17 ms·

I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (2014)

282 points by anchpop 7y ago

ranie93 7y ago
>Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things. so much for that
- baud147258 7y ago
  Well it won't turn into a flame war here, right ? (/s)
- reading-at-work 7y ago
  At least HN is a step above Reddit, right? Right? Funny enough, I actually first read this article when someone in a deep Reddit comment thread linked to it. So yeah, so much for that.
  - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
    I feel like Reddit is a suitable Outgroup even to Reddit.
  - CondensedBrain 7y ago
    It depends on the subreddits you subscribe to. Communities with a single place to interact will vary depending on time of day and topic. One day you get upvotes, the next you get downvotes for the same kind of thing. Hacker News is Hacker News. Reddit is the communities you subscribe to. A negative view of Reddit as a whole makes no sense. The defaults and other big subreddits only reflect society at large, so any problem you have with Reddit is really with society. /r/slatestarcodex, /r/pics, and /r/DaystromInstitute have nothing in common other than the platform.
    - mrfredward 7y ago
      >A negative view of Reddit as a whole makes no sense I tend to think of "reddit" when used generally as meaning r/all for an account that isn't signed in. You won't find many "red-tribe" beliefs here, so I don't think you can say it reflects society at large. Anecdotally, I'd say the subreddit that most consistently gets something that looks a little like red tribe beliefs to the front page is r/unpopularopinion. Reddit is definitely not an even cross section of America.
      - CondensedBrain 7y ago
        If voter turnout is to be taken as a measure, red/blue tribes aren't representative of society. Voters (at least in the US) are a highly-motivated minority with firm opinions. Turnout peaks in Presidential elections, but still barely breaks 50%. Most people don't even pay attention until the debates start. Consistent Voter Tribe people don't believe me when I tell them the most popular prime time cable news program barely has enough viewers to fill a few large stadiums. What you see on /r/all reflects the interests of people who watch TV shows with tens of millions of viewers, not the minority of people extremely tuned in to politics. This is why I stopped watching cable news and following most political media. I realized they gave me a twisted view of how popular my opinions are.
      - leereeves 7y ago
        Reddit, the company, actively bans the "red tribe" and promotes the "blue tribe". They've chosen not to welcome society at large, but to push their own political views through selective censorship.
- rgoulter 7y ago
  FWIW, it is listed as third in his about page. https://slatestarcodex.com/about/ https://slatestarcodex.com/about/
opwieurposiu 7y ago
The recent youtube purges provide an example of this mechanic in action. In order to prevent "discrimination, segregation or exclusion" of certain groups of people, youtube must discriminate, segregate and exclude certain groups of people. We don't make peace with our friends, we make peace with our enemies.
- ridaj 7y ago
  Attention can be gotten with conflict but there is a cliff-like point after which it becomes counterproductive for ad revenue — see advertisers pulling out of YouTube (or some Fox shows for that matter) over not wanting their ads to show next to incendiary content
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    "Incendiary" is relative to tribal group though. Sure the Venn-diagram overlaps a tiny bit in the middle but for the most part what the far left and the far right get angry about is different. Back to advertising potential, imagine some 10sec no-context dashcam video of some racially ambiguous dude who allegedly did something getting run down by a cop car. Whether an ad for a Ford Explorer is appropriate in that context depends totally on the tribe viewing the video.
    - stcredzero 7y ago
      "Incendiary" is relative to tribal group though. Such things have existed for quite awhile. The difference over time is that they are becoming more common and more frequent, while disseminating them got easier and easier. Still, we only rarely saw quite the same kinds of viral common conflagrations of outrage as we have today versus what we had in the cell-phone camera and viral emails era. The structure of the social media of today is vastly different and omnipresent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc Technologists recognized the addictive power of games, applying those dynamics to social media. We tried our hardest to increase engagement, and that drew technologists into combining gamification and viral discovery to amplify outrage on social media. Now we're in 2019. Looking back on it all, is it really any surprise? Now we're in 2019, and it seems like society is ready to let multinational corporations who have access to tremendous amounts of information about us, to monitor, censor, and censure us for "wrongthink." What could possibly go wrong?
klodolph 7y ago
Highly recommend reading some of GK Chesterton. You may or may not like it, but his perspective is unique and he was influential among authors you are more likely to have read (like CS Lewis). Much of his work is now out of copyright and freely available. You could start with The Man Who Was Thursday.
- baud147258 7y ago
  The father Brown stories are all great too, if you like the type of short mystery stories.
- brobdingnagians 7y ago
  I second this. I started reading a lot of his works a while back. He has a very unique point of view from what I know. He was also friends with or friendly with some of the leading authors of the day whom he criticized, notably Shaw. His use of paradox is highly entertaining too and he made it into something of an art form. The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a fun read (he is notable for supporting distributism); his essays are very enjoyable too.
- caenn 7y ago
  Chesterton is a great call. You who are reading this, go read orthodoxy at some point when you have time.
zdragnar 7y ago
What a fascinating read. I was constantly reminded of Girard throughout. Also, you probably know more people of the other tribe than you think. They probably just want to deal with you as a person, rather than as a tribal identity. Granted, I don't think I know any creationists either, but I'm also slightly to highly skeptical of the 40% claim.
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  There are some promising trends, but it seems this is something that will quite some to change. Link to a Gallup poll that roughly matches that claim: https://news.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-int... I know of a ton of people who are creationists from my hometown. I don't think I know any where I'm currently living (I'm sure there are a bunch, but I haven't had much opportunity to meet them).
- opportune 7y ago
  Probably because you don't live in a very rural area or the bible belt. I knew many creationists from my hometown and peripherally in college, but haven't had any creationist friends or active acquaintances since then. A lot of creationists tend to be older and uneducated so working in tech in a larger city is kind of the polar opposite of where they congregate.
  - zdragnar 7y ago
    I do live in a rural area, just not the bible belt. There are plenty of intelligent design types- that is, God made the universe, set evolution in motion, etc., just not the 7 days as literal, evolution is fake kind that the article mentions. There are a few Amish and Jehovah's Witness and Pentecostal types arpund, but nowhere near 40%.
