Uhm, seems like this article has borrowed a lot from the original one[1] by The Knife Media which was mentioned by Weintstein on the Rubin Report[2]. I highly recommend that RR episode.
People have no problem watching movies that long, that have much fewer insights and are often less entertaining than this. At least to me - it surely is subjective.
You can try skipping to the Q&A ~2h 14m. Then you're left with just 30mins, most Q&A questions were reasonable.
I love this model, but I'm confused by this article since it keeps saying "the media’s preferred policies" as if there is one singular policy that the entire media is in favour of, which I'm not sure I can buy into.
If you don't think SV tech (which HN generally represents) has a moralizing utopian political bent, you haven't been paying attention. It's a massive problem.
Yes, I think you need to bound off specific subsets of policy initiatives and "the media" for this model to make sense. It seems to me that Fox News and MSNBC do this symmetrically to each other over the same policies - Fox: Liberals promote affirmative action because they hate white people, MSNBC: Conservatives oppose affirmative action because they hate black people.
Informed people should be absolutely allergic to the suggestion that someone promoting or opposing a given policy does do because they have malicious intent (and frankly, be suspicious of suggestions that someone are doing it because they have particularly pure intent).
> Informed people should be absolutely allergic to the suggestion that someone promoting or opposing a given policy does do because they have malicious intent
This. Once you dig into the research, or just have a lot of conversations with people who have opposing viewpoints, you realize that the vast majority i.e. 99% of people have the same goals and well-meaning intentions. For example, conservatives and democrats both want to maximize human flourishing, they both want people to be happy, they want to prevent poverty and provide people with an environment that maximizes well being for everyone. All sides come from this same starting place morally.
Its on the best pathway to achieve our common goals that people differ in opinions. This is why I always advocate for more scientific method in politics and governmental processes, we need better data and models and we need to test those models so we can better discern which paths are best towards reaching our common goals.
> Once you dig into the research, or just have a lot of conversations with people who have opposing viewpoints, you realize that the vast majority i.e. 99% of people have the same goals and well-meaning intentions.
Suppose counterfactually that one side or both sides are in fact motivated by malice. Do you think you would be able to detect this by examining their officially stated desires and morality?
Nearly all people want to think of themselves as morally good and are good at telling stories (often to themselves) about why they are good. This doesn't provide strong evidence that they are in fact good.
The deeper point is that it doesn't matter if the promotor of a policy "are in fact good". This is largely unknowable and the tribe-based proxy that many people have come up with ("my tribe is good, so the policies my tribe propose must be good") is rather insufficient.
> Do you think you would be able to detect [malicious motivation] by examining their officially stated desires and morality?
Insofar as you can define a measurement for malicious intent, you could detect this. The set of measurements you define might not tell you everything you want to know about malicious intentions but they would give you a decent approximation.
For example:
Image we have a controlled random study, we have two groups A and B. We show both groups a medication K, and give group A a motivation (perhaps monetary say $10) for K to be approved, we give an equal weighted motivation $10 to group B for not approving. Then we show both groups information showing that K has some detrimental effect. Observe outcomes, and those who approve for the monetary motivation would be displaying "malicious intent" as defined by the measurements in this study.
Generalizing from studies, however, to what particular persons in political parties at a particular point in time are thinking is something for historians or debaters and a set of methods I am unfamiliar with, outside of a general knowledge of the dialectic.
The problem is, first you need a reliable measure of good and evil. Sure, most reasonable people can agree on some set of actions that are clearly either, but there's a lot in between. Working out this answer is basically the entire field of philosophy.
Your experiment won't measure evilness, perhaps something along the lines of honesty when faced with conflicting incentives (which of course is a desirable trait in leaders, political and otherwise). But what if one of the subjects in group A needs the money to buy a loaf of bread for their starving family, to illustrate using a favourite ethical dilemma? What do you do if a given policy will benefit yourself, but you know for certain that it's a right and good policy?
The only way I see of alleviating some of the problems you mention is by controlling for them and doing further experiments.
My experiment was not intended to measure evilness but rather to give an example of a general approach to the problem, and was for measuring malicious intent. Regardless, given time I'm sure we could come up with much better experiments for studying both.
