Absolutely. My favorite example is the price of gasoline. This often comes up with the seasonal price shifts (Americans drive much more in the summer than in other seasons, so gas is more expensive then). We might as well blame them for the weather.
I don't recall ever seeing that sentiment, in terms of causing the actual hurricane. Causing the bad response, on the other hand, I've seen a lot and is not on its face an absurd thing to say.
well, first off it says that people distrust people of opposite political parties more than of different races like that's a bad thing ( distrusting people because of their beliefs instead of their race seems an improvement to me), furthermore has this data been adjusted for political affiliation and race - do white Republicans, for example, really distrust white Democrats more than they distrust people of other races? Did this study take other parties than the big two into account?
At the point where you've picked a party, you've picked a side all by yourself.
For example, knowing that someone is a self-described "American republican" in 2016 doesn't let me know if they are a good person or a bad person, but it does let me know that abortion rights for women isn't one of their main priorities.
The goal is not to do away with categorization/heuristics entirely. It's to continually revise and improve them. Political party affiliation is on a whole different ballpark than race.
Burkean conservatism and classical liberalism (modern right-libertarianism) are leaps and bounds apart. Just go read Russell Kirk's essays chewing off libertarians.
well, political parties have platforms describing their beliefs and goals as a party. I know if I'm a member of political party it is because I agree with a large number of those beliefs and goals. So I naively assume that other people who are members of political parties must also agree with those beliefs.
So it seems to me that not equating political party with belief would be a very strange thing - why do you think people are in political parties?
> Equating political party = belief is a big problem
Why? I agree that it's wrong to assume that because person A supports party B, they agree with the party's position on Issue C. However, Surely the party you support is the one that best reflects your beliefs. If it isn't, then why are you supporting that party?
> You're forced to pick a side.
You're forced to pick a side, secretly, in a booth once every n years, for whatever reason you want (beliefs, best looking candidate, best sandwich eating technique, fair roll of die), for a few seconds (though you may live with the consequence of that choice for longer). Even then, only if you live in a jurisdiction with compulsory voting, and even then, only if ballot spoiling is illegal.
You are not forced to pick a side and wear badges and proclaim it in public between elections and campaign in favour of it or against another side and tell everyone that their candidate is the bees knees etc.
To your first point, I think that's correct when you reach a certain level of granularity, like specific issues. Very often what can happen when people lose the distinction between Party and Belief is that (as touched on in the article):
1. We can only think of two viewpoints
2. We unintentionally assume viewpoints at a level of less granularity;
In explanation of (2), consider that the Iyengar's study finds implicit bias not against "People who Disagree with you on Issue C" but "The Word Republican/Democrat" and that this bias was also exhibited by Independents and Leaners.
To your second point, that the side-picking is mostly separate from everyday life, consider the last section of the Iyengar study, which finds that even in non-political contexts, like awarding scholarships, a signal on a resume indicating ties to a Party exerts a very strong impact on which candidate is selected.
The obvious answer is to say, "Don't associate yourself with the D/R Party unless you agree with all of their viewpoints," but I believe we can end up with an even better answer that allows people to get organized even when they don't completely agree on every single thing, and for us to perhaps make fewer incorrect judgements based on this organization.
> The obvious answer is to say, "Don't associate yourself with the D/R Party unless you agree with all of their viewpoints," [...]
Well yeah. The point of a party is to obliterate the minor differences and bull forward efficiently. You're supporting all their platforms even if you only like a few.
> I believe we can end up with an even better answer that allows people to get organized
But can you think of one that doesn't involve signing up for someone else to represent you, lock-stock-and-barrel?
I think so, but I think we need to look beyond parties.
Tribalism of belief instead of skin tone might seem like an improvement. But that's because it might be easier to change belief under gun point that skin color. Though some might not even get that chance.
It's still tribalism. To answer your second question, yeah as a knee jerk reaction. I suspect republicans regardless of skin color distrust democrats regardless of skin color. Look how Ben Carson treated by Democratic voters.
"[...]Americans today are less friendly to people in the other political party than we are to people of a different race. The researchers conclude that 'Americans increasingly dislike people and groups on the other side of the political divide and face no social repercussions for the open expression of these attitudes.' As a result, today 'the level of partisan animus in the American public exceeds racial animus.' That’s saying something!"
Is this a bit of light humor about how virulently racist the US is, or is it a call for racial unity beyond politics? I have no idea.
I closed this almost immediately because of the giant yellow "this is your free article for this month" banner on the top. Get your shit together web designers, I don't need something blaring so everyone in the office sees that it's my free article.
but is it worth encouraging that kind of behavior by visiting the site? I personally don't think so. There's nothing wrong with it per se, but I personally don't like websites functioning like this so I won't encourage it.
Yeah, I'm all for subscription model instead of ads but, as someone else said, it doesn't have to stalk you down the page. It's way too distracting and takes up enough real estate to be obnoxious.
I have uBlock which I'd reach for sooner as it'd remove the element permanently, however I don't want to support websites like this at all, even with just my readership. There are plenty of other places I can read similar articles. I have no interest in reading junk and these sorts of things are a good indicator of junk in my experience.
This is an interesting article, and I think there could be a point made that wasn't expressed. I propose that someone who embodies these methods may be much more likely to have others judge them to have intellectual integrity. That was an awkward sentence. I further propose that this acknowledgement is an important aspect of having even highly polarized people have a worthwhile conversation.
In my experience, because they only see in black and white, polarized people see anybody that isn't polarized as belonging to the other pole. It gets boring after a while.
Hmm, I think that makes that person polarizing if they are viewed in such a light. Being depolarizing would by definition mean that person is able to have polarized people see them in a non-polarizing light, would it not?
Oh yeah, I was conflating depolarizing with not polarized. Good point. Yes, by definition, if you are depolarizing, none of the polarized people will see you as polarized, at least in time. On the other hand, I still believe there are lots of people that cannot listen to anything that isn't what they believe (pick any hot button topic) - like it's really impossible to depolarize them.
So true. Half of my facebook friends think I'm a flaming liberal. The other half think I'm a flaming conservative. This is because I dare to challenge their silly meme posters that lie about and defame the "opposition". They don't seem to notice that I challenge the BS on both sides. They only know that correcting falsehoods that align with their pet belief is proof you're in the enemy camp.
Likewise, they think it's impossible to concede any point made by the enemy, no matter how obviously true, without being entirely aligned with them.
It's a pain in the ass, for sure. On the other hand, it's a good filter for finding people you want to be close to and finding people you want to avoid at all costs, that is unless you want to be punished with tedious drama. At least for me, many of my family members fall into the latter category... which is tricky to negotiate...
One of my favorite quotes actually embodies this pretty well.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
OTOH if you've reached a point where you are ready to accept both 'A' and 'not A', you need to go back and re-examine your premises/assumptions (sort of a real life example of reductio ad absurdum). Related example: accepting 'the left is delusional and corrupt' and 'the right is delusional and corrupt' leads one to re-examine the validity and usefulness of this whole left-right spectrum of political thought.
There's a difference between considering A and not A, and accepting A and not A. In formal logic, one or the other statement must be true. The point being made is that we should refrain from choosing the true statement until we've taken the time to consider both on their own merits.
Mixing reality and absolute statements seems like a recipe for falsehood.
Probabilities work much better. "I'm 50% certain of A and 50% of not-A", which means complete ignorance. A "80% A" means you have an opinion, but you acknowledge a 20% possiblity of being wrong. If anybody claims "100% sure of something", it is an obvious sign of idiocy.
The purpose of ideal statements is to expose some facet of reality in isolation so that it can be understood. Where people get tripped up is in closing the loop and recognizing that the ideal is never present in isolation. It shows when they ignore details that might make their ideal less valid. They're still useful, though.
"The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies[..]"
Opposed ideas doesn't necessarily mean conflicting ideas.
