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I do not know what I expected when I clicked on the comments section. I think the author makes some really good points about human psychology & game theory, and

I do not know what I expected when I clicked on the comments section. I think the author makes some really good points about human psychology & game theory, and the fact that people are immediately riled up by his statements only serves to prove him right. You can only understand people when you're clear-headed, i.e. your "rational you" is the one in control. With these issues, people have either natural or nurtured emotional ties. To such an extent that the topic itself shuts of their rationality, and they revert back to blanket statements ("I can't argue with you because you believe X", or just plain profanities). Mix this in with tribality, and you've got a good recipe for no ability to reconcile two different opinions. There's also the fact that people generally don't want to reconcile. When it comes to charged topics, it is a bare-faced lie to want reconciliation. What each side wants is the other side to relent. I think the term "culture war" is actually pretty accurate, there's no interchange of ideas. It's just seeing who can shout the other into submission.

deleted 4y ago
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robonerd 4y ago
The author has nobody but himself to blame, since he sabotaged the reception of his own article with an inflammatory headline that assumes a false (or at least contentious) premise.
happytoexplain 4y ago
Are people "riled up", or merely disagreeing with him (in full or in part)?
native_samples 4y ago
Yeah it's disappointing that the comments are so dominated by his example rather than his greater point. Especially so for people outside the USA for whom Roe v Wade is irrelevant but tribalism isn't. It's worth considering that this problem isn't necessarily symmetrical around the centre of the political axis. There have been experiments done on this that show conservatives understand the left far better than the other way around. They come up with a large set of "How much do you agree with on a scale of 1-10" type questions on political topics. Then they recruit people from across the political spectrum (self rated) and split them into four groups. Two groups are asked to fill out the survey in the usual way, directly about their own opinions. The other two are asked to answer the survey as they imagine someone from the other side would answer. Then the answers are lined up to see how good each group was at predicting the answers of the other. The results are always the same: conservatives can play 'pretend leftie' much better than the other way around. I'm always quite suspicious of social science these days but the methodology in this type of experiment seems simple enough that there can't be much hiding in it, except maybe, the exact nature of the questions used. This experiment has been replicated however. This provides empirical support for what has probably been the real world experience of many of us, that people on the right are much more willing to interact with and be exposed to left wing views than the reverse. Example: I've encountered people in the past who threw tantrums at work because they discovered that someone else was reading right wing news websites (in their own time). The idea of a conservative person going to HR and filing complaints about other employees because they read the Guardian is laughable, and it's not because the Guardian is somehow better or more moral than other newspapers (very much not so). People on the left are just drastically more afraid than normal people of exposure to non-left wing thought, and this problem gets worse the further left you go. This is also why communist countries always rely heavily on censorship and speech control. Unfortunately the experiments can't illuminate why this effect exists, only proving that it does. The rest is in the realm of speculation. They do leave one clue though: the left wing participants usually fail to predict right wing responses because they're picking answers much more extreme than those people actually hold.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

robonerd 4y ago

The author has nobody but himself to blame, since he sabotaged the reception of his own article with an inflammatory headline that assumes a false (or at least contentious) premise.

happytoexplain 4y ago

Are people "riled up", or merely disagreeing with him (in full or in part)?

native_samples 4y ago

Yeah it's disappointing that the comments are so dominated by his example rather than his greater point. Especially so for people outside the USA for whom Roe v Wade is irrelevant but tribalism isn't. It's worth considering that this problem isn't necessarily symmetrical around the centre of the political axis. There have been experiments done on this that show conservatives understand the left far better than the other way around. They come up with a large set of "How much do you agree with on a scale of 1-10" type questions on political topics. Then they recruit people from across the political spectrum (self rated) and split them into four groups. Two groups are asked to fill out the survey in the usual way, directly about their own opinions. The other two are asked to answer the survey as they imagine someone from the other side would answer. Then the answers are lined up to see how good each group was at predicting the answers of the other. The results are always the same: conservatives can play 'pretend leftie' much better than the other way around. I'm always quite suspicious of social science these days but the methodology in this type of experiment seems simple enough that there can't be much hiding in it, except maybe, the exact nature of the questions used. This experiment has been replicated however. This provides empirical support for what has probably been the real world experience of many of us, that people on the right are much more willing to interact with and be exposed to left wing views than the reverse. Example: I've encountered people in the past who threw tantrums at work because they discovered that someone else was reading right wing news websites (in their own time). The idea of a conservative person going to HR and filing complaints about other employees because they read the Guardian is laughable, and it's not because the Guardian is somehow better or more moral than other newspapers (very much not so). People on the left are just drastically more afraid than normal people of exposure to non-left wing thought, and this problem gets worse the further left you go. This is also why communist countries always rely heavily on censorship and speech control. Unfortunately the experiments can't illuminate why this effect exists, only proving that it does. The rest is in the realm of speculation. They do leave one clue though: the left wing participants usually fail to predict right wing responses because they're picking answers much more extreme than those people actually hold.