deleted 7y ago
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- mistermann 7y ago
  > To me, that interaction illuminated the power of projection. When you (and people around you), suffer from something you deem "bad," of course you're going to assume that everyone suffers from it, especially those who you've lumped into the group as being stereotypically wrought with that trait. He was always talking about how implicitly racially biased we were, but he was speaking from his own experience. He knew he wasn't a bad person, and that he was open-minded, so of course everyone else, and especially "close-minded people" must be even worse. But I suspect his situation was similar to the preacher or politician that is extremely anti-gay, but actually turns out to be gay: you hate that outward thing because you hate it in yourself. I have a different theory. I think that there's two flavors of racism: good-intentioned, and bad-intentioned. Good-intentioned racism exists within (not saying everyone suffers from it) the "progressive" community, who are trying to improve the lot of minorities, with good intentions. If you actually happen to be technically racist, say, you actually believe x-colored people are genuinely not as competent - consciously you would explain this as being the result of lack of opportunity, but sub-consciously, you may believe (have somehow come to believe) there is a fundamental lesser competence. As a result, this person will always have a tendency to "take the side" of minorities in any external debate or internal thought process (forming an opinion on an issue). So when this type of person encounters someone who is genuinely not racist, at all (consciously and subconsciously), which many people on the right happen to be, they will get a "sense" (which typically comes from heuristic processes running in their subconscious) that the person is racist. And in a relative sense, from the perspective of the viewer, they are racist, in that they do not favor x-colored people. The typical person doesn't think about life in terms of absolutes and relatives. If you ask them to explain this knowledge, they will find they are unable to, but it is impossible for them to shake the feeling, because it is very strong and it not only feels real, it is real, to them - it is the remnants of evolution, which is a never ending process.
  - RobertRoberts 7y ago
    I've found that good-intentioned anything that is otherwise considered "bad" isn't actually good-intentioned, it's just perceived that way and used as an excuse for ill-treatment of those they don't like. I have a friend that comes across as pretty racist when he talks politics, but is incredibly respectful of the same race when discussing working with them. I have a friend that moved to the south that openly told me "moving to the south will make you racist because white people are treated so poorly by minorities". My personal experience in extremely liberal areas in Oregon is that expressing any support of a religious idea would instantly garner personal attacks and outrage. Again, the idea that all religious ideas are oppressive, so it seems it was justified to attack me over it. This is a complicated issue, but I have found that discourse over this topic is nearly impossible to have in public with people that disagree with you.
deleted 7y ago
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inflatableDodo 7y ago
>I mean, from a utilitarian point of view, you are still doing the correct action of not giving people grief because they’re a divorcee. You can have all the Utility Points you want. All I’m saying is that if you “forgive” something you don’t care about, you don’t earn any Virtue Points. >(by way of illustration: a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as many Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same amount, but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points) This is a great illustration of what I understand of Antisthenes' precept that Virtue is the only good.
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  I think that’s just another way of saying “rhetoric matters more than logic”. Greek philosophy was obsessed with this argument — which I think is still relevant today. I think the definition of Utility Points and Virtue Points map directly to “points acquired through logic” and “points acquired through rhetoric”. In a democracy, it’s obvious that rhetoric does matter. The masses will always be too uneducated (even if only contextually) to understand or care about the logic, thus rhetoric wins out. It was true for Socrates, and it’s true today. I think it’s pretty easy to see the same divisions in worldview present themselves around the world.
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    >I think that’s just another way of saying “rhetoric matters more than logic”. Greek philosophy was obsessed with this argument — which I think is still relevant today. I think the definition of Utility Points and Virtue Points map directly to “points acquired through logic” and “points acquired through rhetoric”. I might note that in the example of; a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as many Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same amount, but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points, no rhetoric is required. edit - regarding; The masses will always be too uneducated (even if only contextually) to understand or care about the logic, thus rhetoric wins out. It was true for Socrates, and it’s true today. In Phaedrus, Socrates makes the point that knowledge of a subject beats rhetoric, by showing that to deceive with rhetoric consistently, requires knowledge of that which you are trying to misrepresent.
ZeroGravitas 7y ago
This is kind of like the "science is just another religion" argument. If you're going to believe in something awesome that you don't fully understand then believing in the one that gives you vaccines, self-driving cars and Xboxes seems like a good choice. Similarly, if you're going to irrationally hate another group then irrationally hating the people who irrationally hate other people seems like a much better choice than the alternative (possibly even a rational one), since those people are almost certainly causing you direct personal harm by voting for psychopaths and generally holding back progress across a million different areas, even if they don't specifically hate you irrationally, just most of your friends and possibly your children (but probably you as well if you don't join in with the irrational hate). When I follow the news recently I wonder about the pure-blooded Aryan Germans in the Nazi era who weren't complete idiots or psychopaths and how they felt as their country was flushed down the toilet of history by the others in their own "in group". They weren't directly targetted for who they were but I'm sure that was little comfort as they bled to death in Frozen Russia or had firebombs dropped on them by the British. (Edit: I also recently discovered the author thinks recycling is a conspiracy, which I guess moved him out of my in group as I now am far less charitable in how I read some of his stuff)
- chillee 7y ago
  Recycling is a conspiracy? Can I get a link to that?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  Could you point me to where he thinks recycling is a conspiracy? I wonder what his arguments are...
  - godshatter 7y ago
