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Granfalloon technique
- leoc 7y agoThe idea of the granfaloon sounds like Benedict Anderson's concept of 'imagined communities': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_community
- jnbiche 7y agoThis phenomenon is root of all evil in modern day America. People identify with political parties as though they are sports teams. Team R or Team D. If you're one of such people (and there seem to be relatively few of them on HN), please consider where this will lead the country.
- smitty1e 7y ago"All" seems a bit inclusive. From a team building and gamification perspective, granfalloons (while perhaps as objectively specious as TFA) points out, can help to focus group activities. Whether the direction of that focus be good or evil is another discussion. But if there is a natural disaster, and some granfalloon relief agency shows up to help you out, will you be quick to denounce it?
- crispinb 7y agoOne of the few things we can be certain of with complex systems is that effects are not consequences of single causes. The US's political tribalism is clearly a negative for the nation, but is a consequence of history, not the signal flaw in a machine. It is a particularly vicious aspect of the system, I'd agree, as it tends to feed back and make the whole system increasingly dysfunctional. The US looks very much like a nation in precipitous decline. Its hapless response to the current crisis may be the coup de grace.
- kerkeslager 7y agoMore generally, all of identity politics is based around this.
- jnbiche 7y agoI agree.
- GCSAQCMIYI 7y agoWhy do you believe that is not a rational way to act in this environment?
- kerkeslager 7y agoPaul Graham explains it well: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
- GCSAQCMIYI 7y agoHe suggests keeping your identity small. There is only so much you can do on that front. Some potential government policies are beneficial for people with certain characteristics, including immutable ones or ones that are difficult to change, and harmful for other people. Why would it not be rational for people to align politically along the lines of those characteristics to push for policies that benefit them on that basis, especially if they believe people who don't have those characteristics are aligning to push against them?
- crispinb 7y agoThere's nothing inherently 'rational' about self-interest (which is entirely orthogonal to the justification or lack thereof for the latter). It has literally never occurred to me to consider whether party policies are good for me personally when assessing who to vote for. This is not irrational behaviour on my part (I'm well aware of my values and the relationship, as far as I'm able to calculate it, between those values and proposed policies). The conflation of self-interest and rationality is just ideology (often forcefully conveyed by evangelists for the most salient superstition of our age, ie. economics).
- GCSAQCMIYI 7y agoI certainly agree that everyone's values are ultimately arbitrary, but that's pretty far outside of this discussion. Most people are self-interested, and the person I originally replied to was talking about normal people. "This phenomenon is root of all evil in modern day America. People identify with political parties as though they are sports teams."
- lukifer 7y agoPG's "Keep Your Identity Small" should be required reading in high school / college: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html Unfortunately, humans are to some extent intrinsically tribal (when Haidt calls us "90% ape, 10% beehive", I think he's being exceptionally generous). This is so pervasive in our nature, it tends to be unconscious: if I consider an existential crisis for the opposing political party to win, I'll likely filter my thinking to that end, minimizing faults and maximizing virtues in my party, and doing the opposite with my opponents. As they do the same, it creates a race to the bottom, and all norms and decorum and fairness go out the window, in pursuit of victory and raw power. Jason Brennan makes a compelling case [0] that democracy makes this problem worse. A lot can be chalked up to our electoral process being an utter failure of implementing democracy, from campaign finance corruption to First-Past-The-Post (to say nothing of more advanced ideas like holacracy, liquid democracy, public choice econ, etc); nonetheless, there's a case that the tribal dynamics inherent to politics creates perverse incentives for truth-seeking and sense-making. I'm starting to think that democracy is only the second-worst system (except for all the others), and we'd get better results with a completely random lottery [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Democracy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
- renewiltord 7y agoNo, it is a beautiful and powerful thing. Everyone claims to not obey it but the force of tribalism is strong. There is no enlightened man above it. All are subject to it. The best use it well. The average deny it. The worst are used well by it. In its simplest form it lifts you up on a dreary Thursday as you get off the train, walk to the stadium gates, and yell a chant that is picked up by others who know nothing of you but that you know the chant and that you wear the colours. Such power in that unity. In its most powerful form it motivates people to form great civil change. You are a civil rights activist, not merely a person who believes in the inherent rights of all people. You are a gay rights activist, or a climate change activist, or a revolutionary. Learning to harness that mindhack of unity was so fulfilling to me. Yell the right words and you have sixty thousand at your back yelling them with you. You feel gigantic, not like a single man, but like a giant ocean swell. And it is such a trick. I do not share that much with the coal miner and the bus driver and the man who bought a flat in Highbury. But we share this. And over this we can talk. And through the talking we come to share more.
