Comment by cle 20 hours ago
These are real problems. But they are also loaded questions, if someone asked me these at a party I would view them as looking for confirmation, and not seeking truth. There's nothing wrong with that, but the author's goal is curiosity and truth seeking, and I'm skeptical that most of these questions align with that goal.
> the author essentially makes this the main point right from the get go
Then find better friends. The author is essentially complaining about the quality of his friends.
Ah, yes, those pesky humans and their cognitive biases...
> Ah, yes, those pesky humans and their cognitive biases...
This is sort of meaningless without citation of the bias you claim.
In case you're being serious: yes; you can find friends who won't shit on you for your views.
My read is that talkingtab’s agenda here is to focus the conversation on what politics is. Rather than being this thing you discuss with people (or not) it’s about injustice against the majority. So why does that get brought up? Because with the OP it’s easy to end up concluding that politics to the average person is something you choose to idly or deliberately or max-brainpower chatter with other people about. Then it can be easily thought that it’s just about differing policy positions. But talkingtab is saying that it’s more confrontational than that.
So why are the questions “loaded”? Because as you can see with your own eyes, they have their own political agenda. Part of politics is defining what the the agenda should be—and what should be considered political.
As you can imagine, people who think they are arguing or fighting on behalf of people making a living wage etc. want to put that message out there. They are not discussing abstract concepts or competing in some open-mindedness competition or some rationality contest. It matters to them.
> If anything, talkingtab's post just highlights to me the author's specific point about political "tribes" vs political views, and if anything has convinced me more that the author's view is spot on here.
You are even more convinced. Yet there is nothing here that suggests that talkingtab is tribal in the sense of what the OP is talking about. None. Is this received opinion or opinion born from studying like a monk for 10 years? You don’t know.
You also say that talkingtab is presenting what the “correct” answer is. Yes, according to them. Again, is it really tribalism? Or is it conviction as well as the polemic tone of the whole comment? And having conviction doesn’t mean that you cannot conceive of people having other opinions, or being intellectually unable to present counter-arguments to their own position. Again, no proof of tribalism is presented.
And this focus on tribalism presupposes that the end goal is to find your tone. Alternatively you can look at their arguments. Maybe they want to change the flaws they perceive in the world.
I always wondered, what those Pinkerton man thought, when they attacked union members with machine guns for their masters in the guilded age.
The original argument put forth by capitalists was that unionized workers were effectively engaging in economic sabotage by striking and blockading factories.
That said the Pinkertons were basically mercenaries akin to organized crime, so probably viewed things in terms of might makes right.
The strawmanning of arguments from both sides is so intense that most people lay in a bed composed entirely of strawman arguments. I firmly blame the media above all for this, but individuals carry a burden to for not trying to remake their bed.
It took me 15 years to to remake my bed into somewhat rational arguments, and still I find lots of hay in there. Generally both sides, or all sides really, want the same things and disagree on how to get there. And the truth is there is almost never an obvious or clear way to get there. It's fractal pros and cons all the way down.
> but individuals carry a burden to for not trying to remake their bed
In what way? I turn on Fox sometimes and it's not that it's slanted, but it's just a stream of lies and BS. I've watched a bunch of Trump's speeches and in addition to being incoherent, he says the same lies and BS all the way down. Yesterday's tariff speech was a great example.
I don't consider myself progressive (though the MAGA right would think me so), but where do I go to try and 'remake [my] bed'?
I think what's meant is that you need to be open to changing your opinion and manner of approach to things. To stay with the analogy: when you "remake" your bed and it ends up the same, chances are that you didn't try to improve on its design.
By turning on Fox sometimes (provided it's not your main source) you might already not fall into the category of people not trying to remake their bed.
Wait, we're designing bedding now? Not just remaking our beds? What a strained analogy that when you 'remake' your bed and it's the 'same' (why would it be different?) then you didn't improve the design?? Even more shocking is that you ran with this as opposed to realizing that these were warning signs that either your fundamental argument is ridiculous, or your analogy is.
Well, the first thing is to realize CNN is also just a stream of lies and BS. Every media news organization in the world has become (they always were?) pure garbage.
Listening to first-hand sources is the way, I guess, but also remembering they can be lying as well, so be vigilant.
It's true, because all the upper levels of ALL large media organizations have been infiltrated by big-moneyed conservatives.
