9 ms·

More and more I think a good answer for this is something along the lines of "...a shared basic reality of facts." Especially lately in the US it seems like the

by rtkwe 6y ago

More and more I think a good answer for this is something along the lines of "...a shared basic reality of facts." Especially lately in the US it seems like there's a schism in the basic understanding of what's happening with stuff like Coronavirus, effects of systematic racism past and present, climate change, etc.

glial 6y ago
Or at least, an agreement in the value of good faith discussion in pursuit of truth and mutual progress.
- jagged-chisel 6y ago
  How many times have I heard from folks claiming "conservatism" that they don't want progress, in any form-- individual, mutual, societal...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - smegcicle 6y ago
    opposite extreme: "'progress'- whatever the cost"... for some reason referred to as 'woke'? (still need to work on understanding that angle) "replacing what works with what sounds good" --T.Sowell offtopic rant, but on the subject of politics; to me it seems underhanded to pursue experimental federal programs eg for healthcare- why not demonstrate it works in a few test states.. wouldn't california love to pass something like that? if only there were a way to pass the buck to the federal government for the homeless... not that the 'red team' political machine hasn't been pulling on the middle as well, claiming to be 'good guys' while corrupting for their own aims; what grinds my gears is either side claiming any kind of moral highground without referencing empirical positive impact
    - rtkwe 6y ago
      > why not demonstrate it works in a few test states It's tough to do some things at the state level because there's less money at the state level vs the federal level. It's a lot easier for a business to move from a state to avoid taxes meant to pay for healthcare by rerouting fund from the private market to the public market than it is to leave the US entirely. The federal government gets it's taxes first from income taxes then payroll taxes, I checked a couple states and most are income then sales/use tax which is a big difference. Not being able to reroute money from employer based systems into the single payer system is a huge hole in any state level attempt at single payer. Also just having more people means a federal level system will have more bargaining power than even the largest states.
      - rtkwe 6y ago
        As for the etymology of woke I'm no linguist but it seems to flow pretty clearly from the idea of being awake to a problem. The particular slang is just from AAVE, not sure it's possible to trace where the different conjugation started from. > "I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I'm gon' stay woke. And I'm gon help him wake up other black folk." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
      - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
        > there's less money at the state level vs the federal level So if anything, it means to me that we need to work on increasing roles of individual states and decreasing federal powers.
        rtkwe 6y ago
        That's more of a question of where you come down on the idea of federalism. Personally I think way more stuff makes sense to have created and funded uniformly across the country than fragmented. The biggest budget sinks at the federal level of military and entitlement programs like social security make sense to be there. The military for obvious reasons makes more sense to have funded from there and then social security et al as well because people often move from where they were working to where they retire so trying to fund that at the state level get's a bit dicey for moving the money to where the old people actually are.
- AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  Alas, claiming that your opponent discusses things in bad faith is often the simplest way to get the upper hand.
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    It's easier to believe when from your understanding of the world the other side is blatantly lying and misrepresenting things. It forms a bit of a positive feedback loop where seeing bad intentions leads you to being less likely to give slack so you see more bad intentions. From the left looking rightward at Fox News and many local stations (increasingly owned by and forced to run identical scripts from Sinclair Broadcasting) [0] at the response and the response to the response to coronavirus for example it's hard to ascribe that to just a different interpretation of facts. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxtkvG1JnPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxtkvG1JnPk
    - bobthechef 6y ago
      You do realize that the "other side" has the same EXACT perception of you, right? It would be nice if people were a bit more skeptical of their preferred news outlets and opinion makers. What I see instead is the continuing existence of the same bubble that led to the shock and surprise at Trump's election. An absolute refusal or inability to consider other views, an inability to interpret events in historical context and with a healthy dose of common sense.
