Overcoming Us vs. Them
nautil.us
nautil.us
His "Biology of Human Behavior" Stanford lecture course in about 25 parts is on youtube. It's absolutely amazing; he's a great lecturer, articulate, funny, fascinating, a great storyteller about remarkable experiments and legendary scientists. It starts with evolutionary biology/sociobiology and goes down via a dozen levels of explanation ('buckets' he calls them) to brains and genes and how they work, in quite a lot of detail. I couldn't recommend it any more highly. p.s. My girlfriend (very non-sciency) loved it too.
http://nautil.us/blog/a-letter-from-the-publisher-of-nautilu...
If you like them, it looks like they sell subscriptions here: http://shop.nautil.us/
And this irreconcilable difference, if it exists, will eventually always come out if you talk long enough.
A lot of violence will be saved if we start agreeing to amicable divorces.
I don't expect us to do that, so, sadly, I expect a lot of violence.
Because they won't want to. Breaking down at that granular level would be too inconvenient to be worth it, even before considering the issues you laid out yourself.
If we all believe that government requires consent of the governed, why structurally require violence to achieve that state? That's the status quo you're defending.
Meta: this is how a real-life slippery slope argument and response should go. It's not a fallacy, it's just not always applicable, just like every other concept
Territories with strong social identity would maintain political union, territories with weak social identity and severe political disagreements would split. As much as is possible, no one is ruled by people they hate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
We are taught this is impossible because the ruling class, who favors ever more centralization, wishes that to be so.
Tribalism worked well for humans for roughly 350,000 years. Then we idiots come along and think that we've got a better way that is already showing its weaknesses and strain after just a couple of thousand years. Really? Maybe, just maybe our ancestors were on to something and there's something we can learn from them. No that couldn't possibly be it.
Because of course, today's society is completely free of violence now that we've eliminated tribalism?
I think the topic has been successfully in the mind of college educated people, so any mention of it immediately brings to mind both slavery and, somewhat amusingly, fascism.
It is too bad. As I said above, I see it as the best way to avoid violence.
This is in the genome unfortunately.
With inequality rising, expect more anti-social behaviour.
You mean with poverty rising, right ?
After reading Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", it seems to me this difficulty could also be described as people operating from different base layer paradigms.
E.g. "Natural laws are sufficient to explain everything we see" vs "A supernatural element is needed". Or "Power dynamics are the primary force that steer human activity" vs "There are many important factors to consider".
Both of those positions share the base epistemology of seeing and explaining, fortunately for discussions between the two very large groups that believe each of them.
Religious people, by and large, do not respect observation as much as dogma. There's no commonality to be found with that.
Religious texts can be revered studied like mythology (because they are). Critiques of biblical literalism are already fairly old-fashioned and surprisingly unnecessary.
I have a very religious family, which was uncomfortable for me when I was younger. But, that didn’t last long. Once I began studying more art history, mythology and theology, the ‘Us vs. Them’ around the topic has largely dissipated. I participate in all the happenings and have helped my cousins of similar age in contextualizing it all. I feel like I am ushering a healthy shift forward and new atheism now feels old. I’m open to critique of this, of course.
It's definitely not beyond their capacity either, all children figure out a smattering of these for themselves anyways, they just don't learn the names. Even the rather sharp ones only have a few more, or maybe one especially-honed one, but that's all it takes to make a big difference.
"A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points" - Alan Kay
As an aside, children that develop significantly advantageous models early on often end up over-relying on them later, another potential-wasting issue we could avoid by making those children aware of what's going on in their brains.
This reads like a parody.
Memorizing a list of definitions isn’t going to accomplish much of anything, any more than memorizing a list of equipment names will turn someone into a doctor or engineer. These are tricky concepts/tools, and wielding them properly takes serious expertise.
Students need (years of copious) experience reading, making, and analyzing increasingly subtle and sophisticated arguments with significant amounts of feedback from other students and expert teachers/mentors to come to a journeyman-level understanding of logic and rhetoric. Critical introspection is even harder; adults have trouble with it after decades of liberal arts education, professional school, work, personal relationships, meditation, therapy, ....
The greatest superpower we have as humans is that we have the ability to introspect, and second guess our immediate responses in light of what we've learned. That allows us to jump to conclusions much quicker on shoddy evidence, because we can course correct later as we gather more, and it's super effective as a learning strategy. Learning how to better correct our initial hypotheses helps us perform even better, but it requires us to actually study the things that humans tend to get wrong. Most education, professions, and life experiences do not support that goal, so it's an easy win if you go outside the system to do so.
[Or by “rationalism movement” are you talking about, say, philosophy / sociology / anthropology / behavioral economics / history Ph.Ds or licensed psychiatrists? That would be something like the years of dedicated training I was talking about, though those fields have different modes of inquiry and different subjects of study, and some are surely better at reasoning / rhetoric / self reflection than others.]
Also worth pointing out that the rationalist community has a lot of issues and biases that mostly spring from focus problems - like any group, they tend to hyper-analyze a few pet issues that draw their attention and then ignore the rest of the world. Even if they're correctly analyzing those issues, the social problem of biased community focus ends up thwarting the goal of overall rationality. I don't think this is a problem specific to rationalists, rather a general failure of human communication (for any -ism, you'll find that people have tunnel vision and tend to force everything they see and hear through the lens of that -ism), but it is rightly criticized more there because the movement claims to be better at seeking truth than others. I have no idea how to solve that problem, it's really an emergent result of what gets people hot and bothered and draws their attention and analysis, which is an innate human irrationality and extremely hard to think your way around.
Also, it's not like being better able to understand people is an unattractive concept to kids: most of them naturally attempt to make sense of the world, and helping them internalize the completely natural multi-faceted fallibility of humans (including themselves) will pay off enormously in their future interactions with people.
Vocabularies are the building blocks and mapping points of our knowledge stores. I think the suggestion is that emphasis on awareness and, at least some symbolic reverence to the concepts in grade school may offer a better path that what is traditional now.
Memorizing state capitals won’t make anybody Governer, but skipping that step early on can be a major derailment from path. Memorizing the capitals offers one of many maps to understanding more about what America is, and how it’s government works. Knowing the names encourages curiosity and inspires asking questions that otherwise could not be asked.
It sounds entirely reasonable to me that this could be what we need. I agree years and years is what is required, but I notice many people my age (early 30s) still lack basic vocabulary of these topics, so I have a hard time opposing teaching exactly that, but certainly agree many years, and a significant curiosity seems necessary. How do help that along?
> Memorizing state capitals won’t make anybody Governer, but skipping that step early on can be a major derailment from path.
“Major derailment”? You can’t be serious. Nobody at my school ever memorized state capitals, and as far as I can tell they’re all doing about as well as you would expect (a couple decades later) in their various careers, including careers as lawyers, activists, policy analysts, journalists, politicians, scholars of political science, ...