For example, it's possible to appreciate that in the US people need some means of getting an education in order to get a job while at the same time realizing the demand for quality education far outstrips supply, which when paired with federal loans inflates the cost of education so much that it puts it farther out of reach for people.
That's a problem with a solution that exacerbated the problem while trying to solve it. Processing both doesn't involve telling deliberate lies, it just means the solution is more complex than we'd like to admit.
To add to your point, holding opposing ideas in your mind doesn't mean you accept both ideas as correct and valid and good (as in the Orwell quote). It just means that you can appreciate them and understand some of the points they try to make.
The issue with polarized politics is that it encourages one-mindedness. Instead of trying to understand where your political opponents are coming from, you are encouraged to reject them and their ideas as "the enemy". A very anti-intellectual "Us versus Them" mindset.
> To add to your point, holding opposing ideas in your mind doesn't mean you accept both ideas as correct and valid and good (as in the Orwell quote). It just means that you can appreciate them and understand some of the points they try to make.
If two theses conflict each other at least one of them (perhaps even both) must be wrong. That is basic science. This is also why physicists still try to unify general relativity and quantum physics. So instead of accepting multiple ideas use your mind to
1. create predictions that each of the conflicting theses imply, such that the two theses will do different predictions, which if they can't be observed will convince you that the thesis was wrong.
2. develop an experiment with which you can observe these predictions
I don't know why your answer was downvoted. Your point is a sane approach to handling opposing/conflicting ideas. Though I didn't read the Original quote as accepting opposing/conflicting ideas.
I believe it was originally down-voted for making the assumption that science could solve politics (we're talking opinions, not facts, so you cannot rigourously apply the scientific method).
The comment also fell for the trap of falsely equating opposition with conflict.
As a thought experiment, take the issue of abortion. GP is telling me that certainly either "Abortions should be allowed because of the mother's rights" or "Abortions should not be allowed because of the unborn child's rights" is WRONG. Tell me how anyone could possibly create an "experiment" which would result in a meaningful answer. How would you measure the morality and goodness of the event in a way that everyone could agree upon? Do you see the problem?
>
As a thought experiment, take the issue of abortion. GP is telling me that certainly either "Abortions should be allowed because of the mother's rights" or "Abortions should not be allowed because of the unborn child's rights" is WRONG. Tell me how anyone could possibly create an "experiment" which would result in a meaningful answer. How would you measure the morality and goodness of the event in a way that everyone could agree upon? Do you see the problem?
The problem here is that biological and neurological research has a long way to go to resolve the question after what week of pregnancy what level of consciousness or intellectual capacity is there. So at the moment there is no way to answer this question in an acceptable way.
This is a fruitful example: the vast majority of those opposed to abortion will concede that a zygote has no conciousness or intellectual capacity, yet most of them will nonetheless insist on the zygote's personhood and right to life.
No, the problem is that they are "should" questions, and thus experiments can't answer them at all. Now, if you assume a moral framework in which a certain combination of consciousness or intellectual capacity on the part of the mother makes her rights paramount (or one which does so for the child, or one which does some calculus on the relative levels of those traits between the mother and the child to determine which is paramount) then you can reduce this to a fact question that is conceivably resolvable by experiment (and, thus, leave only the problem that you mention), but I would assert that there is no such consensus moral framework, so you've actually identified the easy problem with resolving the conflict, while ignoring the fundamental and intractable one.
In this context opposition is not necessarily conflict.
Are two sides of a bridge opposing each other or conflicting with each other?
In a client-server security model the client usually wants as much as it can take and the server wants to provide as little as it has to. Are these opposed, or in conflict?
> In this context opposition is not necessarily conflict.
Than it's not an opposition.
> In a client-server security model the client usually wants as much as it can take and the server wants to provide as little as it has to. Are these opposed, or in conflict?
Now you create a malicious client which will pretent it has little, say, computational power or network capacity. So the server will have to do lots of work. Voila - a good beginning for a DoS attack. :-)
So, yes, these goals are in conflict and such an attack is a falsification of the soundness of your security model.
I apologize if I'm incorrect, but I believe English is not your first language. There is a difference between opposition and conflict. It's a bit subtle but it's very important in this context.
When you say a "malicious client" you are misunderstanding the purpose of my analogy. A malicious client would be "the enemy". I'm talking about a client that is interested with engaging with the service, not just shutting it down. The client may like to have all the information and resources the server has available to it, (for example, perhaps a facebook user might want to see when people look at their photos, not just like/comment) but the server needs to consider the experience of all the clients and users, not just the one. So there is opposition (but not conflict!) between the two. The client will not be allowed to have this information, even though the server has it. Conflict would be manifested by the user abandoning the service (or attacking it, as in your example) because of this incompatible or insurmountable difference.
This is only true if you can be sure of your starting axioms, which is not the case in social organization. Experiments simply add specific metrics to your set of axioms.
It all comes down to heuristics, and differing heuristics are not mutually exclusive.
> If two theses conflict each other at least one of them (perhaps even both) must be wrong.
This is too simplistic. They can be partially right as well as partially wrong. Is light a wave or a particle? Well, it depends.
Two opposing half-truths form a paradox. While some paradoxes can be resolved, by finding a deeper theory that unifies them, some cannot. To draw an example from the political realm -- more relevant to this discussion -- here are two truths:
(1) We are all in this together.
(2) Each person is responsible for their own life.
These are both true, but conflict. And I do not think there will ever be a final resolution of this paradox. In some situations, the first principle is more important; in others, the second. Hashing out which is which is a never-ending debate, and a critically important one.
> > If two theses conflict each other at least one of them (perhaps even both) must be wrong.
> This is too simplistic. They can be partially right as well as partially wrong. Is light a wave or a particle? Well, it depends.
In this case both statements (light is a wave and light is a particle) are simply wrong and as current scientific matters stand the description given by quantum physics seems to be the correct one (at least for about 70 years no experiment could be given that has disproved it).
It is more than that. There needn't even be a contradiction, many of the most contentious issues of the day have different base axioms supporting their arguments and different levels of credibility assigned to empirical evidence. Further part of the objective is developing empathy for those holding alternate positions. Resolving conflict often requires taking into considering irrational or wrong beliefs (from one's own perspective) but is nevertheless still necessary.
In fact, a big part of the current disagreements is holding oneself oblivious to the different paradigms held by those with opposing views. If you presume they are working from the same assumptions, then of course the only motivation for their views must be malice or some other vice. But that is rarely the case.
Doublethink was a satire/parody of communist "dialectical materialism" - in turn a development of Hegelian dialectics and finally of Heraclitus. Orwell is embarassingly simpleminded in accounting for this, and it's a crying shame he wasn't acquainted with Whitehead and Bergson and other thinkers that were fully aware that reality is process rather than essence.
In this context, "hold" likely does not mean "accepting". I read it to mean closer to "consider", which means that one is able to consider two opposing arguments, and understand them to the point that one could articulate the negatives and benefits of each side. That is very much not doublethink.
The difference between Fitzgerald's intelligence and Orwell's doublethink, as I see it, is that Orwell's doublethink is when the conflicting ideas are understood as binary absolutes, held to exactly represent reality, while Fitzgerald's intelligence is when the conflicting ideas are understood as fuzzy approximations held to convey something important about the world without exactly representing it.
And, going further, I think the root of the danger found in Orwell's doublethink lies even lower -- the danger starts with holding even one idea as a binary absolute that perfectly reflects the real world. Ideas, particularly ideas which can be reduced to language, are more like Platonic forms, which elements of the natural world might fuzzily reflect but will never perfectly embody.
It does sound like it on the surface, but doublethink was about the ability to think something was both true and false. What Fitzgerald was more likely getting at was the ability to assess and appreciate different choices and/or ideologies simultaneously.
> "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Opposed ideas does not always mean that both ideas have the same level of validity.
Some ideas are provably wrong. "Depolarizing" allowed climate change denial and anti-vaxxers, for example, to gain a following because we didn't stamp them out quickly and strongly.
