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The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)

176 points by mef 2mo ago

zahlman 2mo ago
> Don't update positively on your extremist beliefs whenever you hear a bad argument against them Two problems: 1. There are beliefs people hold approximately as strongly as they hold "the Sun will rise tomorrow", so "updating" is kinda irrelevant. 2. How many people actually think any of their beliefs are "extremist"? And if they don't, they won't consider the warning to apply. And after digging in further: 3. Many people reasonably believe that their discussion circles already filter out a lot of "average people" and thus expect a higher standard of discourse from their ideological opponents. When that still doesn't happen, it naturally seems like stronger evidence. 4. (Insert generic annoyance at veganism discourse here.)
- jp_sc 2mo ago
  One big problem is that lately this kind of extremism has become more like a cult: even considering the idea that the “others” might have some truth (while being wrong about the rest) is treated like blasphemy
- inigyou 2mo ago
  I am an extremist - I use GrapheneOS and I think the government shouldn't kill people for being gay.
  - Lord-Jobo 2mo ago
    This really is my big issue with the focus on “extremist, moderate, centrist, whatever”. I don’t care what the centrist or moderate opinion is. It’s been insanely wrong many times throughout history. (1939 German opinions on Jewish people. Public view on MLK at the time of his death) Let’s focus less on “extreme” and more on “unprincipled, uncritical, illogical, undercooked”. If you discard those categories, ignore extreme vs moderate, you get rid of anything that we should consider “bad” that is normally captured by “extreme”
NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
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- Erem 2mo ago
  What in that blog made you write him off? I also clicked through and found very thoughtful writing on the topic, though I still disagree with their position as I understand it.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
    Animal rights nuttery. It is the product of an irrational mind, everything he says and thinks is suspect. While he might be accidentally correct on other topics, now I have to vet every single point and turn of logic on my own... and if I have to do that, I might as well do it without his input. Nor am I particularly curious if we did arrive at the same conclusion. The same impulses that make people search for religions (and when they can find none to their liking, invent them) is what leads to that particular brain disease. I have no need of the religion. I mean, it's already a dietary code, it just needs a prophet and it's complete. Animals are food.
ihsw 2mo ago
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stymaar 2mo ago
The key problem is social media feed boosting “engagement”. Balanced, well thought comments don't bring much engagement so they end up being ignored by the algorithm while outrageously stupid takes generate a lot of (negative) engagement, some of which being equally stupid which will bring more engagement than the sensible responses and so on. And at the end if the day, all you see in your social media feed is stupid people sharing at least some of your values arguing with even stupider people (or so you think, at least) who have the opposite views. This is obviously harmful for society but also obviously the best outcome for the platform who wants to sell your attention to advertisers.
gibbitz 2mo ago
I think the problem here is that we have a bias for those who agree with us that outweighs our patience in searching for oppositional opinions that are well founded. From a liberal bubble it is quite hard to find conservative viewpoints that aren't based on unobserved apriori belief or strawman arguments. It feels like being a heavyweight surrounded by lightweights and it makes me feel like I need a better sparring partner, I just can't find one...
- moritzwarhier 2mo ago
  > I think the problem here is that we have a bias for those who agree with us that outweighs our patience in searching for oppositional opinions that are well founded. This is a very agreeable statement, but I'd add that politics is not about finding the Kantian truth of what's best for everyone (inside the country? globally? also immigrants? lazy and ugly natives?). It's about balancing interests. Of course, the idea of free market democracy was/is that both goals eventually converge.
  - verall 2mo ago
    Like balancing whose interests? I'm thinking you're meaning like "politics is about trying to understand/impact what could plausibly occur", whereas the "truth" you mention is inherantly unconcerned with that, but I think there's also value in finding and debating it. What's implementation without a target? Is politics concerned with improving conditions for people, or is it just balancing enough interests that we don't start killing eachother? It's shades of both I think, and there's fierce disagreement about both the global optimum and how to or if it's worth getting there
    - moritzwarhier 2mo ago
      I thought about balancing the interests of those who have power, by all means short of war. And of course this begs the question who has power and who should have power. The will to improve living conditions comes from the interests of those who have political power, in my view. You can say because of democracy if you like. Or, more cynically, dependence on labor and consumption (Fordism), or, more idealistically, ethical values in powerful people themselves, and all of that are nuances and not absolutes I guess. But I wouldn't say that my definition was precise. I just wanted to point out that it is not a given for politics to have the goal of optimizing utilitarian interests, maximizing wellbeing or long-term goals such as protecting people. In other words, participants in politics do not only discuss how things should be achieved, but also what should be achieved. If that makes sense: this is what I meant by "balancing powers". I'm not sure right now how to map it to the two poles you describe.
cgyvbunji 2mo ago
> it’s very very easy to be negatively polarized by a ton of bad conversations with normal people about it, until you feel like the whole rest of the world is crazy Why wouldn't the world be crazy, though? What reason do we have to assume that the world is not crazy? Most reasons are tautological when you really unpack them.
- Georgelemental 2mo ago
  Of course the world is crazy. But so are you
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mapontosevenths 2mo ago
    Agreed, but also: Just because they're crazy, it doesn't mean they're wrong.
    - 47635274172635 2mo ago
      Depends, if we're being pedantic crazy implies you get some stuff wrong, due to not "being" fully there. This world is a messy complicated place and I tend to think in percentages about everything. Guarantees are rare, I usually think of events as probabilistic, and likewise what other people say. Now, these probabilities can change based on who's saying what. Theoretically someone who specialized in that topic has a higher chance of "getting it right", or sussing it better than people who aren't as versed in that subject. That's what academia is, and if it wouldn't work we wouldn't do it. So, for me it does matter who's saying what, but only to some extent. That means even the most educated, smart and focused individual can get it wrong, and some nobody with no training on the subject can get it right, for various reasons, even pure chance. So I'm never discarding someone's opinion based on who the are or their training, but I do consider the chances of them being right or wrong. There was a recent discussion about Nobelitis.
      - 2mo ago
sfblah 2mo ago
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- Erem 2mo ago
  He calls his position on animal welfare “extremist”. That’s hardly a smuggling. And anyways I found his linked blog post pretty thought provoking, even though I hold a different position than the author.
  - sfblah 2mo ago
    Fine. Not smuggling then “advocating”. It doesn’t actually matter, since it hurts the overall force of his point. Like, if he’s detected this trend why not learn from it himself?
    - SpicyLemonZest 2mo ago
      Because he wants to be clear that you don’t face a choice between turning crazy and believing only things that the people around you consider normal. You can believe strange, extreme things and still be reasonable about them.
    - card_zero 2mo ago
      I thought it was kind of convenient and helpful to be able to say "I, too, am a nutjob" while advocating moderation in one's nutjobbery. See the comment by jrflowers for how it would have come off if the author claimed to be perfect.
miyoji 2mo ago
The good part of this: don't fall into the trap of believing the proposition "an idiot disagrees with me, so I must be right". That's solid advice, idiots believe countless true things and geniuses believe innumerable false things. The intelligence of a random interlocutor has nothing to do with the validity of their opinions, really, so it shouldn't serve as evidence one way or another. Generally, I try to pay attention to good arguments against my ideas, not good arguers. I think the advice for who to listen to is very bad, though. He calls it being "slightly elitist", but his bar is beneath the ground. The example for discussing politics is knowing what the three branches of government are - I knew that when I was 8 and I don't think I had anything interesting to say about politics back then. I definitely couldn't have given a meaningful critique on the latest policy debate, and neither can anyone possessing merely the most basic knowledge of rudimentary facts on the topic.
- imoverclocked 2mo ago
  I think knowing about the branches of your government is a prerequisite to having an opinion or good argument about it. It’s not sufficient to just know that but it’s a good filter in the USA where a surprising number of people have “opinions” but lack the most basic knowledge.
  - miyoji 2mo ago
    It's a prerequisite, but so is breathing. It's necessary but not sufficient. The bar I like to use is pretty simple: do you know who represents you in Congress (I am American so this is my bias, but substitute your country's equivalent if there is one)? As in, your state's two Senators and your district's Representative? If not, you probably don't vote or don't pay attention when you do, and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes, so you probably don't really care that much about whatever it is you say you care about, since you haven't done the easiest thing you can do to make a change. It's not perfect, and no criteria will be, but there are tons of people who can rattle off "executive, legislative, judiciary" who nevertheless don't know ball.
    - 2mo ago
jrflowers 2mo ago
I like that the author doesn’t clarify what constitutes an extremist idea aside from suggesting that he doesn’t believe in any. “Extremism is when people, who are dumb, don’t know facts unlike me, who is very smart” is a kick ass theme for an essay
- miyoji 2mo ago
  "I’m not against extremist ideas on principle. I have my own, the main one being that animal welfare is a much larger urgent catastrophe than most people believe."
  - hackernud3s 2mo ago
    This is clearly a cool take though and author knows it. This is not a polarizing view in the sense that anything about Epstein / Gaza / Trans athletes would be.
    - jhbadger 2mo ago
      Maybe not as polarizing as those, but by "animal welfare" he doesn't mean volunteering at the local animal shelter, he's a vegan. That's pretty polarizing to a lot of people who see veganism as an attack on their whole existence because they like meat.
      - hackernud3s 2mo ago
        [flagged]
      - duncangh 2mo ago
        Veganism is so polarizing because on some level I think most if not all people understand that they are philosophically correct and that veganism is thus the morally right thing to do and those (like me) who still refuse to do it must live with themselves and their immoral choices every time they are confronted by a vegan or reminded of the feasibility of veganism
pstuart 2mo ago