    The parent poster might be referring to this article: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-to-90s-environmentalism/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-to-90s-e... Specifically section 5. I wouldn't characterize the author's view as "recycling is a conspiracy", though. More like "we're not going to be up to our necks in garbage anytime soon, like we thought we were in the 80's" which the author mentions has affected the priority society has given to recycling as a whole. If indeed this is what they were referring to.
lordleft 7y ago
This was a superb article. I was riveted from start to finish. I feel like I've gained some nuance into American political and cultural self-segregation.
- quacked 7y ago
  Check the "top posts" of the blog for more riveting reading.
- RickS 7y ago
  "All debates are bravery debates" from SSC is also brilliant. Really anything on there is going to be worth the read. Different vibe, but if you want another highly interesting take on political segregation, this is a favorite of mine: https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/
motohagiography 7y ago
This SSC piece has influenced a lot of my thinking. Christopher Hitchens wrote about "the narcissism of small differences," concept as well. There was another post on HN recently about a summary of Rene Girard, who extended this idea ("mimetic violence" in his style) with the inevitability of scapegoating neutral parties as an alternative to war. The rationalist community that SSC has represented may be walking right into that scapegoat role because they are viewed as compromised by the extreme right, and as a gateway drug by the extreme left. I would argue critics like figures associated with the so-called, "intellectual dark web," are being scapegoated by social media platforms for precisely the reasons Girard describes for picking scapegoats. There is no point in tracking down the worst extremists because they don't have enough political traction to represent "something being done," but popular, relatively moderate critics are sufficiently high profile figures to make an example of in the hope that it provides some defusing catharsis. I couldn't say how much predictive power that model has. Either de-platforming "works" because it delays sectarian conflict, or it delegitimizes discourse altogether and just accelerates it. We're going to find out anyway, and it appears we indeed live in interesting times.
- pasabagi 7y ago
  I think the problem most left-wing people would have with the rationalist thing is that left wing culture is a culture of reading, especially when it comes to philosophy. That's true from the most hardcore (for instance, YPG rebels in rojava are broadly united under Ocalan, who is first and foremost a thinker), to the most wishy-washy (most hippies will happily talk your ear off about Buddhism). So the problem with rationalism is kind of obvious in the name. Rationalism, if you read philosophy, already has a meaning. It means people who believe that rationality comes prior to experience. That's not the way the 'rationalists' are using it, and what's more, the way they are using it is kinda crude, even if we ignore the fact it displays a kind of illiteracy, or at least, a disinterest in the history of thought, to re-use a really common term in a totally unrelated way. That's also what comes across from the stuff they write. What I've read is clever, well written, well thought out, but also profoundly ignorant of the tradition of thinking about the topics they're interested in. You can't help but be crude if you just try a naive response, without first looking at how other people have addressed the problem at hand. So it comes across as the philosophical equivalent of that guy you met once who's convinced he has invented a new kind of maths without the number zero, because 'zero doesn't exist'. It might have been an interesting debate 2000 years ago, but things have moved on.
skrebbel 7y ago
Star Slate Codex is the only "armchair philosophy" site I read. I really love it. Every time I click a link to some of the author's inspiration sources, or read the comments even, I'm appalled at how complicated and unattractive the writing is there. The contrast to Alexander's writing is simply so stark. I simply find myself giving up after a few paragraphs. I recently read his enormous and lovely "Mediations on Moloch" essay, and was amazed by how hard I found it to follow the Nick Bostrom citations. I mean this is a famous bestseller philosopher. Is Bostrom's writing so bad, or is Alexander's writing simply so good? This article is one of my favourites. I love how, like many of his articles, he doesn't actually change my mind about anything (at least not to my knowledge), but he does help me express, verbally, an itch that I had about something for a long time.
- quacked 7y ago
  That feeling you talk about in your last sentence is one that's familiar to me as well, because I get it all the time when reading SSC, and we've got to be suspicious of it- that's exactly how people who read <religious literature, cult creeds, academic papers> that confirms their preexisting ideas feel.
  - skrebbel 7y ago
    I'm aware of the trap (it's why I added "not to my knowledge"), but to be honest I'm not sure how to avoid it. Any tips?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Not every thing you read is meant to change your mind. I had this feeling with SSC too (more frequently in the past, in the Meditations on Moloch era, less so now), but I can clearly tell that I had pieces of those ideas developed on my own, and an SSC article only let me put them in a refined form. (Having been brought up in a pretty cultish religion, I'm now painfully aware of cultishness works.)
- munificent 7y ago
  > Is Bostrom's writing so bad, or is Alexander's writing simply so good? I think there are three things in play here. First is the simple observation that different writing styles appeal differently to different readers. Some find an informal style easier to absorb while others are turned off by its lack of rigor. But a deeper aspect is that, like everything, writing style is also a social signal. Many authors are put in the unfortunate position to choose between a writing style that identifies them as being in the right tribe (like "academic philosopher") or one that is easier to read by a greater fraction of readers. Given the incentive structure when your job is to be an academic philosopher, people rationally end up writing in a style that makes their material harder to read. Finally, with philosophy in particular, the field has such a long history of self-reflection on everything, including questions like "what does this word mean?" and "what does it mean for words to have meaning?" that it gets really hard to talk precisely about things and move the discussion forward without falling into traps and loops. So philosophers have had to bend English in weird ways to route around past ambiguities or pin down things that we are normally comfortable with being vague. It's the problem of jargon, but applied to the whole damn language.
alexandercrohde 7y ago
tl: dr; 1. Observes that groups can be more critical of groups that are similar to them than those that are starkly distant 2. Supports point 1 with the example that his liberal circle felt more comfortable reveling in the death of Margaret Thatcher than Bin Laden. And that Russel Brand claimed “Fox is worse than ISIS." 3. Observes an apparent self-criticism in liberalism as evidenced by criticism of America relative to Europe, criticism of whites (by whites), and maybe even blanket criticism of "intolerance." 4. Observes the hypocrisy of being intolerant of intolerance, and proposes that Americans criticisizing America are actually criticizing a different class of Americans, rather than being truly self-critical. 5. Notes that America seems to have 3 "tribes" that roughly align with politics "red" (loving football and such), "blue" (loving higher education and such), and "grey" (being bothered by war on drugs + NSA). 6. Concludes by acknowledging his own hypocrisy, in that his this piece targeting is alleged-in-group (Blue)'s intolerance wasn't truly self-critical. Observes he did the same form of non-self-criticism that he dislikes when Blue-tribe does.
