Comment by cle
7 days 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 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.
> 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...
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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.
They thought "Well, I guess this makes me one of those people for whom "Not talking about politics with Friends" becomes a core tenent to my personal philosophy."
They thought that the union members were criminals.
Without the ability to realize that it's politics that defines what a criminal is.
This is about having political conversations with friends, not with people shooting at you with machine guns.
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.
They thought, "if I do a good job, I'm going to get a bonus"
Unfortunately they're thinking the same thing today.
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.
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.
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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.
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> 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.
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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.
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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.
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That's not how economics works. The pie is not fixed, it tends to grow over time as there's more trade between countries and their economies get bigger. The global economic pie has increased a massive amount over the past century.
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Actually they make great conversion. Preface with, “Why is neither party talking about…” and you’ll find that most people agree.
Then lead them to the understanding that both parties are right-wing? (support the current economic system, support mass-murdering brown people overseas, support embezzling for personal gain as long as they don't get caught, etc)
> support embezzling for personal gain as long as they don't get caught
If you think this is a strictly right-wing characteristic you are hopelessly partisan.
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> 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?
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Even if you think it’s a dog whistle, Facism does mean something and it’s rather more accurate to use it now than say, 30 years ago.
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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.
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.
You do not have to look very far to find prominent voices on the right who are apologetically anti-democracy.
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Eh, I really do call BS on that.
Umberto Eco's 14 tenants of fascism still stands strong and is highly visible in modern discourse.
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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".
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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.'
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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.
My favourite genre of this is when the crypto community rediscovers centuries of economic lessons from first-principles.