Comment by fergie

For me, "avoid being dogmatic yourself" is failing to bring home one very important point to avoid being dogmatic: understand that you are equally susceptible from the mistakes/misunderstandings that you blame others for.

An example in this article is the following part

> my angle ... becomes that of opposing their tribalism. Unfortunately ... most people just view me as the opposite of their own tribe

But this part totally fails self-reflection: it talks about your "conservative friends" and your "liberal friends". They are labelled "conservative" or "liberal". How does the author know that the interlocutor did not act exactly like the author: the interlocutor brought a subject, from their point of view their position on it where pretty neutral and sensible, the author reacts by playing the devil's advocate. They therefore see the author as the "conservative" or "liberal" person, and if they follow the author's strategy, they will play the devil's advocate. And then, THE AUTHOR fails to realize they don't actually care about the conclusion.

The lazy answer is: I'm smarter than them, I can tell when it's the case or not. Or: the subject I bring are not political, they are just common sense and sensible position, but they sometimes bring something I disagree with, and this is not common sense and sensible position.

In both case, it's weak and does not acknowledge the possibilities that you may have done the same mistakes as them from time to time (either classifying a "moderate" as "far" just because they were doing the devil's advocate, or presenting opinions that are not "trivially moderate" from the eyes of your interlocutor). It's a detail, but because of that, I'm not sure the author is as "non dogmatic" as they think they are: they are saying what everybody is saying. The large majority of people don't say "I'm dogmatic and my opinions are crazy" (if they believe their opinions are crazy, then it means they don't believe in their opinions and it is not really their opinions).

I find the most productive political discussions are about history. Most people don’t know any history at all, so a willingness to discuss the reason we have the Third Amendment, or the lasting effects of King Leopold’s dominion in Africa, or the Peleponnesian War, makes for a good discussion, and the distance makes people less emotionally tied to their positions and more willing to accept nuance. If we find we disagree, this also gives us social cover to pretend the topic isn’t intensely relevant to the present day.

Some of the best convos I've had are with ideologues, it just requires authentic empathy and effort, which means letting go of moral presuppositions and being willing to really listen to them without injecting your own judgments & opinions. If people subconsciously think you're trying to do that, it'll trigger their defense mechanisms and the convo will instantly shut down (or devolve into chaos).

People love to talk about what they think is important, but NOT when they think they're being setup or playing into someone else's hand.

Not the best title if that’s your message

Well, I know a lot of people in the US who simply don't want to discuss politics at social events these days.

It was a good essay- thanks for writing it :)

I've sent you a line on LinkedIn.

I believe having a partner with directly opposing political views is unsustainable. Partners with adjacent political views may be manageable, or even preferable to a fully aligned one, but those with directly opposing views are a constant source of drama and tension in your life. Political views often reflect deeply held values and beliefs.

Note that various surveys report young women and young men diverging a lot more politically. Partly because women's rights have become so politicised.

Marrying purely for "love" and ignoring core values, mindset compatibility, what they want in life and so on is a recipe for disaster, or at least some deep regrets down the line. I haven't seen nor heard about a single success story a decade or two down the line. Whom to marry is probably the most important decision in our lives. One of reasons why marrying early is too risky - people still massively change till at least 25-30, it cal still work but chances are smaller.

Its a typical junior mistake to marry for love/lust and not think a bit on top of that, in this case I blame parents who don't have some hard talks with their kids explaining them not-so-rosy parts of adult existence. Like initial enormous physical attraction wanes over time, kids crush most of remaining, and what still remains are 2 people and how they treat relationship and each other with that lust tuned down eventually to 0, under various, often not so nice situations. But our parent's generation didn't figure it all out, in contrary the amount of actually nice relationships in higher ages ain't that high.

I didn't have such prep talk neither, nor do I know anybody who had, and had to figure it all on my own via rough trials and failures till finally figuring myself and women out, and then happy marriage (so far, hard knock on the wood). Its like expecting everybody to be sophisticated engineer, learning them to count on fingers and throwing them out and good luck, I am sure you'll figure it out eventually. Some do, some don't. Most don't I'd say.

Politics feels like an integral part of finding a partner nowadays. Which makes sense—values are important to agree upon.

You can’t talk politics without first overcoming tribalism, so I suggest you start there, since in the US that is sadly the state of things.

If you start by talking about which sports team is better you will also cause these reactions. But politics should not be sports. It’s harmless to support a sports team that makes bad choices. Politics has real impact on people’s lives. It’s important to have exit criteria for alignments and affiliations with groups, to the extent they’re necessary.

> What physical changes in the world do you expect afterwards?

Just like voting, it has no effect in the small. You discuss to form and exchange opinions and ideas that become part of the whole. The benefits are in the aggregates. Thus it’s important that it has some other incentive. Where I’m from it’s not very tribalist, so we get the pleasure from thinking and discussing problems even without having an expectation that it will change policy. That wouldn’t work in the US outside very specific groups that understand the rules of engagement and the point of the game. But the discussions themselves are similar in vibe to board games or puzzles, that it’s somewhat fun even though it’s entirely useless (in the small).