8 ms·

The Overton Window and Political Control

89 points by nkurz 10y ago

return0 10y ago
> it has become much easier to build intellectual conversations outside of the overton window of the universities. I don't believe that is true. In fact the problem with the current rhetoric is that academia, (that is, the part of academia that can publish (thus the part that passes the review of its peers)) pushed its fringe identity politics rhetoric to the mainstream media, instead of the actual economic issues that cause the global Trumpism[1]. It's not a new phenomenon - academia always had control of the media rhetoric. On the other side, conspiracies have always existed. From my european perspective, it actually amazes me how everyone is surprised and looking to russian conspiracies for explanations, when we have had this propaganda phenomena for a very long time under the cold war from both sides (and i doubt they caused a huge swing in democracies). Social media doesn't really make such a huge difference, because social networks have always existed, just not online, and just less transparent to everyone. I think Occam's razor would suggest it's much easier to explain your election results on economic terms (again, [1]) than doing a witch hunt. 1. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/11/18/mark_blyth_global_trumpism_and_the_revolt_against_the_creditor_class.html http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/11/18/mark_blyth...
- golemotron 10y ago
  Yes, the tension is mainly economic. Without a vision of opportunity everyone operates from a zero-sum game perspective. Identity politics becomes a way of marshalling power to fight over fixed resources. Blyth has the best analysis of the changes the West is undergoing. I recommend the video you linked to everybody.
  - maehwasu 10y ago
    I agree, except that the fixed resource is votes, not economic resources (which everyone here knows are not fixed in any practical sense). Democracy is a vote market, and strong identities are the strongest persuasive tool available for acquiring votes. Strong identities we know of are skin color, religion, and universalist ideologies (think communism). Once a particular identity, or combination of compatible identities becomes large enough to have a chance at becoming a winning coalition, the logic of the democracy market almost guarantees it will be deployed for that purpose. Even in the absence of underlying economic factors. TLDR; democracy has a lot of very scary failure modes, and the US has been lucky to avoid them because until very recently, there haven't been strong competing identities, so people have been free to argue over tax rates.
    - hga 10y ago
      I agree, except that the fixed resource is votes, not economic resources (which everyone here knows are not fixed in any practical sense). But doesn't this Presidential election at least suggest that enough people got unhappy about the very "fixed" (more like steadily declining) economic "resource" known as the working class job to swing the election to Trump? All the raw statistics, from labor force participation to suicide rate changes, suggest your point isn't correct, except in a theoretical sense, or "any practical sense" except in the very long term.
  - s_kilk 10y ago
    The full video, for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWMmBG3Z4DI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWMmBG3Z4DI
    - return0 10y ago
      also his "global trumpism" presentation has the argument laid out in full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd2d4_LcEig& https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd2d4_LcEig&
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  The "fringe identity politics" of academia and "global Trumpism" are just to aspects of the same phenomena: individuals only being able to react to their conditions in reference to simulacra. What comprises the modern left spends its time (fruitlessly) trying to escape the conditions of Late Capitalist oppression by trying to reform language and symbols, as if the amoral profusion of signs inherent to our era can somehow be cowed into a uniform, virtuous narrative. These supra-simulations of identity immediately collapse beneath their demands of consistency of performance, both from their actors and their audience. The instability of economic and social conditions, as well as the myriad seductions of manufactured identity found in consumerism and technology, erode them as soon as they are constructed. Meanwhile, the modern right (more properly understood as the postmodern right)understands and embraces the semiotic chaos of our contemporary condition, gleefully pirouetting from whatever simulation of politics, truth, and identity serves their immediate purposes. White supremacy, Leninism, religious conservatism, Objectivism, FDR New Dealism, Libertarianism. These are all just just roles which the postmodern right can occupy or discard at will, mirroring the social and psychological conditions of their constituency. The promise is stability, but not in the form of consistent identity. It's a stability of occult freedom, where whatever is can be transmuted into whatever is necessary.