You're right though at what you are getting at, and I think the underlying idea here is that there is a continuous scale from bad (0) to good (1) for any given action/policy, where given additional context our internal moral barometer can move across this domain as well as an independent societal human flourishing barometer which measures the broader repercussions of the action/policy.
Honestly, I do not know enough about ethics or research in this general area to have a truly insightful conversation on this topic.
I'd just like to add that 1) I think good and evil are so broad in their scope that we'd be virtually forced to break them into separate definitions and measurements and study these constituent parts if we wanted to understand the general concepts and 2) we'd need to make a clear distinction between what humans perceive as good/evil in each context vs. what has good/evil repercussions at different levels (individual/familial/societal) based on measurements of brain states, pain/suffering, and human flourishing.
While I understand how it applies in the shown cases I'm still puzzled about the quadrant naming. Are people on the top right aalways a Dupe?
Is there any contrarian that would push for more policy on something?
How does this apply to something like "Should we put dangerous criminals in jail?"
Calling people in the top right a Dupe seems risky. It suggests they're easily tricked into supporting the media agenda - which is probably how the media views them. The risk in naming them so is that one could respond "so you're saying they're too feeble-minded to think for themselves" and thus place the whole four-quadrant model into the "evil" bin. We must be careful about this and make them feel like victims, like they've been played, because they have.
To your second question, it does not apply to question like "should we put dangerous criminals in jail?" It applies to statements like "we should put dangerous criminals in jail". The purpose is to promote an agenda, not to have a reasoned debate.
The model suggests, if I read it correctly, that media would portray Contrarians (who dislike crime but don’t think jail is the solution) as Troglodytes (who oppose jail because they favor crime.)
The “Dupe” label would then apply to those who accept the jail policy because they dislike crime. Perhaps the model tries to disparage people who make this leap, without themselves considering if the policy is a good way to combat crime.
I guess I see your point; there might be people who dislike crime and have done their homework on the policy, and the model unfairly labels them as dupes.
Perhaps the scope of the model is implicitly limited to reason about those who blindly accept the media’s points. The article seems to focus elsewhere: on the case where media pushes the top left quadrant toward the diagonal.
Equipped with Hanlon’s razor, one may alternatively posit a dimensionality reduction which, albeit lossy, improves the performance of media.
> I guess I see your point; there might be people who dislike crime and have done their homework on the policy, and the model unfairly labels them as dupes.
That's exactly what I was trying to say.
Thank you for putting it down so clearly.
Perhaps it is part of the point, but the stigmatized narrative is no more correct according to the 4Q model than the sanctioned one. That is it appears to map 'troglodytes' as morally virtuous. That is surely the correct narrative moves up and down the y-axis, and why can't that exist?
I struggle to put it into words, but for me the model has a koanic quality and is somewhat less of a clear insight than I initially thought it would be.
>> Perhaps it is part of the point, but the stigmatized narrative is no more correct according to the 4Q model than the sanctioned one. That is it appears to map 'troglodytes' as morally virtuous.
Your first statement is often correct, the stigmatized narrative may not be "correct". But no-one is trying to say the 'troglodytes' are morally virtuous either, and suggesting that's what TFA is trying to claim would be it's own attack on the model.
The whole point is that the model contains 4 types of people and the media will only allow for the existence to 2. Anyone that may have something valid to say that doesn't agree with the agenda is dumped into the lower left quadrant even though that may not be who they are.
An important related idea is Russell Conjugation [1]. It would be good to have tools that analyze and rate bias in text based upon the use of emotionally loaded phrasing around positions.
It's definitely not just the media, it's throughout the culture at this point. When it comes to agenda on both broad political sides, it has largely become a scenario of: if you're not with us 100%, then you're on the other side and against us / evil.
The political machine is now fully running on that. The extremism of the partisans in the US is at fever pitch.
This is fundamentally how someone like Matt Damon gets lit on fire - plausibly nearly having his career destroyed - for saying perfectly reasonable and rational things, while simultaneously fully agreeing with the MeToo movement. There is no room for anything except for extremism and absolute agreement. If you so much as tilt your head the wrong way at the wrong time the political correctness machine will destroy you. Damon made the mistake of thinking you can still ask questions and call for reason to be in any of the hot topic discussions in the culture. Reason is out the window, it's all emotionalism all the time, spiked to the nth level.