Anyone who does the real work (reading hundreds of topical books, keeping up with current events for decades, getting involved in political activism, engaging with peers in years of university seminars about related topics, ...) is going to end up having a reasonable grasp of the names of most states and their capitals, but being able to rattle off a list is mostly useless, except as a stunt.
> Knowing the names encourages curiosity and inspires asking questions that otherwise could not be asked.
Memorizing lists of random trivia engenders boredom and makes kids think school is bullshit. The questions they ask are things like “why are we doing this pointless busywork?” and “why doesn’t my teacher respect kids’ intelligence?”
Knowing what a capital is and how to find the name when needed is important. But, history is much more important.
I never memorized state capitals as an assignment in school, but I do know most of them from my interest in the nation’s history and geography. I correlate these things but not in the rigorous trivial way I think my earlier comment suggested. Your input brings clarity to that.
If the federal level is involved it should be to grant scholarships to high performing students, and invest more in trade schools for students that may not achieve high academic marks but have other talents that could be developed.
End welfare programs that subsidize r-selected birth rates, and give tax cuts and incentives to R-selected birth rates, with the goal of boosting the national average IQ. Finally, invest heavily in genetic testing and editing research which would allow parents to select or modify embryos to have genes that correlate with higher intelligence, like China has promised to do.
Basically, go all in on intelligence and address the issue at the biological rather than the cultural level.
The way to recognise this is to ask yourself if you can actually name any particular example of the "them" you're arguing against. Because if not, you risk arguing against a straw man you yourself created.
We're at the point where whole communities are being erected to argue against a "them", usually with an opposing community arguing against a similarly distorted image of the "us".
Instead, we should be able to move beyond the us vs. them approach to the world without first making sure that the "them" are exactly like"us".
Unfortunately, I think what can often compound this line of thinking is a willingness to speculatively ascribe qualities to people we've just met in an attempt to put them into a box we can relate to (either positively relate or negatively relate).
Asking someone to think of a particular example of "them" might simply lead to an example of someone they've judged on first impressions.
I will try to keep this short, so bare with the simplifications. The idea is that humans understand in many different types of ways and they are connected/overlapped. These ways are: mythic, romantic, philosophic, ironic and somatic. Mythic understanding comes out of oral culture and brings along with it narrative, fantasy, metaphors, binary structuring, etc. Romantic understanding came out of literacy and brings romantic rationality, humanized knowledge, transcendence within reality, etc. Ironic understanding brings self-reflection, and so on. One type of understanding is not better/worse than the other, they are important in different ways. For those who are interested, check out "The Educated Mind" by Kiearn Egan.
So, us-vs-them comes out of a mythic understanding of the world. The gut reaction is often to reject the source from which the bad behaviour comes from completely. But mythic understanding and it's binary structuring (along with fantasy, metaphors, abstract thinking) is crucial for human sense-making. So I don't think we should suppress mythic understanding and all that comes along with it, we need to have a balance between these different ways of understanding. Just imagine how many great things invented started as fantasy and strange metaphors in someones head!
That's the epistemological view of it, then you have the political one, that's a totally different beast and so I will end my comment here.
And at lot of this comes because, as the article says, "us versus them" is a powerful psychological dynamic. Given that that current American society is hyper-competitive, it seems likely this situation will continue. If pulling "us versus them" is akin to chemical warfare - a toxic affair for all concerned that only nets a marginal advantage, it will be used when actual chemical gets used - when one player is losing everywhere and no longer has to care. But that "pulling out all the stops" situation now happens ... always. When will politicians "go the low rout"? Always. When will media? etc.
Which goes back to hyper-competitive. When will it end? I don't know. How will end? Probably in tears but otherwise also hard to say.
On time lapse, even tree roots are fighting for water, and leaves are fighting for sunlight.
I feel like this article might as well be called, "Overcoming Reality." Which the article basically admits, since these in-group / out-group distinctions are so deeply hardwired into our neurology.
Yes, cooperation works sometimes, but it's usually to beat out another cooperative group.
Levels of competition within a given collection of organisms is relative - the cells of the human only occasionally compete directly - in the rebellion known as cancer (which clearly isn't the norm).
Not all societies compete at the same level but levels of competition also depend on the level of technologies and resources available. English society didn't stay in permanent civil war when muskets were introduced but you can see situations where the introduction of muskets and potatoes cause civil wars in societies where they were introduced [1].
Now, in the US since WWII and especially since the 1980s, an increase in resources has been channeled to allow society to become more competitive. One could easily imagine that if this trend continues indefinitely, things may well reach the level of something akin to civil war.
Edit: whether one see cooperation as a mean of competition or competition as means of cooperation is kind of a matter of taste. An army facing another army can experience toxic levels of internal competition that prevents it from being effective against an enemy (or oppositely, it might experience a lack of "killer instinct" before the key moments I suppose).
Your conception of "Reality" doesn't even include Zero Sum Games. Once you incorporate that, you can then look at the Finite and Infinite distinction.
The book is a tough read, but I guarantee you will love it, and will conclude that your model here explains 25% of "reality" at most.
Edit: The one star reviews on Amazon are hilarious.
Edit: I'm not saying we should go to war to solve our problems. I'm just observing something that is demonstrably true: groups unify in the face of external threats.
This comment is ignorant of the reality of black military members, both during the war and after.
As I mentioned in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935787), this is because it was not voluntary problem solving. In the military you follow orders.
Research generally shows that working together voluntarily to solve a common problem, where each side needs the others' skills, really does reduce polarization.
Sure, but the major internal strife within America in the late 20's wasn't based upon race, but upon economics and inequality. Just because it didn't remove _all_ strife within an entire nation(which will never happen) doesn't mean that it didn't smoothe things over for most Americans.
For every proposal one party has, the other party tends to have the opposite proposal. Except when it's about giving the military bigger budgets, the NSA more surveillance powers, and expanding U.S. military operations in more countries. On those issues both parties are BFFs.
The two party system has got to go, if for no other reason than that it leaves very little room for the competition of ideas.
It would make it "safe" to vote for an independent candidate without people feeling like their vote was being thrown away. In time, that would lead to more specialized parties running.
Take immigration - Canada has merit-based immigration with language requirements, and not a lot of tolerance for illegal immigration, which is considered firmly a right wing position in the states.
There is slight snag in there I think, because the level of competitiveness is also determined by culture, media, propaganda, education etc.
In other words it is not something that's just there, perceptions of competition is easily manufactured. Think of telling black people that illegal immigrants are taking their jobs. There is all of a sudden a politically motivated competition presented which can be used to make the two groups hate each other.
Broad brush conclusions, of course, are hard to give full support to but I would still expect a large number of folks would say the US is now extremely competitive and has become more competitive over the last twenty and fifty years.
Edit: Also, competition is a bit like fame (if many people believe someone is famous, by the definition of fame those people can't be wrong). If many people believe a society is competitive, it makes the society more competitive because it impels the people to compete more.