Here's One Weird Trick™ to avoid being an ideologue: be ok with being wrong. Flipping that over: aspire to be correct in your beliefs, not in "being right". Karl Popper (the man behind the Intolerance of Intolerance "paradox) identified it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
- mapontosevenths 2mo ago
  I only recently learned that most peoples beliefs are not "factual beliefs". Since most of mine are, I thought that's how other people work. I think Popper may have made the same mistake by assuming "correctness" is always the primary value a belief offers. The other kind of beliefs are "Symbolic beliefs." Symbolic beliefs are not held because they are true, or because they are useful on their own. They're held because they signal that you belong to the tribe. They are similar to the "Alief", which is an automatic unequestioned belief. Most Symbolic beliefs are aliefs, but not all. Since learning about this I've been trying to identify my own aliefs and symbolic beliefs and question them. It turns out I have more than I'd realized. We probably all do.
  - pdonis 2mo ago
    > I only recently learned that most peoples beliefs are not "factual beliefs". I think this greatly underestimates the number of completely mundane, innocuous factual beliefs that everyone, or at least everyone who is able to get through their lives without serious mishap for any length of time, has to have. For anyone in that position, most of their beliefs have to be factual beliefs, and have to be true at least to a good enough approximation to allow them to function. We tend to ignore such beliefs in discussions like this, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.
  - gghackernewsgg 2mo ago
    Personally, I consider "belief" from a behavioral perspective: belief is the model of reality one actually operates from. For example, when I walk on my kitchen floor, I don't have to tell myself: "the floor is structurally sound, it's safe to walk on it." I just walk. The fact that I just walk can be used to infer an infinite number of implied bleiefs that I've never verbalized until this moment. For example, I believe that: 1. The floor can support my weight. 2. The tiles aren't made of toxic materials. 3. I don't pay $$ by the step. 4. Walking on the floor doesn't cause my wife pain. 5. The floor isn't lava. To refine my definition: a belief is that which systematically and implicitly guides my expectations, reactions, choices, etc. In her glass skywalk example, Gendler lays out the definitions roughly so: 1. "I know this skywalk is sturdy and safe" = Belief 2. The hesitancy to cross the skywalk = Alief But to me: 1. "I know this skywalk is sturdy and safe" = knowledge 2. Hesitancy to cross it = actual belief. That's why in my vocavbulary it's perfectly fine to say: "I know it. But I don't believe it." Similarly, if someone says, "I totally believe that planes are safe, but I'm terrified of flying", then I will think to myself: "nope; you totally don't believe that planes are safe."
woodruffw 2mo ago
I think the advice at the end of this post is essentially sound: you should pre-filter your evaluation of others’ opinions through their understanding of related topics. But that isn’t elitist, and I think we shouldn’t call it that! It’s a form of media and cultural literacy we should be encouraging people to have; there isn’t (and shouldn’t) be anything elite about it.
hingler36 2mo ago
I agree with a lot of this, and the framing is new to me and I really appreciate it. I especially appreciate the acknowledgement that there isn't necessarily anything wrong with having extreme beliefs; "extreme" is a label most often applied by antagonists of such beliefs. But I definitely feel like there can be a pipeline where one extreme belief may lead to others simply because they are also labelled extreme and not for a more recognizable reason.
- irishcoffee 2mo ago
  I would counter with people who believe the earth is flat. This is in fact an extreme belief. The best part is, I don’t care if people believe this, not even a little a bit. I care when they start arguing with me and trying to jam their belief down my throat. I didn’t even ask, you brought it up and you’re mad at me because I disagree. I think this is the more interesting point to consider. Having a belief, any belief, is probably just fine. It’s the second part that’s the issue.
  - hingler36 2mo ago
    Where would you draw the line between someone advocating for their belief vs shoving it down your throat? Does the "extremeness" of the belief factor into the judgement? If so, how are we not back at the original question of the definition of what an extreme belief is?
    - irishcoffee 2mo ago
      Why are you implying that advocating for your belief and making someone else endure that advocation is some kind of right? It is not. As to your question, there are a lot of extreme beliefs that sometimes end up becoming true. IIRC the person who first advocated for washing hands because of tiny "things" that could make people sick, he was laughed out of the room, and he was right. It was an extreme belief at the time. I basically reject the whole premise that "no belief is extreme" because there are countless examples throughout history of extreme beliefs that the world considered extreme, and they turned out to be true. Didn't make the belief any less extreme at the time.
ZoomZoomZoom 2mo ago
What a breath of fresh air! If only people were in control of their own selves to stick to this kind of balanced and open-minded disposition.
beloch 2mo ago
Information hygiene is important if you don't want to go "crazy" in this sense. Be careful about what news you consume, even if it appears to agree with you. Check sources. Check facts. Try to work up to your beliefs from direct observation and basic principles whenever possible. Question your beliefs. Maybe they're wrong! e.g. It's easy to get worked up about Trump. There's an awful lot bad press out there about him. Ask yourself, can a human being really be that vile? Maybe I'm just being misled by the media and partisan politics. Go watch some uncut speeches and press conferences. Pay attention to what the man actually does. Oh, he wants to place tariffs on my country because smoke from forest fires sometimes crosses our shared borders*? He actually said that? Yes. Yes he did. That's directly observable scumbag behaviour. If a romantic interest acted that way I'd break things off immediately. Huge red flag. Maybe the negative opinions about him check out. --------- * It crosses both ways, BTW.
- gfrecvh 2mo ago
  > Pay attention to what the man actually does. Pardoned a lot of the highest profile criminals of the past decade. Started a war with Iran.
petermcneeley 2mo ago
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jongjong 2mo ago
Rational people will pick the ideology which has the fewest contradictions. Irrational people will choose that which serves them best. People who benefit from a system are unlikely to look for problems with it and unlikely to notice any contradictions. Anything which appears as a contradiction gets shrugged off as "Well, there must be a good reason, I'm not an expert. I will trust the experts." These people corrupt Occam's Razor that the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. "The experts say ..." becomes the ultimate simplest explanation to everything... And the experts that they choose to listen to are those who are aligned with their existing beliefs. Then you have people who notice the contradictions but they see so many from first-hand experience that they don't trust the experts and they don't have access to enough different information to be able to choose a good one; so they just adopt the least-bad one as their own... The one which best protects their self-image and whose (comparatively) few contradictions can be plausibly explained away by corruption, conspiracy or dishonesty. But I think the latter group is in fact one step closer to the truth. The truth is there is no conspiracy (at least no grand, all-encompassing one), it's worse than that; systemic incentives create alignment and remove the need for intentional coordination. The coordination, the illusion of conspiracy is just a byproduct of incentives. The second group of people are wrong about the mechanism but their view of reality leads to the same outcome... So with each passing year, their views are being reinforced by more "proof." The system which manufactures the incentives which create alignment is itself probably not the product of conspiracy; it's just a system which evolved slowly over time to subtly serve its operators and their supporters. They don't want to change it, not out of nefariousness, but out of justified fear of what havoc any change might wreck... Bureaucracy also plays a part. It's very difficult to co-ordinate a lot of people to agree on anything, let alone act on it. This is one thing that the mainstream anti-conspiracy folks are completely right about. I'm a global top-50-university-credentialed expert in Information Technology who majored in System Design and has worked for a wide range of companies of different sizes, in multiple industries (education, remote work platforms, social media, banking/finance), in multiple countries including in highly political areas like crypto... So the "trust the experts" folk can trust me when it comes to information flows and system design...
- Eisenstein 2mo ago
  Try this: take a position you hold that you are sure is rational but that a number of people disagree with, and pretend it is wrong and look at it from the opposite perspective. Steelman it and honestly take that perspective as true and argue it in your head. You might still not agree with it, but you can make it rational. So, how certain are should we be that our positions are the rational ones if we can do this?
api 2mo ago
This is great. The error it highlights would work for anything. The Earth is on the back of a large turtle. Prove me wrong. Most of the arguments you hear will be deeply flawed. Therefore we are on the back of a giant turtle.
- gfrecvh 2mo ago
  I think it's easy to give correct arguments, it's just easy for you to dismiss them. For example if i say "we're not on the back of a giant turtle, because humans went into a rock ship, went all around the planet and checked there's no turtle", is absolutely correct. But then you'll say something like "how do you know, were you yourself in the rocket ship?". And this is how normal people see extremists: "I just addressed your point, but you choose to hold a ridiculous position"
NathanielBaking 2mo ago
I am vegetarian, not vegan. I am so because it is something I can do about the state of animal welfare. I don't engage in discussions about my eating with people outside my immediate family. My immediate family are all omnivores. I sometimes, but rarely, choose to eat meat because it is served to me by someone who doesn't know my preference. Animal welfare remains my top priority and concern.
wisty 2mo ago
Freedom of association is kind of a mistake, as it encourages these bubbles to form.
kylecazar 2mo ago
Great points and nice write-up. At the risk of sounding AI pilled, I find LLM's are fairly good sparring partners if you instruct them well. At least they're more capable of giving you the best arguments against your position than the average bar patron. Almost all of my non-professional prompts are of that nature.
- kenferry 2mo ago
  I don't know. AI are basically trained to tell you what you want to hear, including when they're disagreeing with you. If you come off of your conversation with AI with a stronger belief than when you went in, is that merited? "AI Advice Suppresses People’s Willingness To Say “I Don’t Know”, Even When The Advice Is Wrong And Accuracy Is Incentivized" https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5y6m4_v1 https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5y6m4_v1
  - childintime 2mo ago
    Yeah you have to frame the prompt as if you've come across some potentially extremist view you want to know more about, and pretend you're an outsider needing advice. Then you bias it to favor what you really want to know.
- Lord-Jobo 2mo ago