There's an esr version of this I enjoy too: "The single most important kind of intelligence is the ability to see past your own strongly-held preconceptions and your tribe's conventional wisdom and engage reality as it actually is and facts as they actually are."
I believe many of the problems of polarization are caused by cognitive dissonance [1] in particular "confirmation bias" (the article is sort of light on references to academic social psychology and cognitive behavior).
Confirmation bias is often exarcebated with greater choices (as the number of choices brings greater discomfort). An example would be the GOP primaries (ie sheer number of candidates).
I also think certain personality types (ie myers briggs/jung) have a tendency to behave in a polarized manner. I don't think being polarized = stupid as another commenter posted albeit probably being ignorant does have an affect.
Perhaps I'm not as knowledgable in the area as you are (and thus think my critique/question trite). Maybe care to elaborate on the irony?
I posted it because the article doesn't bother to answer why the hell people are polarized in the first place. Its like saying America is fat.. here are 7 tips to get in shape... I also think the # prefix tips is clearly a click bait ploy albeit I a nice clever a play on Steven Covey's book title.
Wouldn't it be worthwhile to know why people become polarized in the first place or why we are so much now?
I find the idea that the current level of polarization is unprecedented kind of questionable. McCarthyist purges? The violence of the Reconstruction era, which followed a literal Civil War? Compared to that people calling each other mean names seems like small potatoes.
Those historical disagreements were about something. So much of the current sound and fury is just the marketing department of the status quo attempting to convince us that there's a debate going on at all. On a giant polo field of political possibility, the Bushes and Clintons fight furiously over a tiny postage stamp of "acceptable" policies. Anyone venturing outside that is just craaaaazy!
It sort of backfired on TPTB this time around, however. Not only did they get annoying one-step-beyond-the-pale "alternatives" like Cruz, they also got legitimately different directions like Sanders and Paul. TPTB had wisely saved the easily-controlled pseudo-alternative Trump for this election, though, so he's been able to take the wind out of those sails. His two terms will be like a rerun of W's (or, frankly, O's). In eight years, though, to whom will they turn? There's no way Hillary will be able to stomach "standing by her man" for that much longer. Christie is just too fat. If you want to see the next fake-alternative president before anyone else does, keep watching those reality shows!
In a lot of ways I agree with what you're saying, but that makes the whole "polarization" thing even more preposterous to me. The political parties are broadly in agreement with each other about many of the big issues even when voters are not -- how can anyone look at this situation and say the problem is that more "civility" or "consensus" is what is needed?
Yes we are in broad agreement. The only consolation I see is that the media echo chamber that reinforces this distraction is slowly becoming less effective at that task.
I generally agree with your blame TPTB first mindset, but in this case I think they underestimated Trump. Although he's not a deep policy thinker and historically has been indistinguishable from any other trendy NYC lib, he has two distinguishing traits. First, his massive ego, second, he's a violently pro-American nationalist, moreso than anyone in the past 50 years. That presents a major challenge for the globalist TPTB's current dialog - even his rhetoric is disruptive to their worldwide agenda. Maybe you're right and this is a cleverly planned dialectical antithesis that will be used to sneak in more Patriot Act style moves, but I think there's a genuine chance things have gone off script.
I don't think Donny has a monopoly, among politicians, on "massive ego". As for his nationalism, I won't be surprised when he declines to build mile one of the Great Wall of Arizona. After all, he'll point out, net undocumented Mexican immigration has been negative for years. This will be the big scandal of his third year in office, that he decided to spend all those billions of dollars on more plausibly useful public infrastructure, built in more politically valuable Congressional districts. (Also, public employee pension funds.) Obama still hasn't mothballed the running joke on the taxpayers that is Guantanamo Bay, and that was nearly as important to his supporters when he was running the first time. It will take a stronger person than Donny to ignore the personal surveillance dossiers that land on his desk the day after inauguration.
- The collapse of race relations. Everybody thought a black president would do wonders for the issues of race in this country, it's done just the opposite.
- Several ongoing wars with seemingly no end in sight.
- The illegal immigration ahem "undocumented workers" (for you PC types) issue. 42 million strong at this point and no signs of slowing down. This is quickly approaching a crisis point.
- Government spying, cryptography and the NSA. Snowden's leaks and how much the government really needs to keep us safe and what they're doing with the loads of data they're gathering every day.
- The economy and the recent stagnation and recession already occurring in several areas of the country. More capitalism, less government regulation, or should government be even more involved in regulating business?
There's plenty more, but these were off the top of my head. Ask anybody about one of these topics and they'll most likely give you a fairly polarizing view of where they stand.
It's obvious he's comparing to 90s and early 2000s. Originally I assumed things are the same, but people are just louder because of Internet. Then birthers and Trump happened, so I think it's debatable.
I don't know that it's obvious, or even who you mean by "he." But anyway, the point I wanted to make is that the recent handwringing about "polarization" lacks any sort of historical perspective.
I have never heard the claim of 42 million before. I have investigated only to the point of looking in Wikipedia, but they claim closer to 11 million, which is down from the peak number. Where are you getting that from?
About 11 million of those are illegal/undocumented immigrants. The remaining 34 million are people on visas, people with green cards ("lawful permanent residents"), and naturalized citizens of the United States. This does not include the children born to them, who are natural-born citizens, and are thus not counted as immigrants.
45 million is 14.3% of the US population, which might seem high, but if the list on Wikipedia is sorted by % of population, the U.S. is nowhere on the top of the list. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, Singapore, etc. all have more immigrants per capita than the United States. And gulf countries like the U.A.E. and Qatar have the highest.
>- The collapse of race relations. Everybody thought a black president would do wonders for the issues of race in this country, it's done just the opposite.
I don't understand what you mean. Today we're actually starting to have conversations about race and how the establishment treats people of different races instead of not even addressing the issue. It's being talked about not as a serious issue rather than some fringe thing that most people don't care about.
I feel like progress was made during the civil rights era, then things stagnated for 40-50 years, and now we're having conversations again. It sounds to me like a black president or perhaps other things going on have done wonders for issues of race in the country. It hasn't solved the problems yet, but it's sure brought them front and center and helped given them the attention they actually deserve instead of letting them get swept under the rug.
The only real difference these days is its idiotic in the current political climate not to polarize. You have to defend your beliefs and even defend areas you would rather compromise on because the compromise will allow you to be steamrolled. Look at the tech industry and our constant battle with DC over a lot of tech issues. We keep fighting this years legislation that was the same as last year.
Not to mention the repeated references to Lincoln as a "depolarizing" figure, which is historically ludicrous. His election was the trigger for the Civil War.
IMO, A large part of the problem is people of different political views don't talk, face to face, enough. Like in war, it's easier to kill a "gook" or "haji" than a person.
The Internet makes it easy to dehumanize the other side; they're just avatars and words on your screen. It's a lot harder to hate an actual person, especially just for having a different opinion than you.
Couldn't it be that it is much better that persons of very different political views don't talk so much, face to face?
I can imagine quite well that this would easily in yelling at each other etc. Also at least me I even get more hate to views someone says if I talk to him/her personally than when I only have to see his/her arguments in the internet.
In other words: That people of very different views don't talk much to each other is in my opinion both a "self-protection" and quite plausibly rather prevents spreading even more hate.
Speaking from personal experience only, I work with people who are on the other side of the fence from me politically. We manage to have conversations on political matters without it boiling over into contempt and dislike. Probably the fact that it is a workplace and we all want to keep our jobs serves to keep a lid on it.
I find it far easier to depersonalize someone who I don't see in the flesh on a daily basis.
Are you sure about the contempt and dislike? When I hear somebody say something stupid at work I won't necessarily say anything, or say what I think, but I will change my like/dislike of that person.
I think he's explicitly saying _expressed_ contempt and dislike: "Probably the fact that it is a workplace and we all want to keep our jobs serves to keep a lid on it."
I disagree. People generally have to work themselves up to a place of such strong opinions. This usually happens when people cocoon themselves in echo chambers.