Using Sam Harris as an example is way too charitable to the average person.
Most people are not first-principles thinkers about politics. They are self-interested. Where that motivation is considered unsavory, they will deny it, even to the point of deluding themselves. Race is a prime example, because, like all forms of identity, everyone is biased in favor of their own ingroup, but admitting this bias is far more stigmatized than admitting other forms of ingroup bias.
If you take nearly everyone in the United States at their word, then racism has been effectively wiped out. And yet the indirect evidence of it is everywhere. Which means people aren't being honest with others--and possibly even not with themselves--about being biased in favor of people who look, speak, and act like they do.
This gets even worse when we start talking about politicians, who are trained to routinely lie, to the point where the media starts to safely, and correctly, assume that what they say is motivated entirely by self-interest and completely detached from the truth if it deviates in any way from what would advance their self-interest.
Notably, politicians who buck this trend--Justin Amash, Bernie Sanders, Thomas Massie--aren't generally stigmatized by the mainstream media as self-interested troglodytes. Their views are criticized, surely, but few question that they genuinely hold those views from first-principles reasoning, because they've demonstrated that they're principled people.
This suggests that the media is actually pretty good at distinguishing troglodytes from the truly principled, and while that may rub off on people like Ben Affleck the wrong way, directing your hatred at "the media" is misplacing it.
Also, the guy who wrote this article wrote a conspiracy screen about Obama's "plot to overturn the 2016 election" literally two days before. So him calling out others for impugning their political enemies' motives as coming from bad faith is pretty rich.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 23.7 ms ] thread1. https://medium.com/@rljunco/eric-weinsteins-four-quadrant-mo...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmXq97do-tQ
You can try skipping to the Q&A ~2h 14m. Then you're left with just 30mins, most Q&A questions were reasonable.
Nice attempt to apply the media tactics to the model itself.
Informed people should be absolutely allergic to the suggestion that someone promoting or opposing a given policy does do because they have malicious intent (and frankly, be suspicious of suggestions that someone are doing it because they have particularly pure intent).
This. Once you dig into the research, or just have a lot of conversations with people who have opposing viewpoints, you realize that the vast majority i.e. 99% of people have the same goals and well-meaning intentions. For example, conservatives and democrats both want to maximize human flourishing, they both want people to be happy, they want to prevent poverty and provide people with an environment that maximizes well being for everyone. All sides come from this same starting place morally.
Its on the best pathway to achieve our common goals that people differ in opinions. This is why I always advocate for more scientific method in politics and governmental processes, we need better data and models and we need to test those models so we can better discern which paths are best towards reaching our common goals.
Suppose counterfactually that one side or both sides are in fact motivated by malice. Do you think you would be able to detect this by examining their officially stated desires and morality?
Nearly all people want to think of themselves as morally good and are good at telling stories (often to themselves) about why they are good. This doesn't provide strong evidence that they are in fact good.
What matters is if the policy is good.
Insofar as you can define a measurement for malicious intent, you could detect this. The set of measurements you define might not tell you everything you want to know about malicious intentions but they would give you a decent approximation.
For example:
Image we have a controlled random study, we have two groups A and B. We show both groups a medication K, and give group A a motivation (perhaps monetary say $10) for K to be approved, we give an equal weighted motivation $10 to group B for not approving. Then we show both groups information showing that K has some detrimental effect. Observe outcomes, and those who approve for the monetary motivation would be displaying "malicious intent" as defined by the measurements in this study.
Generalizing from studies, however, to what particular persons in political parties at a particular point in time are thinking is something for historians or debaters and a set of methods I am unfamiliar with, outside of a general knowledge of the dialectic.
Your experiment won't measure evilness, perhaps something along the lines of honesty when faced with conflicting incentives (which of course is a desirable trait in leaders, political and otherwise). But what if one of the subjects in group A needs the money to buy a loaf of bread for their starving family, to illustrate using a favourite ethical dilemma? What do you do if a given policy will benefit yourself, but you know for certain that it's a right and good policy?
My experiment was not intended to measure evilness but rather to give an example of a general approach to the problem, and was for measuring malicious intent. Regardless, given time I'm sure we could come up with much better experiments for studying both.