- jnbiche 7y ago< Everyone claims to not obey it but the force of tribalism is strong. There is no enlightened man above it. Oh, I think that as a American who disdains both major political parties, I can claim that honor. > The best use it well. Sure, modern politicians are great at that. > The worst are used well by it. Yep. Sounds about right. By the way, it's going to destroy your country, too. Surprised that's not obvious. Civil wars suck, I've worked in the aftermath of two. Likely will not go that far in the UK, likely just a breakup and some civil unrest, but there is that risk with any breakup. In the US, I'd say there's a much higher chance. > You feel gigantic, not like a single man, but like a giant ocean swell. It's always amazing to me how different individuals can be. The idea of gaining power and feeling great because I'm shouting with thousands of other people gives me the willies. Sure, protests are necessary, but it's not a feeling we should relish. It means our government is failing. And more often, when large groups of people gather to express emotion, it's for far more malevolent ends.
- renewiltord 7y ago
- fallingfrog 7y agoDon’t forget that the primary reason to divide people up into groups based on superficial characteristics is to prevent them from forming groups based on their real shared economic interests.
- bmn__ 7y ago> please consider where this will lead the country. Procopius of Caesarea wrote in History of the Wars in 545 CE: In every city the population has been divided for a long time past into the Blue and the Green factions [...] And they fight against their opponents knowing not for what end they imperil themselves [...] So there grows up in them against their fellow men a hostility which has no cause, and at no time does it cease or disappear, for it gives place neither to the ties of marriage nor of relationship nor of friendship, and the case is the same even though those who differ with respect to these colours be brothers or any other kin. Spoiler: Blue and Green were indeed sports teams.
- lukifer 7y agoI'm reminded of the experiments where camp kids were randomly given blue and red shirts, and it took them less than an hour to form in-group/out-group dynamics and tribal loyalty based on shirts alone. The thing is, from a game-theoretic standpoint, tribal loyalty is a Schelling focus [0]: your calculation about what alliance(s) to invest in, are inherently influenced by your calculations of the calculations of others. What defines the tribal boundary can be utterly non-sensical (from the objective viewpoint of a proverbial Martian), yet still be a rational choice from the perspective of each individual participant. I'm also reminded of the Netflix b-movie "Circle" [1]: a group of fifty people are forced to vote every two minutes on which of them will be killed (if they refuse, someone is killed at random). At first, they decide to buy time to think, by starting with older people who are closer to the grave; but the older crowd bands together in self-defense, creating a two-party system of old-vs-young. As the headcount shrinks, new rifts and coalitions emerge; some organic, some arbitrary. It's a brilliant thought experiment despite being terrible as a film. :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_(2015_film)
- rirjdjkagsi 7y agoFrom the perspextive of evolutionary game theory, right? I don't remember exactly what was Schelling's approach, but "game theory", without qualifiers, usually refers to games between given rational players as opposed to say populations with predetermined strategies.
- perl4ever 7y agoI am not sure I believe in the implicit premise. Why would, in effect, everyone vote to avoid the randomness? That isn't the way society works in practice, is it?
