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Here’s an idea. What if instead of left/right wing, you’d sort ideas into useful and useless buckets, given that the context of these labels will change dependi

by nis0s 10mo ago

Here’s an idea. What if instead of left/right wing, you’d sort ideas into useful and useless buckets, given that the context of these labels will change depending on your use case. X is useful for Y, but useless for Z. Ideally, you are tooling around with pro-social ideas for your governance or societal organization frameworks, which is a necessity if you’re optimizing for freedom, morality or ethics. Sadly, in lieu of understanding larger societal contexts, our roles in them, and reasoning about uncertainty using grounded frameworks or rationale, most people have a tendency towards tribalism, and this is evident for proponents of both left- and right-wing ideologies. What we’re up against is already codified as the seven deadly sins, and despite the centuries of human societal and technological progress, these basic assumptions about anti-social human behavior still hold true. The problem is when folks lock themselves into positions which they unfortunately convince themselves are beyond reproach. I like the Hegelian approach to ethics and freedom in society, but of course anyone may convince themselves that he’s speaking from their perspective, which I think is great. It shows how similar we all are.

zozbot234 10mo ago
> What if instead of left/right wing, you’d sort ideas into a useful and useless buckets But that's just boring, petty bourgeois centrism.
MPSimmons 10mo ago
Yeah, this is definitely an n-dimensional modeling space. Left/Right wing are only one axis, and as far as I can tell, not even the most definitive in terms of determining if I agree with someone's perspective. I think that would be the authoritarian / anti-authoritarian. Lots of left wing people are still authoritarians, but between those two, you can get a _decent_ feeling of where someone is with regard to the national politics.
jjj123 10mo ago
Not sure about usefulness as the metric. How do you account for populations that will be harmed by a policy? “Not useful” doesn’t really capture it. I usually think of policies as “who gets what, who loses what”, and form my opinion around those outcomes.
- nis0s 10mo ago
  I don’t think we need zero-sum framing for a lot of the things we talk about, and the fact that we do is the result of politics, not the policies per se.
  - jjj123 10mo ago
    I don’t think my system is zero sum! Acknowledging that some population will be harmed is not saying it’s equal and opposite to the benefits. Medicare for all is useful to many, many people. But it does have downsides to some populations: the ownership class loses some amount of power and control, wealthy people with excellent private healthcare are likely to have worse outcomes, the healthcare insurance industry would likely be decimated. I don’t consider that zero-sum, the benefits far, far outweigh the downsides to me. These are the practical impacts of implementing a policy. I do not believe in some technocratic ideal where we can logic our way out of resource distribution causing some people to lose things.
    - nis0s 10mo ago
      How does the ownership class lose benefits under Medicare for All (MFA)? What does ownership class mean? Let’s compare China and U.S., the former has near universal healthcare, but also an unemployment rate of 20%. The U.S. spends more on Medicare than it does for Defense, and the bulk of that money goes to the healthcare industry in all its forms. They don’t touch the healthcare industry function because it’s the largest employment sector in the U.S., and comparably robust for employment even during periods of economic downturn, see the current 4.6% unemployment rate. If we did get MFA in the U.S., you can expect job cuts in the healthcare industry. So the U.S. gets by with paying for Medicare and Defense, and the balance to this is state-based healthcare, and something like ACA subsidies, while ensuring a relatively low unemployment rate. I also don’t understand how in your example MFA results in lesser healthcare for wealthy people, that hasn’t been the case in any country with universal healthcare programs. Let’s also examine the geopolitical angle in all this. The U.S. healthcare system is increasingly made a political issue as a way to induce societal pressure to reduce defense spending, and allocate it elsewhere. I am not taking any stance on this, but this point is often ignored for any number of reasons.
analog31 10mo ago
Are racism, misogyny, and superstition useful or useless? Now one could argue that those things are not right or left wing. There is no epistemology for what any given ideology -- political or religious -- consists of. An apologist can simply deny that "negative" things are part of their ideology.
- nis0s 10mo ago
  > Are racism, misogyny, and superstition useful or useless? Someone can just call you racist, misogynist, or whatever. Those labels don’t mean anything anymore because they’re used as weapons to shut down anyone who is ideologically opposed to you. Are some people racist or misogynistic, yes. But when you use these labels carelessly for anyone who says something you don’t like, you pave the way for actual racists and misogynists because they can call you unreasonable, inaccurate or unreliable. And what is an apologist, exactly? If you’re unable to come up with a different way to look at something, that doesn’t make someone else who looks at the same thing in a different way an apologist. These are just political smears of the incurious or browbeaters. Just because the leftists happen to align themselves with pro-social values that I prefer, like anti-racism or anti-misogyny, doesn’t mean they’re right about everything.
- ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
  > Are racism, misogyny, and superstition useful or useless? Obviously, they're useless and counter-productive. There's no rational reason to think that there is a significant difference between people with different skin/eye/hair colour or between genders, but it's obviously a simplistic tribal belief. What we end up getting is a huge amount of wasted talent because of tribal politics - imagine how many Einstein-like intellects have died in poverty with no access to education. It seems to me that people use racism and misogyny to help them stockpile wealth which is a big detriment to society - rather than working together, we have people working against other people. Even the idea of "races" is itself flawed and has no meaningful basis apart from "they look different".
  - nis0s 10mo ago
    > Even the idea of "races" is itself flawed and has no meaningful basis apart from "they look different". Agreed. There are genetic differences between families (think: extended blood relatives, but even those differences change after enough generations), but they’re hardly along racial lines.

by nis0s 10mo ago

zozbot234 10mo ago

> What if instead of left/right wing, you’d sort ideas into a useful and useless buckets But that's just boring, petty bourgeois centrism.