  - return0 10y ago
    > individuals only being able to react to their conditions in reference to simulacra. I don't think so. They react to their economic condition.
danharaj 10y ago
Lots of abstract conceptualization, not a single concrete example or piece of supporting evidence. Alluring rhetoric, but vacuous.
- dri_ft 10y ago
  I don't think it's vacuous but I agree it would be clearer with examples.
  - danharaj 10y ago
    Maybe vacuous isn't the best word. It's got a lot of empty spaces in between its lines that let you substitute your preconceptions into its narrative. It's rather vague when taken on its own, and if you want to question or verify its assertions, there is nothing concrete to work with.
    - maehwasu 10y ago
      As Moshe_Silnorin demonstrated, the available examples would cause a complete mental shutdown for most people inside the Overton Window, which makes presenting them counterproductive. I do agree with your criticism though, and the author would have done well to present historical examples that have lost their emotional intensity in the present day.
      - Avshalom 10y ago
        Moshe didn't so much demonstrate as state. That said, remarkably convenient that apparently people who don't already agree aren't even capable of hearing examples and evidence, thus rendering it not just unnecessary to substantiate the claims but imperative not to.
- Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
  If he mentioned the heresies, this post would not be read by those in the Overton bubble. An example, in the Overton bubble the cause of all differences in outcome between people is discrimination or perverse socialization. This leads to the following reasoning: Programming is a well paying, desirable job. White, Asian, Indian, and Jewish males are over-represented in the trade. All people have identical abilities and preferences on average, therefore the demographics of a profession should exactly match the census. We note that this isn't the case, therefore these demographics are the result of a subconscious and economically counterproductive racist and sexist conspiracy. Our reigning ideologies believe in a Lysenkoism of the mind, despite all psychometric evidence. There really are blogs with better epistemology on this topic than the top universities in the Overton bubble. Ideological indoctrination is the practice of instilling in people priors of 0 and 1 on certain topics, immunizing them against empirical experience. It is the practice of making geniuses more deluded than fools.
rwmj 10y ago
TL;DR: The Internet allows people to self-publish ideas, uncontrolled by universities which [according to the article, really!] were the main gatekeepers of speech before.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  This is not a complete summary of the article. The article also postulates that due to the threat caused by people outside the academy/media/"cathedral", the overton window has shifted sharply in a radical direction in order to flush out those who are insufficiently loyal.
  - hga 10y ago
    The article also postulates that due to the threat caused by people outside the academy/media/"cathedral", the overton window has shifted sharply in a radical direction in order to flush out those who are insufficiently loyal. And if I recall correctly, that this is a regular process. Which has led us to this rather extreme point, historically near the extreme for the US.
    - danarmak 10y ago
      It is a regular process, but when it works normally, it is self-limiting. The idea is that recently it hasn't been successful, the political opposition hasn't been silenced (it merely moved outside the Overton window), and so as the danger signals grow, the radicalizing response grows, to a point where it is perhaps counterproductive.
      - hga 10y ago
        What makes it self-limiting? There's always an opponent, someone completing for resources or whatever, that you can use this method to outgroup and purge. That's just one of many mechanisms driving it. What are the specific counter-reactions you see that limit this as an ongoing/regularly exercised pattern?
ccleve 10y ago
We have an Overton window here on HN. It's enforced through downvoting. I would very much like to see downvoting eliminated, or at least modified so that a small number of upvotes can counteract it. There are a number of perfectly reasonable comments in this thread that carry the stain of appearing in light gray. EDIT: It appears that I've been downvoted, and I don't know why. Anyone care to explain?
- schoen 10y ago
  There's still the old issue of whether downvotes should be used for disagreement or only for mistaken or unconstructive commenting. Paul Graham said several years ago that it made sense to him to use it for disagreement (because people might use upvotes for agreement), but I continue to feel uncomfortable with that and try never to use it that way. I try to upvote things that I disagree with that I thought were well-put or constructive. Maybe an alternative would be to look at Paul Graham's own "hierarchy of disagreement" and try to use downvoting only for things at DH2 and below. http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