      - rtkwe 6y ago
        No, of course, I never thought about the perception from the other side. Yes I know that, I believe the things I do though because I either think they're correct, they should be correct, or I hope they'll be right some day, I think I've considered and synthesized information from various sources not just one or a small few. I get that my whole world view is a conglomeration of what I was taught, when I grew up, what I've read etc. but if I didn't think I was at least partially right why would I believe it. It's not even strictly about the news itself, the underlying philosophy that tilts the news and policy choices seems like it's missing or ignoring a piece of reality. [0] The further from my view the more alien the terrain seems and the less any of the logic makes sense because the priors are so different. Why do we keep swinging back and forth on banking regulations (or business regulation in general) when fundamentally the incentives haven't changed? [0] Again I get that this is probably what a Conservative feels too but I don't know how to bridge the conceptual gap between the ideological poles here. I went into CS because I can reasonably understand what twiddling a given knob will do and I can control the scope of problems. I have no idea how to even start twiddling societal knobs.
- screye 6y ago
  "good faith assumption" That would be my guess too
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
I don't want to sound like a nitpicker, but "basic understanding" and "facts" are two very different things: facts are facts. Their understanding has more to do with the interpretation. And if we all agree on interpretation of the facts, then cementing the society becomes too easy of a task.
- tasogare 6y ago
  It’s especially egregious in this case with 1/3 of examples being extremely politically oriented (the so-called systemic racism). One of the big issue is when people start thinking their fantasies are reality and will distort every fact to fit in, instead of critically think that they may, in fact, be wrong.
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    This is a fine example of what I mean. To me, from the left, there's very little room to question the existence of systematic racism. [0] From my perspective it flows pretty cleanly from several pretty solid facts. Black people were literally property for several hundred years. Once that ended there were explicitly racist laws and actions to keep black people out of any kind of economic or political power. [1] Maybe most importantly redlining kept black people out of home loans during one of the greatest periods of wealth growth in the US during the postwar boom. Combine this with the fact that poor neighborhoods are more polluted, [2] have worse schools, poor parents have less time to devote to tutoring their kids, etc and we get a self reinforcing system. This system shits on all poor people but history has put a thumb on the scale of who wound up starting where. Given a much longer time span this may sort itself out naturally but with the way wealth compounds in capitalism there are also countervailing forces. [0] The definition gets muddied a lot so I'll define myself here. Systematic racism is the concept that the interlocking /system/ of the government and economy have a racially biased outcome, ie it's racist, hence systematic racism. Importantly it's not that this system is necessarily currently intentional, though personally for me, not addressing the problem does feel like you get some blame for it's continued existence. [1] Jim Crow laws, the Tulsa Race Massacre, the Wilmington insurrection of 1898 (look this one up in particular), the list is long and quite consistent. [2] Which studies show has deleterious effects on educational performance. Pulling one random study out: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6140474/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6140474/
bobthechef 6y ago
Basic understanding? How about an extremely high and unwarranted confidence in one's own understanding of what constitutes a fact. I see no signs of having ever even considered whether the categories underlying one's thought are even valid. All I see is the mindless repetition of slogans and a superficiality of understanding. Concepts are merely accepted because the comedian or talking head or my environment want me to accept them. In other words, little interest in the truth and little common sense in interpreting events and claims.
Lammy 6y ago