komali2 7y ago
I really liked this perspective and I think I learned a lot about my own rejection of my heritage (it's "red group") and hometown friends and family. It's true, I hate'm more than ISIS. Pretty silly, but I think it's good that I'm chewing on this now. One thing I strongly disagree with: >When a friend of mine heard Eich got fired, she didn’t see anything wrong with it. “I can tolerate anything except intolerance,” she said. >“Intolerance” is starting to look like another one of those words like “white” and “American”. >“I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.” Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it? If Eich had gotten fired for arguing that healthcare should be a capitalist free market system in America, or that guns ownership should have no regulation, or some other red-group position that doesn't involve the oppression of others, I'd defend him. But, intolerance can't be tolerated. Paradox of tolerance, sure. Arguably, making me intolerant (ARGUABLY). There's a difference between conservative political views and intolerant political views. The fact that a shitload of red group values coincide with intolerance (or that a lot of intolerant people are red group) is sure unfortunate for red groupers that are tolerant, but that's life. (and no, blue group "intolerance of the intolerant" does not equate to "bad people on both sides" for me)
- 0815test 7y ago
  Maybe Eich should have gotten fired for some other things he did cough cough js cough cough but what's "intolerant" about donating to a political organization which is pursuing its cause by entirely legitimate, non-violent, tolerant means? And what's "tolerant" about firing someone for donating to the _wrong_ sort of political organization? In fact, some politicized organizations, e.g. unions, do engage in violence every now and then, but firing someone for donating or contributing to them would still be beyond the pale. That's how strong the taboo against "you donated to a political organization I don't like, you're fired!" is.
  - komali2 7y ago
    > donating to a political organization which is pursuing its cause by entirely legitimate, non-violent, tolerant means Restricting the ability of a class of people to marry based on their sexual orientation re: consenting adults is not tolerant. There is no "legitimate" way to restrict these human rights - gay people were not an "intolerant" class in this scenario, they were a persecuted minority. Therefore, Eich engaged in a form of intolerance that justified the blowback.
bittercynic 7y ago
I think having an outgroup is avoidable, but it requires ongoing vigilance, and an awareness that it is easy to slip into building your identity partly by deciding who to hate. If we're careful I do think it's possible to maintain an attitude that we're basically all in this together, and we may have significant disagreements on all kinds of things, but at the end of the day we're still all humans and worthy of kindness and respect.
- dave_b 7y ago
  If you care about some people more than others, then you have an ingroup and an outgroup. Would you really want to not care for your own family members any more than you care for a random person on the other side of the planet? That’s what striving for no outgroups entails. I think that’s a horribly misguided mindset. A better approach is to tolerate the outgroups and facilitate live and let live arrangements. Then you can focus more on appreciating your tribe and less on fighting the others.
  - bittercynic 7y ago
    I was taking outgroup to mean a set of people that we find so abhorrent that they're unworthy of any level of consideration or respect, and that we even wished didn't exist. The term has a pretty specific meaning, and it goes beyond just a group other than our own.
pgcj_poster 7y ago
In this 7,340 word exposé on his discovery that "Democrats dislike Republicans," Scott determines that judging people for their beliefs and actions is basically the same thing as judging people for their sexuality or skin color. In passing, he also manages to assert that homophobia is genetic, which perhaps you should keep in mind next time he is conspicuously silent while his fans talk about the genetic basis of the racial IQ gap. "Hacker" "News" nods along, agreeing with Scott's view that the world is basically fine as it is and there's no point in doing anything to change it[1]. This of course has nothing to do with the fact that they are mostly highly-payed white guys getting a great deal out of the current system. Scott includes an epilogue in which he realizes that his argument is self-refuting. Unfortunately, he misses the part where this generalizes to his entire political philosophy. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-johnson-or-stein/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-j...
barberousse 7y ago
It's almost as if human communities are inherently driven to splinter, like a living cell
finder83 7y ago
This article was great and I resonated with it. I grew up in Texas, lived in New Jersey commuting into Manhattan for about ten years, then moved back. Anecdotally the differences do seem to be regional. I have friends on both sides of "red" and "blue" on Facebook and in person. I'd probably side best with "grey", but can run in both groups (standing out no matter where I go). What's interesting to me is the severe level of misunderstanding of each group to the other. I generally avoid media, don't have TV service, avoid Facebook, etc. But in some rare life instances it gets forced on me and I see what seems to be a media portrayal of what is just a characterization of the "other side", whichever side that may be. In my experience, both sides have good motives for the most part and truly care for and love other people. And in my experience, both sides think that the other side doesn't love people or have good intentions because they don't agree with X, while fully misunderstanding or dismissing the issue. It's almost like when you hear some distant relative who's overtly racist and you leave your nice peaceful sphere of influence and realize that there are people who really hate others on a regular basis. And of course, there are jerks on both sides and loving people on both sides. All of that said, I see the polarization growing. It's to a quite scary level and my wife and I have discussed that it wouldn't be surprising to see another civil war within our lifetime. Not that we expect it...but not that we don't expect it either. The confirmation bias is strong everywhere and it's only getting worse. There seems to be no real communication going on at a national level, only talking heads who don't really represent their side well. Any conversation I do see seems to fall back into political rhetoric spouting party lines, and never seem to get to the heart of people or issues. Media complicates this, parties complicate this, and people just wanting to fit in complicates this. I don't know a solution...but I do feel like there needs to be one soon.
kbenson 7y ago
> I need to remind myself that when they are bad people, they are merely Osama-level bad people instead of Thatcher-level bad people. Best line, right there. The full meaning requires calling back to the beginning of the essay, but the complexity of this is amazing, even on the off chance it was quick attempt at a humorous callback.