If you spend 4 hours a day on zerohedge or infowars, you will reach a point where differing opinions piss you off to the point of yelling. If, however, you were getting different perspectives from other human beings on a regular basis, you would likely be less fervent in your views.
It's a lot harder to dismiss actual human beings as "libtards" or "rethugs" or whatever pejorative. You might still disagree, but you usually won't outright dismiss them like you would an article with a "heretical" viewpoint relative to your personal echo chamber.
I think that when the stakes are high enough, you have to work to wind yourself down -- not to wind yourself up. And at this point, between Roe v. Wade and Guantanamo Bay (I oppose both, if you're curious), the stakes are definitely high enough.
Looking at how quickly (in societal terms) the gay rights movement in the USA has progressed: the number one thing that changed people's minds was individuals coming out to their friends & family. It is easy to demonize people you've ever met as perverse deviants: very different to hold on to those demonizations when you learn that somebody you've been close to your whole life is a member of this group.
On the other hand, racial minorities can't really do this: prejudices that exist prior to getting to know somebody have a much easier time both preventing people from interacting as well as having a greater likelihood of persisting during interpersonal interactions.
This is a large portion why the gay rights movement has been progressing at a faster rate than either women's rights or civil rights have in this country.
I agree, but anecdotally, as someone who spends a lot of face-to-face time around people on both sides of the typical left-right division, neither of which represent my views, it is very frustrating for me, and I suspect rather pointless for them. I've never left a political conversation like this feeling like I made a dent in anyone's ideology; they just leave thinking I'm a weirdo.
I think the same, and I'd go a step further. I don't particularly _want_ to get along with people who have no problem with abortion, nor with people who have no problem with torture. Why should I see being de-polarizing as something desirable? (And where can I move to?)
I think the idea is to apply "depolarization" generally, rather than specifically. You call out two specific issues; it's fine to not get on with people who have different (and strong) opinions on those positions, but it's entirely different to label an entire broad category of people ("conservatives" or "liberals" in the context of the article) as Evil and Not Worth My Time.
I think the article makes lots of good arguments for why being de-polarizing is a desirable thing, so I'm not going to attempt to make better ones.
But I think your comment is a really good example in and of itself. You've done the binary thinking thing that the article discussed in detail! I've never met anyone who has no problem with abortion, or anyone who has no problem with torture, but I've met people who think the trade-offs justify limited use of one or the other, which I agree or disagree with to varying degrees. It seems likely to me that you're either not talking to people that think these things, and instead building straw-men to knock down, or you're not really hearing the people you're talking to. (Or, I'll admit, it's possible you know a lot more extreme people than I do.)
I find if you can get anyone to consider the tradeoffs of things they believe, that alone makes it possible and worthwhile to have a conversation. But those people are rare. (I think Rich Hickey noted this is even a problem in programming language flamewars...)
That's certainly true -- although I can hardly say that I have a gift for it. More often, I've found that discussing almost any issue results in me making concessions and the other person not doing so; I'm trying to lean the other way and hopefully reach a suitable balance.
This article left me more ticked-off than it should have; I think it's because I got the sense that the author valued consensus and national cohesion more than he valued any ideological question. If the article had said, "we're at war, but remember that chivalry is a good thing," I would have simply agreed; instead, he quoted Lincoln.
In the case of abortion, I'll grudgingly admit that reasonable people can differ, at least in cases of rape or incest; in life-of-the-mother cases (pregnancy in the Fallopian tube), the other side might even be right.
But on torture? I'm not willing to make any concession to people who think that hanging a Japanese general for waterboarding US soldiers is fine, while leaving a US president entirely unpunished for waterboarding actual and suspected terrorists is not fine. Either we owe the Axis (and especially that general's heirs) some enormous apologies, or we need a few trials of a certain past political administration.
I tend be a fan of bright lines in general. If you don't know that some things are wrong (and, therefore, that any line of reasoning that leads to them has a problem with it somewhere), how do you know when you've gone astray?
Your post specifically opened with an example of how important issues don't have bright lines. When the population is split on an issue, it's unlikely that one and only one half are evil/idiots. Life is complicated.
Abortion gets murky in a narrow range of cases, but torture is never murky. War crimes are war crimes, and they're off limits for everyone, under all circumstances, by definition.
A person as you describe, complete devoid of nuance, would not likely be a very agreeable one. Luckily most people think in varying shades of grey. Lots of us are more "grey" than we think, but you'd never know it unless you talk to people away from the Internet.
Spend more time with real people and you'll see why it's worthwhile to have relationships with persons who have differing political or social philosophies. Variety in personal judgment and alternative worldviews are really beneficial to be able to access; you can learn a lot that way, and your own perspectives and arguments will be improved.
You don't have to agree, but people are still worth something and still have valuable information no matter how vehemently you disagree with them.
Also note that the vehemence of disagreement is usually heavily exaggerated, for propaganda purposes. Very few people, in the global sense, are sufficiently different from each other that they're actually totally incapable of getting along. If we make a basic effort to keep an open mind, I think we could fix a lot of our contemporary issues.
A total breakdown in communication and dismissal of people on the other side is not a win. It's a massive loss, one that means that the parent society is on thin ice. We need to maintain basic levels of respect for each other.
I happen to know a few people who have grown up stewing in a sometimes-violent sometimes-cold conflict. They are openly and honestly essentialist racists, and if given the red genocide button would likely push it, or so they say. They are on the borderline about compatriots who question them, making dark jokes about traitors. I've never truly tried to engage with them, hampered by internal disquiet that kept me mostly quiet. I would say the value of knowing them lies in the knowledge of where complete breakdown of the peace leads. But I am disturbed by the way I see them, as lost causes and human writeoffs.
I'm not sure how many people have "no problem" with either abortion or torture. The people who support them after having thought about it generally do so because they see the alternative as worse, similar to people who want to see hard drugs legalized to ensure people don't have to deal with black markets, criminal gangs, and dangerous substitute chemicals.
(disclosure: I'd ban torture, but for both abortion and most drugs I'd legalise them and try via other methods to reduce the amount that actually occured e.g. better sex-ed and provision of contraception, or better addiction treatment and channeling people towards less harmful (though still currently illegal) drugs.
I don't think there are very many people who actually have "no problem" with torture, and even fewer who have "no qualms" about abortion. It's just a question of whether they should be legal or not (I'm "no exceptions" for torture, but not abortion, FYI).
And the reason why we should be less polarized, politically, is because there are a large number of important issues that can be solved, and need to be solved, even if we can never come to agreement on others. The way politics is being managed in the U.S. is basically an "all or nothing" grab bag on every single issue, with no chance for compromise, and that just leads to hours of pointless rhetoric and gridlock while the problems just get worse.
IMO, one of the parties is a worse offender than the other, but it really only takes one side being intractable to ensure nothing gets done the way the U.S. government is set up.
The problem is that they didn't develop their views by really thinking about the issues. They got some focus-group tested soundbite that sounds good to them but they don't really understand it. It's hard to discuss then.
the polarization of the american congress (in the 90's) happened in large part because the amount of time congress members spent in each other's company went way down. this is at least the explanation i've gotten from people who worked in the congress. so, it seems like that is at least one data point that supports your argument.
How about "think for yourself"? I notice that when you discuss something with a lot of partisan people they come to a pretty balanced view if the party leadership hasn't already staked out a position. But they will make a 180 turn as soon as soon as the official position is out and be totally opposed to the view they have developed previously.
I suspect that's a big part of group identity. Want to solve that problem? Stop referring to those who disagree (or agree) with you as "Democrat" or "Republican". And stop thinking of yourself that way.
It's partially "group identity" and partially that they didn't care about issue X enough to hold onto that idea. I feel like people identify with parties in the U.S. based on its position on a few issues they really care about, like Global Warming or Abortion, and just go along with them on the other issues that they don't care that much about.