I could not disagree more! I've seen this demand for One Shared Reality Of Facts from all sorts of groups who will never be able to agree on one. I've watched our attempts set many well-intentioned humans at many other well-intentioned (and otherwise) humans' (and otherwise's) throats, yelling at each other because THEY'RE WRONG when they describe personally experiencing a reality that sounds at times completely alien to mine. It seems to be a path toward fragmentation and alienation and not a path toward unity. I do not wish to speak for anyone else here, of course, but the concepts of "true" and "false" don't really map on to my physical human dimension of reality very well at all, if I think about it! Observing something as "true" is just observing it. Maybe other peoples' thought patterns run differently? Serious question here for you all, my wonderful fellow HN readers: I don't really walk around in what I perceive as reality thinking "that's false, and that, and that over there too". Exactly the opposite! Everything I observe is true, because I observe it. I don't even think about perceiving reality at all. Everything that Is, just Is. This isn't meant to be coy or cutely condescending — I've legitimately just never thought about thinking very much before now. My concept of the "necessary-shared-binding-force-between-things", if you will, has thus moved away from constantly bikeshedding "truth" and toward the simple observation that all things that Exist exist and all things that Don't don't, such that when another human describes experiencing our physical dimension of reality in a way different than my own, the fact that they experienced it is what's true, not the thing they're talking about when they describe the experience, since I might still completely disagree with that. Most people have usually also gone one leap beyond "experiences" just within their own mind or some smaller slice of community before it's possible for me to hear from them, so what they will actually share are their proposed solutions to the problems they experience in reality. These suggestions are at times very distasteful to my particular (not-Truth) set of values, if you know what I mean, but still must be ignored and/or forgiven if I want to hope we live together here on Earth. I don't see any other possible alternative if I fail to scream loudly enough at all 9 billion of us until finally we all agree (with all of my suggestions, of course) and can stop arguing, all at once, forever. No solutions aside from the, uh — you know, distasteful ones. It's been very personally meaningful to me to be able to find something I can consider "true" in common and makes it a lot easier for myself to communicate with other humans who might hold views I find abhorrent, especially when those are toward groups including myself. My views toward our physical-reality-at-large didn't change at all either — I'm the same typical Bay Area lib-left as ever. I'm not suggesting important and difficult subjects should stop being discussed, be discussed less-intensely or less-frequently, or be discussed among a smaller set of participants. I just feel that discussing them will be a hell of a lot easier once every attempt to do so doesn't begin with an existential punch-in-the-face basically telling the other person that they must be lying about the way they perceive reality. Thinking about it a little more: isn't it kinda extremely fucking amazing that any "truth" or "falsehood" we short-lived humans throw back and forth at one another was, at some point possibly thousands or even tens of thousands of years ago, toggled from a state of non-existence into a state of Existence by a single human mind? Forgive me for torturing the metaphor a bit too hard, but that's one form of true equality I can believe in: that every human mind has the godlike ability to Create new informational "lifeforms" out of complete nothingness. These days AIs have that ability and are our equals too! It's pretty cool to think about how the moment any new informational lifeform is shared by its creator with any any other mind (human, artificial, or otherwise) it becomes forever outside of its creator's control. You can't really kill them, but the various humans (and otherwise)[0] comprising my country's Federal government has sent many well-intention humans to die fighting wars that try to. You might be able to slow or even stop the spread, but all it takes is for one other person to find one copy of one old book, and boom, it's back[1]!! This made the Dawkins definition of "meme" make immediate and intuitive sense. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA [1] You just lost The Game.
sleepysysadmin 6y ago
I think you're right, but I think you might not understand why. All 3 of your examples are part of a new religion that's forming right now. You may not blaspheme against these issues. Take your systemic racism: What is white supremacy? https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-culture-characteristics.html https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-cu... Out of curiosity, do you agree with that webpage that to be an individual or perfectionist is to be a white supremacist? On the issue of climate change, I challenge you to be devils advocate. Go to another thread or even another site and pretend to be against climate change. You might expect that you will be told where you are wrong or have a discussion. That won't happen. You will be told how you're a trump lover who needs to die.
kgwxd 6y ago
That would be a great answer if only there weren't a shit ton a people refusing to accept reality and recognize actual facts.