- fjdjcjd 10y ago
  Not even that. Some users have a habit of flagkilling every comment they disagree with or that offers criticism to their post. Have you tried arguing with tptacek recently? Flags are essentially being used as "super downvotes." I'm alright with downvotes, but hiding posts that are critical of your arguments from being viewed by others seems extreme.
  - DenisM 10y ago
    > Have you tried arguing with tptacek recently? Flags are essentially being used as "super downvotes." huh? can you elaborate?
    - 2109u21930 10y ago
      'tptacek has (by his own admission) been flagging quite ruthlessly on several occasions. This submission, which he apparently disapproves of (see elsewhere in this thread) is also sinking quite fast. Filter bubble as usual.
jancsika 10y ago
Could someone well-versed in "political sociology" provide one or two primary sources for the concept of "Overton window"? None of the links from its Wikipedia page end up in anything like a published study. Just to be clear-- I'm talking about a paper that a) makes a hypothesis about public policy, b) presents relevant data, and c) makes a conclusion based on the results of that data. Edit: removed redundant line
- tptacek 10y ago
  That's a legit question, and I tend to get skeeved out by political pieces referencing "Overton windows", which to me reads like value-laden jargon for concepts we already have perfectly good language to describe: "orthodoxy", for instance, and "taboo".
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- Kadin 10y ago
  I think you are unlikely to find what you want, because the idea of the "Overton window" is not especially controversial, in the sense that it's basically a shorthand for a number of not-especially-new-or-different concepts that have been around, and are widely understood to exist, for a while. It's not really a new concept as much as it's just shorthand for "the range of acceptable opinions that reasonable people can have" on a particular issue. In fact, you could probably find/change every instance of "Overton window" to that phrase, and not lose very much, but you'd gain a bunch of extra syllables in the process. Humans love data compression.
  - hga 10y ago
    I just found a reference to this concept in Churchill's The Gathering Storm (WWI->him being appointed PM), first page of chapter 11, he talked about opinions events had caused to become no longer "excluded from lawful thought", at least by several major groups of people. The events were in 1936, the book written in 1948.
  - 10y ago
tptacek 10y ago
Exercise for the reader: analyze how this (purely political, off-topic) post itself attempts to take control of an "Overton window" to position its preferred side of the left/right trope. Here's a hint: liberal academicians and "people using social media to communicate directly to citizenry" do not, in fact, constitute a dichotomy.
- tnones 10y ago
  Exercise for you: join the actual conversation instead of preaching from above like a schoolteacher and wielding the red marker that is the flag button when it doesn't follow your orthodoxy. It's funny though, because the other day there was a free speech debate at the University of Toronto where a gender ideologue explicitly denigrated her opponent's outreach on Youtube as amateurish videos unworthy of consideration. Despite him being a tenured professor. [1] Then again, both his opponents also expressed how dismayed they were that this debate was taking place at all, after they reinterpreted its topic as being offensive to common decency. They ignored the indecent actions from their camp that led to it though. It seems liberal academicians do not like debate of any kind, official or otherwise, they'll just bang on about empathy and care while denying it to those they disagree with. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDvj6DQd93o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDvj6DQd93o
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Nothing you wrote responds in any way to my comment. The irony is, in response to an actual criticism of the article† you decided to preach for three paragraphs without acknowledging any part of that critique. I'm also not an academician, or part of the academy in any sense (I joined the workforce at age 18), which makes your specific choice of sermons, well, dumb. † which might or might not be valid (I think it is, but then I wrote it)
Tycho 10y ago
So what is actually outside the Overton window? My preliminary list would be - human neurological uniformity - anti-Semitism - Islamophobia - ethnonationalism - conspiracy theories - libertarianism and Objectivism Also there is a kind of inverse-Overton, subjects that can be safely debated because they are unlikely to lead off the reservation. For instance abortion and gun control. Everything's already been said.

