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I never understand why people (especially in the US) have a desire to split everything into two opposing sides. Liberal/conservative, introvert/extrovert and ma

• quacked 3y ago
  Two sides is the most stable form of competition, it's why there are very few sports that have more than two teams. (Card games, maybe.) A few years ago I saw a great essay/blog post/paper/something that made this point really elegantly, about how conflicts seem to naturally resolve into two sides, but I haven't managed to find it again.
  • 0xfae 3y ago
    It's pretty standard game theory. If there are 3 teams, and one team starts to gain an advantage, the other two are highly incentivized to join forces to defeat the larger one. Unless you design systems to allow smaller teams/parties/groups to flourish, most competitions will devolve into two sides. In voting this would be things like ranked choice or approval voting, rather than single vote "first past the post".
    • mikhailfranco 3y ago
      The board game Diplomacy is the classic example of multiplayer competition, where there is explicit negotiation of alliances and the possibility of trust and betrayal at every turn. P.S. Recent success with AI for Diplomacy at DeepMind: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/ai-for-the-board-game-diplomacy https://www.deepmind.com/blog/ai-for-the-board-game-diplomac...
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• costanzaDynasty 3y ago
  Because it's lazy, and most people don't care enough about any issue to have nuisanced thoughts about a topic. And If they ever did any conversation would break down to A or B. Plus its easier to sell to and manipulate money from both sides. I try to have conversation about complex issues all the time and those conversations never advance past basic talking points that any person who spent time actually looking into any topic would not reduce down to a binary answer. Half the people I talk with think I'm super liberal and the other half think Im super conservative and it stems usually from the first interaction Ive had with people where Ive tried to advance a topic to beyond repeating the same lame talking points, but it really never gets past first base.
  • RealityVoid 3y ago
    People generally don't like to think deeply about things. I get it. It's uncomfortable and emotionally draining. It really requires attention and focus. So most people don't practice it and don't get good at it and simply don't like it. And they sometimes their approach might even be right. Since, you know... A lot of the things you think about or talk about don't _really_ matter. So you might as well talk about more trivial but lighter things. I know that I really love to deep dive into things and pick things apart. But my girlfriend hates it when I get like that, so I learned to understand her point as well.
  • InexSquirrel 3y ago
    It feels in part that people like to have opinions, but also lack real information or insight to have a deep conversation about something - hence just breaking it down into basic blobs. That said for topics I do have some more in-depth understanding (and opinions on), I've started to find discussions around them to be... draining. People seem to want to argue or 'discuss' things heatedly, but that's it. It never leads anywhere or to any meaningful change in behaviours. Not that I'm trying to influence anyone, but it just feels like arguing for the sake of arguing. I'd rather just keep to myself at that point.
• tekla 3y ago
  It makes it incredibly easy to shut your brain down and just go along with what your "side" "expects of you". No thinking required. Your side is the "correct" one and so you have moral superiority.
• stronglikedan 3y ago
  It's human nature, and not especially in the US. It eases cognition when thinking about things.
• akomtu 3y ago
  Isn't it the key feature of the lower rational mind to draw a boundary between I and not-I, true vs false? It is this type of mind that loves to criticize, as it needs to label every thing as true or false. Seeing things as a spectrum, as a distribution of probabilities, is a key feature of the upper abstract mind, and it's barely developed in us today. And most people are still developing the rational mind, and usually swim in the stormy sea of emotions.
• karaterobot 3y ago
  > I never understand why people (especially in the US) have a desire to split everything into two opposing sides For the record, I don't think this has anything to do with the U.S., false dichotomies are a more or less equally common human shorthand anywhere and anywhen that I've visited, or studied at all. I've assumed it's because people don't have time or energy to consider all the nuances of everything all the time, or the space to list them out. The brain is in many ways a device for ignoring anything that doesn't help you get food and not get eaten by a lion.
  • iainmerrick 3y ago
    There are two types of people -- those who like to split everything into two categories, and those who believe everything exists on a continuous spectrum.
    • lioeters 3y ago
      "There are two kinds of people in this world. The kind who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t."
    • romusha 3y ago
      You split
  • watwut 3y ago
    But, US culture is saturated by them and Americans really tend to create dichotomies much more then French or what have you. There really seems to be some dteong cultural tendency to do this.
    • karaterobot 3y ago
      Would love to see some evidence for this, but okay.
      • InexSquirrel 3y ago
        Agree that evidence is appropriate, but as someone that's not in the US (NZ), we do broadly see it that way. US politics is very pervasive internationally, and you guys definitely appear to be split way more into 'left' and 'right' (as one example). Compared to NZ's politics... which is more like a blob of parties which sit pretty close the centre, and sometimes parts of the blobs move more left or more right. But naturally the dichotomy comment doesn't hold true in all circumstances.