by rtkwe 6y ago

glial 6y ago

Or at least, an agreement in the value of good faith discussion in pursuit of truth and mutual progress.

jagged-chisel 6y ago
How many times have I heard from folks claiming "conservatism" that they don't want progress, in any form-- individual, mutual, societal...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- smegcicle 6y ago
  opposite extreme: "'progress'- whatever the cost"... for some reason referred to as 'woke'? (still need to work on understanding that angle) "replacing what works with what sounds good" --T.Sowell offtopic rant, but on the subject of politics; to me it seems underhanded to pursue experimental federal programs eg for healthcare- why not demonstrate it works in a few test states.. wouldn't california love to pass something like that? if only there were a way to pass the buck to the federal government for the homeless... not that the 'red team' political machine hasn't been pulling on the middle as well, claiming to be 'good guys' while corrupting for their own aims; what grinds my gears is either side claiming any kind of moral highground without referencing empirical positive impact
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    > why not demonstrate it works in a few test states It's tough to do some things at the state level because there's less money at the state level vs the federal level. It's a lot easier for a business to move from a state to avoid taxes meant to pay for healthcare by rerouting fund from the private market to the public market than it is to leave the US entirely. The federal government gets it's taxes first from income taxes then payroll taxes, I checked a couple states and most are income then sales/use tax which is a big difference. Not being able to reroute money from employer based systems into the single payer system is a huge hole in any state level attempt at single payer. Also just having more people means a federal level system will have more bargaining power than even the largest states.
    - rtkwe 6y ago
      As for the etymology of woke I'm no linguist but it seems to flow pretty clearly from the idea of being awake to a problem. The particular slang is just from AAVE, not sure it's possible to trace where the different conjugation started from. > "I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I'm gon' stay woke. And I'm gon help him wake up other black folk." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
    - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
      > there's less money at the state level vs the federal level So if anything, it means to me that we need to work on increasing roles of individual states and decreasing federal powers.
      - rtkwe 6y ago
        That's more of a question of where you come down on the idea of federalism. Personally I think way more stuff makes sense to have created and funded uniformly across the country than fragmented. The biggest budget sinks at the federal level of military and entitlement programs like social security make sense to be there. The military for obvious reasons makes more sense to have funded from there and then social security et al as well because people often move from where they were working to where they retire so trying to fund that at the state level get's a bit dicey for moving the money to where the old people actually are.
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
Alas, claiming that your opponent discusses things in bad faith is often the simplest way to get the upper hand.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  It's easier to believe when from your understanding of the world the other side is blatantly lying and misrepresenting things. It forms a bit of a positive feedback loop where seeing bad intentions leads you to being less likely to give slack so you see more bad intentions. From the left looking rightward at Fox News and many local stations (increasingly owned by and forced to run identical scripts from Sinclair Broadcasting) [0] at the response and the response to the response to coronavirus for example it's hard to ascribe that to just a different interpretation of facts. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxtkvG1JnPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxtkvG1JnPk
  - bobthechef 6y ago
    You do realize that the "other side" has the same EXACT perception of you, right? It would be nice if people were a bit more skeptical of their preferred news outlets and opinion makers. What I see instead is the continuing existence of the same bubble that led to the shock and surprise at Trump's election. An absolute refusal or inability to consider other views, an inability to interpret events in historical context and with a healthy dose of common sense.
    - rtkwe 6y ago
      No, of course, I never thought about the perception from the other side. Yes I know that, I believe the things I do though because I either think they're correct, they should be correct, or I hope they'll be right some day, I think I've considered and synthesized information from various sources not just one or a small few. I get that my whole world view is a conglomeration of what I was taught, when I grew up, what I've read etc. but if I didn't think I was at least partially right why would I believe it. It's not even strictly about the news itself, the underlying philosophy that tilts the news and policy choices seems like it's missing or ignoring a piece of reality. [0] The further from my view the more alien the terrain seems and the less any of the logic makes sense because the priors are so different. Why do we keep swinging back and forth on banking regulations (or business regulation in general) when fundamentally the incentives haven't changed? [0] Again I get that this is probably what a Conservative feels too but I don't know how to bridge the conceptual gap between the ideological poles here. I went into CS because I can reasonably understand what twiddling a given knob will do and I can control the scope of problems. I have no idea how to even start twiddling societal knobs.
screye 6y ago
"good faith assumption" That would be my guess too

AlexTWithBeard 6y ago

I don't want to sound like a nitpicker, but "basic understanding" and "facts" are two very different things: facts are facts. Their understanding has more to do with the interpretation. And if we all agree on interpretation of the facts, then cementing the society becomes too easy of a task.

tasogare 6y ago
It’s especially egregious in this case with 1/3 of examples being extremely politically oriented (the so-called systemic racism). One of the big issue is when people start thinking their fantasies are reality and will distort every fact to fit in, instead of critically think that they may, in fact, be wrong.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  This is a fine example of what I mean. To me, from the left, there's very little room to question the existence of systematic racism. [0] From my perspective it flows pretty cleanly from several pretty solid facts. Black people were literally property for several hundred years. Once that ended there were explicitly racist laws and actions to keep black people out of any kind of economic or political power. [1] Maybe most importantly redlining kept black people out of home loans during one of the greatest periods of wealth growth in the US during the postwar boom. Combine this with the fact that poor neighborhoods are more polluted, [2] have worse schools, poor parents have less time to devote to tutoring their kids, etc and we get a self reinforcing system. This system shits on all poor people but history has put a thumb on the scale of who wound up starting where. Given a much longer time span this may sort itself out naturally but with the way wealth compounds in capitalism there are also countervailing forces. [0] The definition gets muddied a lot so I'll define myself here. Systematic racism is the concept that the interlocking /system/ of the government and economy have a racially biased outcome, ie it's racist, hence systematic racism. Importantly it's not that this system is necessarily currently intentional, though personally for me, not addressing the problem does feel like you get some blame for it's continued existence. [1] Jim Crow laws, the Tulsa Race Massacre, the Wilmington insurrection of 1898 (look this one up in particular), the list is long and quite consistent. [2] Which studies show has deleterious effects on educational performance. Pulling one random study out: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6140474/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6140474/

bobthechef 6y ago

Basic understanding? How about an extremely high and unwarranted confidence in one's own understanding of what constitutes a fact. I see no signs of having ever even considered whether the categories underlying one's thought are even valid. All I see is the mindless repetition of slogans and a superficiality of understanding. Concepts are merely accepted because the comedian or talking head or my environment want me to accept them. In other words, little interest in the truth and little common sense in interpreting events and claims.