89 points by nkurz 10y ago

> it has become much easier to build intellectual conversations outside of the overton window of the universities. I don't believe that is true. In fact the problem with the current rhetoric is that academia, (that is, the part of academia that can publish (thus the part that passes the review of its peers)) pushed its fringe identity politics rhetoric to the mainstream media, instead of the actual economic issues that cause the global Trumpism[1]. It's not a new phenomenon - academia always had control of the media rhetoric. On the other side, conspiracies have always existed. From my european perspective, it actually amazes me how everyone is surprised and looking to russian conspiracies for explanations, when we have had this propaganda phenomena for a very long time under the cold war from both sides (and i doubt they caused a huge swing in democracies). Social media doesn't really make such a huge difference, because social networks have always existed, just not online, and just less transparent to everyone. I think Occam's razor would suggest it's much easier to explain your election results on economic terms (again, [1]) than doing a witch hunt. 1. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/11/18/mark_blyth_global_trumpism_and_the_revolt_against_the_creditor_class.html http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/11/18/mark_blyth...

golemotron 10y ago
Yes, the tension is mainly economic. Without a vision of opportunity everyone operates from a zero-sum game perspective. Identity politics becomes a way of marshalling power to fight over fixed resources. Blyth has the best analysis of the changes the West is undergoing. I recommend the video you linked to everybody.
- maehwasu 10y ago
  I agree, except that the fixed resource is votes, not economic resources (which everyone here knows are not fixed in any practical sense). Democracy is a vote market, and strong identities are the strongest persuasive tool available for acquiring votes. Strong identities we know of are skin color, religion, and universalist ideologies (think communism). Once a particular identity, or combination of compatible identities becomes large enough to have a chance at becoming a winning coalition, the logic of the democracy market almost guarantees it will be deployed for that purpose. Even in the absence of underlying economic factors. TLDR; democracy has a lot of very scary failure modes, and the US has been lucky to avoid them because until very recently, there haven't been strong competing identities, so people have been free to argue over tax rates.
  - hga 10y ago
    I agree, except that the fixed resource is votes, not economic resources (which everyone here knows are not fixed in any practical sense). But doesn't this Presidential election at least suggest that enough people got unhappy about the very "fixed" (more like steadily declining) economic "resource" known as the working class job to swing the election to Trump? All the raw statistics, from labor force participation to suicide rate changes, suggest your point isn't correct, except in a theoretical sense, or "any practical sense" except in the very long term.
- s_kilk 10y ago
  The full video, for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWMmBG3Z4DI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWMmBG3Z4DI
  - return0 10y ago
    also his "global trumpism" presentation has the argument laid out in full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd2d4_LcEig& https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd2d4_LcEig&
alphonsegaston 10y ago
The "fringe identity politics" of academia and "global Trumpism" are just to aspects of the same phenomena: individuals only being able to react to their conditions in reference to simulacra. What comprises the modern left spends its time (fruitlessly) trying to escape the conditions of Late Capitalist oppression by trying to reform language and symbols, as if the amoral profusion of signs inherent to our era can somehow be cowed into a uniform, virtuous narrative. These supra-simulations of identity immediately collapse beneath their demands of consistency of performance, both from their actors and their audience. The instability of economic and social conditions, as well as the myriad seductions of manufactured identity found in consumerism and technology, erode them as soon as they are constructed. Meanwhile, the modern right (more properly understood as the postmodern right)understands and embraces the semiotic chaos of our contemporary condition, gleefully pirouetting from whatever simulation of politics, truth, and identity serves their immediate purposes. White supremacy, Leninism, religious conservatism, Objectivism, FDR New Dealism, Libertarianism. These are all just just roles which the postmodern right can occupy or discard at will, mirroring the social and psychological conditions of their constituency. The promise is stability, but not in the form of consistent identity. It's a stability of occult freedom, where whatever is can be transmuted into whatever is necessary.
- return0 10y ago
  > individuals only being able to react to their conditions in reference to simulacra. I don't think so. They react to their economic condition.