Arguably that's one of the underlying themes of the entire article. In particular point #5 seems to address this, and especially the article's quote of Daniel Bell:
Ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront individual issues on their own merits.
One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out come the prepared formulae.
I particularly like the "ideological vending machine" metaphor, and I think it describes exactly what you're talking about.
I like the metaphor too but I don't think it's direct enough. The original seven habits had very direct advice "Sharpen the saw", "Being with the end in mind" so I think "Think for yourself" fits with the style.
I am thinking about what could happen if a large company with communication platform engaged in encouraging these rules within their platform. Good world that woulud be.
Politeness comes from social solidarity: it is a consequence of social harmony, not a precursor. What if the polarization represents actual, fundamental disagreements on politics and, at root, moral axioms? Being polite hasn't done much for the respectable right for the last fifty years.
I would rather focus on solutions like secession or federalism that allow groups of people with different and irreconcilable moral axioms to simply leave one another alone to build the social/political structures they would prefer.
While I think secession should probably be a last resort, it would indeed be an intriguing thought experiment to separate the two ideological groups and see what happens. Each side thinks a society run under the opposing side's view would fall apart; wouldn't it be interesting if you could actually see which group does better after a century on their own?
wouldn't it be interesting if you could actually see which group does better after a century on their own
It very much would be. This is another argument for federalism/secessionism: a laboratory of governments/social structures will provide better feedback as to what works and what does not for various populations.
I think it is also worth bearing in mind that "does better" is inherently subjective, since value is subjective. Some political units may be fine trading GDP for a better environment, while others may be fine trading sexual freedom for stability. The irreconcilability of values/moral axioms dictates that we either agree to allow sufficiently differentiated groups to develop their own political units, or we impose our axioms on them (or they, us.)
It would be interesting if we had "virtual countries" where you could choose among the tradeoffs for yourself. I suppose the difficulty would be handling the interactions between each person's virtual country, but the idea that everyone signs up for a different set of laws and freedoms has interesting implications.
Although that's a very long shot, life in most parts of Europe was kinda similar before industrial revolution. Nobility had their own laws. Church had theirs. Jews were living in pretty much a "virtual country", both culturally and legally. Peasants were living in another totally different world with different rules. IMO French revolution and Holocaust were the ultimate endings of "virtual countries".
On the other hand, I totally support independent communities who could live on their own terms, as long as their rules don't conflict with other communities.
Please do not confuse what you see on TV with face to face political party functions.
I've been invited to speak to a fair variety of Green, Socialist, Democratic, Republican, Libertarian and non-partisan events. There are definitely cultural differences.
My Republican hosts have always run polite, organized, on time meetings. If you have the mic, everyone is listening to you.
Whereas my own peeps, the Democrats, run meetings quite a bit more loosely. People interrupt, there's a lot of shushing, arguing over the rules, people chatting in the aisles, etc. Mostly good natured, but it sometimes drives people like me nuts.
I can't speak to the Tea Party, Occupy, BLM efforts, since those are after my time. But I imagine they're not so different from their precursors, because people are people.
Secession and federalism are fairly naive. We already tried those solutions. In the US context it led to slavery and ultimately to a massive armed conflict.
And at what unit do we consider secession acceptable? The Confederacy believed states had the right to secede but not individuals of African descent. Indeed, it was the American South that originally wanted to interfere in the business of the North in order to crack down on fugitive slaves.
As for people with different moral axioms leaving one another alone, good luck with that.
The US and ISIS have different moral axioms but they're both in one another's business.
The world is interdependent, there's just no way around that simple fact.
I don't mean to silence discussions of federalism/secession, it just seems like this is well-trod territory that some people keep bringing up again and again as if it will solve anything. It hasn't and it won't.
In the US context it led to slavery and ultimately to a massive armed conflict.
Secession and federalism lead to neither. Slavery was a pre-existing institution. War is politics by other means and pre-existed both. It being associated with secessionism in one case is no more an argument against secessionism than war being associated with democratic revolutions is an argument against democracy.
Naive: showing a lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment.
I don't mean to get into a civil war discussion, because studying it is a hobby of mine (it's just a very interesting subject)...but at the very least I'd urge you to consider that there are a lot of very important details being left out in order for you to view it that way.
There was almost a century of political back and forth build up that compounded to lead to secession.
Just to highlight one detail to give the counterpoint on your example:
> Indeed, it was the American South that originally wanted to interfere in the business of the North in order to crack down on fugitive slaves.
For that, you should read up on the Tariff of Abominations in 1828 that nearly triggered secession when it was passed. This presented a huge problem to the Port of Charleston and trade with Europe, so much so that South Carolina tried to have it nullified and the Supreme Court said that it could not. When documents of secession reference fugitive slave laws, they're doing so because some northern states were allowed to selectively nullify while the south was not. This came to a head with the Morrill Tariff which was a part of Lincoln's campaign. Indeed, in his first inaugural address preceding the war he even stated that fugitive slave laws would be enforced and that federal force would only be used for collection of duties and imposts. That's the reason Fort Sumter was such a big deal in the first place because whoever held it had the power to enforce port taxes on Charleston harbor. To be clear, I'm not saying that was the cause of the war I'm just highlighting a detail. There were a lot of factors.
The whole thing is a sincerely fascinating subject and is even more interesting when, through studying it, you compare it to the relatively few details we're actually taught about it in school.
After you secede based on one set of disagreements, inevitably your new sovereignty would start another set of disagreements and you would have to secede again.
Polarization has a very strong tribal component to it.
Once you get into the "us vs them" mindset you become the member of the "tribe" purely based on the labels instead of "reality".
At some point in time the label can have a strong correlation with the actual reality,then the label becomes more important than what it actually represents.
Politicians exploit this constantly, "us vs them" is what unites their respective camps and promotes loyalty.
The increasing political divide in the US is the direct result of ever more aggressive gerrymandering.
Jurisdictions are becoming ever more partisan. So now only the most partisan (divisive) candidates can win their primary election, which then pretty much makes the general election moot.
The fix is California style redistricting, where citizens and not politicians are in charge of the process.
That's definitely a cause for what we're seeing out of Congress, but it's not related to what we're seeing with Trump. He is winning at the polls with his hateful angry rhetoric and it's pretty damn strange.
Caucus results are determined by the handful of people who bother to show up. Trump's winning because his supporters are showing up. This speaks more to the failings of the other candidates than the success of Trump.
> The increasing political divide in the US is the direct result of ever more aggressive gerrymandering.
I think that there is almost precisely zero evidence of this; there's a lot more to support that regional strong political divides have always been present in the US, what's new is that the salient issues have become increasingly consistent nationally, so that it is no more the case that the national political scene often seems less sharply divided because all the sharp regional divides used to be in different places, whereas now there are more common national divides.
> The fix is California style redistricting, where citizens and not politicians are in charge of the process.
Non/bipartisan redistricting by notionally independent commissions (which, often, as in California, legislators actually have a role in choosing members for, so they aren't truly independent of the legislators, though they are certainly less accountable than legislators) has been a growing trend in the same time as the increasing polarization in national politics. So, its pretty clearly not fixing the problem.
"Of all the mental habits that encourage polarization, the most dangerous is probably binary thinking"
Does this article recognize it's own irony? It's a whole article about 'depolarizing' as opposed to 'polarizing' and within it, is the line I quoted above.
Here's a thought - intelligent people don't have these problems and they don't need 7 vague bullet points that are impossible to follow.
Dumb people lack nuanced points of view - they polarize/simplify a great deal because that's how humans are - we first learn to think 'hitting other people is bad', and only later learn that 'most times hitting other people is bad'.
When do people learn philosophy and different types of fallacies? For most people, the answer is never. How many people grok fallacies, philosophy and have emotional intelligence to boot? Even fewer.
Thank god someone wrote an article that by-passes all that though, it's just the 10 commandments you need, oh sorry I meant 7 habits...