You're right though at what you are getting at, and I think the underlying idea here is that there is a continuous scale from bad (0) to good (1) for any given action/policy, where given additional context our internal moral barometer can move across this domain as well as an independent societal human flourishing barometer which measures the broader repercussions of the action/policy.
Honestly, I do not know enough about ethics or research in this general area to have a truly insightful conversation on this topic.
I'd just like to add that 1) I think good and evil are so broad in their scope that we'd be virtually forced to break them into separate definitions and measurements and study these constituent parts if we wanted to understand the general concepts and 2) we'd need to make a clear distinction between what humans perceive as good/evil in each context vs. what has good/evil repercussions at different levels (individual/familial/societal) based on measurements of brain states, pain/suffering, and human flourishing.
How does this apply to something like "Should we put dangerous criminals in jail?"
To your second question, it does not apply to question like "should we put dangerous criminals in jail?" It applies to statements like "we should put dangerous criminals in jail". The purpose is to promote an agenda, not to have a reasoned debate.
The “Dupe” label would then apply to those who accept the jail policy because they dislike crime. Perhaps the model tries to disparage people who make this leap, without themselves considering if the policy is a good way to combat crime.
I guess I see your point; there might be people who dislike crime and have done their homework on the policy, and the model unfairly labels them as dupes.
Perhaps the scope of the model is implicitly limited to reason about those who blindly accept the media’s points. The article seems to focus elsewhere: on the case where media pushes the top left quadrant toward the diagonal.
Equipped with Hanlon’s razor, one may alternatively posit a dimensionality reduction which, albeit lossy, improves the performance of media.
That's exactly what I was trying to say. Thank you for putting it down so clearly.
I struggle to put it into words, but for me the model has a koanic quality and is somewhat less of a clear insight than I initially thought it would be.
Your first statement is often correct, the stigmatized narrative may not be "correct". But no-one is trying to say the 'troglodytes' are morally virtuous either, and suggesting that's what TFA is trying to claim would be it's own attack on the model.
The whole point is that the model contains 4 types of people and the media will only allow for the existence to 2. Anyone that may have something valid to say that doesn't agree with the agenda is dumped into the lower left quadrant even though that may not be who they are.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation
The political machine is now fully running on that. The extremism of the partisans in the US is at fever pitch.
This is fundamentally how someone like Matt Damon gets lit on fire - plausibly nearly having his career destroyed - for saying perfectly reasonable and rational things, while simultaneously fully agreeing with the MeToo movement. There is no room for anything except for extremism and absolute agreement. If you so much as tilt your head the wrong way at the wrong time the political correctness machine will destroy you. Damon made the mistake of thinking you can still ask questions and call for reason to be in any of the hot topic discussions in the culture. Reason is out the window, it's all emotionalism all the time, spiked to the nth level.
Most people are not first-principles thinkers about politics. They are self-interested. Where that motivation is considered unsavory, they will deny it, even to the point of deluding themselves. Race is a prime example, because, like all forms of identity, everyone is biased in favor of their own ingroup, but admitting this bias is far more stigmatized than admitting other forms of ingroup bias.
If you take nearly everyone in the United States at their word, then racism has been effectively wiped out. And yet the indirect evidence of it is everywhere. Which means people aren't being honest with others--and possibly even not with themselves--about being biased in favor of people who look, speak, and act like they do.
This gets even worse when we start talking about politicians, who are trained to routinely lie, to the point where the media starts to safely, and correctly, assume that what they say is motivated entirely by self-interest and completely detached from the truth if it deviates in any way from what would advance their self-interest.
Notably, politicians who buck this trend--Justin Amash, Bernie Sanders, Thomas Massie--aren't generally stigmatized by the mainstream media as self-interested troglodytes. Their views are criticized, surely, but few question that they genuinely hold those views from first-principles reasoning, because they've demonstrated that they're principled people.
This suggests that the media is actually pretty good at distinguishing troglodytes from the truly principled, and while that may rub off on people like Ben Affleck the wrong way, directing your hatred at "the media" is misplacing it.
Also, the guy who wrote this article wrote a conspiracy screen about Obama's "plot to overturn the 2016 election" literally two days before. So him calling out others for impugning their political enemies' motives as coming from bad faith is pretty rich.