CNN and NBC weren't always as bad as they are now, but their descent has been obvious and dramatic.
Some of them still employ democrats to some minimal extent, such as Jamelle Bouie at the NYT, but that's merely subterfuge, lest their bent be glaringly obvious.
If someone can name a large organization that is an exception to my first paragraph, I would be happy to learn of them.
> Generally both sides, or all sides really, want the same things and disagree on how to get there.
No, that is just not true. For example, do you think Putin and his supporters wanted a functioning democracy in Russia and independent Ukraine? No, they wanted someone functioning as a dictator to restore Russia's cold war territory and influence, and they wanted to undermine western democracies that stood in their way.
History does not support your claim that everyone wants the same things. Some people want power and strong man to take over the government. We see that with the Trump administration. The religious conservatives want to use that to make America a Christian nation. The billionaire libertarians want to use it to deregulate their industries and run the government like a corporation. And Trump wants to act unilaterally to bring about his vision of being seen as some great figure. They have illiberal aims.
I'm speaking about the collectives, not the individuals. There are always deranged individuals and some of them, many of them, manage to get in power. But the ideological collectives all have pretty much the same core goals. Needs met, population happy.
What's your threshold where an "individual" becomes a "collective"? Certainly billionaire libertarians, religious conservatives, Putin and his supporters and the Trump administration (along with the judges he's appointed, the people in congress and state governments who ran on his platform and the 10s of millions of Americans who voted for them) are not individuals...
They also very obviously want different things compared to others.
politics, especially international geopolitics is a zero-sum game. The game of competition for limited resources and markets. Because resources are limited, the pie is fixed, and this makes it zero sum game.
Although there is a way to frame political alliances as a win-win when two parties increase their share at a cost of some other third party losing theirs.
Because of that, the arguments will always be straw-man, because people want to win resources, not to argue in good faith.
Any political issue can be framed in terms of zero sum game, if you look at the whole picture
This is incorrect. There are few physical resources that we have reached the limit of, such that one entity’s gain is necessarily another’s loss. There are also a great many things of value that aren’t simply raw resources, for which the pie will never be fixed, because the pie is made by humans and can be made bigger or smaller.
This zero-sum narrative is only true in a world of no growth, where all resources are being fully utilized to maximum effect. That is very far from the world we live in, where there is enormous room for additional extraction, creation, and efficient utilization of resources.
the zero sum will always be true because of the fundamental law of physics: Law of preservation of energy.
Everything in the economy thats worth producing/consuming costs energy and labor. Energy and labor is not free.
You may be conflating win-win with debt-based growth, where economy can grow at the cost of running fiscal deficit and accumulating debt. Sure the economy and market can grow, but the debt will also grow and the inflation will cancel out the nominal growth
I guess I can interpret the strongest form of your argument to suggest that resources and markets have a specific level of economically relevant supply at any specific time, which I suppose is an empirical claim that’s true. I feel like recent days’ trade policy earthquakes might operate along a similar line of reasoning: there’s only so much, “they’ve” been getting better off, which means they’ve been “taking” from the US, so the US is taking back.
In the same sense it’s true that there are only so many bushels of seed corn left after the winter. At the moment, we can squabble over how to divide the fixed supply. I could take all the corn, eat half, keep the rest for myself to plant this season. Or, if I’ve already got enough to plant all my land, and you’ve got more land and nothing else to do, I could invest some of my leftover corn with you and we can all have double the harvest in a few months… when the supply will have dramatically expanded, assuming I don’t treat it as a zero-sum game right now. Or I could focus on “winning” right now, and we’ll both be poorer after the harvest than we would have been otherwise.
While I agree that you could frame most any political issue in zero-sum terms, I feel like the blind spot is the same: it tallies the score based on assumptions fixed in time, and it takes a pessimistic view of cooperative potential, of humans’ power to influence the constraints themselves.
the zero sum will always be true because of the fundamental law of physics: Law of preservation of energy / Law of preservation of matter.
Everything in the economy thats worth producing/consuming costs energy and labor. Energy and labor is not free.