282 points by anchpop 7y ago

ranie93 7y ago

>Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things. so much for that

baud147258 7y ago
Well it won't turn into a flame war here, right ? (/s)
reading-at-work 7y ago
At least HN is a step above Reddit, right? Right? Funny enough, I actually first read this article when someone in a deep Reddit comment thread linked to it. So yeah, so much for that.
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  I feel like Reddit is a suitable Outgroup even to Reddit.
- CondensedBrain 7y ago
  It depends on the subreddits you subscribe to. Communities with a single place to interact will vary depending on time of day and topic. One day you get upvotes, the next you get downvotes for the same kind of thing. Hacker News is Hacker News. Reddit is the communities you subscribe to. A negative view of Reddit as a whole makes no sense. The defaults and other big subreddits only reflect society at large, so any problem you have with Reddit is really with society. /r/slatestarcodex, /r/pics, and /r/DaystromInstitute have nothing in common other than the platform.
  - mrfredward 7y ago
    >A negative view of Reddit as a whole makes no sense I tend to think of "reddit" when used generally as meaning r/all for an account that isn't signed in. You won't find many "red-tribe" beliefs here, so I don't think you can say it reflects society at large. Anecdotally, I'd say the subreddit that most consistently gets something that looks a little like red tribe beliefs to the front page is r/unpopularopinion. Reddit is definitely not an even cross section of America.
    - CondensedBrain 7y ago
      If voter turnout is to be taken as a measure, red/blue tribes aren't representative of society. Voters (at least in the US) are a highly-motivated minority with firm opinions. Turnout peaks in Presidential elections, but still barely breaks 50%. Most people don't even pay attention until the debates start. Consistent Voter Tribe people don't believe me when I tell them the most popular prime time cable news program barely has enough viewers to fill a few large stadiums. What you see on /r/all reflects the interests of people who watch TV shows with tens of millions of viewers, not the minority of people extremely tuned in to politics. This is why I stopped watching cable news and following most political media. I realized they gave me a twisted view of how popular my opinions are.
    - leereeves 7y ago
      Reddit, the company, actively bans the "red tribe" and promotes the "blue tribe". They've chosen not to welcome society at large, but to push their own political views through selective censorship.
rgoulter 7y ago
FWIW, it is listed as third in his about page. https://slatestarcodex.com/about/ https://slatestarcodex.com/about/

opwieurposiu 7y ago

The recent youtube purges provide an example of this mechanic in action. In order to prevent "discrimination, segregation or exclusion" of certain groups of people, youtube must discriminate, segregate and exclude certain groups of people. We don't make peace with our friends, we make peace with our enemies.

ridaj 7y ago
Attention can be gotten with conflict but there is a cliff-like point after which it becomes counterproductive for ad revenue — see advertisers pulling out of YouTube (or some Fox shows for that matter) over not wanting their ads to show next to incendiary content
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  "Incendiary" is relative to tribal group though. Sure the Venn-diagram overlaps a tiny bit in the middle but for the most part what the far left and the far right get angry about is different. Back to advertising potential, imagine some 10sec no-context dashcam video of some racially ambiguous dude who allegedly did something getting run down by a cop car. Whether an ad for a Ford Explorer is appropriate in that context depends totally on the tribe viewing the video.
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    "Incendiary" is relative to tribal group though. Such things have existed for quite awhile. The difference over time is that they are becoming more common and more frequent, while disseminating them got easier and easier. Still, we only rarely saw quite the same kinds of viral common conflagrations of outrage as we have today versus what we had in the cell-phone camera and viral emails era. The structure of the social media of today is vastly different and omnipresent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc Technologists recognized the addictive power of games, applying those dynamics to social media. We tried our hardest to increase engagement, and that drew technologists into combining gamification and viral discovery to amplify outrage on social media. Now we're in 2019. Looking back on it all, is it really any surprise? Now we're in 2019, and it seems like society is ready to let multinational corporations who have access to tremendous amounts of information about us, to monitor, censor, and censure us for "wrongthink." What could possibly go wrong?

klodolph 7y ago

Highly recommend reading some of GK Chesterton. You may or may not like it, but his perspective is unique and he was influential among authors you are more likely to have read (like CS Lewis). Much of his work is now out of copyright and freely available. You could start with The Man Who Was Thursday.

baud147258 7y ago
The father Brown stories are all great too, if you like the type of short mystery stories.
brobdingnagians 7y ago
I second this. I started reading a lot of his works a while back. He has a very unique point of view from what I know. He was also friends with or friendly with some of the leading authors of the day whom he criticized, notably Shaw. His use of paradox is highly entertaining too and he made it into something of an art form. The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a fun read (he is notable for supporting distributism); his essays are very enjoyable too.
caenn 7y ago
Chesterton is a great call. You who are reading this, go read orthodoxy at some point when you have time.

zdragnar 7y ago

What a fascinating read. I was constantly reminded of Girard throughout. Also, you probably know more people of the other tribe than you think. They probably just want to deal with you as a person, rather than as a tribal identity. Granted, I don't think I know any creationists either, but I'm also slightly to highly skeptical of the 40% claim.

dwaltrip 7y ago
There are some promising trends, but it seems this is something that will quite some to change. Link to a Gallup poll that roughly matches that claim: https://news.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-int... I know of a ton of people who are creationists from my hometown. I don't think I know any where I'm currently living (I'm sure there are a bunch, but I haven't had much opportunity to meet them).
opportune 7y ago
Probably because you don't live in a very rural area or the bible belt. I knew many creationists from my hometown and peripherally in college, but haven't had any creationist friends or active acquaintances since then. A lot of creationists tend to be older and uneducated so working in tech in a larger city is kind of the polar opposite of where they congregate.
- zdragnar 7y ago
  I do live in a rural area, just not the bible belt. There are plenty of intelligent design types- that is, God made the universe, set evolution in motion, etc., just not the 7 days as literal, evolution is fake kind that the article mentions. There are a few Amish and Jehovah's Witness and Pentecostal types arpund, but nowhere near 40%.

