14 ms·

A Sick Giant

220 points by dsalzman 7y ago

Nition 7y ago
> I recently engaged in a fun, joint Psych Spectrum roller coaster with a stranger on an airplane. We were on the runway, getting ready to take off, and I was doing my typical “I know the flight attendant said to turn all phones onto airplane mode but the whole policy is really quite inane so I’m just gonna keep texting until we take off and I lose service” thing, and a woman next to me decided I was an asshole and loudly told on me to the flight attendant, who was busy and didn’t hear her. So I did the only reasonable thing—I stealthily turned my phone onto airplane mode, re-opened my texts, and very out in the open, started typing a long text. The woman—my new eternal arch-nemesis—took the bait. She saw me texting and again got the flight attendant’s attention, saying, “Excuse me but he’s still texting.” When the flight attendant asked me to turn airplane mode on, I showed her my phone and calmly explained that airplane mode has been on this whole time and I just like to get some texting out of the way during flights—texts that don’t send until I land and re-connect to the internet. The flight attendant said, “Oh then that’s totally fine—my apologies.” I replied, “that’s okay,” and did a little “it’s amazing how awful people can be right?” sigh. Satan watched the whole thing and then just sat there silently, hopefully very embarrassed. It was an unbelievably satisfying, triumphant moment. Not the main point of the article obviously but man, the writer makes himself sound like a bit of an asshole with this story. Didn't encourage me to listen to his other opinions. Edit: I kinda regret making this comment since I think it detracts from discussion of the article itself, which is very thorough and thoughtful in general. Maybe this is a meta Psych Spectrum commentary.
- qub1t 7y ago
  Literally the next paragraph he writes: “But that’s not what happened, because her aggressive tattletale move immediately threw my Primitive Mind into a rage, plummeting me down the Psych Spectrum. This banished my Higher Mind to the closet of my subconscious, allowing my Primitive Mind to come up with a genius-yet-psychotic plan for revenge. Which worked, and made my Primitive Mind feel deeply satisfied in a very not-grown-up way.” His entire point is that the average person acts like an asshole some of the time and like a kind person some of the time, and that it is incredibly easy to cherry-pick examples to paint someone in a bad (or good) light. Which is exactly what you have done here, proving his point!
  - Nition 7y ago
    I'd like to think most people would act more civilized initially in that situation. In fact the most civilized thing to do would have been to simply follow the rules in the first place, knowing that most passengers will believe they must be important.
    - capableweb 7y ago
      For sure, everyone likes to think themselves and most people act decently 100% of the time and never irrationally. But then sometimes, everyone acts irrationally, for one reason or another.
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      I think that's his point. The jerk can be him. It can be you. It can be me. We are all of us able to be like this, able to be controlled by the "primitive mind", able to engage in power games. And I differ a bit with your reasoning. Follow the rules because most passengers believe they must be important? Not because, say, the airline thinks they must be important?
    - Ygg2 7y ago
      Why? The rule is absolutely stupid, and pointless. It's about as meaningful to airplane security as TSA. In other words, none at all. I mean if rules say you need to report your fellow Uighurs, you should follow them because other will?
      - Nition 7y ago
        Because it's likely to cause discomfort and negative attention from the other passengers who will worry it could jeopardize their flight, and not using your phone for a little while isn't a big deal. It's not so much about following a rule or not, as just being socially responsible.
        darkerside 7y ago
        Pantomiming the lie isn't being socially responsible
- aerovistae 7y ago
  Does he? Not sure I agree.
  - Nition 7y ago
    I knew someone would disagree, but it just sounds really antisocial to me. Sure, the woman should have asked him to put his phone in airplane mode instead of going straight to the attendant, but he could have also replied with an "oh, sorry" and put his phone on airplane mode when told off about the rule he was in fact breaking.
    - funnybeam 7y ago
      And the author in fact says in the article that that is what he should have done. The whole thing is about how everyone can be anti social from time to time
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- funnybeam 7y ago
  Agreed. However that is the point he was making - in the next paragraph he goes on to explain that he was being “a bit of a cock about it” and why
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  I don't think you're wrong. This guy has made a career out of smug superiority plus badly drawn cartoons: https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-... Now he's apparently expanded his repertoire to Slatestarcodex-style "oh god, he's still typing..." effortposts.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
xal 7y ago
everyone on HN should read the entire series. It's a commitment, but there is no better writing happening right now.
jpm_sd 7y ago
TL;DR: political polarization in the USA has measurably increased, and this is bad for the country and its citizens. However, some data suggest that that two-thirds of Americans fall into what they call the "Exhausted Majority", people who are fed up with both major parties, and politics in general.
- snarf21 7y ago
  Especially since we live in an oligarchy but everyone still thinks in terms of red vs blue or us vs them. It is quite the trick to misdirect blame to people who are just like you.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    I find it ironic that you respond to a comment about political polarization increasing with a polarizing extreme of a comment...
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      There's nothing polarizing or extreme about noticing oligarchy. It is a prominent feature of contemporary life. [I was tempted to respond with something actually "polarizing extreme" and thus actually "ironic", but I've been warned...]
      - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        > There's nothing polarizing or extreme about noticing oligarchy. See, you and snarf21 keep assuming that we live in an oligarchy (perhaps snarf21 more strongly than you). You keep assuming that everyone can see that. Not only can't I see it, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. And I suspect that, if you polled HN, you'd find that about 80% of people believe that we do not actually live in an oligarchy (all numbers made up on the spot with zero statistical evidence). I refuse to allow you to just assume oligarchy as "everyone knows, everyone can see". You don't get to assume it; you have to prove it. The reason I said snarf21's remark was polarizing is because, in terms of conventional left-right divisions, the claim that we live in an oligarchy is almost exclusively a claim of the far left. (Disclaimer: When I claim that we do not, in fact, live in an oligarchy, I am not claiming that the rich don't have too much influence - just that they don't have enough power to qualify as an actual oligarchy.)
vearwhershuh 7y ago
This is a long and interesting article that, because it is attempting to preserve the system, ultimately misses the mark: My obsession over the past three years has been trying to figure out how our national immune system works, where it draws its strength from, and how we can get it working again. There is no national immune system because there is no nation. The US has never been a nation. It was a loose amalgamation of many nations on a huge continent under a commercial republic, then a warring set of nations, then an oligarchic industrial powerhouse that finally matured into a financial/military empire. All of the internal conflict we see benefits the ruling class and, therefore, will continue and, in all likelihood, get worse.
