I am incredibly jealous of how eloquently you've put it...
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.
If you voted for trump I cannot take any pseudo intellectualization of that choice at face value. Unless you are an anarchist and truly hope the federal government implodes and you don’t mind the cost of that. I am a mostly left European and I’d rather have Cheney as president. And I do think Cheney is probably the worst kind of human being but he is probably not totally disjoint from reality.
I have no reason to "respectfully engage" with beliefs like 'trans people should all be put in jail' (https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/texa...) or 'kill all the Jews' (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/nazis-r...).
On the flip side, one black man has reformed hundreds of KKK members through conversation alone.
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Courtesy:_Daryl_Dav...
Sometimes you have to fight¹, but other times engaging with an open mind² really is the most efficient strategy. Shouting at the opposition only cements them in their own thinking; to change minds you have to understand and engage them where they’re at. And yes, this is way easier said than done and can be quite frustrating.
¹ You probably won’t convince a fascist dictator to change their ways by appealing to their better nature, and it would take too long while irreperable damage is being done.
² Even if the other side believes in something appallingly hateful.
This. I try to meet everyone where they are when entering into political discussions. I’ve learned a lot from people as a result of this and — I’d like to think — have successfully communicated an understanding of my own perspectives. Being able to sit down and talk to someone you disagree with is so important and I feel it is something we have gradually lost over time.
The perspective of the article is completely delusional. The idea that the author thinks they are above the petty "tribe" politics and have based their views on rationality and scientific evidence is complete bollocks.
The author has less self-awareness that the classic "I voted for the guy everyone else is voting for" guy. At least the later has a hint of consciousness about his own limitations.
Every ideology under the sun thinks they are based on objective truth. In reality our political views are shaped by the friends we have, our family, our upbringing, our social class, the media we consume, the experiences we made, our deep core vales and so much more. Most of it is not even conscious.
If you think you are above it all, you are just deluding yours. You just enjoy being in the enlightened centrist tribe or whatever.
Not choosing a stance is also choosing stance. If you see injustice and decide to stay neutral you decided to side with the oppressor.
In the end it is up to you to decide which tribe you want to belong. Do you want to march with those that fight for human dignity and social progress or those that want to oppress the many for the benefit of the few. Or do you want to sit by the sidelines while other people are striped of their human rights?
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.
instead of writing this exact thing i found the first comment from the bottom which said it for me. these people are coping. articles like this read to me as a person good at writing long form whos trying to convince themselves their cowardice and inflated self image-driven decision not to curate their social circles is actually ok and not horribly damaging to our society.
Thanks for reading!
Yeah PG sorta talks about this in his piece I reference, that for some reason he notices conservatives tend to do this less than their liberal counterparts
I thought this was a fair data point and sad it seems to be downvoted almost? I'm not super familiar with HN's voting system
That you believe "conservatives ostracize less than liberals" tells us 100x more information than any number of articles could have.
Ask any gay kid how true that is.
i truly desperately beg of you to recognize that this is an extremely reductive and idiotic viewpoint that does not reflect reality
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.
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
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 actually totally get this and think it's totally fair to be in a tribe (I say this in the piece), this is less about how people vote and more about how they discuss issues
Only time I have issue is when a view is presented as truth-seeking instead of tribal
But agreed, our political system is setup this way
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.
On average people are incapable of holding a moral position through to the end.
- Bad parenting is bad, we should have a permit for it --> are you ready to get denied the right to try having kids?
- Thou shalt not kill --> except those really bad people I don't like!
- Stealing is bad --> except when you're "starving"
Our perception of good and evil are multifaceted, with most of it happening in our background cognition.
There is a strange "mirror" stopping people from exchanging once a rift has opened. Someone else posited that it might be a fight or flight reaction.
I posit that our cognition is based on negation, and thus the shape of our tool impact our results.