I distrust people voting according to their opinions rather than "ones borrowed from books". In many cases younger voters vote "better" (at least according to my views). The Brexit vote, or US presidential election, for example, where older voters appeared to win the vote whilst trusting to their emotional experiences rather than the evidence. They certainly seemed less well informed for the most part.
As you pointed out, we all have our biases. If I were raised racist, I'd try to confirm those biases in my personal experiences. Or perhaps some kind of personal experience would shatter my biases. I could be on the lookout for things I hear on talk radio, or I could make unexpected friends. Equally, I could get my sense of morals from reading Ayn Rand, Nietzsche, St. Augustine, or the Dhammapada. I've known people who have learned atrocious or wonderful things from books, and I've known people who have invented fantastic or horrifying personal philosophies. I don't think I've uncovered any kind of pattern as to why some people think one way and others another.
The funny thing here is that in this discussion, we're using our personal experiences (anecdotes and armchair speculation) to try and analyze it.
My personal contribution is that older people have more property, and that whatever material they use for their political views (be it books or experiences) will mostly be used to support their own goals for enjoying that property. The young folks want to get property, so they vote for that instead. That doesn't explain much, but it does partly explain why younger citizens tend to be more liberal.
I think it's very rare for people who do read a lot, and read varied to not be "better" off than not reading.
Like most I was an idealist in youth, and while I have become more pragmatic, I still try to stoke that fire. I however learned in my 20s to never fear the opposition/unknown, and reading more and challenging views is never dangerous. Sometimes it challenges you to rethink your stance, sometimes it's exposed as ridiculous.
My point is that I think it's really hard to "learn garbage" from reading a lot.
My personal experience—I've met people who are well read but don't read well, if you know what I mean. People who read Nietzcshe and think that they can get by with less sleep because they're übermensch. Yes, I've actually met two people who have come to that particular conclusion. I imagine that they eventually grew out of it, but was it reading, specifically that caused this, or just the general experience of life (of which reading is one part)?
If your attitude is that you are reading to challenge yourself with views that you disagree with, then you are going to find it easier to expand your mind. But that's not why everyone reads, not everything you read will expand your mind, and that kind of attitude will allow you to expand your mind in many other ways as well (besides reading).
I'm also not sold on the idea that youth are idealists in some kind of ideological sense. I feel that it comes across that way, but only because as I get older, I am a better judge of how I can actually change the world, and I might as well devote my resources to where I can make the biggest difference. In other words, we may become more or less idealist as we get older, but being pragmatic is literally a skill that requires experience to develop.
And if you doubt that you are still idealistic, remember that you are the one arguing that it's hard to "learn garbage" from reading—perhaps an ideological standpoint, from my perspective ;-)
I suppose I can't know how other people are affected by what and how much they read other than from my own experience and empathic hypotheticals.
Is it a question of the much talked about view of fixed/growth mindsets?
I knew I knew everything at 17, and obviously I was wrong. I grow less knowledgable by the year, while reading more. I'm not saying anything profound here that hasn't been said by Lao Tsu, Einstein, Aristotle, Emerson, etc.
Are you suggesting that this is not universal truth but merely true for those eager to learn? I suppose I could surrender that merely picking up a book you on the offset disagree with requires a will to be challenged.
And once again, I'm less certain of something than I was going in. Time to rebuild my world view. Thanks.
Ayn Rand has some great ideas, but they make certain assumptions about human nature that are quite simply not true (which is the same problem with capitalism).
I always make a point to reply whenever I see her mentioned on HN, because her philosophy helped me out of a very messy series of life crises, and I hope someone else struggling to figure things out sees my comment and is inspired to take a look.
Click around here if you're curious: http://aynrandlexicon.com/book/conceptual.html.
But as for how the characters behaved and reacted to each other, it seemed too robot-like and lacking empathy that The Fountainhead, for example, literally had me tossing the book across the room multiple times.
"Real people don't act like that!" I remembered saying. And that was in high school, when I was Libertarian. I still finished the book though.
If someone wants to check her out, I think Anthem is the one to read. You get all of her ideas, pretty much, with the bonus of being able to get through it in a few hours. Her other books are way too long-winded. The Fountainhead, despite being infuriating and having some excessive diatribes, I did think was a good book overall.
Personally, of all the high school reading I did, Walden had a much more lasting effect on me than Ayn Rand did.
So in your opinion, there was a "right" choice to make, and a wrong choice? Why let people vote, then? The fact that a group I'll name "L." thinks they're plain right and the others are plain wrong worries me at the highest point.
> trusting the evidence
Can't you just absorb that older people voted rationally, based on evidence and distinct life choices that aren't necessarily stupid? In another world where their vote would match your vision of "right", you'd praise the elderly for having more 70 more years of experience, saluting their knowledge, etc. In the present situation, the "L." group presents older people as too senile to make "the right choice". You belong to this L. group.