- jacinabox 7y ago
  Much to be made about Zizek's observation that there are false characterizations of the problems of a situation emerging from those same situations. Proposals are made to solve the problems that society faces, which are broadly in agreement with the systems that produce the perceived problems, so rather than retarding societies progress toward a certain predicted endpoint, it actually gets society to where it was already going, quicker.
bambataa 7y ago
I have enjoyed WaitButWhy articles in the past but with this new series the author seems to have spent a huge amount of time, energy and words coming up with ideas that aren't that new. I keep skimming through them waiting to find the big point.
- capableweb 7y ago
  I think to gain anything from long form articles, you need to read and consider what's being written, rather than skimming, looking for the holy grail.
  - wayoutthere 7y ago
    What the author says here is better said by a dozen others. I just had an overwhelming feeling of no shit sherlock when reading this -- yes, it's obvious our media is polarized, for obvious reasons. I'm going to guess his next chapter is about how money ruined the media and politics, which is "why you shouldn't write about these things" -- because the people with the loudest voice have the most to gain from the polarization of the media. Again, this is pretty obvious. The loudest voice becomes the only one you hear in an echo chamber. It was insightful the first time I read it from Socrates and Aristotle. But at this point it should be common knowledge for anyone interested in philosophy (literally: the study of knowledge).
    - mistermann 7y ago
      > What the author says here is better said by a dozen others. I just had an overwhelming feeling of no shit sherlock when reading this... As far as I can tell, other writings on the topic haven't had any noteworthy effect in rectifying the problem. Do have any insights on what we should do about the situation?
      - wayoutthere 7y ago
        That would require an assumption that there is something that can be done. I'm not saying we all throw up our hands and die; but any attempt to fix the situation just adds another voice to the echo chamber and doesn't really solve the problem. As far as I can tell from reading history, it's always been like this. We just haven't had a massive mutually-destructive war in anyone's lifetime to remind us why we should work together. Old soldiers are the best anti-war advocates there are. Because I'm pretty sure that's where all this is headed.
tehjoker 7y ago
The liberal worldview thinks that everything is basically ok and that the problem is that "norms" are being violated and bad information leads to pointless conflict. Liberals are wrong. There are fundemental structural problems with this country and the current psychosis is the result of neither political party addressing them while going war and profit crazy on the backs of the working people that slave and die without improving their position.
- CerealFounder 7y ago
  I hope you understand the wild hypocrisy of this comment given the article.
- tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
  The comment is not fitting to the article, but I wanted to respond to it anyways because I found it interesting and it's not something talked about here much, for obvious reasons. The problem is going to escape many on the left, including most people here as well, as many people here are mostly agnostic/atheistic/anti-faith and believe having faith is somehow anti-intellectual. The reality of the situation is the US was founded, both socially and politically on Judeo-Christian principles of morality, and the nuclear family and it is undeniable the evidence to support this in our laws and constitution. We have seen more upheaval and social change in the last 10-15 years than the previous 50 all in the name of "progress" (never mind it is those very people who subscribe to that "progress" that are leading the way in unhappiness, depression, low marriage rate, low birth rate, and suicide). There are positions now being held by major political frontrunners that are simply not compatible with any person of faith, or any sort of compromise with the opposite political party. There is simply no compromise to be had. The biggest elephant in the room is abortion. My two favorite writers on this subject are Caitlin Flanagan for a left-side perspective, and Alexandra Descantis for a right-side perspective. Both write very thoughtfully on this issue: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-democrats-purged-safe-legal-rare-from-the-party/2019/11/15/369af73c-01a4-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-democrats-purged-... https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2019/11/16/an_honest_abortion_debate_response_to_caitlin_flanagan_492615.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2019/11/16/an_honest_abort... Many people call America a Christian nation. I know this will get downvoted to hell here. I consider myself a well traveled man, and I will quote one famous professor I had the pleasure of listening to a lecture of that rings especially true to me: "The only country in the world that doesn't know America is a Christian nation is America."
neogodless 7y ago
These are very long articles, and this is long chapter number ten out of twelve. So it's hard to TL;DR with any respect to a series of articles that's trying to TL;DR sociology, politics and polarization over the last half century. The gist is that we have internal struggles between survival through power compared to thriving through critical thinking. This struggle is affected by the people around us; amplified because being part of a group pulls us in some ways towards survival instincts, and if we're lucky also pulls us towards critical thinking. As groups, we kind of have the same collective struggles as well. The latest article uses ideas and terminology from the previous nine articles that I've attempted to summarize in a tiny paragraph above. It goes into some depth explaining how our country has slid, politically, from critical thinking and having opinions slightly one way or the other off from center (a center that has shifted over time) to having opinions grouped much further apart. Aka polarization. And I'm not even done reading it. I enjoy it, and I'm optimistic models like this can help us, but I know that some people believe the models cut too many things out. I think that's problematic, because it is a very complex issue with a multitude of variables, and I think simplified models (and terminology) are necessary to explore the ultimate problem and potential solutions.
0x8BADF00D 7y ago
This article was highly disappointing to read. No mention of how Conservatism is effectively dead in the US (Donald “Bibi” Trump is basically a Democrat). No discussion of Federal Reserve and how it’s contributing to inflation. The author also seems to be a textbook narcissist given his overreaction to being told to shut his phone off on a plane. The only thing “Giant” about this article is this dude’s ego.
AlphaWeaver 7y ago
I've been reading Tim Urban's writing for a while. One of the most valuable things in his writing isn't originality, but delivery. He might not be coming up with original ideas (he regularly references the research he consulted to form his writing) but he _does_ do a great job of breaking down complex ideas into a form that's easily digestible. The first several chapters of this series (worth a read, even if it's the only thing you read this year) are devoted entirely to building the vocabulary needed to discuss these concepts. He works hard to help build a mental model for the reader, which makes his writing significantly more accessible to the average human.
- WillDaSilva 7y ago
