8 ms·
Individuals who share an ideology have more similar neural representations
- kalimanzaro 4y agoWhat does this imply for the following state (of mind), if it had basis in reality? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
- harimau777 4y agoI think that people confuse the tech-bro subculture with the wider developer subculture. My experience has been that the developer subculture is often more progressive than libertarian.
- Jensson 4y agoThe developer subculture is mostly pro meritocracy, so it isn't really modern progressive. Developers were progressive when meritocracy was progressive, but now they aren't.
- badcppdev 4y agoI don't think the "developer subculture" is clearly bounded or uniform geographically. You state that the developer subculture has stayed with pro-meritocracy but I think it has changed. Where could we find a definition to check that we were referring to the same thing?
- Jensson 4y agoFrom the internal forums at Google, from what I see online and have seen offline. Modern progressive anti-meritocracy people might be loud, but they are a small minority, even at Google at the height of progressivism there you would see pro-meritocracy views winning out strongly among developers. You also see it here, I feel most here on HN are pro meritocracy. There are some progressives around who go into every thread about the topic and post a lot, but meritocracy views and topics tend to get upvoted.
- meitham 4y agoThere’s an old Arabic philosophy that also suggests facial similarities between people that share similar thinking, or more like your facial features will develop according to your personality traits so eventually your look will converge to your likeminded. The theory goes further by classifying these looks into the closest animal and the traits from that animal.
- AstixAndBelix 4y agoIf you look similar you probably come from the same place. If you come from the same place you were probably exposed to the same culture. If you were exposed to the same culture you probably hold very similar worldviews. I mean, it's not that deep of a theory, especially in the old days were people moved a lot less and culture norms were strongly enforced
- harimau777 4y agoI suppose that it could also be true that the facial expressions that someone regularly makes influences the wrinkles that develop as they age.
- meitham 4y agoNo. Another kind user @badcppdev posted links to these theories up in the thread. You will find these various similarities across cultures and races, and you will find differences within one family and village.
- AstixAndBelix 4y agoWhat he linked is not relevant to what I said, plus I used a probabilistic and not deterministic argument. You could deduce where people came from by how they looked because the world was much more inbred and isolated in the past. As such you could correlate physical characteristic with cultural upbringings and thus worldviews.
- badcppdev 4y agoSo like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology but for the front of your head rather than the top. I've just found it's referred to as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiognomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiognomy See also: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphology * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmistry
- version_five 4y agoI'm extremely skeptical of anything that stereotypes like this. Let's see if this holds up, my money's on it turning out to be a kind of phrenology
- ugjka 4y agoPushing paper count is easy (and get some headlines)
- snowpid 4y agoIt is very typical for such kind of paper using only the American political system and with a brief overview the authors arent aware of that flaw (also very typical) It might be at least interesting to see the hypothesis tested in a multi - party - system or countries with a less polarised society. Even similar polarised countries might be an interesting study subject as an parallel experiment..
- syzarian 4y agoMaybe they should say, “individuals who share the same American ideology”. What is interesting to me is this part of the abstract: …revealing that polarization can arise from differences in the brain’s affective valuations of political concepts. I wonder if things are reversed in the sense that consuming the same sort of news content causes those peoples’ brains to end up with the same affective valuations. I know nothing about neuroscience but it seems if we took someone with centrist or left leaning views and subjected them to only political news from very right wing sources for a long time maybe their brains would be altered. Is it reasonable to wonder if similarities in brain responses to political concepts comes from consuming the same sort of media messages? Is Fox News (or left wing equivalent) unwittingly changing our brains (brain washing)?
- rayiner 4y agoI suspect the opposite is true. Political orientation likely maps onto personality traits: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-55834023 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-55834023. The relevant political issues of the time may then cause people to react to them differently depending on personality traits, and cause people with similar traits to coalesce into like minded coalitions. That being said, psychology is a pseudoscience so who knows what anything is anyway.
- syzarian 4y agoPeople can be “brainwashed” or “deprogrammed”. Does this change the brain? Certainly the direction you propose is plausible. I wonder what the direction of the cause/effect is.
- wrycoder 4y agoThe study purports to document physical characteristics in Republican and Democratic brains related to the good vibes associated with preaching to the choir.
- pfdietz 4y agoSabine Hossenfelder tweets sarcastically on this. https://twitter.com/skdh/status/1623728595297345538 https://twitter.com/skdh/status/1623728595297345538
- messe 4y agoRelevant xkcd "Linear Regression": https://xkcd.com/1725/ https://xkcd.com/1725/
- kelipso 4y agoFrom one of the authors: "It's not a linear regression. This representation is a typical mistake when using mixed effect statistics. It is a "dyadic regression" which is a complex mixed effects procedure. We avoid such representation for ME but reviewers ask." (https://twitter.com/ulugeyik/status/1623654892639330304 https://twitter.com/ulugeyik/status/1623654892639330304) So there's more to the story but that graph is really easy to make fun of because it looks like a linear regression.