One point which tips the votes is the "L." group is so dictatorial about their vision of right, and that makes a huge group tip for the alternative, the Trump/Brexit vote. The L group generally uses the "right-vs-wrong" attitude, like you just did, but also weighs the supposedly "correct" vote with plenty of dubious things: If you vote Remain in the brexit, you also vote for a huge increase in London's size which is against countryside's interest – Maybe people don't want that? Maybe a huge London also increases inequalities? If you vote Democrats you also vote for plenty of leftish/liberal laws which aren't right at all (including bribes and murders at the highest level of the government, including plain war and suffering of kids in the Middle-East using blind drones and pure horror, including the militarization of US police). Neither the Democrats nor the Remain planned to do things that convinced most of the population.
Definitely, there wasn't a right and wrong choice in Brexit and Trump. There's just a democratic choice, and people like you, at the end of the year, who still are in denial that their opponent might have a rational reasoning. Which is exactly the lack of listening that is killing our democracies. The ball is on your side.
Like.. no one votes for something they don't think is right. The whole point is a difference of opinion about what right is.
Of course in my opinion there was a right and a wrong choice. If I didn't think that, I wouldn't have an opinion, would I? The "better" was in quotes because I appreciate that it is subjective. I can't say with absolute certainty that one option is better than another because I don't have perfect information.
We prefer democracy because in general it leads to far better outcomes in general than the alternatives that have been tried. That doesn't mean I don't think we often vote badly in individual votes.
> Can't you just absorb that older people voted rationally, based on evidence and distinct life choices that aren't necessarily stupid?
No, I cannot. No one votes entirely rationally, and I certainly include myself. People tend to vote according to their emotions, and because of a range of cognitive biases. A case in point:
> One point which tips the votes is the "L." group is so dictatorial about their vision of right, and that makes a huge group tip for the alternative, the Trump/Brexit vote.
Casting a vote because you are annoyed at your political opponents being confident about their views makes no sense logically. This is an emotional reaction rather than a sober assessment of what is best for yourself, your country and the world. Surely the questions of jobs, climate change, scientific research, health and so on are vastly more important than punishing a certain group's mindset?
I feel that the Trump/Brexit campaigns won because they were far better at manipulating these kind of reactions than because they presented better arguments. I think any objective assessment of the respective campaigns would conclude they or their supporters spread more misinformation. That doesn't mean they were with certainty the wrong choice, just that I don't like how we got there.
> Which is exactly the lack of listening that is killing our democracies.
I have the opposite opinion. The increasing emphasis on making decisions by emotion as in "our opponents aren't listening to us enough" is doing more harm to democracy. Less reliance on personal experience and more reliance on logical argument and facts please.
"Why can't both be right?"
Because if there is a right and a wrong, it is a binary.
What I never hear is an actual argument or fact based reasoning as to why that group (which I'll call R. or A.R.) is right. It's always "My opinion is worth just as much as your facts".
My views on life the universe and everything stem both from direct experience and books - lots and lots of books.
At 15 I was apolitical, and a default conservative, but while I would merrily assign myself these labels my actions spoke very differently. At 22 I was a libertarian/objectivist zealot, and still an authoritarian, just a different source of authority. By 26 I had moved to classical liberalism with leftist leanings - and had become vehemently and vocally antiauthoritarian in a political rather than "fuck you, dad" manner. At this point I just sit on the sidelines and laugh at the insane symbol manipulation that seems to be the primary occupation of humans.
The thing is, while my views and degrees of misanthropy and cynicism have ebbed and flowed over the years, a constant thread can be traced back throughout - a nascent distrust of authority which grew into a rejection of all authority - and a pattern of thinking that makes people look at me cock-eyed, as I think and say things which others consider irregular. Always have.
The only thing that has changed is that I've continued to load more and more information into the system, which has given me more to work with, more precise identifiers, a more nuanced understanding of ape-men and their activities.
So - the crux is that while I rebrand myself every seven years or so, the only thing that's actually changing is the labels, the assignation - I still identify strongly with eleven year old me - although I do now prefer Trek to Wars.
That is, I think people seek pleasurable feelings through altruistic acts. Sometimes the feelings come from the act itself, of having done a good thing. More usually, it comes from other people, whether it's the gratitude of those to whom the thing has been done, or the admiration of those who observed the act, or - probably the most dubious - from feeling morally superior to other people.
Feeling morally superior can lead to moral self-licencing, whereupon you can feel free to act more selfishly or immorally because of a previous morally virtuous or selfless / altruistic act.