  I think that breaking down the concepts is also helpful for Tim, as well as anyone who's trying to wrestle with complex ideas, in addition to the audience. Making sure your concepts are well-defined and clear is key to building them into something greater. So many flawed ideas are flawed because they're built off of a shaky foundation. Unfortunately analyzing those foundational ideas critically is difficult. I've found that writing essays helps force you into doing the hard work, but it's very time consuming.
  - henrik_w 7y ago
    I agree completely! Does wonders for your own understanding, but, like you said, takes a lot of time!
  - AlphaWeaver 7y ago
    I agree with this! I recently had the opportunity to write an outline / script for a TEDx talk, and I found it clarified my ideas _significantly._
- pgcj_poster 7y ago
  It seems to me like most of the topics Tim covers are not very complex at all. His most famous articles are on procrastination, which pretty much everyone already understands. The main value was in adding characters that people could use to visualize the problem. Likewise, all the ideas presented in this series are either obvious (eg. US politics are very polarized these days) or dubious (eg. The rational mind is politically centrist).
aazaa 7y ago
Had a quick look, and can't figure out what this post is about. The cartoon at the beginning makes it appear this is about the decline of the US. Then there's a bunch of meta background I don't care about. Then this: > 1) Seeing in 2D. Getting to know what I see as the core human struggle: the tension between our genes’ will to survive—a primal flame that burns brightly in everyone—and the human capacity to override that flame when it makes sense to do so, with rationality, self-awareness, and wisdom. ... Huh? Is this written by an AI? It's an honest question. I kept scanning looking for something - anything - concrete. Nothing. Apparently, the author has a following, but I can't understand why. I shouldn't need to read the last 8 chapters to figure this out. It's not my responsibility as a reader. It's the responsibility of the writer to ensure that when a reader jumps into a chapter, there's enough context and substance to figure out if it's worth reading.
- rictic 7y ago
  > I shouldn't need to read the last 8 chapters to figure this out. It's not my responsibility as a reader. It's the responsibility of the writer to ensure that when a reader jumps into a chapter, there's enough context and substance to figure out if it's worth reading. What an absurd thing to say. Would you say this about jumping into chapter 9 of a book? What about part 9 of a guide to learning a new programming language?
- mNovak 7y ago
  >> It's the responsibility of the writer to ensure that when a reader jumps into a chapter, there's enough context and substance to figure out if it's worth reading. On the one hand I see your point, I could open a random chapter of a physics textbook and likely get some context or motivation for what follows. On the other, opening a novel to a random chapter would have me totally lost. Did the author fail in their responsibility? This is chapter 10 of a series of long form posts, and the author explicitly asks you to start at the beginning. I don't think they're beholden to an expectation for a quick recap and justification.
- RivieraKid 7y ago
  I agree with you. I wish for a tl;dr summary for most articles on HN (and I'm tired of explaining why "you should always read the full article" is a stupid suggestion).
ken 7y ago
I skimmed this, and there's some good and interesting data and analysis here. The one aspect that seems to be missing, by its own admission, is how this fits in with the rest of the world. This is looking at the USA in a vacuum, which is not without merit, but countries no longer exist in a vacuum, especially the USA. As mentioned in one of the last "Fun and Procrastinatey" footnotes: > The U.S. Left has moved enough that it now matches Europe’s leftness. The U.S. right remains further right of most of the European Right. Viewed globally, according to this link, the US Democratic Party only crossed to the Left of the median party in the past 5 years. There are very few parties in the world as far Right as the US Republican Party. This article sounds like it's trying very hard to stay neutral and simply point out the increased polarization. Left and Right are Blue and Red, and are only compared to each other. It neglects to show full context: that US Left is actually Middle, and US Right is actually Far Right.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  The "US Left" is still voting for stupid wars. So, they could maybe move a bit further in whatever direction would change that...
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > It neglects to show full context: that US Left is actually Middle The US Left is Left, but the US has three big factions: a very large Right faction and smaller Center and Left factions, and he Democratic Party is an uneasy Center-and-Left coalition, where the Center faction has been dominant for the last couple decades but has lost some ground in the last few years to the resurgent Left.
  - ken 7y ago
    If that’s so, it’s an even bigger USA-specific fact that was completely omitted from this analysis.
robbrown451 7y ago
He makes plenty of good points, but completely fails to make mention of how plurality voting (also known as "first past the post") results in two dominant parties, rather than electing people who represent the preference of the median voter. This is known as Duverger's Law, and I would argue it is about 90% responsible for everything he speaks of. Voting systems that don't do this exist. Approval voting is one of the better ones (unfortunately, Ranked Choice voting doesn't do much at all to alleviate this). Approval voting has been enacted in Fargo, ND and is being considered for St. Louis, MO. The charts he included show that there actually is a reasonable middle ground and lots of voters are there. The problem is that candidates that are in the middle can't get elected. Imagine how different things would be if our election system tended to elect the first choice of the median voter.
- snowmaker 7y ago
  Thank you for introducing me to Duverger's Law! I had been looking for that concept for a long time but never knew how what it was called or how to search for it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rezendi 7y ago
  I'm a fan of single transferable voting, but the claim that FPTP is responsible for America's politics does not seem well borne out by the evidence. As the Wikipedia article on Duverger's Law notes: "In practice, most countries with plurality voting have more than two parties." The USA is very much an outlier here. Even if there remained only two _dominant_ parties, a significant third party like the NDP in Canada, or the Liberal Democrats in the UK, would reshape congressional politics very significantly.
  - bjelkeman-again 7y ago
    Without FPTP I think you would get more parties, and as you say these parties will influence the politics or introduce actual dialogue between parties in composing governments. Essentially all countries that I know of with a more proportional representation system have more parties and a less polarised political system.
mntmoss 7y ago