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mistermann 7y ago
> To me, that interaction illuminated the power of projection. When you (and people around you), suffer from something you deem "bad," of course you're going to assume that everyone suffers from it, especially those who you've lumped into the group as being stereotypically wrought with that trait. He was always talking about how implicitly racially biased we were, but he was speaking from his own experience. He knew he wasn't a bad person, and that he was open-minded, so of course everyone else, and especially "close-minded people" must be even worse. But I suspect his situation was similar to the preacher or politician that is extremely anti-gay, but actually turns out to be gay: you hate that outward thing because you hate it in yourself. I have a different theory. I think that there's two flavors of racism: good-intentioned, and bad-intentioned. Good-intentioned racism exists within (not saying everyone suffers from it) the "progressive" community, who are trying to improve the lot of minorities, with good intentions. If you actually happen to be technically racist, say, you actually believe x-colored people are genuinely not as competent - consciously you would explain this as being the result of lack of opportunity, but sub-consciously, you may believe (have somehow come to believe) there is a fundamental lesser competence. As a result, this person will always have a tendency to "take the side" of minorities in any external debate or internal thought process (forming an opinion on an issue). So when this type of person encounters someone who is genuinely not racist, at all (consciously and subconsciously), which many people on the right happen to be, they will get a "sense" (which typically comes from heuristic processes running in their subconscious) that the person is racist. And in a relative sense, from the perspective of the viewer, they are racist, in that they do not favor x-colored people. The typical person doesn't think about life in terms of absolutes and relatives. If you ask them to explain this knowledge, they will find they are unable to, but it is impossible for them to shake the feeling, because it is very strong and it not only feels real, it is real, to them - it is the remnants of evolution, which is a never ending process.
- RobertRoberts 7y ago
  I've found that good-intentioned anything that is otherwise considered "bad" isn't actually good-intentioned, it's just perceived that way and used as an excuse for ill-treatment of those they don't like. I have a friend that comes across as pretty racist when he talks politics, but is incredibly respectful of the same race when discussing working with them. I have a friend that moved to the south that openly told me "moving to the south will make you racist because white people are treated so poorly by minorities". My personal experience in extremely liberal areas in Oregon is that expressing any support of a religious idea would instantly garner personal attacks and outrage. Again, the idea that all religious ideas are oppressive, so it seems it was justified to attack me over it. This is a complicated issue, but I have found that discourse over this topic is nearly impossible to have in public with people that disagree with you.

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inflatableDodo 7y ago

>I mean, from a utilitarian point of view, you are still doing the correct action of not giving people grief because they’re a divorcee. You can have all the Utility Points you want. All I’m saying is that if you “forgive” something you don’t care about, you don’t earn any Virtue Points. >(by way of illustration: a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as many Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same amount, but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points) This is a great illustration of what I understand of Antisthenes' precept that Virtue is the only good.

wayoutthere 7y ago
I think that’s just another way of saying “rhetoric matters more than logic”. Greek philosophy was obsessed with this argument — which I think is still relevant today. I think the definition of Utility Points and Virtue Points map directly to “points acquired through logic” and “points acquired through rhetoric”. In a democracy, it’s obvious that rhetoric does matter. The masses will always be too uneducated (even if only contextually) to understand or care about the logic, thus rhetoric wins out. It was true for Socrates, and it’s true today. I think it’s pretty easy to see the same divisions in worldview present themselves around the world.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  >I think that’s just another way of saying “rhetoric matters more than logic”. Greek philosophy was obsessed with this argument — which I think is still relevant today. I think the definition of Utility Points and Virtue Points map directly to “points acquired through logic” and “points acquired through rhetoric”. I might note that in the example of; a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as many Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same amount, but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points, no rhetoric is required. edit - regarding; The masses will always be too uneducated (even if only contextually) to understand or care about the logic, thus rhetoric wins out. It was true for Socrates, and it’s true today. In Phaedrus, Socrates makes the point that knowledge of a subject beats rhetoric, by showing that to deceive with rhetoric consistently, requires knowledge of that which you are trying to misrepresent.

ZeroGravitas 7y ago

This is kind of like the "science is just another religion" argument. If you're going to believe in something awesome that you don't fully understand then believing in the one that gives you vaccines, self-driving cars and Xboxes seems like a good choice. Similarly, if you're going to irrationally hate another group then irrationally hating the people who irrationally hate other people seems like a much better choice than the alternative (possibly even a rational one), since those people are almost certainly causing you direct personal harm by voting for psychopaths and generally holding back progress across a million different areas, even if they don't specifically hate you irrationally, just most of your friends and possibly your children (but probably you as well if you don't join in with the irrational hate). When I follow the news recently I wonder about the pure-blooded Aryan Germans in the Nazi era who weren't complete idiots or psychopaths and how they felt as their country was flushed down the toilet of history by the others in their own "in group". They weren't directly targetted for who they were but I'm sure that was little comfort as they bled to death in Frozen Russia or had firebombs dropped on them by the British. (Edit: I also recently discovered the author thinks recycling is a conspiracy, which I guess moved him out of my in group as I now am far less charitable in how I read some of his stuff)

chillee 7y ago
Recycling is a conspiracy? Can I get a link to that?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
UnFleshedOne 7y ago
Could you point me to where he thinks recycling is a conspiracy? I wonder what his arguments are...
- godshatter 7y ago
  The parent poster might be referring to this article: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-to-90s-environmentalism/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-to-90s-e... Specifically section 5. I wouldn't characterize the author's view as "recycling is a conspiracy", though. More like "we're not going to be up to our necks in garbage anytime soon, like we thought we were in the 80's" which the author mentions has affected the priority society has given to recycling as a whole. If indeed this is what they were referring to.