Any free lunch one can have in the economy is only possible in nominal terms, when your economy/market grows, but your sovereign debt and fiscal deficit also grows and in real terms, after inflation there is no real growth.
if you look at the core, the bottom of the economics it is just pure physics: The flow and exchange of energy and materials, labor and capital. The fight is over a distribution of the flows between various factions
Aren’t we so, so, so far from physical limits though? To the point that we speak of likely energy reserves in terms of centuries of consumption at current levels, even if we only get around to proving the next couple decades’ worth at a time?
If Musk et al get their wishes, and we become “spacefaring civilization” or whatever—aren’t the conceivable physical limits of known reality so far away as to be irrelevant?
And isn’t the story of the industrial era one of compounding productivity per unit of labor?
And as with most arbitrages, costs have lowered as a result. It means a piece of technology with thousands of individual parts can be in your hand for $200. Labor efficiency differences have resulted in an explosion of value-for-dollar for the American consumer.
They are both real problems and loaded questions. Okay. Ostensibly the point of politics is to solve problems that people have. That will lead to people putting forth what they think the problems are. We simply don’t have time to theorize every concievable potential problem and then, one by one, painstakingly (with our minds wide open like an open brain surgery) consider whether they are in fact problems that people have.
All of these pointed questions can also be disputed.
Actually they make great conversion. Preface with, “Why is neither party talking about…” and you’ll find that most people agree.
> fascism and fascist ideologies
This is political dog-whistling. As Orwell pointed out almost eight decades ago: "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’."[1] and is now obviously only a dog-whistle for fellow ideologues. This does not belong on HN.
[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
I agree the term is vague. But what then would you have us call it? The whole, constitutional crisis, outright flouting of the rule of law, suspension of due process/disappearing of political enemies in the streets type thing that is verifiably happening right now. Are you requesting that the word fascism be banned from HN? Have you seen the videos of legal college students being shoved into unmarked vans by unmarked and masked officers of the law? What do you call that? The talk of a third term?
I'd love to say, "he's just blustering", it's what my father said but he's enacted just about every thing he said. Should he begin speaking about a third term i don't think we have the luxury to ignore that anymore. To annex our nearby "allies" who've now become a united front opposing any economic relationship. What is that called? What would you have us say?
>But what then would you have us call it?
Most people say "fascist" when at most they mean "authoritarian". But maybe the latter's not scary enough for the boogeyman you want to evoke. Sometimes they say it when they should say demagoguery (which is, in my opinion, more than alarming enough of a word in ways that I can forgive people for feeling "populist" isn't). Quite often though, people merely mean "distasteful", but since tastes vary quite a bit, this might not alarm anyone at all.
>suspension of due process/disappearing of political enemies
You mean that when they send people back to their home countries because they're no longer welcome here?
>The talk of a third term?
From a man so old and in such ill health it seems quite likely he won't survive his second term? Mostly he's just trying to get a rise out of you. I don't like bullies, but when they do the "made you flinch" thing, part of me wants to smirk. Couldn't you just this once not flinch?
>To annex our nearby "allies"
He did it in the most asshole way possible, but offering them a proportionate number of votes in our Senate is hardly the insult they make it out to be. Especially when they're all dragged along by our policy already and just have no say in it whatsoever. "We want you to join the richest and most powerful nation on Earth and the benefits are truly too long to list" shouldn't send them running away screaming in terror.
No, it does not mean anything. Different people from the same side of the political spectrum define it differently, let alone different parts of the spectrum. If you don't define it before using it, it's a dog-whistle, full stop.
In the academic community the term still has a useful meaning and is often used appropriately in those circles.
But you could substitute neoreactionary in GP and it would still be referring to real bloggers that are treated as if they're making legitimate and justifiable arguments.
It's a serious concern, I think it's good to criticize this tendency.
if what you mean by anti-democracy, is government oppression, then the left and right both use this equally.
there is only one continuum: liberty from government oppression, or lack thereof.
I hope you don't seriously consider the oligopoly of two parties and small circle of connected elites, dependent on financial backing from ultra high net worth oligarchs, corporations, special lobbying groups - a democracy. This is not democracy, it is plutocracy (the power of capital/rich)
This is the opposite of a dog whistle it's entirely explicit. There are people being thrown into vans for speech right now. There are law firms that are negotiating to lift bills of attainder for their prior political litigation. They are _literally_ throwing people in El Salvadorean prisons without due process, including people that were in this country legally.
Every rationalist movement eventually ends up at odds with rational people.