I basically disagree with this formulation on the grounds that it does not sufficiently respect political opinions as being reflective of self-interest; these opinions are often a result of not just consistent messaging but tangible incentive. It's much more straightforward to view the public politics and culture as a primarily top-down construction: "let's make these groups more upset at each other; let's make these other groups reconcile". This decision, made for cold reasons of accumulating power for oneself and immediate cronies by herding public opinion, subsequently filters down through the system via funding grants, access to information, and the occasional revolving-door or literal kickback. It gets amplified because job holders and job seekers spot the opportunities and threats awaiting them through a simple agreement or disagreement: they therefore start conducting themselves accordingly in "the way of the times", taking up the causes of the powerful with a bare minimum of overt messaging, hoping that they have backed a winning horse. This scramble happens across a broad range of industries, at many levels of the career ladder, and in seeking friends and relationships. There is a lot at stake in having "right opinions," in fact. The way in which the country seems to "come apart" or "come together" on issues is therefore most reflective of disagreements at the top, and produces a four-year cycle in a political-cultural feedback loop tied to electoral results: the politics become the culture, disseminate through media, and in turn inform the politics of the next cycle. The wedge that breaks the cycle, on an individual, issue-by-issue level, is good storytelling. Stories have the power to change self-narrative towards a direction independent of the structural narrative, and their fulfillment generally comes with some way of overcoming structural forces. But as for why there's the specific conflict we're experiencing today, it's pretty simple: it's a local vs global conflict; when you globalize, there are some "powerful losers" at the local level. And so the narrative has been a competition of these interests, proxied through various parties and institutions.
- scythe 7y ago
  I don't think that most political questions pit people's actual self-interests against each other. The biggest exception of course are some policies like affirmative action where the lines of self-interest are obvious. But for many other issues e.g. drug policy and climate change there are a great deal of factual misconceptions driving policy by causing people to think their self-interests lie other than where they are. Engaging the rational mind is usually considered important in dealing with this situation because it does better with facts.
RivieraKid 7y ago
I haven't read the series but it seems that political polarization is the topic. This is perhaps the biggest mystery I'm aware of in the world today, especially because it's not specific to America, I'm seeing the same trends in my country as well: - Extreme polarization along similar axes (conservative/liberal, urban/rural, age, ...). - Outright hatred of traditional political parties. - Rise of populist and non-traditional politicans. - Distrust of traditional media, rise of low quality media (fake news in the extreme). There's surprisingly little discussion and research about the cause of this. One interesting theory I recently came across is that the driver is the process of people moving from rural to urban areas. People who make such move are demographically distinct - more liberal for example. So over time this has cumulative effect and leads to increasingly distinct demographies.
- Enginerrrd 7y ago
  >(can I say more intelligent and ambitious?) Seriously? As someone in a rural area who is not particularly deficient in intelligence, who regularly keeps up with research and innovations in a variety of industries, who bootstrapped my own consulting business & hired two more employees this year, and who regularly deals with the mess created by a regulatory situation where policy makers and voters in CA forget there are a lot of very rural areas in this state and that a one-size-fits all approach is actually crippling to people outside of the bay area and LA: NO. You cannot say that. And even being so willing to jokingly suggest it is an enormous part of the rural/urban political divide. I'm frankly pretty incredulous to see you do that in a post noting this very issue. The reality is, and I understand that this seems like a hard pill to swallow for the urban elite, different people in different places have different needs and issues. That said, prior to your dig on rural people, I agree with everything else you said, and I find the trend deeply troubling.
  - RivieraKid 7y ago
    I apologize, I edited it out.
  - solveit 7y ago
    > Seriously? As someone in a rural area who is [...] NO. You cannot say that. Sure but you're just one person out of millions. We're trying to compare populations. And obviously the prior poster didn't mean that every rural person who moves to a city is more intelligent/ambitious than every person who stays, but you knew that already (note how you didn't object to more liberal, presumably because it doesn't carry a value judgment with it and also because it's clearly true in an important sense). I haven't seen any studies, but it is very plausible to me that people who up and leave tend to be more intelligent and ambitious, if only because it's a costly thing to do and income/wealth correlates with everything good.
alexfromapex 7y ago
Very impressive research
- alexfromapex 7y ago
  To whomever downvoted me, sorry for giving a compliment.
purplezooey 7y ago
I quit reading this dude when his stuff got too long. Paragraphs and paragraphs of rambling.
analognoise 7y ago
This comes across as meandering and juvenile.
jessaustin 7y ago
One imagines wise boomers carefully examining the intricately arranged series of "Media Matrices" and sagely nodding at the subtle points illuminated in each. "Yes, I've heard of this 'Onion'; really not a very useful source of news!" "I wonder why they didn't draw the firm who employ my favorite news personalities here in this 'North Star' area?" Do we really think the main problem in USA is that not enough people consume median journalism? This veers dangerously close to an assumption that our only real problem is that the "Fairness Doctrine" no longer protects us from Badthink. I'd propose a different idea. If there are actual problems of long standing, e.g. myriad interminable wars or shocking incarceration rates, they might owe their durability to the fact that few people really oppose them as hard as some other aspects of modern life are opposed. What sort of coverage would we predict of these problems from "the North Star"? Might that segment of the "matrix" elide such coverage altogether? When we do hear opposition to or even coverage of morewaralwaysmorewar or similar issues, and it comes from kooks like TheNation or ZeroHedge, does that reinforce the marginal importance of these issues, or perhaps does it call into question this matrix picture altogether? What was the point of the internet, if we all ought to watch the same news?
cjslep 7y ago
There's a branch of analyzing US politics through the lens of "primitive" and "civilized" brains that stems from Haidt's old ideas ("elephant and the rider"), which I still to this day do not find compelling. If part of my culture's routine every day is kicking a kitten and my society near-violently disagrees whether it should be 2 kittens per day or just 1, and instead of comparing cultural notes with the 10k+ other cultures of the world (to realize this isn't normal) I spend time talking about human brain hacks which preserves the hideous self-righteousness of my ego and my culture of kicking kittens, then I've effectively absolved myself from personal responsibility like a good Kantian ethicist and can keep kicking kittens without remorse (and, not hold anyone else accountable for kicking kittens) because "My selfish lack of critical thought is forgiven because my brain is just wired to be hacked that way, same for my peers and their brains". Take responsibility for how you use your brain and what you expose it to, and do the same to your peers. You are so much more than just a brain being hacked upon.
fallingfrog 7y ago
Very well written piece, lots of supporting data. However- it bears pointing out the focusing on norms and compromise and mutual understanding is a squarely liberal stance. Remember the John Stewart “Rally to Restore Sanity” which basically made the same points as the article. And unfortunately, Obama discovered that the political right was decidedly unwilling to reciprocate any sort of offers to compromise. So it seems that unless both sides are ready to back down, we are stuck where we are.
justincredible 7y ago
I liked the part about horror movies and the primitive mind. Why bother with logical consistency or exploring philosophical questions when the audience will rate your movie based on how jumpy it made them after watching it?
magwa101 7y ago
Urbanization of america, that's the trend. Stick figures make it all so simple and palatable :-/