I don't disagree. I was mainly trying to point out that competitiveness is also easy to manufacture, especially in the political arena.
My assessment is that we've been building tech to help us FIND one another, but rarely building tech to help us BRIDGE with one another. With the former, we build ubiquitous messaging platforms, and so we can now find and spend time with more people who are more like us than ever before -- engaging in "candy" conversation with very similar people for more and more hours of our waking life. The latter, BRIDGING tools, would instead encourage and help us to break down those silo's that we're creating -- the silo's which are leaving us less and less prepared to engage with folks unlike us, who have perhaps developed whole other forms of language and culture in their own silos.
But as I said, Taiwan is experimenting with some really interesting processes that are breaking that down. Definitely worth reading the article :)
Contact: The consequences of growing up amid diversity just discussed bring us to the effects of prolonged contact on Us/Theming. In the 1950s the psychologist Gordon Allport proposed “contact theory.” Inaccurate version: bring Us-es and Thems together (say, teenagers from two hostile nations in a summer camp), animosities disappear, similarities start to outweigh differences, everyone becomes an Us. More accurate version: put Us and Thems together under narrow circumstances and something sort of resembling that happens, but you can also blow it and worsen things.
Some of the effective narrower circumstances: each side has roughly equal numbers; everyone’s treated equally and unambiguously; contact is lengthy and on neutral territory; there are “superordinate” goals where everyone works together on a meaningful task (say, summer campers turning a meadow into a soccer field).
How do we bring people who disagree back together? Technology is really good at getting people to do things which are individually gratifying so how do we encourage individuals to do something which is individually difficult but will have a strong positive effect on society?
But if we're just Guitarfan_1172 and Guitarfan_3654 then we can chat about guitars and build bonds that transcend the decor war, as long as neither of us goes off topic and starts discussing patterns. Of course the problem is that the positivity is latent and confined to the interior of the guitar forum, unless we meet in battle and then become aware of our mutual guitar friendship which will cause us to re-evaluate our whole worldview.
Think of it as a poker-like game where you have public and private cards. Your public dot or stripe cards are your loyalty to your design tribe, and the # of stripes or dots across all your cards indicate your degree of group identification. But you also have hidden cards reflecting various private interests.
Let's say when you battle another player you're required to reveal one set of hidden cards if any other have the same or more points (or some other ratio) than your public loyalty cards. In this example you really love guitar and have to reveal your guitar cards. If the other player has the same cards they must also reveal theirs, or perhaps the revelation depends on the strength of their affiliation. Of course, by revealing your similarity of interest maybe you lose points among your own (stripe/dot) peer group because you have something in common with an enemy player...
You see where I'm going with this. Of course, any modeling of relationships and disruption built on this framework assumes that tribal affiliation is fundamentally arbitrary, eg as an accident of birth. If it turns out that the Stripers really and truly want to slice up their enemies or that the Dotters really and truly want to punch holes in them then mutual interest in guitars/crochet/pokemon may never be sufficient to overcome their differences. Thus a good deal depends on whether the enemies are opposed to each other by default or have made a conscious choice to fight each other, in which case that's likely to predominate over all other factors.
One issue with the sort of pseudonymous communities, where there is a common identity that persists across discussions, is that once someone is "outed," they can never be un-outed. Systems that rely on forced anonymity assume a single communication channel and no leaks. Also, if a group of dedicated people wants to subvert a community, they can easily do so in a group where their opponents are "playing fair" under completely individual/atomized notions that "we're all just guitar fans!" If a collection of Stripers is able to know that they are Stripers beforehand, or tend to have certain ways of talking about things that secretly reveal their Striperness to each other but not to Dotters, then they can coordinate and increase their own influence to drive Dotters out of the community.
At the end of the day, these systems require some sense of common civility where enough people on both sides are wanting to have the system actually work. If you have to design the system to be completely trustless, that's a hard thing.
It honestly never crossed my mind that the people I was talking to could be anything other than white and mostly guys. I come from a country where races basically don't exist so that worldview made sense kinda.
Sometimes I wonder how many racist jokes I made to people who were black or asian and I had no idea. In my defense, those were just jokes/opinions I picked up on the internet, completely learned behavior as I was trying to learn how this "American Society" thing works because most of the internet seemed to follow american society rules.
Anonymity is great, but it has its drawbacks. Had I known the people I'm talking to are black/asian, I would've asked about their cultures and how they perceive this American Society thing I was exploring.
Anonymity allows the content to be judged by every reader on the content's own merit, and colored solely by the reader's perception.
However, it's also rather depersonalizing, as every participant will often interpret the others as manifestations of a generic individual, based on their own mental model of what generic individuals look, act, and sound like. It therefore creates the illusion of homogeneity from every point of view, where in truth the real membership might be quite diverse.
The resulting interaction means that over time, the community will develop a sort of institutional identity, complete with etiquette, mannerisms, and tropes they are expected to adhere to to be welcome in the in-group. Some people will don the institutional identity despite it being radically different from their own, just to feel part of a community.
You'd have one login, but the ability to set a different persona for certain audiences, like on specific subreddits, Twitter hashtags, etc. That way, the people who want to talk about gaming or TV or movies won't also be able to go through your history and tell that you also post about say, politics or personal fetishes or whatever else.
And bots couldn't be developed to auto ban people for 'wrongthink' based on the other parts of the network they post on.
That being said, the solution is a fairly simple one. Stress critical thinking. In all things. In personal life most especially, but also in other actions. Encourage people to recognize their inescapable biases and to resist them because those biases are irrational and provide no actual benefit.
There are unfortunately strong indications that this might not work, however, and that differing brain structures might actually be at play. Some people might have brains that are essentially hard-wired into an in-group/out-group way of processing the world which is inescapable. And seeking to change that would be seeking to change their fundamental character as people, clearly a morally wrong thing to do. But, we were never guaranteed that this whole 'society and civilization' thing was going to be simple or easy... so I guess we can't ask for our money back.
No one was starving, and famine wasn't the alternative. The alternative was educating the public and leaving them with the choice, a situation which is less totally effective but more flexible and seemingly less prone to large scale unintended consequences.
I won't get into genocides in too much detail, but the concentration camps were an outgrowth of eugenics, an attempt to improve human health and well-being through "scientific" engineering of the gene pool. It was based, however, upon fundamentally incorrect ideas about how genetics and evolution work, flaws which were known at the time but which were ignored because the idea of rounding up anyone not liked and wiping them out was apparently too alluring for them to step back and say 'we don't have sufficient evidence this would even work'.
That's the simple solution?
I have two things to say about it:
First, there are many, many traps to fall into when you develop critical thinking. The way out of those traps is to refine your understanding of critical thinking even more and be more aware of biases. Frankly, this is sustainable only for those who are strongly interested in it - which in my experience is probably less than 10% of the population. Hardly "simple".