Lammy 6y ago

I could not disagree more! I've seen this demand for One Shared Reality Of Facts from all sorts of groups who will never be able to agree on one. I've watched our attempts set many well-intentioned humans at many other well-intentioned (and otherwise) humans' (and otherwise's) throats, yelling at each other because THEY'RE WRONG when they describe personally experiencing a reality that sounds at times completely alien to mine. It seems to be a path toward fragmentation and alienation and not a path toward unity. I do not wish to speak for anyone else here, of course, but the concepts of "true" and "false" don't really map on to my physical human dimension of reality very well at all, if I think about it! Observing something as "true" is just observing it. Maybe other peoples' thought patterns run differently? Serious question here for you all, my wonderful fellow HN readers: I don't really walk around in what I perceive as reality thinking "that's false, and that, and that over there too". Exactly the opposite! Everything I observe is true, because I observe it. I don't even think about perceiving reality at all. Everything that Is, just Is. This isn't meant to be coy or cutely condescending — I've legitimately just never thought about thinking very much before now. My concept of the "necessary-shared-binding-force-between-things", if you will, has thus moved away from constantly bikeshedding "truth" and toward the simple observation that all things that Exist exist and all things that Don't don't, such that when another human describes experiencing our physical dimension of reality in a way different than my own, the fact that they experienced it is what's true, not the thing they're talking about when they describe the experience, since I might still completely disagree with that. Most people have usually also gone one leap beyond "experiences" just within their own mind or some smaller slice of community before it's possible for me to hear from them, so what they will actually share are their proposed solutions to the problems they experience in reality. These suggestions are at times very distasteful to my particular (not-Truth) set of values, if you know what I mean, but still must be ignored and/or forgiven if I want to hope we live together here on Earth. I don't see any other possible alternative if I fail to scream loudly enough at all 9 billion of us until finally we all agree (with all of my suggestions, of course) and can stop arguing, all at once, forever. No solutions aside from the, uh — you know, distasteful ones. It's been very personally meaningful to me to be able to find something I can consider "true" in common and makes it a lot easier for myself to communicate with other humans who might hold views I find abhorrent, especially when those are toward groups including myself. My views toward our physical-reality-at-large didn't change at all either — I'm the same typical Bay Area lib-left as ever. I'm not suggesting important and difficult subjects should stop being discussed, be discussed less-intensely or less-frequently, or be discussed among a smaller set of participants. I just feel that discussing them will be a hell of a lot easier once every attempt to do so doesn't begin with an existential punch-in-the-face basically telling the other person that they must be lying about the way they perceive reality. Thinking about it a little more: isn't it kinda extremely fucking amazing that any "truth" or "falsehood" we short-lived humans throw back and forth at one another was, at some point possibly thousands or even tens of thousands of years ago, toggled from a state of non-existence into a state of Existence by a single human mind? Forgive me for torturing the metaphor a bit too hard, but that's one form of true equality I can believe in: that every human mind has the godlike ability to Create new informational "lifeforms" out of complete nothingness. These days AIs have that ability and are our equals too! It's pretty cool to think about how the moment any new informational lifeform is shared by its creator with any any other mind (human, artificial, or otherwise) it becomes forever outside of its creator's control. You can't really kill them, but the various humans (and otherwise)[0] comprising my country's Federal government has sent many well-intention humans to die fighting wars that try to. You might be able to slow or even stop the spread, but all it takes is for one other person to find one copy of one old book, and boom, it's back[1]!! This made the Dawkins definition of "meme" make immediate and intuitive sense. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA [1] You just lost The Game.

sleepysysadmin 6y ago

I think you're right, but I think you might not understand why. All 3 of your examples are part of a new religion that's forming right now. You may not blaspheme against these issues. Take your systemic racism: What is white supremacy? https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-culture-characteristics.html https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-cu... Out of curiosity, do you agree with that webpage that to be an individual or perfectionist is to be a white supremacist? On the issue of climate change, I challenge you to be devils advocate. Go to another thread or even another site and pretend to be against climate change. You might expect that you will be told where you are wrong or have a discussion. That won't happen. You will be told how you're a trump lover who needs to die.

kgwxd 6y ago

That would be a great answer if only there weren't a shit ton a people refusing to accept reality and recognize actual facts.