220 points by dsalzman 7y ago

> I recently engaged in a fun, joint Psych Spectrum roller coaster with a stranger on an airplane. We were on the runway, getting ready to take off, and I was doing my typical “I know the flight attendant said to turn all phones onto airplane mode but the whole policy is really quite inane so I’m just gonna keep texting until we take off and I lose service” thing, and a woman next to me decided I was an asshole and loudly told on me to the flight attendant, who was busy and didn’t hear her. So I did the only reasonable thing—I stealthily turned my phone onto airplane mode, re-opened my texts, and very out in the open, started typing a long text. The woman—my new eternal arch-nemesis—took the bait. She saw me texting and again got the flight attendant’s attention, saying, “Excuse me but he’s still texting.” When the flight attendant asked me to turn airplane mode on, I showed her my phone and calmly explained that airplane mode has been on this whole time and I just like to get some texting out of the way during flights—texts that don’t send until I land and re-connect to the internet. The flight attendant said, “Oh then that’s totally fine—my apologies.” I replied, “that’s okay,” and did a little “it’s amazing how awful people can be right?” sigh. Satan watched the whole thing and then just sat there silently, hopefully very embarrassed. It was an unbelievably satisfying, triumphant moment. Not the main point of the article obviously but man, the writer makes himself sound like a bit of an asshole with this story. Didn't encourage me to listen to his other opinions. Edit: I kinda regret making this comment since I think it detracts from discussion of the article itself, which is very thorough and thoughtful in general. Maybe this is a meta Psych Spectrum commentary.

qub1t 7y ago
Literally the next paragraph he writes: “But that’s not what happened, because her aggressive tattletale move immediately threw my Primitive Mind into a rage, plummeting me down the Psych Spectrum. This banished my Higher Mind to the closet of my subconscious, allowing my Primitive Mind to come up with a genius-yet-psychotic plan for revenge. Which worked, and made my Primitive Mind feel deeply satisfied in a very not-grown-up way.” His entire point is that the average person acts like an asshole some of the time and like a kind person some of the time, and that it is incredibly easy to cherry-pick examples to paint someone in a bad (or good) light. Which is exactly what you have done here, proving his point!
- Nition 7y ago
  I'd like to think most people would act more civilized initially in that situation. In fact the most civilized thing to do would have been to simply follow the rules in the first place, knowing that most passengers will believe they must be important.
  - capableweb 7y ago
    For sure, everyone likes to think themselves and most people act decently 100% of the time and never irrationally. But then sometimes, everyone acts irrationally, for one reason or another.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    I think that's his point. The jerk can be him. It can be you. It can be me. We are all of us able to be like this, able to be controlled by the "primitive mind", able to engage in power games. And I differ a bit with your reasoning. Follow the rules because most passengers believe they must be important? Not because, say, the airline thinks they must be important?
  - Ygg2 7y ago
    Why? The rule is absolutely stupid, and pointless. It's about as meaningful to airplane security as TSA. In other words, none at all. I mean if rules say you need to report your fellow Uighurs, you should follow them because other will?
    - Nition 7y ago
      Because it's likely to cause discomfort and negative attention from the other passengers who will worry it could jeopardize their flight, and not using your phone for a little while isn't a big deal. It's not so much about following a rule or not, as just being socially responsible.
      - darkerside 7y ago
        Pantomiming the lie isn't being socially responsible
aerovistae 7y ago
Does he? Not sure I agree.
- Nition 7y ago
  I knew someone would disagree, but it just sounds really antisocial to me. Sure, the woman should have asked him to put his phone in airplane mode instead of going straight to the attendant, but he could have also replied with an "oh, sorry" and put his phone on airplane mode when told off about the rule he was in fact breaking.
  - funnybeam 7y ago
    And the author in fact says in the article that that is what he should have done. The whole thing is about how everyone can be anti social from time to time
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
funnybeam 7y ago
Agreed. However that is the point he was making - in the next paragraph he goes on to explain that he was being “a bit of a cock about it” and why
ForHackernews 7y ago
I don't think you're wrong. This guy has made a career out of smug superiority plus badly drawn cartoons: https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-... Now he's apparently expanded his repertoire to Slatestarcodex-style "oh god, he's still typing..." effortposts.
deleted 7y ago
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xal 7y ago

everyone on HN should read the entire series. It's a commitment, but there is no better writing happening right now.

jpm_sd 7y ago

TL;DR: political polarization in the USA has measurably increased, and this is bad for the country and its citizens. However, some data suggest that that two-thirds of Americans fall into what they call the "Exhausted Majority", people who are fed up with both major parties, and politics in general.

snarf21 7y ago
Especially since we live in an oligarchy but everyone still thinks in terms of red vs blue or us vs them. It is quite the trick to misdirect blame to people who are just like you.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  I find it ironic that you respond to a comment about political polarization increasing with a polarizing extreme of a comment...
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    There's nothing polarizing or extreme about noticing oligarchy. It is a prominent feature of contemporary life. [I was tempted to respond with something actually "polarizing extreme" and thus actually "ironic", but I've been warned...]
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      > There's nothing polarizing or extreme about noticing oligarchy. See, you and snarf21 keep assuming that we live in an oligarchy (perhaps snarf21 more strongly than you). You keep assuming that everyone can see that. Not only can't I see it, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. And I suspect that, if you polled HN, you'd find that about 80% of people believe that we do not actually live in an oligarchy (all numbers made up on the spot with zero statistical evidence). I refuse to allow you to just assume oligarchy as "everyone knows, everyone can see". You don't get to assume it; you have to prove it. The reason I said snarf21's remark was polarizing is because, in terms of conventional left-right divisions, the claim that we live in an oligarchy is almost exclusively a claim of the far left. (Disclaimer: When I claim that we do not, in fact, live in an oligarchy, I am not claiming that the rich don't have too much influence - just that they don't have enough power to qualify as an actual oligarchy.)

vearwhershuh 7y ago

This is a long and interesting article that, because it is attempting to preserve the system, ultimately misses the mark: My obsession over the past three years has been trying to figure out how our national immune system works, where it draws its strength from, and how we can get it working again. There is no national immune system because there is no nation. The US has never been a nation. It was a loose amalgamation of many nations on a huge continent under a commercial republic, then a warring set of nations, then an oligarchic industrial powerhouse that finally matured into a financial/military empire. All of the internal conflict we see benefits the ruling class and, therefore, will continue and, in all likelihood, get worse.