I can't blame the author to trying to focus on the best aspects of how to reach across the political spectrum (even within the same party), but I'll be honest and say that some ideas/positions are fundamentally incompatible with a liberal society. For example, the current crop of social conservatism to seem to be dead set on putting inspectors at the entrances of public restrooms because of pseudo-fears over transgender people (specifically male-to-female transsexuals). Clearly, it's not about protecting children, women, and the elderly. It's about shaming a minority into submission since we've been making gains in terms of the national discussion. Hell, the fact that Caitlyn Jenner got some conservatives to rethink their ideas signals that certain virulent ideologies are on their way out. So, all they got left is to demonize. Worse still, there's no compromising with these people on such legislation like ENDA. They always want more protection to discriminate in private settings where they would be in violation of existing protected class laws. If such people want to have a seat at the table then they need to stop assuming that transgender people are monsters first and foremost. If that's not in their agenda then there can be no depolarization or compromises, ever. You can't debate the humanity of another person, either they're human or they're not.
>Clearly, it's not about protecting children, women, and the elderly. It's about shaming a minority into submission since we've been making gains in terms of the national discussion.
It would be fruitless for me to speculate on the particular aversion you mention to transsexuals, but in general you'll gain a better understanding by looking for a motivation other than malice; that's seldom the explanation. The real rationale may be short-sighted, ignorant, wildly unfair, and unlikely to be advanced by the outlandish actions taken, but nonetheless there is some underlying thought process, and most people care far too much about themselves to go out significantly out of their ways to deliberately do harm to others.
The fact of the matter is they are open about their malice. Search on Youtube for the South Dakota senator's remarks in response to someone's skepticism of his bathroom bill. He basically states that trans people are effectively bad or broken people. If he's saying that sort of bunk then there's no room for debate for him, he's made his mind up. For me, talking to or trying to compromise with these kinds of people is like compromising with a robber: he's still gonna steal your stuff even if he doesn't beat you up or kill you.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] thread140 characters don't lend themselves to sustained and depolarising argument -- quite the opposite.
U.S. presidents seem to get blamed (and sometimes praised) for things they can't really control.
Oh we have, remember how Bush caused Katrina?
(for broad definitions of we)
Yes.
like that's a bad thing
No. It did not say this.
distrusting people because of their beliefs instead of their race seems an improvement to me
Equating political party = belief is a big problem. It's basically the definition of tribalism.
You're forced to pick a side.
For example, knowing that someone is a self-described "American republican" in 2016 doesn't let me know if they are a good person or a bad person, but it does let me know that abortion rights for women isn't one of their main priorities.
The goal is not to do away with categorization/heuristics entirely. It's to continually revise and improve them. Political party affiliation is on a whole different ballpark than race.
On the spectrum from hardcore libertarianism to hardcore conservatism, the two political parties are huddled closely together in the middle of it.
You don't get a choice. But you get to be branded for the rest of your life as one of those two groups.
It's a game I refuse to play.
Exactly what better criteria would you use to judge people if not their choices and actions?
Only then should you hate them, if you really choose to. Not before.
So it seems to me that not equating political party with belief would be a very strange thing - why do you think people are in political parties?
Why? I agree that it's wrong to assume that because person A supports party B, they agree with the party's position on Issue C. However, Surely the party you support is the one that best reflects your beliefs. If it isn't, then why are you supporting that party?
> You're forced to pick a side.
You're forced to pick a side, secretly, in a booth once every n years, for whatever reason you want (beliefs, best looking candidate, best sandwich eating technique, fair roll of die), for a few seconds (though you may live with the consequence of that choice for longer). Even then, only if you live in a jurisdiction with compulsory voting, and even then, only if ballot spoiling is illegal.
You are not forced to pick a side and wear badges and proclaim it in public between elections and campaign in favour of it or against another side and tell everyone that their candidate is the bees knees etc.
1. We can only think of two viewpoints
2. We unintentionally assume viewpoints at a level of less granularity;
In explanation of (2), consider that the Iyengar's study finds implicit bias not against "People who Disagree with you on Issue C" but "The Word Republican/Democrat" and that this bias was also exhibited by Independents and Leaners.
To your second point, that the side-picking is mostly separate from everyday life, consider the last section of the Iyengar study, which finds that even in non-political contexts, like awarding scholarships, a signal on a resume indicating ties to a Party exerts a very strong impact on which candidate is selected.
The obvious answer is to say, "Don't associate yourself with the D/R Party unless you agree with all of their viewpoints," but I believe we can end up with an even better answer that allows people to get organized even when they don't completely agree on every single thing, and for us to perhaps make fewer incorrect judgements based on this organization.
Well yeah. The point of a party is to obliterate the minor differences and bull forward efficiently. You're supporting all their platforms even if you only like a few.
> I believe we can end up with an even better answer that allows people to get organized
But can you think of one that doesn't involve signing up for someone else to represent you, lock-stock-and-barrel?
I think so, but I think we need to look beyond parties.
It's still tribalism. To answer your second question, yeah as a knee jerk reaction. I suspect republicans regardless of skin color distrust democrats regardless of skin color. Look how Ben Carson treated by Democratic voters.
"[...]Americans today are less friendly to people in the other political party than we are to people of a different race. The researchers conclude that 'Americans increasingly dislike people and groups on the other side of the political divide and face no social repercussions for the open expression of these attitudes.' As a result, today 'the level of partisan animus in the American public exceeds racial animus.' That’s saying something!"
Is this a bit of light humor about how virulently racist the US is, or is it a call for racial unity beyond politics? I have no idea.
Almost as fast as closing the page, and you're no longer letting crap web designers dictate what you read and what you don't.
Likewise, they think it's impossible to concede any point made by the enemy, no matter how obviously true, without being entirely aligned with them.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Probabilities work much better. "I'm 50% certain of A and 50% of not-A", which means complete ignorance. A "80% A" means you have an opinion, but you acknowledge a 20% possiblity of being wrong. If anybody claims "100% sure of something", it is an obvious sign of idiocy.
Something something Sith, something something absolutes :)
Doublethink:
"The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies[..]"
1984, George Orwell
I love the irony in following the first quote by holding both quotes in my mind, and considering that there is some wisdom to both.
The GP is talking about the ability to think and find the truth, Orwell is talking about using the same skill to lie (to oneself and the others).
For example, it's possible to appreciate that in the US people need some means of getting an education in order to get a job while at the same time realizing the demand for quality education far outstrips supply, which when paired with federal loans inflates the cost of education so much that it puts it farther out of reach for people.
That's a problem with a solution that exacerbated the problem while trying to solve it. Processing both doesn't involve telling deliberate lies, it just means the solution is more complex than we'd like to admit.
The issue with polarized politics is that it encourages one-mindedness. Instead of trying to understand where your political opponents are coming from, you are encouraged to reject them and their ideas as "the enemy". A very anti-intellectual "Us versus Them" mindset.
If two theses conflict each other at least one of them (perhaps even both) must be wrong. That is basic science. This is also why physicists still try to unify general relativity and quantum physics. So instead of accepting multiple ideas use your mind to
1. create predictions that each of the conflicting theses imply, such that the two theses will do different predictions, which if they can't be observed will convince you that the thesis was wrong.
2. develop an experiment with which you can observe these predictions
3. execute the experiment
The comment also fell for the trap of falsely equating opposition with conflict.
As a thought experiment, take the issue of abortion. GP is telling me that certainly either "Abortions should be allowed because of the mother's rights" or "Abortions should not be allowed because of the unborn child's rights" is WRONG. Tell me how anyone could possibly create an "experiment" which would result in a meaningful answer. How would you measure the morality and goodness of the event in a way that everyone could agree upon? Do you see the problem?
The problem here is that biological and neurological research has a long way to go to resolve the question after what week of pregnancy what level of consciousness or intellectual capacity is there. So at the moment there is no way to answer this question in an acceptable way.
Are two sides of a bridge opposing each other or conflicting with each other?
In a client-server security model the client usually wants as much as it can take and the server wants to provide as little as it has to. Are these opposed, or in conflict?