  LLM are so insanely terrible at this that I constantly have to moderate my prompts with “maybe this isn’t true” or “maybe I am misunderstanding this explanation” to get them to STOP crumbling into dust over the slightest pressure. That’s WITH strong pre prompts that also push against this bias. Roleplay/persona used to be a good way to get around this. “Pretend you are an almighty, rarely wrong, curmudgeonly professor with 150 different phds talking to me, a student”. But these abilities have been strongly restricted due to other (fair) issues so it’s not a solution any more. Better than a bar patron, no doubt. Still nothing compared to any normal well educated human being
uiuihu 2mo ago
If you're not an extremist at this point relative to everyone else, the vast majority of whom have beliefs that are incompatible with the existence of other life on this planet, then you're probably a moron.
- NonHyloMorph 2mo ago
  I asked a question, and it's not a rhetorical one, even though it's formulation indicates that I have some serious doubts that there is a factual answer - it's called capital-ism for a reason. edited for typo
card_zero 2mo ago
Pretty good. I have something to say about this part: > most people are in fact “asleep” about most things most of the time, not super thoughtful in how they develop beliefs Which is later echoed, but differently, as: > the average person just doesn’t know much about your hyper specific thing This is skirting around whether they have a duty to know about your thing. The first phrasing suggests they do, the second suggests not. Given that your thing is probably stupid and wrong, and life's too short, it seems reasonable to me that most people can't give you good arguments about it unless you invite them to take a pleasant and entertaining walk around your reasoning and maybe sleep on it and come back later. If the subject can't be made pleasant and entertaining, you're probably out of luck. This unfortunately still applies even when your thing is genuinely a great insight.
- Lord-Jobo 2mo ago
  There is a pretty small set of things I think people have a duty to know in our very open and comfortable first world. Civics is the main one that is being catastrophically neglected as pointed out by some other comments here. A majority of the discourse in every political space completely fumbles this(USA). Conservatives openly desire a king above the constitution. Centrists believe that a highly lopsided balance of power can somehow be fixed with moderate responses. And leftists are nearly 24/7 frothing at the mouth with “why WONT THE DEMOCRATS DO SOMETHING” without any apparent understanding of how majorities and pluralities dictate action in our government. I wouldn’t guess higher than 5% of our political dialogue reflects anything higher than a grade schooler understanding of civics, history, or politics. Which is damn near the only thing we MUST know about to keep the ship upright here thanks to technology and abundance. And we still fuck it more and more every year.
pessimizer 2mo ago
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- sosodev 2mo ago
  > Congratulations on being a vegan. 20% of the population doesn't have health insurance. These two things are completely unrelated.
deleted 2mo ago
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ajb 2mo ago
I think this is a good observation, but I think the diagnosis is slightly wrong. I don't think the process of becoming dismissive of opinions different to yours is limited to those with "extremist" views. The people who agree with you are a biased sample of the population. But so are the people who are willing to openly disagree. So we have both a "bubble" and an "anti-bubble". This is especially true for people with unusual views, but it's also true for everyone. I had a colleague who was part of an idiosyncratic religious denomination, which believes in the literal truth of the Bible etc. He was a nice guy and mostly we avoided talking about this. The one person who raised it in social conversation was the most tactless guy in the office. (To be fair he wasn't that tactless. Someone has to be last). Lots of people online are looking for a verbal fight. The decent people who know you socially or via work, but disagree with you over some political or religious issue, will usually avoid talking about it with you. That applies just as much if you have a mainstream but not universally held belief, as if you have an extreme one. The problem here is that there's not really any incentive to seriously engage with a person with opposing views, even though our society would be a lot better if people did it. Lots of people seem to think that freedom of speech just means freedom to harangue those you disagree with, and aren't interested in the search for truth.
delis-thumbs-7e 2mo ago
In the pie chart 100% of people one meets disagree with ”extremist” belief of Matxism. I guess, if you move in very conservative right-wing circles, but I still doubt if this fella understands how pie-charts work. On the general topic, most people do not have arguments and they do not know how to construct one. They cannot articulate what they believe, since they don’t really know what they believe. Most things people say are just stuff copied from whatever TV-show or meme they saw last. However, if you go around starting discussions on politics with ”what are the three branches of government” most people who actually understand the topic just walk away. I also don’t think ”hey everybody must he stupid except me” explains how people radicalise - or whatever ”idelogically crazy” means. Rather it tells more about the writer and his… problem. I have another suggestion: just fuckin listen. A truck driver or a cleaning lady might have very original and interesting ideas about the world, if you just shut the fuck up and let them talk. Then there’s about quadrillion firebrands across the internet shouting at a video camera almost none of which are worth your time.
regularization 2mo ago
> Suppose you become politically radicalized and become a Marxist. You get convinced that the labor theory of value is correct. > The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect, He's correct most people don't know about labor theory of value. Which is why it's easy for him to categorize those who believe it as "radicalized" and "Marxist" versus the minority of calm, rational, objective people who can discount it. Marx did follow the labor theory of value - as did virtually every major economist (or as they put it probably better back then, student of political economy) before Marx, who also believed it. Marx credits another revolutionary for discovering the labor theory of value - Benjamin Franklin. There were a few proto-papers on subjective theory of value, but an alternative theory of value did not even really exist before Capital was published. Labor theory of value was the theory of Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and all the major economists before Marx. And Marx accepted what they accepted. Alternative theories of value were not really fleshed out until after Marx published Capital. So consider all of this when he categorizes the idea of the labor theory of value as extremist, radical, Marxist etc. According to this article, believing that a carpenter banging wood and nails into a table creates value is an extremist belief. Even though pretty much every major economist before Marx believed the same thing. Ps. This was told to you by myself - from one the 1% of people who know this stuff Pps. If you didn't read the article, you would not know I am referring to myself as part of an elite 1% of knowledge sarcastically
- opo 2mo ago
  The important issue to focus on isn't that long ago people had a model that was not a good model of reality. The issue is that now we have better models and the person who claims they have an educated opinion should know it. Blindly holding to a model that has been shown to be inferior is what makes it an extremist belief. The geocentric model was thought to be true for literally thousands of years by every astronomer and scientist. Today if someone claimed the geocentric model was true, we would consider it an extremist belief - even though pretty much every major astronomer believed it for thousands of years.
DavidPiper 2mo ago
> The person [is not super fired up and] doesn’t just want to act as a soldier for their team This pulled me into a tangential thought: Has anyone else noticed that a lot of people just CAN'T be wrong? They might be contrarian, cynical, narcissists, experts in their field, experiencing PTSD or other emotional disregulation, extremely online, ... Then the team-based things: political entrenchment, [colour]-pilled, conspiracy theorists, religious, Collingwood supporters (kidding) ... Finding people who are genuinely interested in learning about things that might change their views in substantial ways is very hard. Even when you find people genuinely interested in learning, it's so common to see evidence take a back seat to political or religious views. It makes you feel crazy sometimes.
- ifwinterco 2mo ago
  It’s not that you’re crazy, it’s that human beings are not actually rational most of the time. More intelligent human beings can do a better impression of rationality but in most situations they’re still using their intelligence to post-rationalise some existing feeling. Once you recognise that you’ll see that it’s true even in yourself
- mrguyorama 2mo ago
  Remind yourself that every single comment, post, video, update, whatever on the internet is already a selection bias for people who either aren't deterred by the fact that shouting into the void like that is inherently low value and stupid, or reject it and believe a tweet is inherently valuable. IE, you should never ever ever treat an average of online discourse as a representative average of humanity. It is already a niche cohort before you get into specific groups. That alone means you will see more of people who strongly believe their opinions, see more of people who like to hear themselves talk, see more of people who unironically state that "I am never wrong", etc. The comment format of the internet is also pretty much perfectly designed to support the absolute wrong kind of discussion if you want actual productive discourse. Instead of two people going back and forth and building up that context of "Heres what I mean when I say X" and being able to ground discussion on that shared context, there is no shared context and every dumbass can leave a large drive by argument that is not in the same shared context as the rest of the conversation, leading to vacuous "point scoring" and "um akshually" and talking past each other. Online discourse just doesn't progress, because there's nothing that drags my ass back here to respond to your point, like I would feel compelled to in reality.
thrance 2mo ago
Consider two categories of people: 1. The number of people in the general population who will object to neoliberalism. 2. The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why neoliberalism and the trickle down theory of economics is incorrect, and can speak to your very specific concerns about government bloat and over-regulation in a way that gets across how modern social theorists and economists give a more compelling and ethically coherent account of the way the world works, and do so patiently and thoroughly. This is great! It works with everything.
anigbrowl 2mo ago
