War Room Lounge v135: Accidental Meme Thread Click

[Pseudo Sane]

I'll take a look into it. I have to say that the conservative mind is highly susceptible to doublethink, though. When someone believes things that are in contradiction with another and doesn't have a problem with the dissonance, it becomes extremely difficult to take them at their word. Hence the gap in understanding.

I would strongly suggest that you are falling into the weak man fallacy which Jack mentioned. It's easy to find idiot conservatives. It's also easy to find idiot liberals. There are no points to be scored dunking on halfwits.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

Speaking of steelmen, did anyone else see that Slatestarcodex has gone under due to the NY Times threatening to doxx Scott Alexander in an upcoming article?

Yea hence the tag, it was brought up on the last page. Tragedy.

 

[Pseudo Sane]

I actually enjoyed that Haidt book as well. Have you read Klein’s why we are polarized? It really gets into the central divide being population density which is something I’ve suspected for quite awhile. You can reasonably determine why someone would agree/ oppose most issues usually if they lived in a city vs the woods.

I haven't. Is it good? I agree that the urban/rural divide is real and I'd like to read a treatment that expands on it substantively. Shamefully, I read much less than I used to. I am reading a good book on immigration at the moment, Strangers in Our Midst by David Miller, which a left-leaning friend of mine suggested to me.

 

[Pseudo Sane]

Yea hence the tag, it was brought up on the last page. Tragedy.

Missed that post somehow. mea culpa.

I'll miss SCC. Hopefully it comes back at some point.

 

[Falsedawn]

I haven't. Is it good? I agree that the urban/rural divide is real and I'd like to read a treatment that expands on it substantively. Shamefully, I read much less than I used to. I am reading a good book on immigration at the moment, Strangers in Our Midst by David Miller, which a left-leaning friend of mine suggested to me.

There's nothing in your books that can't be taught by anime. Anime is knowledge.

 

[BarryDillon]

I would strongly suggest that you are falling into the weak man fallacy which Jack mentioned. It's easy to find idiot conservatives. It's also easy to find idiot liberals. There are no points to be scored dunking on halfwits.

Who do you consider to be a strong conservative thinker in the US?

 

[Jack V Savage]

Is the distinction that you are you using 'rightist' as something other than a synonym for conservative? I'm afraid your point elides me.

I took your claim to be that rightists have a poor mental model of liberal and leftist thought, and thus fall for obvious forgeries. This is obviously true in this particular instance, but says nothing about whether this general human weakness is more prevalent among liberals or conservatives.

I didn't comment on whether it was more- prevalent among any particular group, and I wasn't discussing moral foundations. I discussed coherent worldviews, which we're more likely to encounter in a place like this than in real life (where most people do have moral foundations that guide their thinking).

One of the most interesting conclusions from Haidt's research, in my mind, is that conservatives actually have a better mental model of liberals than liberals do of conservatives, which to my mind is a direct counter to your point, that you haven't really addressed.

I addressed it by saying it's not a counter to my point. He points out that conservatives tend to divide their emphasis on different moral foundations pretty evenly while liberals disregard a couple of axes that conservatives see as important. That's fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't connect with the specific discussion. Understanding a state of mind is very different from understanding ideas. Think "I can relate to someone caring about harm" (or "I can't understand anyone being particularly upset about violations of purity") vs. "I understand why people think X is harmful, even though I disagree that it is."

Any ideas for a fun topic to write on? @JDragon seems interested as well.

You can probably do a better job coming up with something. What's an issue where conservatives have a principled stance that isn't just about identity? Something that concerns me is that I think on a lot of issues, I can say the lyrics but not really sing the song. Like, I know exactly what the arguments are that rightists put forward to defend, say, Trump's attack on free speech of social media companies, but I really believe that if Twitter caved and said they'd only fact check liberals, they'd reverse those arguments, as they did on their arguments about debt and the need for interest-rate hikes. I thought Austrians were fun even though they were deluded because I really did buy that they believed their arguments, and I made a pretty deep effort to understand them myself. My interest in the exercise would be more along those lines--not just regurgitating bullshit that everyone knows is bullshit, but really understanding areas of real, sincere disagreement.

 

[PolishHeadlock2]

Stop everything, a lawyer fell for that one?? A real one, or the Amerikuracana type?

In other news, the Mythbusters: Black Fatherhood thread is going about as well as you'd expect it to go simply by reading the title of the thread.

He's legit and has won some big cases at some fairly high levels I believe.

He steps in when things are getting too scary for the NRA lawyers

 

[Pseudo Sane]

There's nothing in your books that can't be taught by anime. Anime is knowledge.

Reading in anime.

Checkmate.

 

[Lead]

I agree with all that. Another thing I'd add is that it hurts your understanding to read real idiots you disagree with because you could fall back on just thinking that that's all there is on the other side. Scott Alexander (sigh, @Tycho Brah) was the first to introduce to me "weak men," which are like strawmen but they're real. It's a big world, and you can find real people to espouse every stupid idea you can imagine, but by giving a disproportionate voice to the crazies on the other side, you get a distorted idea of what the good ones think.

Yep, a good test for someone is if they can point out multiple opposing pundits who someone on their side would see as having identical views but you are able to point out distinctions. I think this is especially true on the left as they are more likely to propose new policies so could get a wide range of what priorities or systems they want or don’t want.

Speaking of steelmen, did anyone else see that Slatestarcodex has gone under due to the NY Times threatening to doxx Scott Alexander in an upcoming article?

I did not

I am 98% on phone here, but I have discovered this funny key that starts a new paragraph.

I cannot find it sorry man

 

[Falsedawn]

Reading in anime.

Checkmate.

Yeah but she's reading right to left. Do you read right to left? No? That's what I thought.

ANIME!

 

[Jack V Savage]

Ironically, Haidt's point is that they do, just arising from different premises that are not shared with liberals. In particular, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

I would strong suggest reading the Righteous Mind, which @Jack V Savage mentioned. You might learn something interesting.

He doesn't get into coherence that I recall, and our emotional leanings are inherently incoherent. I think the crisis on the right is that coherent rightist ideologies are really creepy to most Americans so they try to dress their ideology up in liberal clothes. To go back to the free-speech thing, that's an inherently liberal idea, and rightist thought isn't really supportive of it. But American rightists don't just say, "I oppose free speech for my political opponents because it's dangerous." They would not be taken seriously, and a political party trying to make that argument would get crushed. So they're forced to take strategies that lead inevitably to incoherence.

That all said, I'll second the recommendation. There is some valuable stuff in there.

 

[Falsedawn]

He's legit and has won some big cases at some fairly high levels I believe.

He steps in when things are getting too scary for the NRA lawyers

Yeah but how do you know he's a real lawyer? He could be a dog lawyer. Or just a dog. Can dogs practice law? No they can't! No they can't! Air Bud didn't have a JD.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

I'll take a look into it. I have to say that the conservative mind is highly susceptible to doublethink, though. When someone believes things that are in contradiction with another and doesn't have a problem with the dissonance, it becomes extremely difficult to take them at their word. Hence the gap in understanding.

Actually Haidt was a strong early influence on my initial "bothsides"-type thinking, and a bridge between the psych I was studying then and political philosophy. The contents of The Righteous Mind came out of a flourishing of papers in the sub-field of moral psychology that made a few bold claims at the time but has kind of withered since then.

One of those claims, the one Haidt popularized with his The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail paper, was that moral judgments are precursors of moral reasoning rather than consequences of it, i.e. we make the judgments and then attach reasons to them after that fact. A concept he used to support this theory was moral dumbfounding, where you basically disintegrate all of a person's reasons for morally objecting to a behaviour (say, incest), and find out that they are not only unpersuaded to abandon the position, but will instead cling to it along with the admission that they don't quite know why they believe what they do, but they do just as strongly.

The latter (and weaker, imo) half of the book tried to say that that the true, emotional determinates of moral judgment are distributed something like taste buds, where we each partake in the same domains but with different emphasis, and that groupings of those emphases define contemporary party lines. Sadly it wasn't really within the domain of the book to explain how political parties in the U.S. came to conveniently coalesce around these moral domains (as opposed to other factors) in the current time and place.

I do think Haidt is right that most people do a bad job of justifying their moral judgments and that the issues that define liberals and conservatives in the present are expressions of different values. I also think he flirts a little to closely with relativism by abandoning hope in cultivating good judgement that is both emotionally satiating and as fact-based as possible.

 

[Jack V Savage]

I'll take a look into it. I have to say that the conservative mind is highly susceptible to doublethink, though. When someone believes things that are in contradiction with another and doesn't have a problem with the dissonance, it becomes extremely difficult to take them at their word. Hence the gap in understanding.

Might be that conservatism is more emotionally fulfilling but more frustrating if you want views that hold together upon deep thought. If you try to reconcile different moral foundations logically, you might end up having to conclude that some of them should be de-emphasized, and your willingness or ability to do that could partly determine where you end up. @Pseudo Sane

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

Might be that conservatism is more emotionally fulfilling but more frustrating if you want views that hold together upon deep thought. If you try to reconcile different moral foundations logically, you might end up having to conclude that some of them should be de-emphasized, and your willingness or ability to do that could partly determine where you end up. @Pseudo Sane

Yup. Hence why disgust tends to be through-the-roof for conservatives, while liberals (possibly even those predisposed to responding to it acutely) are more able to identify it as vestigial and unworthy of being a serious moral influence.

(Truthfully, and consistent with Haidt's pessimism, I doubt that the converted group is very large.)

 

[JDragon]

He's legit and has won some big cases at some fairly high levels I believe.

He steps in when things are getting too scary for the NRA lawyers

I imagine Saul Goodman with muscles, for gun people instead cartel.

 

[Captain Davis]

“Fuck you. This is personal. I’m coming for your account. Posters like me pay to make this a better place. Posters like you are ruining it.”

@Captain Davis Never forget.

Lol

 

[Jack V Savage]

I do think Haidt is right that most people do a bad job of justifying their moral judgments and that the issues that define liberals and conservatives in the present are expressions of different values. I also think he flirts a little to closely with relativism by abandoning hope in cultivating good judgement that is both emotionally satiating and as fact-based as possible.

This was the problem I had with Haidt and kind of with PS. Different societies have different policies and general approaches to governance, and some of them are better or worse places to live because of those differences. So it's not just a matter of taste. Reality intervenes. Also, it seems to me that what he calls the care and liberty foundations might not be all that matters morally, you can make an argument even from the perspective of someone who values the other foundations highly, that governance specifically should be based on them.

 

[Fawlty]

Ooof.

Many of us don't have our of.