Also, having spent time amongst top scientists in academia, and seeing how irrational they can become outside of their field of expertise, I have little faith that critical thinking alone is a solution.
Second, there is a fair amount of research that shows that rational thinking devoid of emotions is infeasible. People with brain injuries where emotions essentially go away (perfectly "logical" creatures) can barely function. Every decision had to be justified. Like why you chose to eat an orange instead of an apple.
This may be an argument from extreme, but the consensus appears to be that a full emotion free approach to problem solving is less than ideal.
Emotion and rational thinking are not opposites. I am aware of the neurological cases you're likely referencing, and think that they are extremely important to understanding the interplay of emotion and reason. Without emotion, it is impossible for people to make decisions regardless of the amount of information or understanding available about a situation. Even with a list a mile long of "pro"s set next to a list with only a single "con", a person without emotion can not make the decision to act. It is indeed debilitating. Emotion certainly doesn't need to be eliminated or anything of the sort. It doesn't have to be misleading, it simply can't be relied upon in the absence of reason. Emotions are a basic trained response, and inexplicably linked to the physiological processes of their manifestation. They would probably be extremely useful if we lived in an illiterate possibly pre-lingual tribe on the savannah in Africa where they evolved as an important tool. Our world is far different from that, though, and so we have some baggage we have to deal with. As far as I'm aware, critical thinking is the only tool we've got to recognize and deal with that baggage intentionally.
Women of all colors, backgrounds, and economic statuses are sexually harassed and assaulted.
Men of all colors, backgrounds, and economic statuses are sexually harassed and assaulted.
These are facts of reality.
Our culture makes it such that women are more likely to be on the receiving end. But it doesn't make the fact that both sexes in various backgrounds are victims.
How do we help people with emotional or health issues? We don't unless they can pay for it.
Oh, you mean wealth inequality may play into "Us vs Them?" mentalities?
Another example:
Everyone race, gender, and creed has been some victim of society in the past. Irish slaves, African slaves... I knew my great-grandfather on my dad's side; 100% Chippewa Indian with papers to prove it, family documents that went back 3 generations prior to HIM being born, not me.
When suddenly everyone has a historical claim, but society only recognizes the claims of a minority because it can be traced back along arbitrary legal lines (which include by todays standards some pretty horrific violence and theft)... well you have a ripe field for "us vs them" when it comes to which claim.
But since almost anyone can make a claim, and since the special elite we do "prefer" can't show except through cherry-picked historical examples, any reason they should be lifted higher than others. Or that they're divine...
Change all conversations to focus on the similarities.
> Change all conversations to focus on the similarities.
> (GP) I think this is going to be the next big challenge in social tech:
But so far social media is completely reliant on us-vs-them, in- vs out-group differentiation. It would seem that social media already changed dozens of societies across the globe to the worse in the matter of a just few years.
At this point it would probably be a huge success if "social media" were able to heal the massive damage it has caused so far.
Given that most of our online interactions are completely text-based, what cues are we using to determine if someone is Us or Them? Do the same emotion-first impulses apply when our entire perception of another person's identity is based on the content of their written words?
So this is the challenge, then, probably no different than most "human condition" type challenges - to what extent do we let our subconscious thoughts drive out conscious ones?
Without consideration, we are slaves to our unconscious thoughts and instincts. As philosophers and religious leaders have demonstrated for millennia, however, we can wrestle our quick shot subconscious into relative submissions with enough application of conscious thought. Say, mindfulness, meditation, consideration.
So the article alleges that as a white male my amygdala is gonna fire off an aggression response when I see a black male, microseconds before my conscious brain can grab the wheel and apply my hard-fought-for values (non racist ones). Is this just how it's gonna be for me, or can I subvert even that initial, lizard brain initial response to be in line with my value that all humans are equal?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
"Only a sith deals in absolutes"
I love phrases like these. Not sure what to call them but they're fun. Recursive contradictions?
:)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
More an artifact of our language and people wanting to condense/compress ideas down too far.
Possible sets of people: - sith - non sith
Known attributes sith have: - deals in absolutes
Presumption of the phrase being used is that the phrase itself is an absolute, thus meaning the person speaking has to be a sith even if they claim not to be a sith.
But that is flawed, as there are more than just those sets of individuals as we well know. There are non sith that also deal in absolutes, so thus the statement can't be taken at face value. Thus cannot be self referential.
But as with all of this, it also misses the mark by ignoring that describing a state doesn't necessarily mean your state has changed. Its also nonsensical in that if the only definition needed to be in the sith set is to deal in absolutes, the category is likely overbroad and meaningless.
Think about it, if we take the statement at face value, everyone is a sith, as everyone at some point will deal in absolutes. Even yoda uses do or do not, there is no try. So we arrive at the fundamental flaw in attributing a description of a thing or group, to the thing being described.
That can't be true if "ONLY a sith deals in absolutes" is true.
I think there are only two possible outcomes
1. Obi is wrong - not only Sith deal in absolutes. From a story perspective, this demonstrates the Arrogance of the Jedi.
2. Obi is a Sith.
Is there a more general formulation?
Seeing most everyone on Earth as ingroup improves collaboration and thus propels culture / prosperity.
Also, does universal collaboration necessarily bring the best results? Seems like there might be a number of people over which universal coordination becomes infeasible.
I prefer the former, because it is a pure "improvement" mindset, whereas the latter allows for "success" via subjugation of other people while your Us stagnants.
Universal individualism and distrust is great when there are no attackers but it needs to be hardened against cooperative attacks somehow.
Also, does universal individualism necessarily bring the best results? Seems like there might be a number of people over which universal individualism becomes infeasible.
There is no extending, there's always going to be some arbitrary point for Us vs Them.
Not when this isn't a shared sentiment. Whites are resented, not praised, for their anti-identity politics and inclusiveness. Now we're called racist for trying to ignore race or judging people based on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin.
Also it's a pretty radical proposition to overcome nature regarding in-group preferences, since that has a genetic component.
The "you're my ingroup by default" approach works best when reciprocated. It still works tolerably well when not, as long as overt hostility is met with an adequate reaction.
Otherwise it still works with those who agree to collaborate, and ends up in a disappointment with those who don't. (Moral panic that can grow or not from such a disappointment is another issue.)
I also think that is a mischaracterization of the problem, and of the solution.
Our instinct is to trust those in our communities, and distrust those outside our communities.
While that was useful in the past, two significant things have changed:
1. We are in a civilized society where it is to our advantage to begin relationships with trust rather than distrust.
2. We are not in separate communities fighting over basic resources, but in a large community where smaller parts work together.
These changes mean that the problem stems from us not trusting each other, and fragmenting the larger community.
The solution is for us to realize our limitations, and overcome them, by trusting those with whom we are unfamiliar, and working together as a larger community.
Entering any relationship with a default of distrust and allowing trust to be earned seems very prudent in 2017 (and probably any other time period).
The distinction is that people who disagree with us are not out to do us harm.
We can disagree and work together.