- messe 4y agoInteresting. That's not from the authors though: https://twitter.com/ulugeyik/status/1623749246322089984 https://twitter.com/ulugeyik/status/1623749246322089984
- kelipso 4y agoOh ok, just seemed like it from the way he talked but yeah, it is dyadic regression so there's more the story (no idea what it is) but it's still such a terrible graph that I would never want to put in a paper.
- syzarian 4y agoExpert with controversial opinions in her area of expertise feels qualified to criticize the work of experts in an area she knows nothing about. EDIT: Turns out it’s a dyadic regression and Sabine doesn’t know what she is talking about.
- cainxinth 4y agoYet another reason to discount the philosophical concept of free will. We are all born with genes we didn’t choose and raised by people we didn’t choose in environments we didn’t choose… and any ‘choices’ we make thereafter are heavily influenced by those factors, all of which were completely out of our control.
- MadSudaca 4y agoOk, let's imagine we all agree that free will doesn't exist. Now what?
- haswell 4y agoIf we all actually accepted this today, incarceration and policing reforms become an immediate moral imperative, as would changing attitudes about the behaviors of those around us. The resulting societal changes would arguably change the world for the better. The notion that individuals should be punished for circumstances outside of their control is as problematic as jailing someone for getting the flu. This isn’t to claim that criminal behavior is acceptable or that nothing should be done about it, but the change in understanding of the behavior itself would immediately demand a shift towards rehabilitation instead of punishment/vengeance. Some people are still gonna have to be locked up, just like critically ill patients require ongoing care. But headlines like “scientists make breakthrough discovery in correcting brain chemistry that leads to sociopathy” will be as exciting as headlines about cancer cures.
- HideousKojima 4y ago>If we all actually accepted this today, incarceration and policing reforms become an immediate moral imperative. Nope, I have no free will with which to choose to stop imprisoning people in horrible conditions.
- bena 4y agoYeah, it's hilarious because it's a useless question and a useless answer. Because what they're asking is "What if we could fundamentally change existence?" That's what it would take to perform these reforms without the existence of free will. Because people wouldn't have the choice to do whatever. So while we would have to accept that not only are criminals incapable of doing anything different, but also the police are incapable of doing anything different, and the people hiring them, etc. Turtles all the way down. Nothing changes.
- Scubabear68 4y agoPrior to reading the article, I had a mental model of a joke headline “scientists find people who think alike think alike”. But as others say here, using binary US politics in this kind of research makes little sense.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoOr is it: Similar neural representation leds to shared ideology?
- Jensson 4y agoThis is a very important part: > It is important to note that throughout our analyses, the topic of immigration elicited the strongest polarized response. That these effects did not extend to the other political topics is likely the result of the political climate at the time of data collection, which took place at the beginning of 2019, only a few months after D. Trump introduced the Build the Wall, Enforce the Law Act. So it doesn't seem that there is a difference in general, just that the climate then created a very different environment for the sides. They didn't find such differences on abortion or black lives matter, its just immigration in a very special time.
- agoose77 4y agoHas anyone looked at the sketchy figures? Talk about jumping to conclusions ...
- DougN7 4y agoI wonder which is the cause and which is the effect. Aren’t neural pathways changed by experience?
- jrsj 4y agoHow long until it’s a common part of the interview process to do a brain scan for wrongthink?
- _2uwr 4y ago> Through targeted online and field recruiting (N = 360), we invited 44 participants (equally split among liberals and conservatives) to participate in a study on political cognition And thats your problem with science. We dont know how old these people are, we dont know the selection process, ie were they all recruited down the local Masonic Lodge, or at a University, or at a Church. More data is needed on the recruitment processes in order to eliminate any selection or manipulation bias, otherwise am I watching a scientific magic show? We dont know if these people are Early Adopters on the Everett Rogers Diffusion of innovations curve. It might be better to title this study, fMRI used to map Social Conformity as studied by people like Solomon Asch or fMRI used to map Authority to Obedience as studied by people like Stanley Milgram and more recently Phillip Zimbardo, where the idea's/ideology are the authority. Would that be fair?
- telotortium 4y agoAlways important to remember: https://gwern.net/causality https://gwern.net/causality
- vjulian 4y agoAn obtuse study (and obtusely written article) that concludes truisms: birds of a feather; people preferring to congregate with others of similar interests.
- natmaka 4y agoThis may be linked to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity