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Comment by Double_Cast | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about you, but calling Democrats "pro-crime" sounds pretty immature to me. I'm embarrassed to belong to a society where the status quo is so uncharitable that you're willing to excuse this slander as "people just being people". You may cringe at the word "retard", but does it not unnerve you just as much that the journalist called half the U.S. literally malicious?

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I'm personally of the opinion that people who spout such nonsense are perfectly aware that it's nonsense; they're simply trying to appeal to the radicals: the vocal, irrational minority.

The reason to do so is also perfectly rational - they're easier to get to the voting booths to vote for your candidate with such rhetoric. The moderates, who are unswayed (yet annoyed) by such rhetoric are more likely to be the ones who do not show up at the voting table, because they see the rhetoric from both sides as equally reprehensible, and will either not vote at all (in my case, due to the futility of voting in the US's current two party system), or vote for a third party (making their vote equally irrelevant as if they hadn't voted at all).

So, both sides appeal to those folks who are so easily swayed by irrational comments which make them feel superior to "those dirty left/right-wingers", and the result is power (government positions) and money (PACs, lobbyists, donations).

I think a lot of people really do believe their own non-sense. It's easier to lie when one honestly believes the falsehood. Consider that the same instincts that drive partisan politics are the same instincts that drive spectator sports. Are the fans cheering because of a conscious awareness of political strategy? Or are they cheering because -- gosh darnit -- being on a team is fun. Do you think the children in the Robbers Cave Experiment were masterminds of political intrigue? Or do you think the conflict arose out of instinct. That the strategy happens to turn out super-rational in the field is orthogonal to the question of whether their beliefs bubble up to a level of conscious awareness.

I've met people who honestly have made the "dey must be evil" maneuver. My experience says the sentiment is genuine.

do you realize that you're now going for a very emotional attack on my comment? do you see the problem? :)

you also seem to be putting words into my mouth. i was merely offering an additional explanation for that behavior, to indicate that simply putting it under "poor cognitive development" (i.e. calling people retards, but in bigger words) is insufficient. i never said that we should all accept absolutely anything, and skip across blooming meadows singing kumbaya lol.

And I disagree with your explanation. The journalist isn't simply committing a fallacy or misinterpreting an argument. The journalist went out of their way to accuse a political demographic of malicious intent. Out-group dynamics like this is something people actively shape (as demonstrated by the Robber Caves Experiment). Maybe we ought to classify it under something other than immaturity. But we can't chalk it up to laziness, mental fatigue, or #justPeopleThings as if it were an accident.

> do you realize that you're now going for a very emotional attack on my comment?

Honestly, I don't know what you're trying to prove here. My comment is invalid because I expressed embarrassment? lol?

Errata regarding your other threads. LW members call themselves "aspiring rationalists" to remind themselves that they have not yet "outgrown humanity" [0]. You also seem to confuse logic and rationality. When economists talk about rational agents, they're discussing an agent which employs a decision making algorithm consistent with the VonNeuman Morgenstern Utility Theorem [1].

[0] http://lesswrong.com/lw/h8/tsuyoku_naritai_i_want_to_become_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenster...

no, it's just you keep putting words in my mouth. as i already said above, which you fail to read for the second time - i did not offer it as THE black-and-white explanation. i merely pointed out that going for the retard explanation is insufficient - as you yourself have said, they could just be evil :) so why are you fuming? we seem to actually agree. jeez.

and the reason i asked the "do you realize" question is because we were talking here about rationalism and it's limits. i'm in a kind of mildly anti-rationalism position, and you attack me, all emotional. so i thought, this is kinda funny. get it?

edit - and now, in an edit, you suddenly join the discussion... i'll have to get back to you later.

> as you yourself have said, they could just be evil

This is exactly the opposite of my opinion. Very rarely do people think of themselves as "evil". E.g. I highly doubt Bin Laden thought of himself as an evil man. He probably thought he was doing the Middle East a favor. Same goes for Hitler.

My embarrassment and disappointment is directed towards contemporary society, the decadence of which I find your comment's non-chalance indicative of. And no, you're not as clever as you think you are by distinguishing rationality from emotion as if they were mutually exclusive. That you posit others believe emotions are something to be ashamed of is a straw man. Or better yet, a Straw Vulcan [0] (it looks like temporal covered this topic already).

[0] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan

your perception of society's "decadence", whatever the hell that's supposed to mean, is your problem. i was trying to have a discussion here, but you're apparently deliberately misreading everything i write because you have some battle to fight against society... wow.

must be hard being so superior to everyone around you, huh? ;)

I'm not trying to fight a battle against society. I was trying to express exasperation at your explanation.

A thought experiment. Imagine that everyone in the 18th century (including 60 year old men and women) jokingly called each other "retard". Would this strike you as immature? What if I expressed this sentiment aloud, and someone responded "There's a confounding social factor. If one were to object to such a social norm, he or she might be called a square and thus ridiculed! Maybe it's not right, but we can never stop being people."

This response bothers me. To call it a "confounding" rather than "additional" factor implies that risk of reputation somehow funges against the immaturity of the social norm. I would argue that calling people "retards" is immature regardless of the mechanism driving the social norm. On top of this, you seem to be implying that I think myself "superior" to those calling other people retards.

(Now replace every instance of "retard" with "evil democrats". That is my original argument.)

(By the way, your comment frames things as if you're 100% the good guy, and I'm obviously a villain. This is the exact behavior the Robinson article criticizes.)

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