But then, whom are you dissing? Whom is GP dissing? Because it's really unclear. On the one hand, "rational people" keep their views even as they drift apart from a wider "rationalist movement". On the other hand, it's the rationalist communities - the movement - that's much more likely to actually know something "about the foundations of economics or political science". On the grasping hand, such communities can and do get stuck missing forest for the trees.
But then on the slapping hand, approximately all criticism of rationalism (particularly LessWrong-associated) I've seen on HN and elsewhere, involves either heresay and lies, or just a legion of strawmen like "zomg Roko's basilisk" or GP's own "arguments" like:
> Nobody likes a technocrat, because a technocrat would let a kid who fell down a well die there, since the cost of rescuing them could technically save the lives of 3 others someplace else
It's hard to even address something that's just plain bullshit, so in the end, I'm still leaning towards giving rationalists the benefit of doubt. Strange as some conclusions of some people may sometimes be, they at least try to argue it with reason, and not strawmen and ideological rally cries.
EDIT: and then there's:
> They often re-hash arguments which have been had and settled like 200 years ago
Well, somebody has to. It's important for the same reason reproducibility in science is important.
I'd be wary of assuming any complex argument has been "settled like 200 years ago". When people say this, they just mean "shut up and accept the uninformed, simplistic opinion". In a sense, this is even worse than blindly following religious dogma, as with organized religions, the core dogmas are actually designed by smart people to achieve some purpose (ill-minded or not); cutting people off with "settled like 200 years ago" is just telling them to accept whatever's the cheapest, worst-quality belief currently on sale on the "marketplace of ideas".
Rationalism, and the people who believe in it and promote it, has the problem that the human mind unavoidably decides to act as the arbiter of what is rational or not. This limits your vision to only that which the mind internally 'agrees with' or not, entrenching hidden biases.
Fundamentally, it's the mind only engaging with the cognitive, and ignoring the limbic. Engaging with the limbic, with the deep, primal parts of the brain, challenges cognitively-held truths and demands you to support these truths from a broader context.
This is why rationalists are more prone to engage with fascist viewpoints, they seek more power for their held beliefs and fascism offers that in spades. You're not thinking about the history of fascist movements and how horrible they all turned out. You're thinking: How can we do it better this time?
Just like in math, the rational is a subset of the real, and you need both the rational and the irrational to make reality. Focusing exclusively on rationality is intentionally blinding yourself to messy reality.
> whom are you dissing? Whom is GP dissing?
Just a nit, it's "who" in this case, not "whom," because it is a subject not an object. "Whom" is more often used as "to/with/for whom."
Thanks! English is not my first language, and I still have problem with this particular thing.
(IIRC use of "whom" was never covered in my English classes; I only learned about it from StarGate: SG-1, a show in which one of the main characters had a habit of mocking enemies by correcting their grammar.)
It always falls down because the end-goal of ones "rationalism" always has to be determined by a set of values.
If you want to form a political ideology based on rationality, your very first step will stick you right in the middle of the sticky-icky world of the humanities. 'Hello deontology, my old friend.'
Its almost like you’ve discovered content manufactured whose only purpose is propaganda
What's also remarkable is that these people often have incredible disdain for communities of experts who study these topics for their careers. The number of times that I've seen one of these blogs discuss a topic that they believe they have invented while ignoring the mountains of literature already produced on the topic is... concerning.
This is what no humanities education does to a motherfucker.
The ironic thing to me is that the author essentially makes this the main point right from the get go:
> 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.
As you point out, nearly all of talkingtab's questions are loaded. At the very least, talkingtab essentially says outright what they expect the "correct" answer to be, e.g I'm baffled why talkingtab seems to think "inflation" is a "code word". I speak English, and inflation is "telling it like it is" based on the simple definition of the word.
As another example, for this question:
> Are common Americans paid a living wage? Can one person earn enough to have a family?
What happens if a response is "No, I don't believe that cashiers at McDonald's deserve to be paid a 'living wage', because I don't believe that job is intended to support a family on its own"? To emphasize, I'm not saying what the "right" answer is, but I do believe reasonable people can disagree over what constitutes a living wage and which jobs deserve to be paid it.
If anything, talkingtab's post just highlights to me the author's specific point about political "tribes" vs political views, and if anything has convinced me more that the author's view is spot on here.