The Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People
the-american-interest.com
the-american-interest.com
The Internet makes it easy to dehumanize the other side; they're just avatars and words on your screen. It's a lot harder to hate an actual person, especially just for having a different opinion than you.
[Edited]
But I think your comment is a really good example in and of itself. You've done the binary thinking thing that the article discussed in detail! I've never met anyone who has no problem with abortion, or anyone who has no problem with torture, but I've met people who think the trade-offs justify limited use of one or the other, which I agree or disagree with to varying degrees. It seems likely to me that you're either not talking to people that think these things, and instead building straw-men to knock down, or you're not really hearing the people you're talking to. (Or, I'll admit, it's possible you know a lot more extreme people than I do.)
But on torture? I'm not willing to make any concession to people who think that hanging a Japanese general for waterboarding US soldiers is fine, while leaving a US president entirely unpunished for waterboarding actual and suspected terrorists is not fine. Either we owe the Axis (and especially that general's heirs) some enormous apologies, or we need a few trials of a certain past political administration.
I tend be a fan of bright lines in general. If you don't know that some things are wrong (and, therefore, that any line of reasoning that leads to them has a problem with it somewhere), how do you know when you've gone astray?
This article left me more ticked-off than it should have; I think it's because I got the sense that the author valued consensus and national cohesion more than he valued any ideological question. If the article had said, "we're at war, but remember that chivalry is a good thing," I would have simply agreed; instead, he quoted Lincoln.
You don't have to agree, but people are still worth something and still have valuable information no matter how vehemently you disagree with them.
Also note that the vehemence of disagreement is usually heavily exaggerated, for propaganda purposes. Very few people, in the global sense, are sufficiently different from each other that they're actually totally incapable of getting along. If we make a basic effort to keep an open mind, I think we could fix a lot of our contemporary issues.
A total breakdown in communication and dismissal of people on the other side is not a win. It's a massive loss, one that means that the parent society is on thin ice. We need to maintain basic levels of respect for each other.
And the reason why we should be less polarized, politically, is because there are a large number of important issues that can be solved, and need to be solved, even if we can never come to agreement on others. The way politics is being managed in the U.S. is basically an "all or nothing" grab bag on every single issue, with no chance for compromise, and that just leads to hours of pointless rhetoric and gridlock while the problems just get worse.
IMO, one of the parties is a worse offender than the other, but it really only takes one side being intractable to ensure nothing gets done the way the U.S. government is set up.
(disclosure: I'd ban torture, but for both abortion and most drugs I'd legalise them and try via other methods to reduce the amount that actually occured e.g. better sex-ed and provision of contraception, or better addiction treatment and channeling people towards less harmful (though still currently illegal) drugs.
There's also a video explaining it in terms of funny cat video production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
Another take on this, from Scott Alexander: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ .
I can imagine quite well that this would easily in yelling at each other etc. Also at least me I even get more hate to views someone says if I talk to him/her personally than when I only have to see his/her arguments in the internet.
In other words: That people of very different views don't talk much to each other is in my opinion both a "self-protection" and quite plausibly rather prevents spreading even more hate.
If you spend 4 hours a day on zerohedge or infowars, you will reach a point where differing opinions piss you off to the point of yelling. If, however, you were getting different perspectives from other human beings on a regular basis, you would likely be less fervent in your views.
It's a lot harder to dismiss actual human beings as "libtards" or "rethugs" or whatever pejorative. You might still disagree, but you usually won't outright dismiss them like you would an article with a "heretical" viewpoint relative to your personal echo chamber.
On the other hand, racial minorities can't really do this: prejudices that exist prior to getting to know somebody have a much easier time both preventing people from interacting as well as having a greater likelihood of persisting during interpersonal interactions.
This is a large portion why the gay rights movement has been progressing at a faster rate than either women's rights or civil rights have in this country.
I find it far easier to depersonalize someone who I don't see in the flesh on a daily basis.
If your only interaction with them is the disagreement, it's far easier to assume they "are stupid" rather than just "have a different opinion."
It sort of backfired on TPTB this time around, however. Not only did they get annoying one-step-beyond-the-pale "alternatives" like Cruz, they also got legitimately different directions like Sanders and Paul. TPTB had wisely saved the easily-controlled pseudo-alternative Trump for this election, though, so he's been able to take the wind out of those sails. His two terms will be like a rerun of W's (or, frankly, O's). In eight years, though, to whom will they turn? There's no way Hillary will be able to stomach "standing by her man" for that much longer. Christie is just too fat. If you want to see the next fake-alternative president before anyone else does, keep watching those reality shows!