lordleft 7y ago

This was a superb article. I was riveted from start to finish. I feel like I've gained some nuance into American political and cultural self-segregation.

quacked 7y ago
Check the "top posts" of the blog for more riveting reading.
RickS 7y ago
"All debates are bravery debates" from SSC is also brilliant. Really anything on there is going to be worth the read. Different vibe, but if you want another highly interesting take on political segregation, this is a favorite of mine: https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/

motohagiography 7y ago

This SSC piece has influenced a lot of my thinking. Christopher Hitchens wrote about "the narcissism of small differences," concept as well. There was another post on HN recently about a summary of Rene Girard, who extended this idea ("mimetic violence" in his style) with the inevitability of scapegoating neutral parties as an alternative to war. The rationalist community that SSC has represented may be walking right into that scapegoat role because they are viewed as compromised by the extreme right, and as a gateway drug by the extreme left. I would argue critics like figures associated with the so-called, "intellectual dark web," are being scapegoated by social media platforms for precisely the reasons Girard describes for picking scapegoats. There is no point in tracking down the worst extremists because they don't have enough political traction to represent "something being done," but popular, relatively moderate critics are sufficiently high profile figures to make an example of in the hope that it provides some defusing catharsis. I couldn't say how much predictive power that model has. Either de-platforming "works" because it delays sectarian conflict, or it delegitimizes discourse altogether and just accelerates it. We're going to find out anyway, and it appears we indeed live in interesting times.

pasabagi 7y ago
I think the problem most left-wing people would have with the rationalist thing is that left wing culture is a culture of reading, especially when it comes to philosophy. That's true from the most hardcore (for instance, YPG rebels in rojava are broadly united under Ocalan, who is first and foremost a thinker), to the most wishy-washy (most hippies will happily talk your ear off about Buddhism). So the problem with rationalism is kind of obvious in the name. Rationalism, if you read philosophy, already has a meaning. It means people who believe that rationality comes prior to experience. That's not the way the 'rationalists' are using it, and what's more, the way they are using it is kinda crude, even if we ignore the fact it displays a kind of illiteracy, or at least, a disinterest in the history of thought, to re-use a really common term in a totally unrelated way. That's also what comes across from the stuff they write. What I've read is clever, well written, well thought out, but also profoundly ignorant of the tradition of thinking about the topics they're interested in. You can't help but be crude if you just try a naive response, without first looking at how other people have addressed the problem at hand. So it comes across as the philosophical equivalent of that guy you met once who's convinced he has invented a new kind of maths without the number zero, because 'zero doesn't exist'. It might have been an interesting debate 2000 years ago, but things have moved on.

skrebbel 7y ago

Star Slate Codex is the only "armchair philosophy" site I read. I really love it. Every time I click a link to some of the author's inspiration sources, or read the comments even, I'm appalled at how complicated and unattractive the writing is there. The contrast to Alexander's writing is simply so stark. I simply find myself giving up after a few paragraphs. I recently read his enormous and lovely "Mediations on Moloch" essay, and was amazed by how hard I found it to follow the Nick Bostrom citations. I mean this is a famous bestseller philosopher. Is Bostrom's writing so bad, or is Alexander's writing simply so good? This article is one of my favourites. I love how, like many of his articles, he doesn't actually change my mind about anything (at least not to my knowledge), but he does help me express, verbally, an itch that I had about something for a long time.

quacked 7y ago
That feeling you talk about in your last sentence is one that's familiar to me as well, because I get it all the time when reading SSC, and we've got to be suspicious of it- that's exactly how people who read <religious literature, cult creeds, academic papers> that confirms their preexisting ideas feel.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  I'm aware of the trap (it's why I added "not to my knowledge"), but to be honest I'm not sure how to avoid it. Any tips?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Not every thing you read is meant to change your mind. I had this feeling with SSC too (more frequently in the past, in the Meditations on Moloch era, less so now), but I can clearly tell that I had pieces of those ideas developed on my own, and an SSC article only let me put them in a refined form. (Having been brought up in a pretty cultish religion, I'm now painfully aware of cultishness works.)
munificent 7y ago
> Is Bostrom's writing so bad, or is Alexander's writing simply so good? I think there are three things in play here. First is the simple observation that different writing styles appeal differently to different readers. Some find an informal style easier to absorb while others are turned off by its lack of rigor. But a deeper aspect is that, like everything, writing style is also a social signal. Many authors are put in the unfortunate position to choose between a writing style that identifies them as being in the right tribe (like "academic philosopher") or one that is easier to read by a greater fraction of readers. Given the incentive structure when your job is to be an academic philosopher, people rationally end up writing in a style that makes their material harder to read. Finally, with philosophy in particular, the field has such a long history of self-reflection on everything, including questions like "what does this word mean?" and "what does it mean for words to have meaning?" that it gets really hard to talk precisely about things and move the discussion forward without falling into traps and loops. So philosophers have had to bend English in weird ways to route around past ambiguities or pin down things that we are normally comfortable with being vague. It's the problem of jargon, but applied to the whole damn language.

alexandercrohde 7y ago

tl: dr; 1. Observes that groups can be more critical of groups that are similar to them than those that are starkly distant 2. Supports point 1 with the example that his liberal circle felt more comfortable reveling in the death of Margaret Thatcher than Bin Laden. And that Russel Brand claimed “Fox is worse than ISIS." 3. Observes an apparent self-criticism in liberalism as evidenced by criticism of America relative to Europe, criticism of whites (by whites), and maybe even blanket criticism of "intolerance." 4. Observes the hypocrisy of being intolerant of intolerance, and proposes that Americans criticisizing America are actually criticizing a different class of Americans, rather than being truly self-critical. 5. Notes that America seems to have 3 "tribes" that roughly align with politics "red" (loving football and such), "blue" (loving higher education and such), and "grey" (being bothered by war on drugs + NSA). 6. Concludes by acknowledging his own hypocrisy, in that his this piece targeting is alleged-in-group (Blue)'s intolerance wasn't truly self-critical. Observes he did the same form of non-self-criticism that he dislikes when Blue-tribe does.