jacinabox 7y ago
Much to be made about Zizek's observation that there are false characterizations of the problems of a situation emerging from those same situations. Proposals are made to solve the problems that society faces, which are broadly in agreement with the systems that produce the perceived problems, so rather than retarding societies progress toward a certain predicted endpoint, it actually gets society to where it was already going, quicker.

bambataa 7y ago

I have enjoyed WaitButWhy articles in the past but with this new series the author seems to have spent a huge amount of time, energy and words coming up with ideas that aren't that new. I keep skimming through them waiting to find the big point.

capableweb 7y ago
I think to gain anything from long form articles, you need to read and consider what's being written, rather than skimming, looking for the holy grail.
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  What the author says here is better said by a dozen others. I just had an overwhelming feeling of no shit sherlock when reading this -- yes, it's obvious our media is polarized, for obvious reasons. I'm going to guess his next chapter is about how money ruined the media and politics, which is "why you shouldn't write about these things" -- because the people with the loudest voice have the most to gain from the polarization of the media. Again, this is pretty obvious. The loudest voice becomes the only one you hear in an echo chamber. It was insightful the first time I read it from Socrates and Aristotle. But at this point it should be common knowledge for anyone interested in philosophy (literally: the study of knowledge).
  - mistermann 7y ago
    > What the author says here is better said by a dozen others. I just had an overwhelming feeling of no shit sherlock when reading this... As far as I can tell, other writings on the topic haven't had any noteworthy effect in rectifying the problem. Do have any insights on what we should do about the situation?
    - wayoutthere 7y ago
      That would require an assumption that there is something that can be done. I'm not saying we all throw up our hands and die; but any attempt to fix the situation just adds another voice to the echo chamber and doesn't really solve the problem. As far as I can tell from reading history, it's always been like this. We just haven't had a massive mutually-destructive war in anyone's lifetime to remind us why we should work together. Old soldiers are the best anti-war advocates there are. Because I'm pretty sure that's where all this is headed.

tehjoker 7y ago

The liberal worldview thinks that everything is basically ok and that the problem is that "norms" are being violated and bad information leads to pointless conflict. Liberals are wrong. There are fundemental structural problems with this country and the current psychosis is the result of neither political party addressing them while going war and profit crazy on the backs of the working people that slave and die without improving their position.

CerealFounder 7y ago
I hope you understand the wild hypocrisy of this comment given the article.
tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
The comment is not fitting to the article, but I wanted to respond to it anyways because I found it interesting and it's not something talked about here much, for obvious reasons. The problem is going to escape many on the left, including most people here as well, as many people here are mostly agnostic/atheistic/anti-faith and believe having faith is somehow anti-intellectual. The reality of the situation is the US was founded, both socially and politically on Judeo-Christian principles of morality, and the nuclear family and it is undeniable the evidence to support this in our laws and constitution. We have seen more upheaval and social change in the last 10-15 years than the previous 50 all in the name of "progress" (never mind it is those very people who subscribe to that "progress" that are leading the way in unhappiness, depression, low marriage rate, low birth rate, and suicide). There are positions now being held by major political frontrunners that are simply not compatible with any person of faith, or any sort of compromise with the opposite political party. There is simply no compromise to be had. The biggest elephant in the room is abortion. My two favorite writers on this subject are Caitlin Flanagan for a left-side perspective, and Alexandra Descantis for a right-side perspective. Both write very thoughtfully on this issue: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-democrats-purged-safe-legal-rare-from-the-party/2019/11/15/369af73c-01a4-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-democrats-purged-... https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2019/11/16/an_honest_abortion_debate_response_to_caitlin_flanagan_492615.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2019/11/16/an_honest_abort... Many people call America a Christian nation. I know this will get downvoted to hell here. I consider myself a well traveled man, and I will quote one famous professor I had the pleasure of listening to a lecture of that rings especially true to me: "The only country in the world that doesn't know America is a Christian nation is America."

neogodless 7y ago

These are very long articles, and this is long chapter number ten out of twelve. So it's hard to TL;DR with any respect to a series of articles that's trying to TL;DR sociology, politics and polarization over the last half century. The gist is that we have internal struggles between survival through power compared to thriving through critical thinking. This struggle is affected by the people around us; amplified because being part of a group pulls us in some ways towards survival instincts, and if we're lucky also pulls us towards critical thinking. As groups, we kind of have the same collective struggles as well. The latest article uses ideas and terminology from the previous nine articles that I've attempted to summarize in a tiny paragraph above. It goes into some depth explaining how our country has slid, politically, from critical thinking and having opinions slightly one way or the other off from center (a center that has shifted over time) to having opinions grouped much further apart. Aka polarization. And I'm not even done reading it. I enjoy it, and I'm optimistic models like this can help us, but I know that some people believe the models cut too many things out. I think that's problematic, because it is a very complex issue with a multitude of variables, and I think simplified models (and terminology) are necessary to explore the ultimate problem and potential solutions.

0x8BADF00D 7y ago

This article was highly disappointing to read. No mention of how Conservatism is effectively dead in the US (Donald “Bibi” Trump is basically a Democrat). No discussion of Federal Reserve and how it’s contributing to inflation. The author also seems to be a textbook narcissist given his overreaction to being told to shut his phone off on a plane. The only thing “Giant” about this article is this dude’s ego.

AlphaWeaver 7y ago

I've been reading Tim Urban's writing for a while. One of the most valuable things in his writing isn't originality, but delivery. He might not be coming up with original ideas (he regularly references the research he consulted to form his writing) but he _does_ do a great job of breaking down complex ideas into a form that's easily digestible. The first several chapters of this series (worth a read, even if it's the only thing you read this year) are devoted entirely to building the vocabulary needed to discuss these concepts. He works hard to help build a mental model for the reader, which makes his writing significantly more accessible to the average human.