The only real difference these days is its idiotic in the current political climate not to polarize. You have to defend your beliefs and even defend areas you would rather compromise on because the compromise will allow you to be steamrolled. Look at the tech industry and our constant battle with DC over a lot of tech issues. We keep fighting this years legislation that was the same as last year.
- The collapse of race relations. Everybody thought a black president would do wonders for the issues of race in this country, it's done just the opposite.
- Several ongoing wars with seemingly no end in sight.
- The illegal immigration ahem "undocumented workers" (for you PC types) issue. 42 million strong at this point and no signs of slowing down. This is quickly approaching a crisis point.
- Government spying, cryptography and the NSA. Snowden's leaks and how much the government really needs to keep us safe and what they're doing with the loads of data they're gathering every day.
- The economy and the recent stagnation and recession already occurring in several areas of the country. More capitalism, less government regulation, or should government be even more involved in regulating business?
There's plenty more, but these were off the top of my head. Ask anybody about one of these topics and they'll most likely give you a fairly polarizing view of where they stand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni...
About 11 million of those are illegal/undocumented immigrants. The remaining 34 million are people on visas, people with green cards ("lawful permanent residents"), and naturalized citizens of the United States. This does not include the children born to them, who are natural-born citizens, and are thus not counted as immigrants.
45 million is 14.3% of the US population, which might seem high, but if the list on Wikipedia is sorted by % of population, the U.S. is nowhere on the top of the list. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, Singapore, etc. all have more immigrants per capita than the United States. And gulf countries like the U.A.E. and Qatar have the highest.
I don't understand what you mean. Today we're actually starting to have conversations about race and how the establishment treats people of different races instead of not even addressing the issue. It's being talked about not as a serious issue rather than some fringe thing that most people don't care about.
I feel like progress was made during the civil rights era, then things stagnated for 40-50 years, and now we're having conversations again. It sounds to me like a black president or perhaps other things going on have done wonders for issues of race in the country. It hasn't solved the problems yet, but it's sure brought them front and center and helped given them the attention they actually deserve instead of letting them get swept under the rug.
The point here isn't that there aren't disagreements.
I've been on a history bug about the Revolutionary War & the founding of America (admittedly, triggered by Hamilton).
In a nutshell, America has been incredibly partisan since 1796.
It doesn't make me like it better, but it's good to know it's not actually a big problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Doublethink:
"The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies[..]"
1984, George Orwell
For example, it's possible to appreciate that in the US people need some means of getting an education in order to get a job while at the same time realizing the demand for quality education far outstrips supply, which when paired with federal loans inflates the cost of education so much that it puts it farther out of reach for people.
That's a problem with a solution that exacerbated the problem while trying to solve it. Processing both doesn't involve telling deliberate lies, it just means the solution is more complex than we'd like to admit.
The issue with polarized politics is that it encourages one-mindedness. Instead of trying to understand where your political opponents are coming from, you are encouraged to reject them and their ideas as "the enemy". A very anti-intellectual "Us versus Them" mindset.
If two theses conflict each other at least one of them (perhaps even both) must be wrong. That is basic science. This is also why physicists still try to unify general relativity and quantum physics. So instead of accepting multiple ideas use your mind to
1. create predictions that each of the conflicting theses imply, such that the two theses will do different predictions, which if they can't be observed will convince you that the thesis was wrong.
2. develop an experiment with which you can observe these predictions
3. execute the experiment
This is too simplistic. They can be partially right as well as partially wrong. Is light a wave or a particle? Well, it depends.
Two opposing half-truths form a paradox. While some paradoxes can be resolved, by finding a deeper theory that unifies them, some cannot. To draw an example from the political realm -- more relevant to this discussion -- here are two truths:
(1) We are all in this together.
(2) Each person is responsible for their own life.
These are both true, but conflict. And I do not think there will ever be a final resolution of this paradox. In some situations, the first principle is more important; in others, the second. Hashing out which is which is a never-ending debate, and a critically important one.
> This is too simplistic. They can be partially right as well as partially wrong. Is light a wave or a particle? Well, it depends.
In this case both statements (light is a wave and light is a particle) are simply wrong and as current scientific matters stand the description given by quantum physics seems to be the correct one (at least for about 70 years no experiment could be given that has disproved it).
Are two sides of a bridge opposing each other or conflicting with each other?