My axis for judgement would be closer to fair vs unfair, from a Rawlsian veil of ignorance perspective, which lends the notion of fairness a wider social dimension rather than restricting it to the fairness of individual acts, and enables more consequentialist reasoning for the outcomes of universal rules, rather than deontological reasoning.
You're discounting the possibility that someone may perform an altruistic act for logical reasons - for example, because they have calculated the cost of the act they are performing is small to them but of great benefit to the other person, or have decided from a dispassionate perspective that living in a better world is better for everyone and a good reason to perform altruistic acts occasionally.
Even if we only consider altruistic acts that are performed because of emotion, I think it is far more common for acts to be performed to avoid negative emotions such as guilt or empathetic pain.
Fair vs unfair works too, and to peel back Kant's rehash of the golden rule, "do as you would be done by" appears to still be the best maxim we have come up with.
I wish 11yo me had discovered Clarke & Sagan before Gene & George, but as they say: that's life.
Sample size = 1? Almost sounds like younger you was better off
Personal experience is a pretty terrible way to form political opinions, it leads to stuff like overestimating the rate of crime, the cost of terror etc.
Isn't it the other way around? Few have significant personal experiences with crime or terrorism so it is only when they read about it that they start thinking that it is a big issues.
In contrast to, say, looking at the actual data and crunch the numbers yourself to try and get an educated view
This is obviously not very practical but at least then you could hold your opinions with good conscience
..and the very belief that personal experience is worth more than theory and data. In normal human beings personal experience is related to the amygdala which is related to emotions.
We study a great deal in our youth. Sure, we don't all go to uni or college. Do we stop learning after that? Not completely, but we peak at age 35. After that we still get more experienced. Smarter? Generally, not so much.
The senior adults and elder are voting based on their experience, and this clouds their judgement. While it is partly by choice (look at how intelligent Noam Chomsky for example still is), it is also inevitable.
What we see now is what I suspect the onset of the babyboom generation. Once they've passed away we will see more balance between the two camps.
Also, if everyone voted personal opinion, shouldn't the voting process average everything out, rather than the kind of wild media-driven opinion surges/swings we observe today? (Not being rhetorical, I'm actually asking if that's a possibility)
But if you're going to vote for representatives and Presidents, at least use the Approval vote. The system used in every state except Maine suffers from spoiler effects, and devolves into a self perpetuating two party system that polarizes the population into two camps that hate each other for things that no one person can really change by voting, and deride third parties as a "waste of a vote". Sound familiar?
That's why I don't want to participate in this voting system.
I'd almost go so far as to say that polls are garbage and shouldn't even exist, let alone replace voting, but that may be going too far.
As it is, no matter how many people want eg certain gun control regulations, or not to go to war with a country, it will never happen due to special interests.
It is far harder to fool all the people all the time than to buy off and control some of the people all the time.
This is why I think direct democracy isn't a good idea. I suspect it would be far better to work on reducing corruption and increasing accountability of our representatives than to have people vote on policy directly.
It goes into detail on aspects of crowd wisdom, accountability, and a feeling of loyalty from the elected to the electorate.
I'm not even sure it has any other qualities. But this one is already enough to make it better than anything else we have around.
Democracy will lead to accountability only to the extent that your "collective mind" consider it worth fighting for. If it doesn't you'll get no accountability at all.
This is an interesting subject matter though: We change as time goes on, but is that change correct?
Eg, i don't think my current self and my experiences have somehow made me inherently more correct than my younger self. I'm vastly different, but it seems likely that we are so quick to judge our younger selves because we're always in a state of feeling right. Whether we're 20, 30, or 60 - we're always feeling we are right, and our old selves are wrong.
While that seems logical, doesn't that also mean we're frequently/often/always wrong in the eyes of a future self? How can we be so sure to be so much better than our 20yr-self at 30, when at 40 we'll be saying the same thing about our 30yr-self.
There is no empirical right or wrong for most things like politics though, which only go to confuse the matter.. but it's interesting nonetheless, imo. (My current self is 32 btw, and my 20 self could use some advice)
This could just as easily be spun as a negative. I.e. Anecdotal evidence & self-interest driven opinions vs dispassionate analysis based on systematically obtained data.
Which of your opinion changed so radically?
Socialism and associated social justice criteria vs capitalism and profit criteria.
My first job was at a company with socialist background and the same management criteria lingering on (company was privatized by workers who were majority owners after the communist system). It's just like politics on a smaller scale - you see people abuse the system all over the place and the social criteria discourages actual productivity - it's very off putting if you actually want to achieve something and eventually it spiraled down to shit and got sold off.
These days I think as much as money incentives can be perverted at least they have a scenario in which they work (measuring value as close to objective as you can get) - the alternative (determining value trough politics) is much worse.
> It is the when you no longer take your dreams for reality, and instead take reality for your dreams.
Perhaps you crossed that line a few years ago?