WillDaSilva 7y ago
I think that breaking down the concepts is also helpful for Tim, as well as anyone who's trying to wrestle with complex ideas, in addition to the audience. Making sure your concepts are well-defined and clear is key to building them into something greater. So many flawed ideas are flawed because they're built off of a shaky foundation. Unfortunately analyzing those foundational ideas critically is difficult. I've found that writing essays helps force you into doing the hard work, but it's very time consuming.
- henrik_w 7y ago
  I agree completely! Does wonders for your own understanding, but, like you said, takes a lot of time!
- AlphaWeaver 7y ago
  I agree with this! I recently had the opportunity to write an outline / script for a TEDx talk, and I found it clarified my ideas _significantly._
pgcj_poster 7y ago
It seems to me like most of the topics Tim covers are not very complex at all. His most famous articles are on procrastination, which pretty much everyone already understands. The main value was in adding characters that people could use to visualize the problem. Likewise, all the ideas presented in this series are either obvious (eg. US politics are very polarized these days) or dubious (eg. The rational mind is politically centrist).

aazaa 7y ago

Had a quick look, and can't figure out what this post is about. The cartoon at the beginning makes it appear this is about the decline of the US. Then there's a bunch of meta background I don't care about. Then this: > 1) Seeing in 2D. Getting to know what I see as the core human struggle: the tension between our genes’ will to survive—a primal flame that burns brightly in everyone—and the human capacity to override that flame when it makes sense to do so, with rationality, self-awareness, and wisdom. ... Huh? Is this written by an AI? It's an honest question. I kept scanning looking for something - anything - concrete. Nothing. Apparently, the author has a following, but I can't understand why. I shouldn't need to read the last 8 chapters to figure this out. It's not my responsibility as a reader. It's the responsibility of the writer to ensure that when a reader jumps into a chapter, there's enough context and substance to figure out if it's worth reading.

rictic 7y ago
> I shouldn't need to read the last 8 chapters to figure this out. It's not my responsibility as a reader. It's the responsibility of the writer to ensure that when a reader jumps into a chapter, there's enough context and substance to figure out if it's worth reading. What an absurd thing to say. Would you say this about jumping into chapter 9 of a book? What about part 9 of a guide to learning a new programming language?
mNovak 7y ago
>> It's the responsibility of the writer to ensure that when a reader jumps into a chapter, there's enough context and substance to figure out if it's worth reading. On the one hand I see your point, I could open a random chapter of a physics textbook and likely get some context or motivation for what follows. On the other, opening a novel to a random chapter would have me totally lost. Did the author fail in their responsibility? This is chapter 10 of a series of long form posts, and the author explicitly asks you to start at the beginning. I don't think they're beholden to an expectation for a quick recap and justification.
RivieraKid 7y ago
I agree with you. I wish for a tl;dr summary for most articles on HN (and I'm tired of explaining why "you should always read the full article" is a stupid suggestion).

ken 7y ago

I skimmed this, and there's some good and interesting data and analysis here. The one aspect that seems to be missing, by its own admission, is how this fits in with the rest of the world. This is looking at the USA in a vacuum, which is not without merit, but countries no longer exist in a vacuum, especially the USA. As mentioned in one of the last "Fun and Procrastinatey" footnotes: > The U.S. Left has moved enough that it now matches Europe’s leftness. The U.S. right remains further right of most of the European Right. Viewed globally, according to this link, the US Democratic Party only crossed to the Left of the median party in the past 5 years. There are very few parties in the world as far Right as the US Republican Party. This article sounds like it's trying very hard to stay neutral and simply point out the increased polarization. Left and Right are Blue and Red, and are only compared to each other. It neglects to show full context: that US Left is actually Middle, and US Right is actually Far Right.

jessaustin 7y ago
The "US Left" is still voting for stupid wars. So, they could maybe move a bit further in whatever direction would change that...
dragonwriter 7y ago
> It neglects to show full context: that US Left is actually Middle The US Left is Left, but the US has three big factions: a very large Right faction and smaller Center and Left factions, and he Democratic Party is an uneasy Center-and-Left coalition, where the Center faction has been dominant for the last couple decades but has lost some ground in the last few years to the resurgent Left.
- ken 7y ago
  If that’s so, it’s an even bigger USA-specific fact that was completely omitted from this analysis.

robbrown451 7y ago

He makes plenty of good points, but completely fails to make mention of how plurality voting (also known as "first past the post") results in two dominant parties, rather than electing people who represent the preference of the median voter. This is known as Duverger's Law, and I would argue it is about 90% responsible for everything he speaks of. Voting systems that don't do this exist. Approval voting is one of the better ones (unfortunately, Ranked Choice voting doesn't do much at all to alleviate this). Approval voting has been enacted in Fargo, ND and is being considered for St. Louis, MO. The charts he included show that there actually is a reasonable middle ground and lots of voters are there. The problem is that candidates that are in the middle can't get elected. Imagine how different things would be if our election system tended to elect the first choice of the median voter.

snowmaker 7y ago
Thank you for introducing me to Duverger's Law! I had been looking for that concept for a long time but never knew how what it was called or how to search for it.
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rezendi 7y ago
I'm a fan of single transferable voting, but the claim that FPTP is responsible for America's politics does not seem well borne out by the evidence. As the Wikipedia article on Duverger's Law notes: "In practice, most countries with plurality voting have more than two parties." The USA is very much an outlier here. Even if there remained only two _dominant_ parties, a significant third party like the NDP in Canada, or the Liberal Democrats in the UK, would reshape congressional politics very significantly.
- bjelkeman-again 7y ago
  Without FPTP I think you would get more parties, and as you say these parties will influence the politics or introduce actual dialogue between parties in composing governments. Essentially all countries that I know of with a more proportional representation system have more parties and a less polarised political system.

mntmoss 7y ago

I basically disagree with this formulation on the grounds that it does not sufficiently respect political opinions as being reflective of self-interest; these opinions are often a result of not just consistent messaging but tangible incentive. It's much more straightforward to view the public politics and culture as a primarily top-down construction: "let's make these groups more upset at each other; let's make these other groups reconcile". This decision, made for cold reasons of accumulating power for oneself and immediate cronies by herding public opinion, subsequently filters down through the system via funding grants, access to information, and the occasional revolving-door or literal kickback. It gets amplified because job holders and job seekers spot the opportunities and threats awaiting them through a simple agreement or disagreement: they therefore start conducting themselves accordingly in "the way of the times", taking up the causes of the powerful with a bare minimum of overt messaging, hoping that they have backed a winning horse. This scramble happens across a broad range of industries, at many levels of the career ladder, and in seeking friends and relationships. There is a lot at stake in having "right opinions," in fact. The way in which the country seems to "come apart" or "come together" on issues is therefore most reflective of disagreements at the top, and produces a four-year cycle in a political-cultural feedback loop tied to electoral results: the politics become the culture, disseminate through media, and in turn inform the politics of the next cycle. The wedge that breaks the cycle, on an individual, issue-by-issue level, is good storytelling. Stories have the power to change self-narrative towards a direction independent of the structural narrative, and their fulfillment generally comes with some way of overcoming structural forces. But as for why there's the specific conflict we're experiencing today, it's pretty simple: it's a local vs global conflict; when you globalize, there are some "powerful losers" at the local level. And so the narrative has been a competition of these interests, proxied through various parties and institutions.