In a client-server security model the client usually wants as much as it can take and the server wants to provide as little as it has to. Are these opposed, or in conflict?
Than it's not an opposition.
> In a client-server security model the client usually wants as much as it can take and the server wants to provide as little as it has to. Are these opposed, or in conflict?
Now you create a malicious client which will pretent it has little, say, computational power or network capacity. So the server will have to do lots of work. Voila - a good beginning for a DoS attack. :-)
So, yes, these goals are in conflict and such an attack is a falsification of the soundness of your security model.
When you say a "malicious client" you are misunderstanding the purpose of my analogy. A malicious client would be "the enemy". I'm talking about a client that is interested with engaging with the service, not just shutting it down. The client may like to have all the information and resources the server has available to it, (for example, perhaps a facebook user might want to see when people look at their photos, not just like/comment) but the server needs to consider the experience of all the clients and users, not just the one. So there is opposition (but not conflict!) between the two. The client will not be allowed to have this information, even though the server has it. Conflict would be manifested by the user abandoning the service (or attacking it, as in your example) because of this incompatible or insurmountable difference.
It all comes down to heuristics, and differing heuristics are not mutually exclusive.
The comment also fell for the trap of falsely equating opposition with conflict.
As a thought experiment, take the issue of abortion. GP is telling me that certainly either "Abortions should be allowed because of the mother's rights" or "Abortions should not be allowed because of the unborn child's rights" is WRONG. Tell me how anyone could possibly create an "experiment" which would result in a meaningful answer. How would you measure the morality and goodness of the event in a way that everyone could agree upon? Do you see the problem?
The problem here is that biological and neurological research has a long way to go to resolve the question after what week of pregnancy what level of consciousness or intellectual capacity is there. So at the moment there is no way to answer this question in an acceptable way.
To keep two opposed ideas in mind should be done with the aim of solving contradictions.
If you can distill a better abstraction you are solving the contradiction and you finish with only one idea.
In fact, a big part of the current disagreements is holding oneself oblivious to the different paradigms held by those with opposing views. If you presume they are working from the same assumptions, then of course the only motivation for their views must be malice or some other vice. But that is rarely the case.
I love the irony in following the first quote by holding both quotes in my mind, and considering that there is some wisdom to both.
The GP is talking about the ability to think and find the truth, Orwell is talking about using the same skill to lie (to oneself and the others).
And, going further, I think the root of the danger found in Orwell's doublethink lies even lower -- the danger starts with holding even one idea as a binary absolute that perfectly reflects the real world. Ideas, particularly ideas which can be reduced to language, are more like Platonic forms, which elements of the natural world might fuzzily reflect but will never perfectly embody.
Bonus: Heraclitus on Wikiquote: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Heraclitus
Probabilities work much better. "I'm 50% certain of A and 50% of not-A", which means complete ignorance. A "80% A" means you have an opinion, but you acknowledge a 20% possiblity of being wrong. If anybody claims "100% sure of something", it is an obvious sign of idiocy.
Something something Sith, something something absolutes :)
Opposed ideas does not always mean that both ideas have the same level of validity.
Some ideas are provably wrong. "Depolarizing" allowed climate change denial and anti-vaxxers, for example, to gain a following because we didn't stamp them out quickly and strongly.
I would rather focus on solutions like secession or federalism that allow groups of people with different and irreconcilable moral axioms to simply leave one another alone to build the social/political structures they would prefer.
I've been invited to speak to a fair variety of Green, Socialist, Democratic, Republican, Libertarian and non-partisan events. There are definitely cultural differences.
My Republican hosts have always run polite, organized, on time meetings. If you have the mic, everyone is listening to you.
Whereas my own peeps, the Democrats, run meetings quite a bit more loosely. People interrupt, there's a lot of shushing, arguing over the rules, people chatting in the aisles, etc. Mostly good natured, but it sometimes drives people like me nuts.
I can't speak to the Tea Party, Occupy, BLM efforts, since those are after my time. But I imagine they're not so different from their precursors, because people are people.
And at what unit do we consider secession acceptable? The Confederacy believed states had the right to secede but not individuals of African descent. Indeed, it was the American South that originally wanted to interfere in the business of the North in order to crack down on fugitive slaves.
As for people with different moral axioms leaving one another alone, good luck with that.
The US and ISIS have different moral axioms but they're both in one another's business.
The world is interdependent, there's just no way around that simple fact.
I don't mean to silence discussions of federalism/secession, it just seems like this is well-trod territory that some people keep bringing up again and again as if it will solve anything. It hasn't and it won't.