Trust is a nuanced subject, which is the very fact the "Us vs. Them" attitude ignores. If we clump everyone who disagrees with "us" into one group, we turn a prudent critical attitude into blatant distrust.
It is important for us to be critical of ideas, but not of people.
I also see the problem with “us vs them” with the “us” side of the equation. I’m a unique individual who’s thoughts, wants and needs don’t overlap with any group. To me everyone else is a “them” until I build a personal relationship with them.
As someone who is often mischaracterized in a "them" category, I have the same frustrations.
For example, my dad, rather often, dismisses real conversation as me being a "liberal", a group which he refuses (possibly cannot) define. Rather than tackle the ideas themselves, he chooses to dismiss them, and, whether he recognizes this fact, uses "Us vs. Them" as a personal excuse.
Because this is an instinct, we are all susceptible. I certainly do not want to blindly consolidate individuals into an undefined group, and dismiss their ideas. I would much rather trust a person's ability to have honest perspective that is different from mine, and learn from that perspective.
For someone who has years of expertise, or who has spent decades fine-tuning his or her worldview based on real evidence and life experience... what need to they have of uninformed opinions or debate.
At some point, it only slows you down.
All that matters is what you can or can't achieve, and that comes down more to persuasion.
In my experience, that is not the case, and I benefit from hearing others' perspectives even if they do not persuade me.
Some advice: you aren't likely to persuade many by ignoring their viewpoints or dismissing their character by grouping "Them".
Bad actors exist in the world and can and do team up. If you adhere to the view that Nobody Is Truly Bad that's nice but you won't be able to defend yourself or anyone else when attacked and thus raise the incentives for non-cooperators.There's a reason your body has an immune system.
I do.
It is their actions and ideas that are bad.
Even if you do not agree with me, I think it is important to show others trust until you have a real reason not to.
What the "Us vs. Them" attitude does is ignore the potential for people in the "Them" group to have anything of value to the "Us" group, or the potential for both groups to work together.
Put another way, sure, people are products of their circumstances to some extent, but they do also have agency, and insofar as they choose to be aggressive I consider them 'bad people' until they abandon such choices.
That's perfectly reasonable.
I was still focused on the "Us vs. Them" attitude, which doesn't apply here.
If you haven't met or interacted with someone, but you choose to categorize that person in the "Them" group, that is unreasonable.
It can be tricky when individuals seem to put themselves in your "Them" group. When that happens, it's probably a good idea to stop, and take care to define what "Them" entails, and how that individual fits there. If you don't, that person may be unjustly labeled by you, and you by them.
When we label each other, and create meta-groups to dislike, that creates a divide that isn't helpful for either side, because each side is mischaracterized, and all nuance is ignored.
> until they abandon such choices
My advice is to be careful not to judge others solely by the things you dislike about them. The details you focus on are not the entirety of their character.
If someone only finds friendship in a group that promotes ideas that you are opposed to, that person is likely to promote those ideas. If you befriend that person, you can begin on common ground, and work together toward ideas that you agree to be worthwhile. That person will thereby have less focus on the idea you don't like.
None of us is perfect, and we can certainly all find faults in one another. If we all reject others for the faults we find in them, we will all be rejected.
Both are effectively stable equilibria, so it's hard to upgrade trust across a society. And where it's possible to profit from breach of trust it becomes profitable for a few to turn a society from high-trust into low-trust, which I suspect is happening at the moment in the West.
For example, our "rational brain" tells us that racism is bad, but our "lizard brain" is still going to fail the implicit bias test every time. We can consciously override that bias some of the time, but it's still there. Even if you believe that you can consistently override your bias, surely you don't expect that the average person could. So how can a society comprised of "average" people avoid being plagued by racial bias?
Our rational brain -- the part that tries to overcome bias -- is also the part that is responsible for designing our society. And the people designing society tend to be more rational than most. As a result, society is in direct conflict with our lizard brain. If you are not adept at suppressing your automatic responses, you are a bad citizen. For the most part, this is what we want; after all, your lizard brain generates a lot of unsavory impulses, like the desire to enact violence. But I think it's a mistake to disregard the lizard brain entirely. "Whatever your lizard brain says, do the opposite" is unlikely to result in a perfect society. We should continue to push the limits of what we can successfully repress, but we should also be willing to admit when repression has failed.
Thousands of years ago, we began to experiment with repressing our urges to murder, steal, commit adultery, etc. That experiment was largely successful. In modern times, we are launching new experiments, many of which concern implicit bias. We don't know yet whether we can suppress those impulses. And we don't seem to have very good criteria for deciding whether the experiment has succeeded or failed. That concerns me, because it likely means that things have to get really bad before the experiment can be deemed a failure.
>We should continue to push the limits of what we can successfully repress, but we should also be willing to admit when repression has failed.
I think we are there already to some extent. This movement to try and repress implicit bias, and to hold people accountable for their implicit bias is a radical failure. Consider that since this movement got started in the West we have become more divided, and more militant about it. Micro-aggression, sexual harassment (becoming very broad and ill defined), and the general expectation that everyone be hyper-PC has riled up the lizard brains of many and even the rational brains of some. You could argue that this is an application of tribalism for good, but I think the problem is that it is too much too fast and is therefore a force of evil. Gay marriage just became legal. Now a certain population wants to normalize in-your-face transsexuals, a spectrum of genders, and social slights as criminal behavior amongst a slew of other wants; hard pushes like this radicalize people, and that's what we are seeing on the right at the moment.
This sexual harassment campaign is especially alienating for a lot of people specifically because sex requires you to disengage your rationale brain and give over to your animalistic desires. I'm not saying all of these men should get a pass, some of them appear to have committed truly heinous acts, but when things are said like "Even though my situation with Matt was consensual, I ultimately felt like a victim because of the power dynamic." [1] It is going to alienate a lot of people who would call that poor willpower. Like, Mr. Lauer is giving in to his lizard brain when he does this and cheats, but so is she when she accepts his offer.
Going back to the main point, I think that this in particular is driving a huge wedge between the sexes in America because it comes across as a double standard, and I think that in order to effectively utilize tribalism for the social good, it is critical to eliminate double standards.
[1]https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/inside-matt-lauer’s-secret...
This is not true. People vary in how much they are biased about race. I normally think of myself as fairly free for innate racism (largely because my early schooling was very multicultural). When I took a light-dark skinned association test, I go a neutral result.
Though to be clear, I don't think I am free from such innate biases in general, but I am fairly unbiased from on race.
> Even if you believe that you can consistently override your bias, surely you don't expect that the average person could.
I don't expect people to completely override their biases, but I do expect that people could mostly eliminate bias for important decisions (hiring, court, etc).
"From massive barbarity to pinpricks of microaggression, Us versus Them has produced oceans of pain. Yet, I don’t think our goal should be to “cure” us of all Us/Them dichotomizing (separate of it being impossible, unless you have no amygdala).
