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I like pg's theory here, it's definitely something I try to live by (keeping my identity small), but I think he missed a key observation: Religion (perhaps mor

I like pg's theory here, it's definitely something I try to live by (keeping my identity small), but I think he missed a key observation: Religion (perhaps moreso historically) and especially politics are mine fields because there are so many inputs and so many outputs. That is to say almost any policy decision will affect a lot of people in a lot of different ways. He touches on this by discussing vague and definite questions, but he doesn't really explore that avenue. For instance, consider the evaluation of how much a government program is going to cost. It doesn't matter how precisely you can answer that question because it just leads directly to other questions such as where the money will come from and what the results of the program will be. Even if the follow up questions are precise as well, they bloom out into innumerable consequences far and wide. It's not just that the bar of having an opinion is low, it's because these decisions actually affect all these people, and all in different ways. The fact that they may not have the expertise or knowledge to know the true affects and are easily manipulated by identity-appealing propaganda just exacerbates the problem, but it's not the root cause. The more fundamental problem is that politics is a direct view into the massively interdependent organic ecosystem of large-scale human society. Even if you are the foremost expert on the implications of some political issue and your facts are indisputable, people will still (with good reason) disagree on the merits of those indisputable implications.

SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
>It's not just that the bar of having an opinion is low, it's because these decisions actually affect all these people, and all in different ways. The fact that they may not have the expertise or knowledge to know the true affects and are easily manipulated by identity-appealing propaganda just exacerbates the problem, but it's not the root cause. You make it sound like people end up voting to protect their own interests. A lot of studies show this is frequently not the case: Far more frequently they vote their values, which ends up with a very different result. This is why the Republican "Family Values" theme has been so effective. >Even if you are the foremost expert on the implications of some political issue and your facts are indisputable, people will still (with good reason) disagree on the merits of those indisputable implications. George Lakoff talks about two major philosophies in the US that define the Liberal and Conservative movements, respectively. [1] I think he gets to the heart of the disagreement between these two sides, explaining why large groups of poor people, for instance, vote Republican despite this being against their own self interest (workplace safety, minimum wage, workers' rights, etc.). That said, it seems sometimes that even indisputable facts (dangers of cigarette smoke, seriousness of lead poisoning, and more recently, anthropomorphic climate change and the proven failures of "trickle-down" economics) are frequently politicized such that people end up believing that there's still a debate among experts, and that all politicians are lying to support their own side. Propaganda at its best (or worst, I suppose). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_%28book%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_%28book%29 or http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/elephant http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/elephant

SomeCallMeTim 13y ago

>It's not just that the bar of having an opinion is low, it's because these decisions actually affect all these people, and all in different ways. The fact that they may not have the expertise or knowledge to know the true affects and are easily manipulated by identity-appealing propaganda just exacerbates the problem, but it's not the root cause. You make it sound like people end up voting to protect their own interests. A lot of studies show this is frequently not the case: Far more frequently they vote their values, which ends up with a very different result. This is why the Republican "Family Values" theme has been so effective. >Even if you are the foremost expert on the implications of some political issue and your facts are indisputable, people will still (with good reason) disagree on the merits of those indisputable implications. George Lakoff talks about two major philosophies in the US that define the Liberal and Conservative movements, respectively. [1] I think he gets to the heart of the disagreement between these two sides, explaining why large groups of poor people, for instance, vote Republican despite this being against their own self interest (workplace safety, minimum wage, workers' rights, etc.). That said, it seems sometimes that even indisputable facts (dangers of cigarette smoke, seriousness of lead poisoning, and more recently, anthropomorphic climate change and the proven failures of "trickle-down" economics) are frequently politicized such that people end up believing that there's still a debate among experts, and that all politicians are lying to support their own side. Propaganda at its best (or worst, I suppose). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_%28book%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_%28book%29 or http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/elephant http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/elephant