Secession and federalism lead to neither. Slavery was a pre-existing institution. War is politics by other means and pre-existed both. It being associated with secessionism in one case is no more an argument against secessionism than war being associated with democratic revolutions is an argument against democracy.
Naive: showing a lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment.
Heal thyself.
There was almost a century of political back and forth build up that compounded to lead to secession.
Just to highlight one detail to give the counterpoint on your example:
> Indeed, it was the American South that originally wanted to interfere in the business of the North in order to crack down on fugitive slaves.
For that, you should read up on the Tariff of Abominations in 1828 that nearly triggered secession when it was passed. This presented a huge problem to the Port of Charleston and trade with Europe, so much so that South Carolina tried to have it nullified and the Supreme Court said that it could not. When documents of secession reference fugitive slave laws, they're doing so because some northern states were allowed to selectively nullify while the south was not. This came to a head with the Morrill Tariff which was a part of Lincoln's campaign. Indeed, in his first inaugural address preceding the war he even stated that fugitive slave laws would be enforced and that federal force would only be used for collection of duties and imposts. That's the reason Fort Sumter was such a big deal in the first place because whoever held it had the power to enforce port taxes on Charleston harbor. To be clear, I'm not saying that was the cause of the war I'm just highlighting a detail. There were a lot of factors.
The whole thing is a sincerely fascinating subject and is even more interesting when, through studying it, you compare it to the relatively few details we're actually taught about it in school.
It very much would be. This is another argument for federalism/secessionism: a laboratory of governments/social structures will provide better feedback as to what works and what does not for various populations.
I think it is also worth bearing in mind that "does better" is inherently subjective, since value is subjective. Some political units may be fine trading GDP for a better environment, while others may be fine trading sexual freedom for stability. The irreconcilability of values/moral axioms dictates that we either agree to allow sufficiently differentiated groups to develop their own political units, or we impose our axioms on them (or they, us.)
On the other hand, I totally support independent communities who could live on their own terms, as long as their rules don't conflict with other communities.
Ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront individual issues on their own merits.
One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out come the prepared formulae.
Jurisdictions are becoming ever more partisan. So now only the most partisan (divisive) candidates can win their primary election, which then pretty much makes the general election moot.
The fix is California style redistricting, where citizens and not politicians are in charge of the process.
I think that there is almost precisely zero evidence of this; there's a lot more to support that regional strong political divides have always been present in the US, what's new is that the salient issues have become increasingly consistent nationally, so that it is no more the case that the national political scene often seems less sharply divided because all the sharp regional divides used to be in different places, whereas now there are more common national divides.
> The fix is California style redistricting, where citizens and not politicians are in charge of the process.
Non/bipartisan redistricting by notionally independent commissions (which, often, as in California, legislators actually have a role in choosing members for, so they aren't truly independent of the legislators, though they are certainly less accountable than legislators) has been a growing trend in the same time as the increasing polarization in national politics. So, its pretty clearly not fixing the problem.
It becomes a "Team up? What for?" situation
Yes.
like that's a bad thing
No. It did not say this.
distrusting people because of their beliefs instead of their race seems an improvement to me
Equating political party = belief is a big problem. It's basically the definition of tribalism.
You're forced to pick a side.
For example, knowing that someone is a self-described "American republican" in 2016 doesn't let me know if they are a good person or a bad person, but it does let me know that abortion rights for women isn't one of their main priorities.
The goal is not to do away with categorization/heuristics entirely. It's to continually revise and improve them. Political party affiliation is on a whole different ballpark than race.
On the spectrum from hardcore libertarianism to hardcore conservatism, the two political parties are huddled closely together in the middle of it.
You don't get a choice. But you get to be branded for the rest of your life as one of those two groups.
It's a game I refuse to play.
Exactly what better criteria would you use to judge people if not their choices and actions?
Only then should you hate them, if you really choose to. Not before.
Why? I agree that it's wrong to assume that because person A supports party B, they agree with the party's position on Issue C. However, Surely the party you support is the one that best reflects your beliefs. If it isn't, then why are you supporting that party?
> You're forced to pick a side.
You're forced to pick a side, secretly, in a booth once every n years, for whatever reason you want (beliefs, best looking candidate, best sandwich eating technique, fair roll of die), for a few seconds (though you may live with the consequence of that choice for longer). Even then, only if you live in a jurisdiction with compulsory voting, and even then, only if ballot spoiling is illegal.