The author makes some good points, but imho undermines his argument by leading of with concepts like 'you come to believe in an extremist idea'; extremism is a word heavily freighted not only with meanings of intensity, inflexibility, or relative unpopularity but also with the implication of exceptional consequences that follow thereon, like rounding up perceived enemies of the state or overthrowing the social order. It might have been better to start from a perspective of unpopularity or rigid belief in a particular principle, which then hardens into an extremist position following the process of rejection and retrenchment the author describes. On a side note: Suppose you become politically radicalized and become a Marxist. You get convinced that the labor theory of value is correct. Marx did not believe in the Labor Theory of Value, although the above is a very common misconception because a lot of self-avowed Marxists do. On the contrary, Marx believed that some things had inherent value, like an oasis in the desert which provides a much-needed resource without any investment of labor. The LTV was adopted as part of the platform at the inaugural conference of the German Social Democratic Party in 1875. At the time, socialism was split between followers of Marx on one side, and followers of socialists like Ferdinand Lasalle on the other. The differences are too complex to delve into here, but you could say that Marxian socialism was more revolutionary and aspired to a general reorganization of society, while Lasallean socialism was more reformist and oriented around securing rights around pay and working conditions via collective bargaining, rather than having a general hostility to the economic order of the time. Anyway, Marx did not attend this conference but when he was subsequently sent a copy of the program adopted there, he was so annoyed that he wrote a blistering critique, attacking the what he saw as the weak intellectual foundations of the plan and arguing that that they would fundamentally undermine the socialist project. You can read the cirique here, along with a much more comprehensive introduction that provides a lot of additional context: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index... Marx's writing has a reputation for being turgid and difficult, which I think is somewhat undeserved. But lest people think think I'm just doing the academic or political trick of telling you what I think it means, here's the opening couple of paragraphs, in which Marx gets straight to the point: First part of the paragraph: "Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture." Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission. The whole thing is fairly short, maybe 8 or 10 pages though obviously the prose of 150 years ago is rather dense; also Marx was writing to argue with an expert audience rather than to explain to a general one. Nevertheless, it's pretty readable and probably the clearest articulation of how Marx anticipated a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would operate on the way to full Communism (where Marx imagined all economic productivity would be owned and operated by workers in general, and envisioned everyone working part-time for 20-30 hours a week and having abundant time left over for education, entertainment, time with family, or whatever they happened to enjoy).
NonHyloMorph 2mo ago
I'm curious what the author means by: "Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect". First of all isn't that the wrong way around and should be the value theory of labor? But that aside: what is wrong about the concept of surplus value and labour power? (Which I assume would form the core of a marxism and be the value theory of labour; or vice versa) Aren't those generally accepted concepts? The entirety of marxism, especially its teleologial argument/eschatology is a different story, but what social/economic theory falsifies or even contradicts the concept of labour power and surplus value and in what way?
- zahlman 2mo ago
  > First of all isn't that the wrong way around and should be the value theory of labor? No; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value is an established term and has been for centuries. > what is wrong about the concept of surplus value and labour power? ...what social/economic theory falsifies or even contradicts the concept of labour power and surplus value and in what way? The theory has also been superseded for centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism
opo 2mo ago
One thing that I think would be helpful for anyone is to think about a contentious issue you hold a very strong opinion on. Consider what would make you change your mind on this issue. If there is literally nothing anyone could say to you (no new information, no perspective) that would make you change your mind, maybe you should ask yourself why...
pibaker 2mo ago
Your daily reminder that Andy Masley lives on a grant from the effective altruist cult.
gfrecvh 2mo ago
> Their disagreements are also very visible entirely rooted in their pre-existing social identity. This is such a nuanced point. I think that's why it's difficult to get a Jewish person to admit that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. > The reason it’s so easy is that most people are in fact “asleep” about most things most of the time, Bingo against. I first had this exact thought in the context of people losing more and more time to distractions like Instagram tiktok etc. At the time people around me thought I was crazy (it's changing now). Such an insightful post. > Many people adopt beliefs because it seems like the people they think of as good adopted them too And not just beliefs. Fashion and all sorts of mannerisms. What is it with a certain segment of the population using their pants at the bottom of their asses? Did they all decide to do this independently? Or do look around and see that all their favourite gangstas do it?
TrackerFF 2mo ago
For the past few years, I've seen a dozen of friends or acquaintances turn "ideologically crazy", and they can be roughly grouped into: A) Onset of schizophrenia or other serious mental illness, followed by psychosis. This is actually the most common I've seen. But it is also the easiest to spot. B) Some crisis event in life, followed by finding / joining a community. Some were hit hard by this during COVID. I've yet to personally see people that have their, well, shit together and live busy lives turn into ideological crazies or extremists - where there is no mental illness. Of course, it could be that they just hide it better. Don't use their public accounts, etc. I also think it is much easier to become radicalized today. Once you search for any extremist views on say social media, you'll be bombarded with it. Just belonging to a certain demographic could trigger a non-stop barrage of extreme wing influencer content in your feed.
- 121789 2mo ago
  Don’t agree actually. Have seen many busy working professionals fall into “extremism” and it’s pretty much always the same. They have a few issues they are firm on and align with one party, they don’t like the other side because of this, then they only hang out with people aligned with their views and only consume media aligned with their views. Quickly turns into lunatic talking points, and I’ve seen it happen to both the left and right.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    I've only seen this with the right. Can you describe what it's like when it's left?
    - aftbit 2mo ago
      In my experience, it looks almost identical, just mirror imaged. Lots of anger and fear, a strong certainty that they know the full story about every issue and that the other side is evil or idiotic. No grace or space in their hearts to consider that many of today's contentious issues are actually complicated, with overlapping and conflicting ethical arguments.
mxmilkiib 2mo ago
DUCK DUCK GO MURRAY BOOKCHIN!! https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-herber-murray-bookchin-towards-a-liberatory-technology https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-herber-murray-... (1965) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post-scarcity-anarchism-book https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post... (1971) https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/06/15/how-my-fathers-ideas-helped-the-kurds-create-a-new-democracy https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/06/15/how-my-fathers-ide...
gaigalas 2mo ago
> "Consider two categories of people:" That's precisely how crazy ideologies form.
ozozozd 2mo ago
There is a much cheaper heuristic: if someone is very confident about their beliefs, can’t critique those beliefs or find flaws or inconsistencies in them, by the very definition, they are religious, and it’s not an intellectual discussion. I can’t think of a belief I currently hold - other than more instinctive ones like children’s welfare - and that I cannot critique or find flaws in. If I you push me, I might even find inconsistencies there. Although I agree with the author for the inverse. E.g. I haven’t heard a non-religious or non-grifter argument about AI safety, so far. But I shouldn’t conclude it’s crazy. I haven’t heard of an argument for effective altruism that is even remotely altruistic or one that is not a legitimization of libertarian-style support for social injustice. But maybe I only heard crappy arguments.
burnt-resistor 2mo ago
If you need use of specific words, slogans, clothing, implements, secrets handshakes, or silly walks to be a member of a club, then it's probably a cult. Grifters in various media markets have done a very good job on behalf of their respective backers and establishment to divide and conquer and manufacture consent of the audience into atomized disorganization with the above arbitrary elements and almost arbitrary wedge issues that that might be a first step in reevaluating a belief structure. The next might be a bit of introspection and consideration of other people's perspectives. Stay unsure, curious, and calm.
anovikov 2mo ago
One can formulate it a lot simpler: whatever are you arguing about, you are mostly arguing with idiots because normal people have shit to do and they don't care arguing about abstract things unless paid to do so.
harvey9 2mo ago
Having similar diet and politics as the writer, I remember years ago falling out with a socialist acquaintance because he thought it was ok for farm workers to go on strike and leave animals to starve. His commitment to never crossing picket lines was absolute.
- anonymous_user9 2mo ago
  But that implies being a farm worker turns you into a sort of indentured servant
ElevenLathe 2mo ago
This is a decent post, but I object to the framing of "Marxism" as some kind of extreme political ideology. It's just a view of economics, not radically different from other strains of economics. Being a "Marxist" doesn't mean you're a steely eyed revolutionary. I'd guess that all the richest people we can think of are Marxists in the sense that they believe in a materialist class analysis, and that their class interests (those of capitalists) are opposed to the class interests of, at minimum, their own employees. How do we know this? Because capitalists demonstrably and objectively behave as though they have class solidarity. Yes, they compete in the market and even through political corruption, but they are very organized and committed to basic principles that benefit all capitalists: anti-labor policies, weak anti-corruption laws and enforcement, tax breaks and loopholes, etc. They have lots of money, so they obviously support policies that make it easier to transmute money into power over others. This is not ideological, but a matter of material class interests. Musk's "makers vs takers" framing is Marxism, but from the point of view of a capitalist. Likewise, it's totally possible to be a middle-class anti-labor Marxist. Marxism is only a lens to look at things through, and what it ultimately says is about the class position of whoever is looking through it. It's about identifying what one's interests are, not necessarily a prescription of what to do about it.
AuthAuth 2mo ago
I dont know how to convey this in a sticky way but these extremist beliefs are not organic. People do not organically become neo nazis or Marxist lennists. They are not randomly adopting these beliefs because of circumstances of the world. These groups specifically target and craft messages and strategies. You can see it if you browse their spaces and they openly talk about it. They will have threads where they pick a common argument and refine the response. They then go into the space and make the bad side of the argument on one account and pile on it with the refined arguments. Praise all the people that agree as intelligent and demean all the people that disagree. It really does not take that many people to successfully flip a space. Because the message is crafted its always just on the edge of what can be banned for. If they are banned its a good opportunity to act like it was a massive overreach. People see these tiny little seeds getting planted and eventually when they are presented with the argument they reach the extreme position and feel like it was their own work.
duxup 2mo ago
>The person is not super fired up and doesn’t just want to act as a soldier for their team I wish I knew how to filter that last part. On the internet folks even smell something that SEEMS not 100% on their side, conversation is over and they just want to e-yell at you.

