Comment by sfink
17 days ago
Speaking of politics, I've always thought it would be fun to see the different assumptions made by two "sides". My expectation is that both sides gradually accumulate more and more extreme, and often more and more ridiculous, assumptions to distinguish their side from the other.
Eventually, everyone's downstream beliefs are resting on extreme assumptions that nobody actually believes! Which makes moderate well-reasoned arguments from "the other side" much more threatening than extreme positions that can be passed off as lunacy, naivete, or evil.
Yeah... so far, I have found that trying to fully justify a political conclusion has a way of moderating the conclusion. But it's still possible to arrive at very different well-reasoned conclusions just from different axiomatic personal values.