Than it's not an opposition.
> In a client-server security model the client usually wants as much as it can take and the server wants to provide as little as it has to. Are these opposed, or in conflict?
Now you create a malicious client which will pretent it has little, say, computational power or network capacity. So the server will have to do lots of work. Voila - a good beginning for a DoS attack. :-)
So, yes, these goals are in conflict and such an attack is a falsification of the soundness of your security model.
When you say a "malicious client" you are misunderstanding the purpose of my analogy. A malicious client would be "the enemy". I'm talking about a client that is interested with engaging with the service, not just shutting it down. The client may like to have all the information and resources the server has available to it, (for example, perhaps a facebook user might want to see when people look at their photos, not just like/comment) but the server needs to consider the experience of all the clients and users, not just the one. So there is opposition (but not conflict!) between the two. The client will not be allowed to have this information, even though the server has it. Conflict would be manifested by the user abandoning the service (or attacking it, as in your example) because of this incompatible or insurmountable difference.
It all comes down to heuristics, and differing heuristics are not mutually exclusive.
This is too simplistic. They can be partially right as well as partially wrong. Is light a wave or a particle? Well, it depends.
Two opposing half-truths form a paradox. While some paradoxes can be resolved, by finding a deeper theory that unifies them, some cannot. To draw an example from the political realm -- more relevant to this discussion -- here are two truths:
(1) We are all in this together.
(2) Each person is responsible for their own life.
These are both true, but conflict. And I do not think there will ever be a final resolution of this paradox. In some situations, the first principle is more important; in others, the second. Hashing out which is which is a never-ending debate, and a critically important one.
> This is too simplistic. They can be partially right as well as partially wrong. Is light a wave or a particle? Well, it depends.
In this case both statements (light is a wave and light is a particle) are simply wrong and as current scientific matters stand the description given by quantum physics seems to be the correct one (at least for about 70 years no experiment could be given that has disproved it).
To keep two opposed ideas in mind should be done with the aim of solving contradictions.
If you can distill a better abstraction you are solving the contradiction and you finish with only one idea.
In fact, a big part of the current disagreements is holding oneself oblivious to the different paradigms held by those with opposing views. If you presume they are working from the same assumptions, then of course the only motivation for their views must be malice or some other vice. But that is rarely the case.
Bonus: Heraclitus on Wikiquote: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Heraclitus
And, going further, I think the root of the danger found in Orwell's doublethink lies even lower -- the danger starts with holding even one idea as a binary absolute that perfectly reflects the real world. Ideas, particularly ideas which can be reduced to language, are more like Platonic forms, which elements of the natural world might fuzzily reflect but will never perfectly embody.
Opposed ideas does not always mean that both ideas have the same level of validity.
Some ideas are provably wrong. "Depolarizing" allowed climate change denial and anti-vaxxers, for example, to gain a following because we didn't stamp them out quickly and strongly.
Confirmation bias is often exarcebated with greater choices (as the number of choices brings greater discomfort). An example would be the GOP primaries (ie sheer number of candidates).
I also think certain personality types (ie myers briggs/jung) have a tendency to behave in a polarized manner. I don't think being polarized = stupid as another commenter posted albeit probably being ignorant does have an affect.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
I posted it because the article doesn't bother to answer why the hell people are polarized in the first place. Its like saying America is fat.. here are 7 tips to get in shape... I also think the # prefix tips is clearly a click bait ploy albeit I a nice clever a play on Steven Covey's book title.
Wouldn't it be worthwhile to know why people become polarized in the first place or why we are so much now?
In essence I share your opinion. It's just I couldn't resist the chance.
I know, childish.
It sort of backfired on TPTB this time around, however. Not only did they get annoying one-step-beyond-the-pale "alternatives" like Cruz, they also got legitimately different directions like Sanders and Paul. TPTB had wisely saved the easily-controlled pseudo-alternative Trump for this election, though, so he's been able to take the wind out of those sails. His two terms will be like a rerun of W's (or, frankly, O's). In eight years, though, to whom will they turn? There's no way Hillary will be able to stomach "standing by her man" for that much longer. Christie is just too fat. If you want to see the next fake-alternative president before anyone else does, keep watching those reality shows!
- The collapse of race relations. Everybody thought a black president would do wonders for the issues of race in this country, it's done just the opposite.
- Several ongoing wars with seemingly no end in sight.
- The illegal immigration ahem "undocumented workers" (for you PC types) issue. 42 million strong at this point and no signs of slowing down. This is quickly approaching a crisis point.
- Government spying, cryptography and the NSA. Snowden's leaks and how much the government really needs to keep us safe and what they're doing with the loads of data they're gathering every day.
- The economy and the recent stagnation and recession already occurring in several areas of the country. More capitalism, less government regulation, or should government be even more involved in regulating business?
There's plenty more, but these were off the top of my head. Ask anybody about one of these topics and they'll most likely give you a fairly polarizing view of where they stand.
The point here isn't that there aren't disagreements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni...
About 11 million of those are illegal/undocumented immigrants. The remaining 34 million are people on visas, people with green cards ("lawful permanent residents"), and naturalized citizens of the United States. This does not include the children born to them, who are natural-born citizens, and are thus not counted as immigrants.
45 million is 14.3% of the US population, which might seem high, but if the list on Wikipedia is sorted by % of population, the U.S. is nowhere on the top of the list. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, Singapore, etc. all have more immigrants per capita than the United States. And gulf countries like the U.A.E. and Qatar have the highest.
I don't understand what you mean. Today we're actually starting to have conversations about race and how the establishment treats people of different races instead of not even addressing the issue. It's being talked about not as a serious issue rather than some fringe thing that most people don't care about.
I feel like progress was made during the civil rights era, then things stagnated for 40-50 years, and now we're having conversations again. It sounds to me like a black president or perhaps other things going on have done wonders for issues of race in the country. It hasn't solved the problems yet, but it's sure brought them front and center and helped given them the attention they actually deserve instead of letting them get swept under the rug.
The only real difference these days is its idiotic in the current political climate not to polarize. You have to defend your beliefs and even defend areas you would rather compromise on because the compromise will allow you to be steamrolled. Look at the tech industry and our constant battle with DC over a lot of tech issues. We keep fighting this years legislation that was the same as last year.
I've been on a history bug about the Revolutionary War & the founding of America (admittedly, triggered by Hamilton).
In a nutshell, America has been incredibly partisan since 1796.
It doesn't make me like it better, but it's good to know it's not actually a big problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
The Internet makes it easy to dehumanize the other side; they're just avatars and words on your screen. It's a lot harder to hate an actual person, especially just for having a different opinion than you.
[Edited]
I can imagine quite well that this would easily in yelling at each other etc. Also at least me I even get more hate to views someone says if I talk to him/her personally than when I only have to see his/her arguments in the internet.
In other words: That people of very different views don't talk much to each other is in my opinion both a "self-protection" and quite plausibly rather prevents spreading even more hate.
I find it far easier to depersonalize someone who I don't see in the flesh on a daily basis.
If your only interaction with them is the disagreement, it's far easier to assume they "are stupid" rather than just "have a different opinion."
If you spend 4 hours a day on zerohedge or infowars, you will reach a point where differing opinions piss you off to the point of yelling. If, however, you were getting different perspectives from other human beings on a regular basis, you would likely be less fervent in your views.
It's a lot harder to dismiss actual human beings as "libtards" or "rethugs" or whatever pejorative. You might still disagree, but you usually won't outright dismiss them like you would an article with a "heretical" viewpoint relative to your personal echo chamber.
On the other hand, racial minorities can't really do this: prejudices that exist prior to getting to know somebody have a much easier time both preventing people from interacting as well as having a greater likelihood of persisting during interpersonal interactions.
This is a large portion why the gay rights movement has been progressing at a faster rate than either women's rights or civil rights have in this country.
There's also a video explaining it in terms of funny cat video production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
Another take on this, from Scott Alexander: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ .
But I think your comment is a really good example in and of itself. You've done the binary thinking thing that the article discussed in detail! I've never met anyone who has no problem with abortion, or anyone who has no problem with torture, but I've met people who think the trade-offs justify limited use of one or the other, which I agree or disagree with to varying degrees. It seems likely to me that you're either not talking to people that think these things, and instead building straw-men to knock down, or you're not really hearing the people you're talking to. (Or, I'll admit, it's possible you know a lot more extreme people than I do.)
This article left me more ticked-off than it should have; I think it's because I got the sense that the author valued consensus and national cohesion more than he valued any ideological question. If the article had said, "we're at war, but remember that chivalry is a good thing," I would have simply agreed; instead, he quoted Lincoln.
But on torture? I'm not willing to make any concession to people who think that hanging a Japanese general for waterboarding US soldiers is fine, while leaving a US president entirely unpunished for waterboarding actual and suspected terrorists is not fine. Either we owe the Axis (and especially that general's heirs) some enormous apologies, or we need a few trials of a certain past political administration.
I tend be a fan of bright lines in general. If you don't know that some things are wrong (and, therefore, that any line of reasoning that leads to them has a problem with it somewhere), how do you know when you've gone astray?
You don't have to agree, but people are still worth something and still have valuable information no matter how vehemently you disagree with them.
Also note that the vehemence of disagreement is usually heavily exaggerated, for propaganda purposes. Very few people, in the global sense, are sufficiently different from each other that they're actually totally incapable of getting along. If we make a basic effort to keep an open mind, I think we could fix a lot of our contemporary issues.
A total breakdown in communication and dismissal of people on the other side is not a win. It's a massive loss, one that means that the parent society is on thin ice. We need to maintain basic levels of respect for each other.
(disclosure: I'd ban torture, but for both abortion and most drugs I'd legalise them and try via other methods to reduce the amount that actually occured e.g. better sex-ed and provision of contraception, or better addiction treatment and channeling people towards less harmful (though still currently illegal) drugs.
And the reason why we should be less polarized, politically, is because there are a large number of important issues that can be solved, and need to be solved, even if we can never come to agreement on others. The way politics is being managed in the U.S. is basically an "all or nothing" grab bag on every single issue, with no chance for compromise, and that just leads to hours of pointless rhetoric and gridlock while the problems just get worse.
IMO, one of the parties is a worse offender than the other, but it really only takes one side being intractable to ensure nothing gets done the way the U.S. government is set up.
I would rather focus on solutions like secession or federalism that allow groups of people with different and irreconcilable moral axioms to simply leave one another alone to build the social/political structures they would prefer.
It very much would be. This is another argument for federalism/secessionism: a laboratory of governments/social structures will provide better feedback as to what works and what does not for various populations.
I think it is also worth bearing in mind that "does better" is inherently subjective, since value is subjective. Some political units may be fine trading GDP for a better environment, while others may be fine trading sexual freedom for stability. The irreconcilability of values/moral axioms dictates that we either agree to allow sufficiently differentiated groups to develop their own political units, or we impose our axioms on them (or they, us.)
On the other hand, I totally support independent communities who could live on their own terms, as long as their rules don't conflict with other communities.
I've been invited to speak to a fair variety of Green, Socialist, Democratic, Republican, Libertarian and non-partisan events. There are definitely cultural differences.
My Republican hosts have always run polite, organized, on time meetings. If you have the mic, everyone is listening to you.
Whereas my own peeps, the Democrats, run meetings quite a bit more loosely. People interrupt, there's a lot of shushing, arguing over the rules, people chatting in the aisles, etc. Mostly good natured, but it sometimes drives people like me nuts.
I can't speak to the Tea Party, Occupy, BLM efforts, since those are after my time. But I imagine they're not so different from their precursors, because people are people.
And at what unit do we consider secession acceptable? The Confederacy believed states had the right to secede but not individuals of African descent. Indeed, it was the American South that originally wanted to interfere in the business of the North in order to crack down on fugitive slaves.
As for people with different moral axioms leaving one another alone, good luck with that.
The US and ISIS have different moral axioms but they're both in one another's business.
The world is interdependent, there's just no way around that simple fact.
I don't mean to silence discussions of federalism/secession, it just seems like this is well-trod territory that some people keep bringing up again and again as if it will solve anything. It hasn't and it won't.
Secession and federalism lead to neither. Slavery was a pre-existing institution. War is politics by other means and pre-existed both. It being associated with secessionism in one case is no more an argument against secessionism than war being associated with democratic revolutions is an argument against democracy.
Naive: showing a lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment.
Heal thyself.
There was almost a century of political back and forth build up that compounded to lead to secession.
Just to highlight one detail to give the counterpoint on your example:
> Indeed, it was the American South that originally wanted to interfere in the business of the North in order to crack down on fugitive slaves.
For that, you should read up on the Tariff of Abominations in 1828 that nearly triggered secession when it was passed. This presented a huge problem to the Port of Charleston and trade with Europe, so much so that South Carolina tried to have it nullified and the Supreme Court said that it could not. When documents of secession reference fugitive slave laws, they're doing so because some northern states were allowed to selectively nullify while the south was not. This came to a head with the Morrill Tariff which was a part of Lincoln's campaign. Indeed, in his first inaugural address preceding the war he even stated that fugitive slave laws would be enforced and that federal force would only be used for collection of duties and imposts. That's the reason Fort Sumter was such a big deal in the first place because whoever held it had the power to enforce port taxes on Charleston harbor. To be clear, I'm not saying that was the cause of the war I'm just highlighting a detail. There were a lot of factors.
The whole thing is a sincerely fascinating subject and is even more interesting when, through studying it, you compare it to the relatively few details we're actually taught about it in school.
At some point in time the label can have a strong correlation with the actual reality,then the label becomes more important than what it actually represents.
Politicians exploit this constantly, "us vs them" is what unites their respective camps and promotes loyalty.
Jurisdictions are becoming ever more partisan. So now only the most partisan (divisive) candidates can win their primary election, which then pretty much makes the general election moot.
The fix is California style redistricting, where citizens and not politicians are in charge of the process.
It becomes a "Team up? What for?" situation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Citizens_Redistrict...
I think that there is almost precisely zero evidence of this; there's a lot more to support that regional strong political divides have always been present in the US, what's new is that the salient issues have become increasingly consistent nationally, so that it is no more the case that the national political scene often seems less sharply divided because all the sharp regional divides used to be in different places, whereas now there are more common national divides.
> The fix is California style redistricting, where citizens and not politicians are in charge of the process.
Non/bipartisan redistricting by notionally independent commissions (which, often, as in California, legislators actually have a role in choosing members for, so they aren't truly independent of the legislators, though they are certainly less accountable than legislators) has been a growing trend in the same time as the increasing polarization in national politics. So, its pretty clearly not fixing the problem.
Does this article recognize it's own irony? It's a whole article about 'depolarizing' as opposed to 'polarizing' and within it, is the line I quoted above.
Here's a thought - intelligent people don't have these problems and they don't need 7 vague bullet points that are impossible to follow.
Dumb people lack nuanced points of view - they polarize/simplify a great deal because that's how humans are - we first learn to think 'hitting other people is bad', and only later learn that 'most times hitting other people is bad'.
When do people learn philosophy and different types of fallacies? For most people, the answer is never. How many people grok fallacies, philosophy and have emotional intelligence to boot? Even fewer.
Thank god someone wrote an article that by-passes all that though, it's just the 10 commandments you need, oh sorry I meant 7 habits...
It would be fruitless for me to speculate on the particular aversion you mention to transsexuals, but in general you'll gain a better understanding by looking for a motivation other than malice; that's seldom the explanation. The real rationale may be short-sighted, ignorant, wildly unfair, and unlikely to be advanced by the outlandish actions taken, but nonetheless there is some underlying thought process, and most people care far too much about themselves to go out significantly out of their ways to deliberately do harm to others.