176 points by mef 2mo ago

> Don't update positively on your extremist beliefs whenever you hear a bad argument against them Two problems: 1. There are beliefs people hold approximately as strongly as they hold "the Sun will rise tomorrow", so "updating" is kinda irrelevant. 2. How many people actually think any of their beliefs are "extremist"? And if they don't, they won't consider the warning to apply. And after digging in further: 3. Many people reasonably believe that their discussion circles already filter out a lot of "average people" and thus expect a higher standard of discourse from their ideological opponents. When that still doesn't happen, it naturally seems like stronger evidence. 4. (Insert generic annoyance at veganism discourse here.)

jp_sc 2mo ago
One big problem is that lately this kind of extremism has become more like a cult: even considering the idea that the “others” might have some truth (while being wrong about the rest) is treated like blasphemy
inigyou 2mo ago
I am an extremist - I use GrapheneOS and I think the government shouldn't kill people for being gay.
- Lord-Jobo 2mo ago
  This really is my big issue with the focus on “extremist, moderate, centrist, whatever”. I don’t care what the centrist or moderate opinion is. It’s been insanely wrong many times throughout history. (1939 German opinions on Jewish people. Public view on MLK at the time of his death) Let’s focus less on “extreme” and more on “unprincipled, uncritical, illogical, undercooked”. If you discard those categories, ignore extreme vs moderate, you get rid of anything that we should consider “bad” that is normally captured by “extreme”

NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago

[flagged]

Erem 2mo ago
What in that blog made you write him off? I also clicked through and found very thoughtful writing on the topic, though I still disagree with their position as I understand it.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
  Animal rights nuttery. It is the product of an irrational mind, everything he says and thinks is suspect. While he might be accidentally correct on other topics, now I have to vet every single point and turn of logic on my own... and if I have to do that, I might as well do it without his input. Nor am I particularly curious if we did arrive at the same conclusion. The same impulses that make people search for religions (and when they can find none to their liking, invent them) is what leads to that particular brain disease. I have no need of the religion. I mean, it's already a dietary code, it just needs a prophet and it's complete. Animals are food.

ihsw 2mo ago

[dead]

stymaar 2mo ago

The key problem is social media feed boosting “engagement”. Balanced, well thought comments don't bring much engagement so they end up being ignored by the algorithm while outrageously stupid takes generate a lot of (negative) engagement, some of which being equally stupid which will bring more engagement than the sensible responses and so on. And at the end if the day, all you see in your social media feed is stupid people sharing at least some of your values arguing with even stupider people (or so you think, at least) who have the opposite views. This is obviously harmful for society but also obviously the best outcome for the platform who wants to sell your attention to advertisers.

gibbitz 2mo ago

I think the problem here is that we have a bias for those who agree with us that outweighs our patience in searching for oppositional opinions that are well founded. From a liberal bubble it is quite hard to find conservative viewpoints that aren't based on unobserved apriori belief or strawman arguments. It feels like being a heavyweight surrounded by lightweights and it makes me feel like I need a better sparring partner, I just can't find one...

moritzwarhier 2mo ago
> I think the problem here is that we have a bias for those who agree with us that outweighs our patience in searching for oppositional opinions that are well founded. This is a very agreeable statement, but I'd add that politics is not about finding the Kantian truth of what's best for everyone (inside the country? globally? also immigrants? lazy and ugly natives?). It's about balancing interests. Of course, the idea of free market democracy was/is that both goals eventually converge.
- verall 2mo ago
  Like balancing whose interests? I'm thinking you're meaning like "politics is about trying to understand/impact what could plausibly occur", whereas the "truth" you mention is inherantly unconcerned with that, but I think there's also value in finding and debating it. What's implementation without a target? Is politics concerned with improving conditions for people, or is it just balancing enough interests that we don't start killing eachother? It's shades of both I think, and there's fierce disagreement about both the global optimum and how to or if it's worth getting there
  - moritzwarhier 2mo ago
    I thought about balancing the interests of those who have power, by all means short of war. And of course this begs the question who has power and who should have power. The will to improve living conditions comes from the interests of those who have political power, in my view. You can say because of democracy if you like. Or, more cynically, dependence on labor and consumption (Fordism), or, more idealistically, ethical values in powerful people themselves, and all of that are nuances and not absolutes I guess. But I wouldn't say that my definition was precise. I just wanted to point out that it is not a given for politics to have the goal of optimizing utilitarian interests, maximizing wellbeing or long-term goals such as protecting people. In other words, participants in politics do not only discuss how things should be achieved, but also what should be achieved. If that makes sense: this is what I meant by "balancing powers". I'm not sure right now how to map it to the two poles you describe.

cgyvbunji 2mo ago

> it’s very very easy to be negatively polarized by a ton of bad conversations with normal people about it, until you feel like the whole rest of the world is crazy Why wouldn't the world be crazy, though? What reason do we have to assume that the world is not crazy? Most reasons are tautological when you really unpack them.

Georgelemental 2mo ago
Of course the world is crazy. But so are you
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- mapontosevenths 2mo ago
  Agreed, but also: Just because they're crazy, it doesn't mean they're wrong.
  - 47635274172635 2mo ago
    Depends, if we're being pedantic crazy implies you get some stuff wrong, due to not "being" fully there. This world is a messy complicated place and I tend to think in percentages about everything. Guarantees are rare, I usually think of events as probabilistic, and likewise what other people say. Now, these probabilities can change based on who's saying what. Theoretically someone who specialized in that topic has a higher chance of "getting it right", or sussing it better than people who aren't as versed in that subject. That's what academia is, and if it wouldn't work we wouldn't do it. So, for me it does matter who's saying what, but only to some extent. That means even the most educated, smart and focused individual can get it wrong, and some nobody with no training on the subject can get it right, for various reasons, even pure chance. So I'm never discarding someone's opinion based on who the are or their training, but I do consider the chances of them being right or wrong. There was a recent discussion about Nobelitis.
    - 2mo ago

sfblah 2mo ago

[flagged]

Erem 2mo ago
He calls his position on animal welfare “extremist”. That’s hardly a smuggling. And anyways I found his linked blog post pretty thought provoking, even though I hold a different position than the author.
- sfblah 2mo ago
  Fine. Not smuggling then “advocating”. It doesn’t actually matter, since it hurts the overall force of his point. Like, if he’s detected this trend why not learn from it himself?
  - SpicyLemonZest 2mo ago
    Because he wants to be clear that you don’t face a choice between turning crazy and believing only things that the people around you consider normal. You can believe strange, extreme things and still be reasonable about them.
  - card_zero 2mo ago
    I thought it was kind of convenient and helpful to be able to say "I, too, am a nutjob" while advocating moderation in one's nutjobbery. See the comment by jrflowers for how it would have come off if the author claimed to be perfect.

miyoji 2mo ago

The good part of this: don't fall into the trap of believing the proposition "an idiot disagrees with me, so I must be right". That's solid advice, idiots believe countless true things and geniuses believe innumerable false things. The intelligence of a random interlocutor has nothing to do with the validity of their opinions, really, so it shouldn't serve as evidence one way or another. Generally, I try to pay attention to good arguments against my ideas, not good arguers. I think the advice for who to listen to is very bad, though. He calls it being "slightly elitist", but his bar is beneath the ground. The example for discussing politics is knowing what the three branches of government are - I knew that when I was 8 and I don't think I had anything interesting to say about politics back then. I definitely couldn't have given a meaningful critique on the latest policy debate, and neither can anyone possessing merely the most basic knowledge of rudimentary facts on the topic.

imoverclocked 2mo ago
I think knowing about the branches of your government is a prerequisite to having an opinion or good argument about it. It’s not sufficient to just know that but it’s a good filter in the USA where a surprising number of people have “opinions” but lack the most basic knowledge.
- miyoji 2mo ago
  It's a prerequisite, but so is breathing. It's necessary but not sufficient. The bar I like to use is pretty simple: do you know who represents you in Congress (I am American so this is my bias, but substitute your country's equivalent if there is one)? As in, your state's two Senators and your district's Representative? If not, you probably don't vote or don't pay attention when you do, and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes, so you probably don't really care that much about whatever it is you say you care about, since you haven't done the easiest thing you can do to make a change. It's not perfect, and no criteria will be, but there are tons of people who can rattle off "executive, legislative, judiciary" who nevertheless don't know ball.
  - 2mo ago

jrflowers 2mo ago

I like that the author doesn’t clarify what constitutes an extremist idea aside from suggesting that he doesn’t believe in any. “Extremism is when people, who are dumb, don’t know facts unlike me, who is very smart” is a kick ass theme for an essay

miyoji 2mo ago
"I’m not against extremist ideas on principle. I have my own, the main one being that animal welfare is a much larger urgent catastrophe than most people believe."
- hackernud3s 2mo ago
  This is clearly a cool take though and author knows it. This is not a polarizing view in the sense that anything about Epstein / Gaza / Trans athletes would be.
  - jhbadger 2mo ago
    Maybe not as polarizing as those, but by "animal welfare" he doesn't mean volunteering at the local animal shelter, he's a vegan. That's pretty polarizing to a lot of people who see veganism as an attack on their whole existence because they like meat.
    - hackernud3s 2mo ago
      [flagged]
    - duncangh 2mo ago
      Veganism is so polarizing because on some level I think most if not all people understand that they are philosophically correct and that veganism is thus the morally right thing to do and those (like me) who still refuse to do it must live with themselves and their immoral choices every time they are confronted by a vegan or reminded of the feasibility of veganism

