Comment by ta_donk_gt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ta_donk_gt | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"Violence against Trump supporters is justified because he is literally Hitler",

"Even though everyone knew the rules of the game up front, Trump is not actually the legitimate president because his popular vote tally was lower",

"Trump is not a legitimate president because the Russians may have been involved in releasing some 'routine, not interesting' emails",

"Even though the U.S. has interfered in over 80 elections in the last 20 years (including Russia in 1996), and even though a significant percentage of the mainstream media is foreign owned, and even though there is significant foreign money and foreign influence involved in every election, this election is not legitimate because Russia may have helped release some emails",

"Enforcing existing immigration laws (and shoring up abused immigration laws) to protect American jobs and wages is racist"

----

I could go on for days, but the point is that people in general will say and believe a lot of stupid stuff if it helps their team. Pretending only people on the other team do it is pretty out there.

>people in general will say and believe a lot of stupid stuff if it helps their team

It's all about "Motivated Reasoning," a term I learned from Jonathan Haidt.

For things we want to do, we ask ourselves, "how can I?"

For things we don't want to do, we ask, "must I?"

Since I've learned this, about 95% of discussion has been reduced for me. It doesn't make things easier though. It's hard for me to take that so many people are operating in such a biased way.

And it's even harder because it means really thinking through concepts like fairness, immigration, sexism, etc. These are not easy to reason about. And it takes a lot of time.

Interesting take. Thanks for that.

I think what also contributes is the idea that the brain will twist and contort reality to protect foundational beliefs (beyond my own observation of human behavior, there are a number of studies backing this up). We make decisions based on what we believe to be true, and the more decisions based on and built on a belief, the more foundational that belief is to our life. The more foundational a belief, the harder the brain will work to protect you from facing something that contradicts the belief head on (because directly facing the fact, without being prepared for it, that a significant number of decisions in your life have been based on false information could cause real system damage). Changing foundational beliefs must occur in steps, as you can only move so far from the current belief at once. And in the other direction, we much more readily accept anything that reinforces our foundational beliefs, even more so when being bombarded with ideas that may challenge those beliefs at the same time.

Religion and politics are extremely foundational things for most people, thus people are much more likely to overlook facts contradicting their beliefs and accept irrational ideas that happen to reinforce the belief.

> Since I've learned this...It doesn't make things easier though...

Same.

EDIT: Another complex/interesting idea to think through is that Us vs. Them is baked into human nature. You can change who "us" and "them" are, but I don't think you can change that there is always an Us vs. Them, and that "us" is always the good guys and "them" is always the bad guys.

These are all shitty arguments, but they're not conspiracies. They're just shitty arguments.

A conspiracy would be more like "Bush did 9/11", which the left was guilty of for a while. Eugh.

Initially, the point was that it is only Trump supporters that are uninterested in actual facts, but sure, plenty of conspiracy theories on the left as well (was just trying to keep it clean):

"Trump has had or wants to have sex with his daughter..see, here is this picture of her sitting on his lap when she was 12"

"Trump stayed in a Russian hotel room, found out the Obamas had previously stayed in that room so hired prostitutes to urinate on the bed in front of him"

"Russia sold 19% of their state owned oil company to an unknown party and there is a document 'procured' by the Never Trump movement that says something about 19%, so Russia made a deal with Trump to get him elected and give him 19% of their oil if he would lift sanctions"

OK, that is weird as shit and I've never heard it before, but a cursory internet search checks out. I think my brain actively filters out mirror.co.uk links at this point.

Only the last of those three things is a conspiracy theory. I would be very happy to see evidence disproving it, but for now it seems implausible, but worth discussing.

Agreed, in a true definition of a conspiracy theory only the last one meets the criteria, though I was trying to match ideas on the other side generally lumped into the conspiracy theory category such as the Podesta brothers are pedofiles (though I know this is a smaller component of a larger actual conspiracy theory).

And agree also on discussion, plenty of conspiracy theories on all sides that are actually probably worth discussing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com