I’m fairly solitary—I’ve spent a lot of my life living alone in a tent in Africa, studying another species. Yet some of my most exquisitely happy moments have come from feeling like an Us, feeling accepted, safe, and not alone, feeling part of something large and enveloping, with a sense of being on the right side and doing both well and good. There are even Us/Thems that I—eggheady, meek, and amorphously pacifistic—would kill or die for.
If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s challenging to always be on the side of angels. Distrust essentialism. Remember that supposed rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces we never suspect. Focus on shared goals. Practice perspective taking. Individuate, individuate, individuate. And recall how often, historically, the truly malignant Thems hid themselves while making third parties the fall guy.
Meanwhile, give the right-of-way to people driving cars with the “Mean people suck” bumper sticker, and remind everyone that we’re in this together against Lord Voldemort and House Slytherin."
But the special thing about being human is that we have higher level thought. When I see a black person at a party, I acknowledge my bias and remind myself that there is every chance this person would be interesting to get to know.
But not everyone does this, and many people "go on their gut". And ironically, this is one of the most significant us/them divisions; between head-rules-heart and heart-rules-head.
For example, I recognize that Nazis are people too, but that doesn't mean that I want to support them in our society.
If we can determine that Nazis are bad due to their toxic culture, then that shows that certain cultures are bad. Where do we draw the line? How do we determine what cultures are good and what aren't?
If we want to build a better world, we need to work together instead of target eachother.
-Dr. King
I recently came across an organization that seems to be doing some remarkable work along these lines. It's called Better Angels.
How ironic that their Network has the same acronym as one of the most violent Anti-Fa groups - By Any Means Necessary (BAMN).
Very nice organization -- I was impressed with their video from Ohio.
I'm pretty sure this way of thinking isn't being instilled systematically from the top down, but it is happening at a very large scale. What's creating this "us vs. them" which kids often interpret as "everyone vs. me," is that there are so many easy ways out of feeling pain (and thus, ways out of learning how to live as a basic human) that we're in the process of forgetting how to deal with our emotions. We opt for solitary escape early on, because that's how our parents dealt with their issues too (their parents likely believed in pulling up bootstraps, or something). And then we/they continue to opt for escape via any sensory experience available in consumer capitalist society, most recently in socially acceptable life-escape games like Facebook and Twitter. We know it's not an authentic social feed, that it's actually designed to be a game you play with yourself where your social circle makes up the characters. What happens if that real-life game turns against you though, or if your mind simply starts to think they're turning against you? Mass shootings[1], terrorism[2], and Trump[3], I think.
If the horrors of modern American childhood don't happen at home, by the hand of adults who also sought solace from their fears in similar ways, these horrors usually happen in school, where they spend the rest of their time. From fellow classmates who figure out that bullies get their way, and clever bullies get their way even more. Us vs. them happens very early on, and when kids seek out solo escape via phones, games, whatever, well that's the beginning of a neverending search via consumer society for some answer that can allow them to live with the thoughts in their head.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...
If you haven't seen it yet, Nautil.us has a very spotty record of paying their workers over the last year at least.
https://nwu.org/an-open-letter-from-freelancers-at-nautilus-...
Nevertheless, an intelligent person must be aware of workings of ones biology and physiology and try to correct his behavior.
It is same like riding a bicycle - difficult to learn but once the skill set is acquired it becomes a habit. Meditation is the another name for it.
Anyone know of similar studies done on neuro-atypical people? I'm particularly interested about studies for people on the autism spectrum and people with anti-social personality disorder.
This is also my meta-answer for those who think that even today the us/them mechanism has no value. I've read some accounts of trying to raise children with Williams Syndrome. Truly defaulting to 100% trust is pathologically dangerous even in the safest places you can imagine in the US. People who are imagining that they are open and trusting still don't realize how much they are defending themselves, until they compare themselves to someone who seems to truly lack those mechanisms.
Which doesn't invalidate the idea that we may need less us/them than we currently have, but that doesn't prove or even provide a lot of evidence for the idea that the correct amount is zero.
(Long before the singularity arrives to wipe us all out, we face a greater danger from someone managing to successfully socially engineer the population, and in their infinite wisdom, doing something very, very stupid, such as setting our outgroup trust to 100% all the time, with no way to modify it based on experience, and rendering the entire population trivially exploitable by the first parasite that comes along or something.)
What can I pluck it out of
Or plunge it into
when you are all the world?
(Devara Dasimayya 10th century Indian poet)
Us vs Them happens when there is competition. Competition happens when there is demand for limited valuable resources and not all that demand can be satisfied.
We bring the people of the world and the people within our nations closer together by eliminating absolute poverty.
Eliminating inequality is neither necessary nor even desirable, but the floor of our economies must be such that those sitting upon it enjoy a certain minimum acceptable level of comfort.
Behavioral economic research shows this isn't how humans think, particularly Americans. They are naturally competitive regardless of their base level of comfort and "fairness" is inherently very important to them. If one would get 1 unit of free utility and another person gets 5 units of free utility, but the person who gets 1 unit has unilateral control over whether or not anyone gets anything, a startlingly high percentage of people in the 1 unit group will completely axe the deal entirely despite being better off.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
Now that google and other tech startups make blacklists of "them" that they want to block promotions and ban from working with people and groups, it seems us vs them is well embraced by the tech community.
And left-leaning google/facebook/youtube/twitter using alt-right as a banner to ban conservatives, then using "Truth masters" like snopes/politifact to confirm a viewpoint as the only truth, then SPLC/RightWingWatch to confirm anyone not spouting the common truth must be outcasts, and all followers of them are also "them". Easier for patreon/kickstarter and other crowdfunding to avoid supporting "them".
Then when programmers are on a list, or a project doesn't support the diversity license, you get banned from github, hackathons or talks.
Tech is sick with "us" vs "them" mentality and its spreading.
What? Citation needed. I haven't heard of any conservatives getting banned from these services due to their political affiliation.
> Then when programmers are on a list, or a project doesn't support the diversity license, you get banned from github, hackathons or talks.
Again, what? Has this happened? I've never heard of this, and this seems like fairly extreme hyperbole.
What is your argument here? Tech companies are against conservative americans? If reading HN has taught me anything, the tech scene is full of conservatives and libertarians.
In my experience, libertarians yes, conservatives not so much. Also, libertarians have to tread extremely carefully in tech. The true libertarian perspective doesn't fit with the new left at all, and can be easily misinterpreted as supporting racism/harassment etc... Try making a joke about dongles with a friend at a conference (totally fine from the libertarian perspective), and watch the dominate ideology of the left in tech crush you...
James Damore was fired from Google for posting his opinion to a mailing list about the topic in question.
Brendan Eich was forced out of Mozilla for voting the “wrong” way years earlier.
Look into “opal-gate” or “dongle-gate”.
Look into Strange Loop banning speakers.
The threat of being fired or hurt professionally for not being left leaning is very real.
EDIT:
My comment providing the requested citations is now being aggressively downvoted. Just further proof that it’s most definitely not ok to question the left in this industry. I simply listed incidents that have happened.
We ban accounts when they break the site rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We don't ban people for ideological reasons. That has the ironic effect of leading most partisans to see us as secretly aligned with the opposite ideology, but what can you do.
I hadn't broken any stated rules. I had posted some points about IQ, which would be considered offensive or "harmful" from the leftist viewpoints that dominate the San Francisco tech overculture.
Probably this rule was the excuse: "We ban accounts that use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle, regardless of which politics they favor."
However, it seems very unlikely that this rule is enforced in an even-handed manner.
Thankfully, I haven't had this account banned yet, which is nice at least. But it does happen.
Certainly I made points that are culture war relevant a few times, but I think that account is clearly still within the rules. Certainly no rules were blatantly broken. I am human, but I've always engaged in good faith.
A warning, at least, would've been appropriate. But, it just got flat silent shadowbanned after a decent history of participation. I'd still love to know why.
Side note: "the majority of the audience agrees it's rule-breaking" should not be the standard you apply to determine what's rule-breaking. That's just a recipe for ideological uniformity; an obvious slippery slope into the space being being under the exclusive power of one tribe or another. A healthy discussion space needs moderators who will take unpopular positions and stick to the rules as written, in an even-handed way.
Instead of countering my statement, you implied since you never heard of such things happening, it doesn't happen. This is the same argument the left uses for whites not knowing about police violence on minorities. Which is true, minorities are pulled over more by police and have a different viewpoint, just because I/we don't see/know about it, doesn't mean people need to be called out as liars.
This is exactly the "us" vs. "them" in action. Since it doesn't fit your view, its a "them" Argument.
But to answer you for some examples, not sure if you really asked in good faith, but here are some.
Check out Google engineer ousted, James Damore a liberal engineer spoke out about diversity and now is classified as alt-right hero. I would clearly say hes no alt-right or even conservative, but he is now "Them".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/08...
Check out Drupal developer ousted. http://reason.com/blog/2017/04/18/drupal-developer-ousted-ov...
For Github diversity training thats slanted against whites. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/44ttzj/racist_diversi...
Code of Conduct war that happened in Ruby. It gets worse, but here is an example. https://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004
Now I won't say google these topics, because google will return from the anti-right viewpoints. Example, If you tried to google gamergate you would think gamers hate women. Try reading /r/KotakuInAction/ over on reddit for these types of stories, they happen all the time. The sub is very middle of the road and will call both sides bullshit out. Which is refreshing.
The "US" vs. "Them" has invaded all my hobbies, news, and entertainment. And I'm sure I'm not the only tech person around who feels the same. Facebook alone has turned to shit.
See: Professor Gad Saad, whose YouTube videos are regularly demonetized. Sometimes they are demonetized while they are processing. Dennis Prager's "Prager University" is currently suing Google for a similar situation with their channel (https://www.prageru.com/press-release-prager-university-prag... and https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/10/14/youtube-rest...)
> Again, what? Has this happened? I've never heard of this, and this seems like fairly extreme hyperbole.
There is this tweet from the npm CEO, which I subjectively find quite disgusting. Not that it affects me, but I care about javascript and node, not the identity or background of the speaker. I would even listen to Pol Pot if he gave a good talk on these subjects. https://twitter.com/izs/status/911105515798720513
Then there was this incident - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868. The link of the submission is no longer relevant, but the first comment is consistent with how I also feel about the subject. It covers what happened as well.
> What is your argument here? Tech companies are against conservative americans? If reading HN has taught me anything, the tech scene is full of conservatives and libertarians.
That does not counter the points made. They exist, but they are censored, so it is not in anyone's interest in terms of job security or career advancement, to express their conservative views. Diversity and multiculturalism is essentially the equivalent of halal or kosher now. If it isn't there, seemingly nothing can be done. In general, conservatives these days don't subscribe to these ideas of classification on the basis of various identity properties, but if you do not think this way, there seems to be no place for you. James Damore is a good example of this as well. You are apparently not allowed to think differently, which is sort of ironic, coming from the birthplace of Apple.
I hate to be "that guy", talking about the "normies" invading his favorite community, but I feel like this is essentially what happened in tech. The shear value of the industry has mandated the involvement of more conventional groups. It's no longer a space of cold logical computer nerds, emotion and ideology has crept in.
My main point is, I don't think that the innovators, or the "different thinking" is gone at all, it's just been overwhelmed by the cookie cutter college intellectuals we churn out these days. I mean lets face it a College education isn't what it used to be...
I'm not trying to say that computer nerds are somehow smarter than other people, or that College grads today are idiots. My College GPA alone would suggest I'm the idiot. I'm more talking about the death of cold logic, doing whats effective, and living ones own life, which seemed to be the mantra of the old school libertarian "big thinkers".
And yes, I do hate myself for using the term "normies". I'm washing my keyboard with bleach as we speak.
For example, there are a fair amount of liberal channels being demonetized on youtube as well.
Perhaps in your case, a little introspection will reveal an "us" vs "them" attitude which you already hold.
Sure, it's self referential to an extent, but it's literally impossible to criticize someones behavior without defining two categories. The point as I see it is, a large minority of libertarians/conservatives in tech are arguing for "live and let live", but the dominate left won't give up forcing their ideology on the industry.
"Live and let live" at it's core tries to eliminate the "us vs them" mentality, but there is still always a "them". In this case it's the people who don't "live and let live"...
Edit:
Self referential seems wrong... I think I meant it's a paradox? Even in acknowledging the category "us vs them believer" as existing, makes you an "us vs them" practitioner.
>Perhaps in your case, a little introspection will reveal an "us" vs "them" attitude which you already hold.
Lol, Just because I can see the trees in the forest, doesn't make me want to chop them down.
Yeah, maybe that's better on the other side than inside though. Like if President Trump started a huge "Beat China" campaign all about making sure America stays the world hegemon, that could bring a lot of neighbors together even if it widens the gulf between me and someone on the other side of the world. It's hard to say.
- Enemy nations will be somewhat less motivated to invade if they know they will be facing a population that is entirely armed and ready to resist.
- Putting the population into the service of the country helps build a sense of national cohesion by giving a shared sense of mission and duty.
- Training the citizens to fight could also be a tool to help prevent dictatorships where the military persecutes the people; a military of citizen-soldiers would be less likely to see their own people as a "them" and more as an "us."
I work with some people in Armenia (which has mandatory conscription) - and from what I've observed that military service made the Us v. Them between Armenians and Azerbaijani stronger than perhaps it would have been without said military service (a drunken encounter between one of said Armenians and an Azerbaijani person outside of Armenia literally came to blows for no real reason I could observe except Us v. Them (well, and alcohol)).
edited: punctuation
The key with military is being forced to do something you hate alongside complete strangers with little opportunity to socialize outside of the group, under threat of court martial for leaving. And the group of strangers may change at any time. You really have to learn to get along, or work people you don't respect or hate.