pstuart 2mo ago

Here's One Weird Trick™ to avoid being an ideologue: be ok with being wrong. Flipping that over: aspire to be correct in your beliefs, not in "being right". Karl Popper (the man behind the Intolerance of Intolerance "paradox) identified it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

mapontosevenths 2mo ago
I only recently learned that most peoples beliefs are not "factual beliefs". Since most of mine are, I thought that's how other people work. I think Popper may have made the same mistake by assuming "correctness" is always the primary value a belief offers. The other kind of beliefs are "Symbolic beliefs." Symbolic beliefs are not held because they are true, or because they are useful on their own. They're held because they signal that you belong to the tribe. They are similar to the "Alief", which is an automatic unequestioned belief. Most Symbolic beliefs are aliefs, but not all. Since learning about this I've been trying to identify my own aliefs and symbolic beliefs and question them. It turns out I have more than I'd realized. We probably all do.
- pdonis 2mo ago
  > I only recently learned that most peoples beliefs are not "factual beliefs". I think this greatly underestimates the number of completely mundane, innocuous factual beliefs that everyone, or at least everyone who is able to get through their lives without serious mishap for any length of time, has to have. For anyone in that position, most of their beliefs have to be factual beliefs, and have to be true at least to a good enough approximation to allow them to function. We tend to ignore such beliefs in discussions like this, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.
- gghackernewsgg 2mo ago
  Personally, I consider "belief" from a behavioral perspective: belief is the model of reality one actually operates from. For example, when I walk on my kitchen floor, I don't have to tell myself: "the floor is structurally sound, it's safe to walk on it." I just walk. The fact that I just walk can be used to infer an infinite number of implied bleiefs that I've never verbalized until this moment. For example, I believe that: 1. The floor can support my weight. 2. The tiles aren't made of toxic materials. 3. I don't pay $$ by the step. 4. Walking on the floor doesn't cause my wife pain. 5. The floor isn't lava. To refine my definition: a belief is that which systematically and implicitly guides my expectations, reactions, choices, etc. In her glass skywalk example, Gendler lays out the definitions roughly so: 1. "I know this skywalk is sturdy and safe" = Belief 2. The hesitancy to cross the skywalk = Alief But to me: 1. "I know this skywalk is sturdy and safe" = knowledge 2. Hesitancy to cross it = actual belief. That's why in my vocavbulary it's perfectly fine to say: "I know it. But I don't believe it." Similarly, if someone says, "I totally believe that planes are safe, but I'm terrified of flying", then I will think to myself: "nope; you totally don't believe that planes are safe."

woodruffw 2mo ago

I think the advice at the end of this post is essentially sound: you should pre-filter your evaluation of others’ opinions through their understanding of related topics. But that isn’t elitist, and I think we shouldn’t call it that! It’s a form of media and cultural literacy we should be encouraging people to have; there isn’t (and shouldn’t) be anything elite about it.

hingler36 2mo ago

I agree with a lot of this, and the framing is new to me and I really appreciate it. I especially appreciate the acknowledgement that there isn't necessarily anything wrong with having extreme beliefs; "extreme" is a label most often applied by antagonists of such beliefs. But I definitely feel like there can be a pipeline where one extreme belief may lead to others simply because they are also labelled extreme and not for a more recognizable reason.

irishcoffee 2mo ago
I would counter with people who believe the earth is flat. This is in fact an extreme belief. The best part is, I don’t care if people believe this, not even a little a bit. I care when they start arguing with me and trying to jam their belief down my throat. I didn’t even ask, you brought it up and you’re mad at me because I disagree. I think this is the more interesting point to consider. Having a belief, any belief, is probably just fine. It’s the second part that’s the issue.
- hingler36 2mo ago
  Where would you draw the line between someone advocating for their belief vs shoving it down your throat? Does the "extremeness" of the belief factor into the judgement? If so, how are we not back at the original question of the definition of what an extreme belief is?
  - irishcoffee 2mo ago
    Why are you implying that advocating for your belief and making someone else endure that advocation is some kind of right? It is not. As to your question, there are a lot of extreme beliefs that sometimes end up becoming true. IIRC the person who first advocated for washing hands because of tiny "things" that could make people sick, he was laughed out of the room, and he was right. It was an extreme belief at the time. I basically reject the whole premise that "no belief is extreme" because there are countless examples throughout history of extreme beliefs that the world considered extreme, and they turned out to be true. Didn't make the belief any less extreme at the time.

ZoomZoomZoom 2mo ago

What a breath of fresh air! If only people were in control of their own selves to stick to this kind of balanced and open-minded disposition.

beloch 2mo ago

Information hygiene is important if you don't want to go "crazy" in this sense. Be careful about what news you consume, even if it appears to agree with you. Check sources. Check facts. Try to work up to your beliefs from direct observation and basic principles whenever possible. Question your beliefs. Maybe they're wrong! e.g. It's easy to get worked up about Trump. There's an awful lot bad press out there about him. Ask yourself, can a human being really be that vile? Maybe I'm just being misled by the media and partisan politics. Go watch some uncut speeches and press conferences. Pay attention to what the man actually does. Oh, he wants to place tariffs on my country because smoke from forest fires sometimes crosses our shared borders*? He actually said that? Yes. Yes he did. That's directly observable scumbag behaviour. If a romantic interest acted that way I'd break things off immediately. Huge red flag. Maybe the negative opinions about him check out. --------- * It crosses both ways, BTW.

gfrecvh 2mo ago
> Pay attention to what the man actually does. Pardoned a lot of the highest profile criminals of the past decade. Started a war with Iran.

petermcneeley 2mo ago

[flagged]

jongjong 2mo ago

Rational people will pick the ideology which has the fewest contradictions. Irrational people will choose that which serves them best. People who benefit from a system are unlikely to look for problems with it and unlikely to notice any contradictions. Anything which appears as a contradiction gets shrugged off as "Well, there must be a good reason, I'm not an expert. I will trust the experts." These people corrupt Occam's Razor that the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. "The experts say ..." becomes the ultimate simplest explanation to everything... And the experts that they choose to listen to are those who are aligned with their existing beliefs. Then you have people who notice the contradictions but they see so many from first-hand experience that they don't trust the experts and they don't have access to enough different information to be able to choose a good one; so they just adopt the least-bad one as their own... The one which best protects their self-image and whose (comparatively) few contradictions can be plausibly explained away by corruption, conspiracy or dishonesty. But I think the latter group is in fact one step closer to the truth. The truth is there is no conspiracy (at least no grand, all-encompassing one), it's worse than that; systemic incentives create alignment and remove the need for intentional coordination. The coordination, the illusion of conspiracy is just a byproduct of incentives. The second group of people are wrong about the mechanism but their view of reality leads to the same outcome... So with each passing year, their views are being reinforced by more "proof." The system which manufactures the incentives which create alignment is itself probably not the product of conspiracy; it's just a system which evolved slowly over time to subtly serve its operators and their supporters. They don't want to change it, not out of nefariousness, but out of justified fear of what havoc any change might wreck... Bureaucracy also plays a part. It's very difficult to co-ordinate a lot of people to agree on anything, let alone act on it. This is one thing that the mainstream anti-conspiracy folks are completely right about. I'm a global top-50-university-credentialed expert in Information Technology who majored in System Design and has worked for a wide range of companies of different sizes, in multiple industries (education, remote work platforms, social media, banking/finance), in multiple countries including in highly political areas like crypto... So the "trust the experts" folk can trust me when it comes to information flows and system design...

Eisenstein 2mo ago
Try this: take a position you hold that you are sure is rational but that a number of people disagree with, and pretend it is wrong and look at it from the opposite perspective. Steelman it and honestly take that perspective as true and argue it in your head. You might still not agree with it, but you can make it rational. So, how certain are should we be that our positions are the rational ones if we can do this?

api 2mo ago

This is great. The error it highlights would work for anything. The Earth is on the back of a large turtle. Prove me wrong. Most of the arguments you hear will be deeply flawed. Therefore we are on the back of a giant turtle.

gfrecvh 2mo ago
I think it's easy to give correct arguments, it's just easy for you to dismiss them. For example if i say "we're not on the back of a giant turtle, because humans went into a rock ship, went all around the planet and checked there's no turtle", is absolutely correct. But then you'll say something like "how do you know, were you yourself in the rocket ship?". And this is how normal people see extremists: "I just addressed your point, but you choose to hold a ridiculous position"

NathanielBaking 2mo ago

I am vegetarian, not vegan. I am so because it is something I can do about the state of animal welfare. I don't engage in discussions about my eating with people outside my immediate family. My immediate family are all omnivores. I sometimes, but rarely, choose to eat meat because it is served to me by someone who doesn't know my preference. Animal welfare remains my top priority and concern.

wisty 2mo ago

Freedom of association is kind of a mistake, as it encourages these bubbles to form.

kylecazar 2mo ago

Great points and nice write-up. At the risk of sounding AI pilled, I find LLM's are fairly good sparring partners if you instruct them well. At least they're more capable of giving you the best arguments against your position than the average bar patron. Almost all of my non-professional prompts are of that nature.

kenferry 2mo ago
I don't know. AI are basically trained to tell you what you want to hear, including when they're disagreeing with you. If you come off of your conversation with AI with a stronger belief than when you went in, is that merited? "AI Advice Suppresses People’s Willingness To Say “I Don’t Know”, Even When The Advice Is Wrong And Accuracy Is Incentivized" https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5y6m4_v1 https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5y6m4_v1
- childintime 2mo ago
  Yeah you have to frame the prompt as if you've come across some potentially extremist view you want to know more about, and pretend you're an outsider needing advice. Then you bias it to favor what you really want to know.
Lord-Jobo 2mo ago
LLM are so insanely terrible at this that I constantly have to moderate my prompts with “maybe this isn’t true” or “maybe I am misunderstanding this explanation” to get them to STOP crumbling into dust over the slightest pressure. That’s WITH strong pre prompts that also push against this bias. Roleplay/persona used to be a good way to get around this. “Pretend you are an almighty, rarely wrong, curmudgeonly professor with 150 different phds talking to me, a student”. But these abilities have been strongly restricted due to other (fair) issues so it’s not a solution any more. Better than a bar patron, no doubt. Still nothing compared to any normal well educated human being

uiuihu 2mo ago

If you're not an extremist at this point relative to everyone else, the vast majority of whom have beliefs that are incompatible with the existence of other life on this planet, then you're probably a moron.