danharaj 10y ago

Lots of abstract conceptualization, not a single concrete example or piece of supporting evidence. Alluring rhetoric, but vacuous.

dri_ft 10y ago
I don't think it's vacuous but I agree it would be clearer with examples.
- danharaj 10y ago
  Maybe vacuous isn't the best word. It's got a lot of empty spaces in between its lines that let you substitute your preconceptions into its narrative. It's rather vague when taken on its own, and if you want to question or verify its assertions, there is nothing concrete to work with.
  - maehwasu 10y ago
    As Moshe_Silnorin demonstrated, the available examples would cause a complete mental shutdown for most people inside the Overton Window, which makes presenting them counterproductive. I do agree with your criticism though, and the author would have done well to present historical examples that have lost their emotional intensity in the present day.
    - Avshalom 10y ago
      Moshe didn't so much demonstrate as state. That said, remarkably convenient that apparently people who don't already agree aren't even capable of hearing examples and evidence, thus rendering it not just unnecessary to substantiate the claims but imperative not to.
Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
If he mentioned the heresies, this post would not be read by those in the Overton bubble. An example, in the Overton bubble the cause of all differences in outcome between people is discrimination or perverse socialization. This leads to the following reasoning: Programming is a well paying, desirable job. White, Asian, Indian, and Jewish males are over-represented in the trade. All people have identical abilities and preferences on average, therefore the demographics of a profession should exactly match the census. We note that this isn't the case, therefore these demographics are the result of a subconscious and economically counterproductive racist and sexist conspiracy. Our reigning ideologies believe in a Lysenkoism of the mind, despite all psychometric evidence. There really are blogs with better epistemology on this topic than the top universities in the Overton bubble. Ideological indoctrination is the practice of instilling in people priors of 0 and 1 on certain topics, immunizing them against empirical experience. It is the practice of making geniuses more deluded than fools.

rwmj 10y ago

TL;DR: The Internet allows people to self-publish ideas, uncontrolled by universities which [according to the article, really!] were the main gatekeepers of speech before.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
This is not a complete summary of the article. The article also postulates that due to the threat caused by people outside the academy/media/"cathedral", the overton window has shifted sharply in a radical direction in order to flush out those who are insufficiently loyal.
- hga 10y ago
  The article also postulates that due to the threat caused by people outside the academy/media/"cathedral", the overton window has shifted sharply in a radical direction in order to flush out those who are insufficiently loyal. And if I recall correctly, that this is a regular process. Which has led us to this rather extreme point, historically near the extreme for the US.
  - danarmak 10y ago
    It is a regular process, but when it works normally, it is self-limiting. The idea is that recently it hasn't been successful, the political opposition hasn't been silenced (it merely moved outside the Overton window), and so as the danger signals grow, the radicalizing response grows, to a point where it is perhaps counterproductive.
    - hga 10y ago
      What makes it self-limiting? There's always an opponent, someone completing for resources or whatever, that you can use this method to outgroup and purge. That's just one of many mechanisms driving it. What are the specific counter-reactions you see that limit this as an ongoing/regularly exercised pattern?

ccleve 10y ago

We have an Overton window here on HN. It's enforced through downvoting. I would very much like to see downvoting eliminated, or at least modified so that a small number of upvotes can counteract it. There are a number of perfectly reasonable comments in this thread that carry the stain of appearing in light gray. EDIT: It appears that I've been downvoted, and I don't know why. Anyone care to explain?