MPSimmons 10mo ago

Yeah, this is definitely an n-dimensional modeling space. Left/Right wing are only one axis, and as far as I can tell, not even the most definitive in terms of determining if I agree with someone's perspective. I think that would be the authoritarian / anti-authoritarian. Lots of left wing people are still authoritarians, but between those two, you can get a _decent_ feeling of where someone is with regard to the national politics.

jjj123 10mo ago

Not sure about usefulness as the metric. How do you account for populations that will be harmed by a policy? “Not useful” doesn’t really capture it. I usually think of policies as “who gets what, who loses what”, and form my opinion around those outcomes.

nis0s 10mo ago
I don’t think we need zero-sum framing for a lot of the things we talk about, and the fact that we do is the result of politics, not the policies per se.
- jjj123 10mo ago
  I don’t think my system is zero sum! Acknowledging that some population will be harmed is not saying it’s equal and opposite to the benefits. Medicare for all is useful to many, many people. But it does have downsides to some populations: the ownership class loses some amount of power and control, wealthy people with excellent private healthcare are likely to have worse outcomes, the healthcare insurance industry would likely be decimated. I don’t consider that zero-sum, the benefits far, far outweigh the downsides to me. These are the practical impacts of implementing a policy. I do not believe in some technocratic ideal where we can logic our way out of resource distribution causing some people to lose things.
  - nis0s 10mo ago
    How does the ownership class lose benefits under Medicare for All (MFA)? What does ownership class mean? Let’s compare China and U.S., the former has near universal healthcare, but also an unemployment rate of 20%. The U.S. spends more on Medicare than it does for Defense, and the bulk of that money goes to the healthcare industry in all its forms. They don’t touch the healthcare industry function because it’s the largest employment sector in the U.S., and comparably robust for employment even during periods of economic downturn, see the current 4.6% unemployment rate. If we did get MFA in the U.S., you can expect job cuts in the healthcare industry. So the U.S. gets by with paying for Medicare and Defense, and the balance to this is state-based healthcare, and something like ACA subsidies, while ensuring a relatively low unemployment rate. I also don’t understand how in your example MFA results in lesser healthcare for wealthy people, that hasn’t been the case in any country with universal healthcare programs. Let’s also examine the geopolitical angle in all this. The U.S. healthcare system is increasingly made a political issue as a way to induce societal pressure to reduce defense spending, and allocate it elsewhere. I am not taking any stance on this, but this point is often ignored for any number of reasons.

analog31 10mo ago

Are racism, misogyny, and superstition useful or useless? Now one could argue that those things are not right or left wing. There is no epistemology for what any given ideology -- political or religious -- consists of. An apologist can simply deny that "negative" things are part of their ideology.

nis0s 10mo ago
> Are racism, misogyny, and superstition useful or useless? Someone can just call you racist, misogynist, or whatever. Those labels don’t mean anything anymore because they’re used as weapons to shut down anyone who is ideologically opposed to you. Are some people racist or misogynistic, yes. But when you use these labels carelessly for anyone who says something you don’t like, you pave the way for actual racists and misogynists because they can call you unreasonable, inaccurate or unreliable. And what is an apologist, exactly? If you’re unable to come up with a different way to look at something, that doesn’t make someone else who looks at the same thing in a different way an apologist. These are just political smears of the incurious or browbeaters. Just because the leftists happen to align themselves with pro-social values that I prefer, like anti-racism or anti-misogyny, doesn’t mean they’re right about everything.
ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
> Are racism, misogyny, and superstition useful or useless? Obviously, they're useless and counter-productive. There's no rational reason to think that there is a significant difference between people with different skin/eye/hair colour or between genders, but it's obviously a simplistic tribal belief. What we end up getting is a huge amount of wasted talent because of tribal politics - imagine how many Einstein-like intellects have died in poverty with no access to education. It seems to me that people use racism and misogyny to help them stockpile wealth which is a big detriment to society - rather than working together, we have people working against other people. Even the idea of "races" is itself flawed and has no meaningful basis apart from "they look different".
- nis0s 10mo ago
  > Even the idea of "races" is itself flawed and has no meaningful basis apart from "they look different". Agreed. There are genetic differences between families (think: extended blood relatives, but even those differences change after enough generations), but they’re hardly along racial lines.