• Tokkemon 3y ago
  Because 3D chess is hard.
• ravitation 3y ago
  One other problem is that whenever these conversations come up in "extremely public spaces" (i.e. the internet), you inevitably have a small group that strongly identifies with the textbook definitions of introvert/extrovert. Anecdotally (though this is the internet), this is almost entirely self-identified introverts; they will swear that every social interaction leaves them drained and they need a certain amount of hours alone to recover (there is almost certainly some confounding variables and bias at play here). Afterwards, those that do not see their own lives described by these definitions are generally less interested than the former group in arguing about the definitions' supposed validity.
• Bloating 3y ago
  Theres 10 types of people, those who understand binary and those who don't
  • elwell 3y ago
    What about the other 8?
    • 2143 3y ago
      "10" is the binary for "2"
      • squirtlebonflow 3y ago
        [dead]
      • elwell 3y ago
        I understand binary, but the quote said "10 types" without claiming it was written in binary. It should say: "There are 10 types of people: those who default to reading numbers in binary, and normal people."
• bregma 3y ago
  It starts with "self" and "other" and goes analogically from there.
• thomastjeffery 3y ago
  The problem isn't in creating or even using these labels: it's in trusting their completeness. Categories are good for introduction, nothing more.
• NickNaraghi 3y ago
  May well be a function of chronic stress. So many people are constantly in fight or flight (sympathetic nervous system) that narrows focus and decreases broad-range / spectrum-based thinking. Makes sense that many people would default their worldview to black and white.
• nuancebydefault 3y ago
  In fact this happens with any form of social or psychological science. If you start with, anything is a spectrum, gray zone, nuance... you are not able to make different categories. Even with music, pop, rock, metal, hiphop, balade,... if you ask any musician they will tell their music dies not fit any category. My point is, making categories is just a starting point for certain sorts of science and literature.
• wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
  Most of us are somewhere in the middle, but true extraverts are just wired different. They are really different. Many normal people are social when they feel good, and less so when they are not. But extraverts have learned to use social interactions to "fix" their emotional state. Or maybe they are born with it. However they deal with social aspects completely different. I think most of us are in the middle. Where some of us lean to less social, but I think part of that is emotional issues that haven't been dealt with. Whereas extraverts are just different.
• lioeters 3y ago
  > why people (especially in the US) have a desire to split everything into two opposing sides Fundamentally, this is a typical strategy for the human mind and even organisms in general, to understand the world by categorizing it into opposing pairs: light/dark, hot/cold, life/death, up/down, left/right. This is often discussed in Buddhism, for example, there is a whole school of tradition called "Not Two" that focuses on going beyond this illusion of duality. About how polar opposition seems to be stronger in the U.S., in my opinion that's due to the weaponization of culture in the country, how the media is used to manipulate the public into outrage and conflict. It's a form of social control that's pretty much everywhere, but it seems to have especially reached a boiling point in the U.S. in recent years. It's a primitive, simplistic and reductive way of looking at the world, ignoring the spectrum in between the opposing sides, which are arbitrary anyway. Maybe there are introverts, extroverts, various mixtures between, and even hyperverts or transverts who prefer one side or the other depending on their mood or life stages.
• elwell 3y ago
  Why do people (especially on Hacker News) have the desire to point out that binary simplifications more truly exist on spectrums?
• munificent 3y ago
  > I never understand why people (especially in the US) You are aware that you are creating a dichotomy right here, no? You might find this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_opposition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_opposition One way to think about is that given a set of items, you want to understand them by finding both commonality and distinction between them. Partitioning into two sets is the simplest form that accomplishes some of both. If you lump them all into a single set, you may have a sense of commonality, but you've learned nothing about distinguishing them. If you put each element into its own set, you have distinguished all of them, but learned nothing about what they have in common. You could form the elements into pairs, but the it's not clear what to do with the odd one out if there is one. Given multiple items, you can always split them into two sets and how you choose to do that reflects both what the elements in each set have in common, while also showing how the two sets differ. I suspect that binary opposition is in some ways fundamental to cognition. It certainly shows up profoundly throughout all cultures across all history: sun and moon, night and day, yin and yang, god and devil, woman and man, earth and sky, etc.
• throwaway4837 3y ago
  Creating dichotomies is central to mathematics and science. Humans tend to think of things as being either "in" or "out", and apply this distinguishing ability to every facet of life. It is not surprising that pretty much everyone is creating little dichotomies in their head which shapes their worldview. That's kind of what models do too, they draw lines in data and categorize things. It's easier to understand things if you can decompose them into orthogonal vectors in your mind. I agree that it can be dangerous if you create a false dichotomy, because that can lead to a misunderstanding of how something works.