The root comment was connected to the topic, of course, but its off topic component has a stronger magnetic pull... that's the way these things grow.
I doubt it. Turkey has it yet there are plenty of problems between religious people and secular people, as well as between Kurds and other Turks.
The book Influence by Cialdini dives deep into some of the elements needed. Some takeaways that I remember:
Forcing people to be together in unpleasant circumstances, without a common goal they can work towards, does not reduce the us vs them mindset. His example was school, but anything "mandatory" would qualify.
If people are forced to be together, and they work together voluntarily to solve a problem (e.g. by one side needing the other side's skills), then you have reduced polarization.
The biggest thing we are missing in the fight against the two party system is confidence.
We need people to be confident that they can elect someone from outside the two parties, and that those people can effect change in politics.
The problem is that individuals see greater participation by others as a dependency for their own participation.
Because people wait for that dependency, they refuse to act until there is a significant participation, and they themselves are no longer needed.
To tell someone otherwise is (or seems to be) to tell them that their vote does not effect the result, which is untrue, and undesirable.
I'm not really sure how to express this problem, or its solution.
A first-past-the-post [1] voting scheme will always result in 2 parties (assuming it doesn't collapse into a single-party autocracy) due to the spoiler [2] 3rd party vote problem.
It's not psychology but basic probability math and game theory.
Why is not fixed? Because this is the cheapest way for the moneyed elite to both a) wield power, and b) prevent that power from getting concentrated (which could result in a powerful dictator who doesn't listen to them).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect
What I was unclear about is that our best method for fighting the current system is to convince a significant portion of the electorate to vote for a third party candidate.
Because we all know the system is against us, we are afraid to work together to circumvent it.
We can't replace the system until we use our votes to do so.
We need main 2-party candidates like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders (who understood that running as an Independent is mathematically impossible in any meaningful election so switched their party affiliations).
while it’s true that a system set up that way with the given behavioral preconditions likely devolves into those stable solutions, you have the causality backwards. the math is descriptive of a behavioral phenomena, rather than prescribing the outcomes. human behavior seems fixed but it’s highly adaptive. just when you think you’ve figured it out, the system changes on you.
One of those difficulties is that there isn't a clear winner among the alternatives. Approval voting, the STV(/IRV), and the Borda Count all have adherents, who disparage the other two.
Worse, none of them is perfect. For example, STV and BC are both susceptible to strategic voting. I recall reading about some municipality that decided to try STV. IIRC, in the very next election they had two competent but extreme candidates at opposite ends of the political spectrum, and a centrist generally regarded as less competent (and who got a much smaller number of first-place votes than either of the others). The electorate was so evenly divided that the centrist won; the voters were so upset with this outcome that they ditched the STV and went back to PV (plurality). Evidently they would have been happier with one of the two extremists, even though that would have been the "wrong" choice for almost half of them.
We could object that none of the three candidates was obviously a great choice, and that if voters really preferred their opposite-extreme candidate over the centrist, they should have voted that way. But it's easy to see why they didn't. We could also object that AV would have given a better result in this case, picking whichever extreme candidate got the most votes and ignoring a widely-disliked centrist. But STV tends to be an easier sell, perhaps because it maintains the notion of "one person, one vote". And finally, we could object that they were too quick to pull the plug and should have given STV another chance, having learned a lesson about the importance of finding competent centrist candidates.
But their conclusion was, they tried an alternative system and it didn't work.
I tend to favor AV personally, as it's relatively resistant to pathological outcomes, but have to admit that it has another problem: it's the least tamper-resistant. With PV and STV, the total number of votes counted shouldn't be greater than the number of voters. AV has a much looser and less useful bound: the total number of votes shouldn't be greater than the product of the number of voters and the number of candidates. That leaves a lot more room for manipulation. In a world where our voting systems are already not as trustworthy as they should be, this is a problem.
I've no particular expertise in this area; I know about it from http://rangevoting.org/
My take is that range voting is useful when you have a relatively small number of voters, but once that number gets into the thousands, its advantages over AV fade. Instead of one voter rating one candidate a 7, say, instead what you have is 100 voters of whom 70 vote yes on the candidate and 30 vote no. Once you have enough voters that that effect is statistically reliable, there's no further need for the added complexity of allowing more scale values.
And as you add scale values, tampering gets even easier. How would we notice it if someone went in and changed a bunch of people's 6 votes to 7s?
I long for the problems with strategic voting over the cluster-f* that is FPTP.
We have essentially, through gerry-mandering and other slice/dice mechanisms in some cases 20% of the electorate having more say than the 80%.
I don't care if it's STV/Borda/Approval/whatever. What we have is fare more broken.
I think US vs THEM is incomparably bigger than the question of politics. Would 9/11, Vietnam, Iraq, hollocaust, or most wars for that matter have been possible without Us vs them? What about most corruption? What about class systems?
Edit: I'm just amazed that people cannot see this guy is blantantly arguing for the exact thing he claims to despise:
'Meanwhile, give the right-of-way to people driving cars with the “Mean people suck” bumper sticker, and remind everyone that we’re in this together against Lord Voldemort and House Slytherin.'
He goes on at length about why us and them is bad and then LITERALLY ARGUES FOR an us and them attitude :|
> and then LITERALLY ARGUES FOR an us and them attitude :|
I'll argue that he doesn't refute his own point by closing with a claim that we're all the US against a THEM of eternal evil embodied. It's like the non-overtoned version of saying "it's all of humanity vs satan".
To say bluntly -- Sapolsky was not arguing for us to strive towards including the principalities of timeless spiritual evil in the _us_ group.
"Hey brown people. You're not being completely ignored by our society. When we have to make decisions based on arbitrary characteristics like race, we prefer to occasional choose people you might be able to relate to on the bases of colour, rather than trying to appeal to some obviously incorrect notion that we should only relate to 'the average UK citizen' (which doesn't exist)."
Or maybe those actors just worked best? Or maybe they drew straws. Either way, there's no reason to believe that the skin colour of the actors on your screen is some kind of manipulation/propaganda against you. That's an irrational leap.
>Am I one of the bad guys to recognise the colour of the skin?
No. You're one of the bad guys for failing to recognize that the colour of the skin is an arbitrary choice and thus not relevant. The only thing about a person you should consider relevant is their ability to make good decisions.
The BBC will not occupy any moral high ground by using only white actors. (Which is what you're saying they should do, on account of some frankly stupid appeal to 'averages.' The 'average' UK citizen is riddled with disease and missing most of their limbs. So maybe don't try to tacitly substitute 'average' for 'ideal/typical/most common'. And why does the BBC has any obligation to represent any of these anyway?)
Maybe that's a harsh-seeming way of putting it, but that's the logical alternative you imply by using crappy metrics.