Comment by shw1n
8 days ago
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.