komali2 7y ago

I really liked this perspective and I think I learned a lot about my own rejection of my heritage (it's "red group") and hometown friends and family. It's true, I hate'm more than ISIS. Pretty silly, but I think it's good that I'm chewing on this now. One thing I strongly disagree with: >When a friend of mine heard Eich got fired, she didn’t see anything wrong with it. “I can tolerate anything except intolerance,” she said. >“Intolerance” is starting to look like another one of those words like “white” and “American”. >“I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.” Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it? If Eich had gotten fired for arguing that healthcare should be a capitalist free market system in America, or that guns ownership should have no regulation, or some other red-group position that doesn't involve the oppression of others, I'd defend him. But, intolerance can't be tolerated. Paradox of tolerance, sure. Arguably, making me intolerant (ARGUABLY). There's a difference between conservative political views and intolerant political views. The fact that a shitload of red group values coincide with intolerance (or that a lot of intolerant people are red group) is sure unfortunate for red groupers that are tolerant, but that's life. (and no, blue group "intolerance of the intolerant" does not equate to "bad people on both sides" for me)

0815test 7y ago
Maybe Eich should have gotten fired for some other things he did cough cough js cough cough but what's "intolerant" about donating to a political organization which is pursuing its cause by entirely legitimate, non-violent, tolerant means? And what's "tolerant" about firing someone for donating to the _wrong_ sort of political organization? In fact, some politicized organizations, e.g. unions, do engage in violence every now and then, but firing someone for donating or contributing to them would still be beyond the pale. That's how strong the taboo against "you donated to a political organization I don't like, you're fired!" is.
- komali2 7y ago
  > donating to a political organization which is pursuing its cause by entirely legitimate, non-violent, tolerant means Restricting the ability of a class of people to marry based on their sexual orientation re: consenting adults is not tolerant. There is no "legitimate" way to restrict these human rights - gay people were not an "intolerant" class in this scenario, they were a persecuted minority. Therefore, Eich engaged in a form of intolerance that justified the blowback.

bittercynic 7y ago

I think having an outgroup is avoidable, but it requires ongoing vigilance, and an awareness that it is easy to slip into building your identity partly by deciding who to hate. If we're careful I do think it's possible to maintain an attitude that we're basically all in this together, and we may have significant disagreements on all kinds of things, but at the end of the day we're still all humans and worthy of kindness and respect.

dave_b 7y ago
If you care about some people more than others, then you have an ingroup and an outgroup. Would you really want to not care for your own family members any more than you care for a random person on the other side of the planet? That’s what striving for no outgroups entails. I think that’s a horribly misguided mindset. A better approach is to tolerate the outgroups and facilitate live and let live arrangements. Then you can focus more on appreciating your tribe and less on fighting the others.
- bittercynic 7y ago
  I was taking outgroup to mean a set of people that we find so abhorrent that they're unworthy of any level of consideration or respect, and that we even wished didn't exist. The term has a pretty specific meaning, and it goes beyond just a group other than our own.

pgcj_poster 7y ago

In this 7,340 word exposé on his discovery that "Democrats dislike Republicans," Scott determines that judging people for their beliefs and actions is basically the same thing as judging people for their sexuality or skin color. In passing, he also manages to assert that homophobia is genetic, which perhaps you should keep in mind next time he is conspicuously silent while his fans talk about the genetic basis of the racial IQ gap. "Hacker" "News" nods along, agreeing with Scott's view that the world is basically fine as it is and there's no point in doing anything to change it[1]. This of course has nothing to do with the fact that they are mostly highly-payed white guys getting a great deal out of the current system. Scott includes an epilogue in which he realizes that his argument is self-refuting. Unfortunately, he misses the part where this generalizes to his entire political philosophy. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-johnson-or-stein/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-j...

barberousse 7y ago

It's almost as if human communities are inherently driven to splinter, like a living cell

finder83 7y ago

This article was great and I resonated with it. I grew up in Texas, lived in New Jersey commuting into Manhattan for about ten years, then moved back. Anecdotally the differences do seem to be regional. I have friends on both sides of "red" and "blue" on Facebook and in person. I'd probably side best with "grey", but can run in both groups (standing out no matter where I go). What's interesting to me is the severe level of misunderstanding of each group to the other. I generally avoid media, don't have TV service, avoid Facebook, etc. But in some rare life instances it gets forced on me and I see what seems to be a media portrayal of what is just a characterization of the "other side", whichever side that may be. In my experience, both sides have good motives for the most part and truly care for and love other people. And in my experience, both sides think that the other side doesn't love people or have good intentions because they don't agree with X, while fully misunderstanding or dismissing the issue. It's almost like when you hear some distant relative who's overtly racist and you leave your nice peaceful sphere of influence and realize that there are people who really hate others on a regular basis. And of course, there are jerks on both sides and loving people on both sides. All of that said, I see the polarization growing. It's to a quite scary level and my wife and I have discussed that it wouldn't be surprising to see another civil war within our lifetime. Not that we expect it...but not that we don't expect it either. The confirmation bias is strong everywhere and it's only getting worse. There seems to be no real communication going on at a national level, only talking heads who don't really represent their side well. Any conversation I do see seems to fall back into political rhetoric spouting party lines, and never seem to get to the heart of people or issues. Media complicates this, parties complicate this, and people just wanting to fit in complicates this. I don't know a solution...but I do feel like there needs to be one soon.

kbenson 7y ago

> I need to remind myself that when they are bad people, they are merely Osama-level bad people instead of Thatcher-level bad people. Best line, right there. The full meaning requires calling back to the beginning of the essay, but the complexity of this is amazing, even on the off chance it was quick attempt at a humorous callback.