NonHyloMorph 2mo ago
I asked a question, and it's not a rhetorical one, even though it's formulation indicates that I have some serious doubts that there is a factual answer - it's called capital-ism for a reason. edited for typo

card_zero 2mo ago

Pretty good. I have something to say about this part: > most people are in fact “asleep” about most things most of the time, not super thoughtful in how they develop beliefs Which is later echoed, but differently, as: > the average person just doesn’t know much about your hyper specific thing This is skirting around whether they have a duty to know about your thing. The first phrasing suggests they do, the second suggests not. Given that your thing is probably stupid and wrong, and life's too short, it seems reasonable to me that most people can't give you good arguments about it unless you invite them to take a pleasant and entertaining walk around your reasoning and maybe sleep on it and come back later. If the subject can't be made pleasant and entertaining, you're probably out of luck. This unfortunately still applies even when your thing is genuinely a great insight.

Lord-Jobo 2mo ago
There is a pretty small set of things I think people have a duty to know in our very open and comfortable first world. Civics is the main one that is being catastrophically neglected as pointed out by some other comments here. A majority of the discourse in every political space completely fumbles this(USA). Conservatives openly desire a king above the constitution. Centrists believe that a highly lopsided balance of power can somehow be fixed with moderate responses. And leftists are nearly 24/7 frothing at the mouth with “why WONT THE DEMOCRATS DO SOMETHING” without any apparent understanding of how majorities and pluralities dictate action in our government. I wouldn’t guess higher than 5% of our political dialogue reflects anything higher than a grade schooler understanding of civics, history, or politics. Which is damn near the only thing we MUST know about to keep the ship upright here thanks to technology and abundance. And we still fuck it more and more every year.

pessimizer 2mo ago

[flagged]

sosodev 2mo ago
> Congratulations on being a vegan. 20% of the population doesn't have health insurance. These two things are completely unrelated.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

ajb 2mo ago

I think this is a good observation, but I think the diagnosis is slightly wrong. I don't think the process of becoming dismissive of opinions different to yours is limited to those with "extremist" views. The people who agree with you are a biased sample of the population. But so are the people who are willing to openly disagree. So we have both a "bubble" and an "anti-bubble". This is especially true for people with unusual views, but it's also true for everyone. I had a colleague who was part of an idiosyncratic religious denomination, which believes in the literal truth of the Bible etc. He was a nice guy and mostly we avoided talking about this. The one person who raised it in social conversation was the most tactless guy in the office. (To be fair he wasn't that tactless. Someone has to be last). Lots of people online are looking for a verbal fight. The decent people who know you socially or via work, but disagree with you over some political or religious issue, will usually avoid talking about it with you. That applies just as much if you have a mainstream but not universally held belief, as if you have an extreme one. The problem here is that there's not really any incentive to seriously engage with a person with opposing views, even though our society would be a lot better if people did it. Lots of people seem to think that freedom of speech just means freedom to harangue those you disagree with, and aren't interested in the search for truth.

delis-thumbs-7e 2mo ago

In the pie chart 100% of people one meets disagree with ”extremist” belief of Matxism. I guess, if you move in very conservative right-wing circles, but I still doubt if this fella understands how pie-charts work. On the general topic, most people do not have arguments and they do not know how to construct one. They cannot articulate what they believe, since they don’t really know what they believe. Most things people say are just stuff copied from whatever TV-show or meme they saw last. However, if you go around starting discussions on politics with ”what are the three branches of government” most people who actually understand the topic just walk away. I also don’t think ”hey everybody must he stupid except me” explains how people radicalise - or whatever ”idelogically crazy” means. Rather it tells more about the writer and his… problem. I have another suggestion: just fuckin listen. A truck driver or a cleaning lady might have very original and interesting ideas about the world, if you just shut the fuck up and let them talk. Then there’s about quadrillion firebrands across the internet shouting at a video camera almost none of which are worth your time.

regularization 2mo ago

> Suppose you become politically radicalized and become a Marxist. You get convinced that the labor theory of value is correct. > The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect, He's correct most people don't know about labor theory of value. Which is why it's easy for him to categorize those who believe it as "radicalized" and "Marxist" versus the minority of calm, rational, objective people who can discount it. Marx did follow the labor theory of value - as did virtually every major economist (or as they put it probably better back then, student of political economy) before Marx, who also believed it. Marx credits another revolutionary for discovering the labor theory of value - Benjamin Franklin. There were a few proto-papers on subjective theory of value, but an alternative theory of value did not even really exist before Capital was published. Labor theory of value was the theory of Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and all the major economists before Marx. And Marx accepted what they accepted. Alternative theories of value were not really fleshed out until after Marx published Capital. So consider all of this when he categorizes the idea of the labor theory of value as extremist, radical, Marxist etc. According to this article, believing that a carpenter banging wood and nails into a table creates value is an extremist belief. Even though pretty much every major economist before Marx believed the same thing. Ps. This was told to you by myself - from one the 1% of people who know this stuff Pps. If you didn't read the article, you would not know I am referring to myself as part of an elite 1% of knowledge sarcastically

opo 2mo ago
The important issue to focus on isn't that long ago people had a model that was not a good model of reality. The issue is that now we have better models and the person who claims they have an educated opinion should know it. Blindly holding to a model that has been shown to be inferior is what makes it an extremist belief. The geocentric model was thought to be true for literally thousands of years by every astronomer and scientist. Today if someone claimed the geocentric model was true, we would consider it an extremist belief - even though pretty much every major astronomer believed it for thousands of years.

DavidPiper 2mo ago

> The person [is not super fired up and] doesn’t just want to act as a soldier for their team This pulled me into a tangential thought: Has anyone else noticed that a lot of people just CAN'T be wrong? They might be contrarian, cynical, narcissists, experts in their field, experiencing PTSD or other emotional disregulation, extremely online, ... Then the team-based things: political entrenchment, [colour]-pilled, conspiracy theorists, religious, Collingwood supporters (kidding) ... Finding people who are genuinely interested in learning about things that might change their views in substantial ways is very hard. Even when you find people genuinely interested in learning, it's so common to see evidence take a back seat to political or religious views. It makes you feel crazy sometimes.

ifwinterco 2mo ago
It’s not that you’re crazy, it’s that human beings are not actually rational most of the time. More intelligent human beings can do a better impression of rationality but in most situations they’re still using their intelligence to post-rationalise some existing feeling. Once you recognise that you’ll see that it’s true even in yourself
mrguyorama 2mo ago
Remind yourself that every single comment, post, video, update, whatever on the internet is already a selection bias for people who either aren't deterred by the fact that shouting into the void like that is inherently low value and stupid, or reject it and believe a tweet is inherently valuable. IE, you should never ever ever treat an average of online discourse as a representative average of humanity. It is already a niche cohort before you get into specific groups. That alone means you will see more of people who strongly believe their opinions, see more of people who like to hear themselves talk, see more of people who unironically state that "I am never wrong", etc. The comment format of the internet is also pretty much perfectly designed to support the absolute wrong kind of discussion if you want actual productive discourse. Instead of two people going back and forth and building up that context of "Heres what I mean when I say X" and being able to ground discussion on that shared context, there is no shared context and every dumbass can leave a large drive by argument that is not in the same shared context as the rest of the conversation, leading to vacuous "point scoring" and "um akshually" and talking past each other. Online discourse just doesn't progress, because there's nothing that drags my ass back here to respond to your point, like I would feel compelled to in reality.

thrance 2mo ago

Consider two categories of people: 1. The number of people in the general population who will object to neoliberalism. 2. The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why neoliberalism and the trickle down theory of economics is incorrect, and can speak to your very specific concerns about government bloat and over-regulation in a way that gets across how modern social theorists and economists give a more compelling and ethically coherent account of the way the world works, and do so patiently and thoroughly. This is great! It works with everything.