You are not forced to pick a side and wear badges and proclaim it in public between elections and campaign in favour of it or against another side and tell everyone that their candidate is the bees knees etc.
1. We can only think of two viewpoints
2. We unintentionally assume viewpoints at a level of less granularity;
In explanation of (2), consider that the Iyengar's study finds implicit bias not against "People who Disagree with you on Issue C" but "The Word Republican/Democrat" and that this bias was also exhibited by Independents and Leaners.
To your second point, that the side-picking is mostly separate from everyday life, consider the last section of the Iyengar study, which finds that even in non-political contexts, like awarding scholarships, a signal on a resume indicating ties to a Party exerts a very strong impact on which candidate is selected.
The obvious answer is to say, "Don't associate yourself with the D/R Party unless you agree with all of their viewpoints," but I believe we can end up with an even better answer that allows people to get organized even when they don't completely agree on every single thing, and for us to perhaps make fewer incorrect judgements based on this organization.
Well yeah. The point of a party is to obliterate the minor differences and bull forward efficiently. You're supporting all their platforms even if you only like a few.
> I believe we can end up with an even better answer that allows people to get organized
But can you think of one that doesn't involve signing up for someone else to represent you, lock-stock-and-barrel?
I think so, but I think we need to look beyond parties.
So it seems to me that not equating political party with belief would be a very strange thing - why do you think people are in political parties?
"[...]Americans today are less friendly to people in the other political party than we are to people of a different race. The researchers conclude that 'Americans increasingly dislike people and groups on the other side of the political divide and face no social repercussions for the open expression of these attitudes.' As a result, today 'the level of partisan animus in the American public exceeds racial animus.' That’s saying something!"
Is this a bit of light humor about how virulently racist the US is, or is it a call for racial unity beyond politics? I have no idea.
It's still tribalism. To answer your second question, yeah as a knee jerk reaction. I suspect republicans regardless of skin color distrust democrats regardless of skin color. Look how Ben Carson treated by Democratic voters.
At some point in time the label can have a strong correlation with the actual reality,then the label becomes more important than what it actually represents.
Politicians exploit this constantly, "us vs them" is what unites their respective camps and promotes loyalty.
U.S. presidents seem to get blamed (and sometimes praised) for things they can't really control.
Oh we have, remember how Bush caused Katrina?
(for broad definitions of we)
It would be fruitless for me to speculate on the particular aversion you mention to transsexuals, but in general you'll gain a better understanding by looking for a motivation other than malice; that's seldom the explanation. The real rationale may be short-sighted, ignorant, wildly unfair, and unlikely to be advanced by the outlandish actions taken, but nonetheless there is some underlying thought process, and most people care far too much about themselves to go out significantly out of their ways to deliberately do harm to others.
Likewise, they think it's impossible to concede any point made by the enemy, no matter how obviously true, without being entirely aligned with them.
Confirmation bias is often exarcebated with greater choices (as the number of choices brings greater discomfort). An example would be the GOP primaries (ie sheer number of candidates).
I also think certain personality types (ie myers briggs/jung) have a tendency to behave in a polarized manner. I don't think being polarized = stupid as another commenter posted albeit probably being ignorant does have an affect.
I posted it because the article doesn't bother to answer why the hell people are polarized in the first place. Its like saying America is fat.. here are 7 tips to get in shape... I also think the # prefix tips is clearly a click bait ploy albeit I a nice clever a play on Steven Covey's book title.
Wouldn't it be worthwhile to know why people become polarized in the first place or why we are so much now?
In essence I share your opinion. It's just I couldn't resist the chance.
I know, childish.
Almost as fast as closing the page, and you're no longer letting crap web designers dictate what you read and what you don't.
140 characters don't lend themselves to sustained and depolarising argument -- quite the opposite.
Does this article recognize it's own irony? It's a whole article about 'depolarizing' as opposed to 'polarizing' and within it, is the line I quoted above.
Here's a thought - intelligent people don't have these problems and they don't need 7 vague bullet points that are impossible to follow.
Dumb people lack nuanced points of view - they polarize/simplify a great deal because that's how humans are - we first learn to think 'hitting other people is bad', and only later learn that 'most times hitting other people is bad'.
When do people learn philosophy and different types of fallacies? For most people, the answer is never. How many people grok fallacies, philosophy and have emotional intelligence to boot? Even fewer.
Thank god someone wrote an article that by-passes all that though, it's just the 10 commandments you need, oh sorry I meant 7 habits...