- lukifer 7y agoI think the idea is similar to statistical sampling, or Nielsen ratings: to have a branch of government which is, on average, mathematically representative of the public, in a way that no electoral process could ever hope to accomplish. The specific proposal I would make for the US is what I call the People's Congress, replacing the House of Representatives, leaving the Senate and executive roles as-is (other than unrelated electoral reforms like RCV). As a check against abuse of power, or nominating someone unfit, every randomly-selected candidate can be voted out, albeit requiring a very high margin (maybe 66%: "the People's Veto"). Note that this position would be a mandatory form of public service, not unlike jury duty. Terms would be two years, and representatives would cycle in and out on a regular, rolling basis. A realistic proposal? Not even slightly. In the current climate we can barely get basics like mail-in voting right. (Maybe it's something that be done as proof-of-concept at the scale of an eccentric municipality?) Nonetheless: my hunch is that having a branch of government, possibly even the entire legislative body, being statistically comprised of We The People in a way that is impossible to game, would generally be less corrupt, and more responsive to the needs and preferences of constituents.
- asldihgiyug 7y agoMy granfalloon is anyone who knows the meaning of granfalloon.
- downerending 7y agoI thought it was the name of a bar.
- lukifer 7y agoI love these sorts of "conceptual onomatopoeias" :) - "word" - every Audible book begins with: "this is audible" - "shibboleth" works perfectly well as a shibboleth
- gowld 7y agoThe tent you are looking for is "self-referential". Is the word "non-self-referential" self-referential? Is it non-self-referential? > shibboleth" works perfectly well as a shibboleth You know why that is, right? The concept is named after the use of the word.
- lukifer 7y agoThe category I'm thinking of is a subset of self-referential; a concept which is encapsulated in its expression, where it is an example of itself: "This is a sentence" or "is sentence fragment" or `<html>`. It's an admittedly fuzzy/arbitrary category that I made up. :) > Is it non-self-referential? Haha, nice. I also like "non-descript". > The concept is named after the use of the word. Cool, TIL :)
- throwaway5752 7y agoNo, that is actually a perfectly reasonable karass.
- kerkeslager 7y agoAn implication of this is that labeling groups you disagree with may actually serve to strengthen their commitment to that disagreement. I.e. calling someone a climate change denier or an anti-vaxxer, groups them with other people with the same misconceptions, and strengthens their commitment to the ideas because it's now a commitment to their group.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- throwaway5752 7y agoHoosiers! (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3789074-hazel-obsession-with-hoosiers-around-the-world-was-a-textbook https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3789074-hazel-obsession-wit...) Scroll up in the linked Wikipedia submission, and read Cat's Cradle if you haven't. This is nothing new - Cat's Cradle was published in 1963 - just looked back to Seuss and star-bellied Sneetches. It's simply become magnified w/ self-reinforcing social platform dynamics.
- jdkee 7y ago"They had found a can of white paint, and on the front doors of the cab Frank had painted white stars, and on the roof he had painted the letters of a granfalloon: U.S.A." – Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle The COVID-19 pandemic will test the assertion that the USA is a granfalloon. And presage our ability to tackle climate change.
- rirjdjkagsi 7y agoI think Ad Hominems are sometimes a trivial instance of this. The idea being that you have said this or that which apparently contradicts what you've just said and, basically, you wouldn't want to disagree with yourself, do you? (the Granfalloon). Which is infuriating on multiple levels. One is that the person sometimes shifts from asking a question (but then why did you say...?) to an accusation (but you've said...!), as if they knew your thoughts better than you. But the other is that, sometimes, I do actually change my mind and, as a matter of fact, I don't judge others for doing so. The other instance would be those debates where the only bipartisan position is that that non-partisanship is not an option. As if people couldn't find both sides stupid and think if either side got their way, they would get us all killed, because they're idiots.
- lainga 7y agoIs the group of all humans a granfalloon?
- happytoexplain 7y agoIt will be the moment we make contact with aliens.
- fallingfrog 7y agoManagement and politicians are notorious for doing this; if there is threat of a union forming, historically the management’s first move is to sow discord between immigrants and natives, French and Irish, or black and white- anything to keep people from forming groups based on actual shared economic interests. 90% of the acrimony in politics is just this phenomenon writ large. Urban vs rural, native vs immigrant, it’s just a control mechanism.
- iron0013 7y agoI get how Hoosiers are a granfalloon (the borders of the state of Indiana being essentially arbitrary), but how are groups defined by a shared philosophy and belief system like the Communist party a granfalloon? Like, what are some examples of groups that everyone would agree are definitely a “karass” rather than a “granfalloon”?