anigbrowl 2mo ago

The author makes some good points, but imho undermines his argument by leading of with concepts like 'you come to believe in an extremist idea'; extremism is a word heavily freighted not only with meanings of intensity, inflexibility, or relative unpopularity but also with the implication of exceptional consequences that follow thereon, like rounding up perceived enemies of the state or overthrowing the social order. It might have been better to start from a perspective of unpopularity or rigid belief in a particular principle, which then hardens into an extremist position following the process of rejection and retrenchment the author describes. On a side note: Suppose you become politically radicalized and become a Marxist. You get convinced that the labor theory of value is correct. Marx did not believe in the Labor Theory of Value, although the above is a very common misconception because a lot of self-avowed Marxists do. On the contrary, Marx believed that some things had inherent value, like an oasis in the desert which provides a much-needed resource without any investment of labor. The LTV was adopted as part of the platform at the inaugural conference of the German Social Democratic Party in 1875. At the time, socialism was split between followers of Marx on one side, and followers of socialists like Ferdinand Lasalle on the other. The differences are too complex to delve into here, but you could say that Marxian socialism was more revolutionary and aspired to a general reorganization of society, while Lasallean socialism was more reformist and oriented around securing rights around pay and working conditions via collective bargaining, rather than having a general hostility to the economic order of the time. Anyway, Marx did not attend this conference but when he was subsequently sent a copy of the program adopted there, he was so annoyed that he wrote a blistering critique, attacking the what he saw as the weak intellectual foundations of the plan and arguing that that they would fundamentally undermine the socialist project. You can read the cirique here, along with a much more comprehensive introduction that provides a lot of additional context: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index... Marx's writing has a reputation for being turgid and difficult, which I think is somewhat undeserved. But lest people think think I'm just doing the academic or political trick of telling you what I think it means, here's the opening couple of paragraphs, in which Marx gets straight to the point: First part of the paragraph: "Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture." Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission. The whole thing is fairly short, maybe 8 or 10 pages though obviously the prose of 150 years ago is rather dense; also Marx was writing to argue with an expert audience rather than to explain to a general one. Nevertheless, it's pretty readable and probably the clearest articulation of how Marx anticipated a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would operate on the way to full Communism (where Marx imagined all economic productivity would be owned and operated by workers in general, and envisioned everyone working part-time for 20-30 hours a week and having abundant time left over for education, entertainment, time with family, or whatever they happened to enjoy).

NonHyloMorph 2mo ago

I'm curious what the author means by: "Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect". First of all isn't that the wrong way around and should be the value theory of labor? But that aside: what is wrong about the concept of surplus value and labour power? (Which I assume would form the core of a marxism and be the value theory of labour; or vice versa) Aren't those generally accepted concepts? The entirety of marxism, especially its teleologial argument/eschatology is a different story, but what social/economic theory falsifies or even contradicts the concept of labour power and surplus value and in what way?

zahlman 2mo ago
> First of all isn't that the wrong way around and should be the value theory of labor? No; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value is an established term and has been for centuries. > what is wrong about the concept of surplus value and labour power? ...what social/economic theory falsifies or even contradicts the concept of labour power and surplus value and in what way? The theory has also been superseded for centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism

opo 2mo ago

One thing that I think would be helpful for anyone is to think about a contentious issue you hold a very strong opinion on. Consider what would make you change your mind on this issue. If there is literally nothing anyone could say to you (no new information, no perspective) that would make you change your mind, maybe you should ask yourself why...

pibaker 2mo ago

Your daily reminder that Andy Masley lives on a grant from the effective altruist cult.

gfrecvh 2mo ago

> Their disagreements are also very visible entirely rooted in their pre-existing social identity. This is such a nuanced point. I think that's why it's difficult to get a Jewish person to admit that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. > The reason it’s so easy is that most people are in fact “asleep” about most things most of the time, Bingo against. I first had this exact thought in the context of people losing more and more time to distractions like Instagram tiktok etc. At the time people around me thought I was crazy (it's changing now). Such an insightful post. > Many people adopt beliefs because it seems like the people they think of as good adopted them too And not just beliefs. Fashion and all sorts of mannerisms. What is it with a certain segment of the population using their pants at the bottom of their asses? Did they all decide to do this independently? Or do look around and see that all their favourite gangstas do it?

TrackerFF 2mo ago

For the past few years, I've seen a dozen of friends or acquaintances turn "ideologically crazy", and they can be roughly grouped into: A) Onset of schizophrenia or other serious mental illness, followed by psychosis. This is actually the most common I've seen. But it is also the easiest to spot. B) Some crisis event in life, followed by finding / joining a community. Some were hit hard by this during COVID. I've yet to personally see people that have their, well, shit together and live busy lives turn into ideological crazies or extremists - where there is no mental illness. Of course, it could be that they just hide it better. Don't use their public accounts, etc. I also think it is much easier to become radicalized today. Once you search for any extremist views on say social media, you'll be bombarded with it. Just belonging to a certain demographic could trigger a non-stop barrage of extreme wing influencer content in your feed.

121789 2mo ago
Don’t agree actually. Have seen many busy working professionals fall into “extremism” and it’s pretty much always the same. They have a few issues they are firm on and align with one party, they don’t like the other side because of this, then they only hang out with people aligned with their views and only consume media aligned with their views. Quickly turns into lunatic talking points, and I’ve seen it happen to both the left and right.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  I've only seen this with the right. Can you describe what it's like when it's left?
  - aftbit 2mo ago
    In my experience, it looks almost identical, just mirror imaged. Lots of anger and fear, a strong certainty that they know the full story about every issue and that the other side is evil or idiotic. No grace or space in their hearts to consider that many of today's contentious issues are actually complicated, with overlapping and conflicting ethical arguments.

mxmilkiib 2mo ago

DUCK DUCK GO MURRAY BOOKCHIN!! https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-herber-murray-bookchin-towards-a-liberatory-technology https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-herber-murray-... (1965) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post-scarcity-anarchism-book https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post... (1971) https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/06/15/how-my-fathers-ideas-helped-the-kurds-create-a-new-democracy https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/06/15/how-my-fathers-ide...

gaigalas 2mo ago

> "Consider two categories of people:" That's precisely how crazy ideologies form.

ozozozd 2mo ago

There is a much cheaper heuristic: if someone is very confident about their beliefs, can’t critique those beliefs or find flaws or inconsistencies in them, by the very definition, they are religious, and it’s not an intellectual discussion. I can’t think of a belief I currently hold - other than more instinctive ones like children’s welfare - and that I cannot critique or find flaws in. If I you push me, I might even find inconsistencies there. Although I agree with the author for the inverse. E.g. I haven’t heard a non-religious or non-grifter argument about AI safety, so far. But I shouldn’t conclude it’s crazy. I haven’t heard of an argument for effective altruism that is even remotely altruistic or one that is not a legitimization of libertarian-style support for social injustice. But maybe I only heard crappy arguments.

burnt-resistor 2mo ago

If you need use of specific words, slogans, clothing, implements, secrets handshakes, or silly walks to be a member of a club, then it's probably a cult. Grifters in various media markets have done a very good job on behalf of their respective backers and establishment to divide and conquer and manufacture consent of the audience into atomized disorganization with the above arbitrary elements and almost arbitrary wedge issues that that might be a first step in reevaluating a belief structure. The next might be a bit of introspection and consideration of other people's perspectives. Stay unsure, curious, and calm.

anovikov 2mo ago

One can formulate it a lot simpler: whatever are you arguing about, you are mostly arguing with idiots because normal people have shit to do and they don't care arguing about abstract things unless paid to do so.

harvey9 2mo ago

Having similar diet and politics as the writer, I remember years ago falling out with a socialist acquaintance because he thought it was ok for farm workers to go on strike and leave animals to starve. His commitment to never crossing picket lines was absolute.

anonymous_user9 2mo ago
But that implies being a farm worker turns you into a sort of indentured servant

ElevenLathe 2mo ago

This is a decent post, but I object to the framing of "Marxism" as some kind of extreme political ideology. It's just a view of economics, not radically different from other strains of economics. Being a "Marxist" doesn't mean you're a steely eyed revolutionary. I'd guess that all the richest people we can think of are Marxists in the sense that they believe in a materialist class analysis, and that their class interests (those of capitalists) are opposed to the class interests of, at minimum, their own employees. How do we know this? Because capitalists demonstrably and objectively behave as though they have class solidarity. Yes, they compete in the market and even through political corruption, but they are very organized and committed to basic principles that benefit all capitalists: anti-labor policies, weak anti-corruption laws and enforcement, tax breaks and loopholes, etc. They have lots of money, so they obviously support policies that make it easier to transmute money into power over others. This is not ideological, but a matter of material class interests. Musk's "makers vs takers" framing is Marxism, but from the point of view of a capitalist. Likewise, it's totally possible to be a middle-class anti-labor Marxist. Marxism is only a lens to look at things through, and what it ultimately says is about the class position of whoever is looking through it. It's about identifying what one's interests are, not necessarily a prescription of what to do about it.

AuthAuth 2mo ago

I dont know how to convey this in a sticky way but these extremist beliefs are not organic. People do not organically become neo nazis or Marxist lennists. They are not randomly adopting these beliefs because of circumstances of the world. These groups specifically target and craft messages and strategies. You can see it if you browse their spaces and they openly talk about it. They will have threads where they pick a common argument and refine the response. They then go into the space and make the bad side of the argument on one account and pile on it with the refined arguments. Praise all the people that agree as intelligent and demean all the people that disagree. It really does not take that many people to successfully flip a space. Because the message is crafted its always just on the edge of what can be banned for. If they are banned its a good opportunity to act like it was a massive overreach. People see these tiny little seeds getting planted and eventually when they are presented with the argument they reach the extreme position and feel like it was their own work.

duxup 2mo ago

>The person is not super fired up and doesn’t just want to act as a soldier for their team I wish I knew how to filter that last part. On the internet folks even smell something that SEEMS not 100% on their side, conversation is over and they just want to e-yell at you.