schoen 10y ago
There's still the old issue of whether downvotes should be used for disagreement or only for mistaken or unconstructive commenting. Paul Graham said several years ago that it made sense to him to use it for disagreement (because people might use upvotes for agreement), but I continue to feel uncomfortable with that and try never to use it that way. I try to upvote things that I disagree with that I thought were well-put or constructive. Maybe an alternative would be to look at Paul Graham's own "hierarchy of disagreement" and try to use downvoting only for things at DH2 and below. http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
fjdjcjd 10y ago
Not even that. Some users have a habit of flagkilling every comment they disagree with or that offers criticism to their post. Have you tried arguing with tptacek recently? Flags are essentially being used as "super downvotes." I'm alright with downvotes, but hiding posts that are critical of your arguments from being viewed by others seems extreme.
- DenisM 10y ago
  > Have you tried arguing with tptacek recently? Flags are essentially being used as "super downvotes." huh? can you elaborate?
  - 2109u21930 10y ago
    'tptacek has (by his own admission) been flagging quite ruthlessly on several occasions. This submission, which he apparently disapproves of (see elsewhere in this thread) is also sinking quite fast. Filter bubble as usual.

jancsika 10y ago

Could someone well-versed in "political sociology" provide one or two primary sources for the concept of "Overton window"? None of the links from its Wikipedia page end up in anything like a published study. Just to be clear-- I'm talking about a paper that a) makes a hypothesis about public policy, b) presents relevant data, and c) makes a conclusion based on the results of that data. Edit: removed redundant line

tptacek 10y ago
That's a legit question, and I tend to get skeeved out by political pieces referencing "Overton windows", which to me reads like value-laden jargon for concepts we already have perfectly good language to describe: "orthodoxy", for instance, and "taboo".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Kadin 10y ago
I think you are unlikely to find what you want, because the idea of the "Overton window" is not especially controversial, in the sense that it's basically a shorthand for a number of not-especially-new-or-different concepts that have been around, and are widely understood to exist, for a while. It's not really a new concept as much as it's just shorthand for "the range of acceptable opinions that reasonable people can have" on a particular issue. In fact, you could probably find/change every instance of "Overton window" to that phrase, and not lose very much, but you'd gain a bunch of extra syllables in the process. Humans love data compression.
- hga 10y ago
  I just found a reference to this concept in Churchill's The Gathering Storm (WWI->him being appointed PM), first page of chapter 11, he talked about opinions events had caused to become no longer "excluded from lawful thought", at least by several major groups of people. The events were in 1936, the book written in 1948.
- 10y ago

tptacek 10y ago

Exercise for the reader: analyze how this (purely political, off-topic) post itself attempts to take control of an "Overton window" to position its preferred side of the left/right trope. Here's a hint: liberal academicians and "people using social media to communicate directly to citizenry" do not, in fact, constitute a dichotomy.

tnones 10y ago
Exercise for you: join the actual conversation instead of preaching from above like a schoolteacher and wielding the red marker that is the flag button when it doesn't follow your orthodoxy. It's funny though, because the other day there was a free speech debate at the University of Toronto where a gender ideologue explicitly denigrated her opponent's outreach on Youtube as amateurish videos unworthy of consideration. Despite him being a tenured professor. [1] Then again, both his opponents also expressed how dismayed they were that this debate was taking place at all, after they reinterpreted its topic as being offensive to common decency. They ignored the indecent actions from their camp that led to it though. It seems liberal academicians do not like debate of any kind, official or otherwise, they'll just bang on about empathy and care while denying it to those they disagree with. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDvj6DQd93o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDvj6DQd93o
- tptacek 10y ago
  Nothing you wrote responds in any way to my comment. The irony is, in response to an actual criticism of the article† you decided to preach for three paragraphs without acknowledging any part of that critique. I'm also not an academician, or part of the academy in any sense (I joined the workforce at age 18), which makes your specific choice of sermons, well, dumb. † which might or might not be valid (I think it is, but then I wrote it)

Tycho 10y ago

So what is actually outside the Overton window? My preliminary list would be - human neurological uniformity - anti-Semitism - Islamophobia - ethnonationalism - conspiracy theories - libertarianism and Objectivism Also there is a kind of inverse-Overton, subjects that can be safely debated because they are unlikely to lead off the reservation. For instance abortion and gun control. Everything's already been said.