scythe 7y ago
I don't think that most political questions pit people's actual self-interests against each other. The biggest exception of course are some policies like affirmative action where the lines of self-interest are obvious. But for many other issues e.g. drug policy and climate change there are a great deal of factual misconceptions driving policy by causing people to think their self-interests lie other than where they are. Engaging the rational mind is usually considered important in dealing with this situation because it does better with facts.

RivieraKid 7y ago

I haven't read the series but it seems that political polarization is the topic. This is perhaps the biggest mystery I'm aware of in the world today, especially because it's not specific to America, I'm seeing the same trends in my country as well: - Extreme polarization along similar axes (conservative/liberal, urban/rural, age, ...). - Outright hatred of traditional political parties. - Rise of populist and non-traditional politicans. - Distrust of traditional media, rise of low quality media (fake news in the extreme). There's surprisingly little discussion and research about the cause of this. One interesting theory I recently came across is that the driver is the process of people moving from rural to urban areas. People who make such move are demographically distinct - more liberal for example. So over time this has cumulative effect and leads to increasingly distinct demographies.

Enginerrrd 7y ago
>(can I say more intelligent and ambitious?) Seriously? As someone in a rural area who is not particularly deficient in intelligence, who regularly keeps up with research and innovations in a variety of industries, who bootstrapped my own consulting business & hired two more employees this year, and who regularly deals with the mess created by a regulatory situation where policy makers and voters in CA forget there are a lot of very rural areas in this state and that a one-size-fits all approach is actually crippling to people outside of the bay area and LA: NO. You cannot say that. And even being so willing to jokingly suggest it is an enormous part of the rural/urban political divide. I'm frankly pretty incredulous to see you do that in a post noting this very issue. The reality is, and I understand that this seems like a hard pill to swallow for the urban elite, different people in different places have different needs and issues. That said, prior to your dig on rural people, I agree with everything else you said, and I find the trend deeply troubling.
- RivieraKid 7y ago
  I apologize, I edited it out.
- solveit 7y ago
  > Seriously? As someone in a rural area who is [...] NO. You cannot say that. Sure but you're just one person out of millions. We're trying to compare populations. And obviously the prior poster didn't mean that every rural person who moves to a city is more intelligent/ambitious than every person who stays, but you knew that already (note how you didn't object to more liberal, presumably because it doesn't carry a value judgment with it and also because it's clearly true in an important sense). I haven't seen any studies, but it is very plausible to me that people who up and leave tend to be more intelligent and ambitious, if only because it's a costly thing to do and income/wealth correlates with everything good.

alexfromapex 7y ago

Very impressive research

alexfromapex 7y ago
To whomever downvoted me, sorry for giving a compliment.

purplezooey 7y ago

I quit reading this dude when his stuff got too long. Paragraphs and paragraphs of rambling.

analognoise 7y ago

This comes across as meandering and juvenile.

jessaustin 7y ago

One imagines wise boomers carefully examining the intricately arranged series of "Media Matrices" and sagely nodding at the subtle points illuminated in each. "Yes, I've heard of this 'Onion'; really not a very useful source of news!" "I wonder why they didn't draw the firm who employ my favorite news personalities here in this 'North Star' area?" Do we really think the main problem in USA is that not enough people consume median journalism? This veers dangerously close to an assumption that our only real problem is that the "Fairness Doctrine" no longer protects us from Badthink. I'd propose a different idea. If there are actual problems of long standing, e.g. myriad interminable wars or shocking incarceration rates, they might owe their durability to the fact that few people really oppose them as hard as some other aspects of modern life are opposed. What sort of coverage would we predict of these problems from "the North Star"? Might that segment of the "matrix" elide such coverage altogether? When we do hear opposition to or even coverage of morewaralwaysmorewar or similar issues, and it comes from kooks like TheNation or ZeroHedge, does that reinforce the marginal importance of these issues, or perhaps does it call into question this matrix picture altogether? What was the point of the internet, if we all ought to watch the same news?

cjslep 7y ago

There's a branch of analyzing US politics through the lens of "primitive" and "civilized" brains that stems from Haidt's old ideas ("elephant and the rider"), which I still to this day do not find compelling. If part of my culture's routine every day is kicking a kitten and my society near-violently disagrees whether it should be 2 kittens per day or just 1, and instead of comparing cultural notes with the 10k+ other cultures of the world (to realize this isn't normal) I spend time talking about human brain hacks which preserves the hideous self-righteousness of my ego and my culture of kicking kittens, then I've effectively absolved myself from personal responsibility like a good Kantian ethicist and can keep kicking kittens without remorse (and, not hold anyone else accountable for kicking kittens) because "My selfish lack of critical thought is forgiven because my brain is just wired to be hacked that way, same for my peers and their brains". Take responsibility for how you use your brain and what you expose it to, and do the same to your peers. You are so much more than just a brain being hacked upon.

fallingfrog 7y ago

Very well written piece, lots of supporting data. However- it bears pointing out the focusing on norms and compromise and mutual understanding is a squarely liberal stance. Remember the John Stewart “Rally to Restore Sanity” which basically made the same points as the article. And unfortunately, Obama discovered that the political right was decidedly unwilling to reciprocate any sort of offers to compromise. So it seems that unless both sides are ready to back down, we are stuck where we are.

justincredible 7y ago

I liked the part about horror movies and the primitive mind. Why bother with logical consistency or exploring philosophical questions when the audience will rate your movie based on how jumpy it made them after watching it?

magwa101 7y ago

Urbanization of america, that's the trend. Stick figures make it all so simple and palatable :-/