Political radicals don’t evaluate their own errors–about anything (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Political radicals don’t evaluate their own errors–about anything (2018)

arstechnica.com

30 pointsTomte34 comments

"Wherever I go, my first object, if I wish to find out the truth, is to get hold of the Free Press in France as in England, and even in America. But I know that wherever I get hold of such an organ it will be very strongly coloured with the opinion, or even fanaticism, of some minority. The Free Press, as a whole, if you add it all up and cancel out one exaggerated statement against another, does give you a true view of the state of society in which you live. The Official Press to-day gives you an absurdly false one everywhere." Hilaire Belloc - The Free Press (The free press here being the ideological press)

I remember reading many surveys where centrists end up being less knowledgeable than those on the extremes of the ideological spectrum. This is just one I found googling but I know there's more out there.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/10/political-mod...

I guess it depends on how you define a political radical, as a radical is one who stands against the status quo.

Given that current mainstream politics seemingly sees evaluating your own errors as some kind of a weakness, to openly do so right now would be fairly radical for a politician.

>a radical is one who stands against the status quo.

A radical is someone who is willing to use extreme measures to achieve their political objectives. Nothing to do with the status quo. Totalitarian regimes, for example, usually maintain their status quo with radical zeal and measures.

>A radical is someone who is willing to use extreme measures to achieve their political objectives.

The Quakers are political radicals. They are so extreme they utterly refuse to kill people, even when ordered.

edit - Given the article about it also on the front page, I thought I'd look it up in the original Mirriam Webster. The result is kind of interesting;

>2. (Politics)

>One who advocates radical changes in government or social institutions, especially such changes as are intended to level class inequalities; -- opposed to conservative. In politics they [the Independents] were, to use phrase of their own time. "Root-and-Branch men," or, to use the kindred phrase of our own, Radicals. Macaulay.

http://lexicon.x10host.com/?w=radical

And to contrast with my first port of call, in the Cambridge dictionary you get a politically neutral definition;

>believing or expressing the belief that there should be great or extreme social or political change

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/radical

Radical as an adjective has to do with fundamental change. If you've seen someone use it the way you describe, I'd argue you've seen the word used wrong.

The article links to https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S09609822183142... which explains how they define radical:

> To typify a spectrum of radical views, we first conducted a separate online survey of 344 US participants (study 1) who completed questionnaires about political issues [4, 19, 20, 21, 22]. We included standard questionnaires about political orientation, voting behavior, attitudes toward specific political issues, intolerance of opposing political attitudes, belief rigidity, and (left- and right-wing) authoritarianism. These questionnaires were selected based on prior models of political radicalism as stemming from a combination of intolerance to others’ viewpoints, dogmatic and rigid beliefs, and authoritarianism, which represents adherence to in-group authorities and conventions, and aggression in relation to deviance from these norms [23, 24, 25]. However, we stress that radicalism is likely to reflect a general cognitive style that transcends the political domain—as exemplified by links between religious fundamentalism and increased dogmatism and authoritarianism [22, 26]—and instead refers to how one’s beliefs are held and acted upon [27].

Western democracies are very good at monitoring and subduing radicals. This is not something anyone in the Western world worries about. Most radicals are labelled the lunatic fringe and treated as such. That's all good and well, the only downside is that liberal democracy is not really all that democratic. But it is what it is...

Hell they even made a song about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTFVMMCwsss

> Western democracies are very good at monitoring and subduing radicals.

In a way, that's true - democracy is based on some degree of reasonably-widespread consensus, not on what a single power-hungry autocrat might want at any given moment. That would seem to have an inherently stabilizing and moderating effect, and the historical record seems to indicate the same. OTOH, this also implies that deliberative institutions are very important - if a society becomes fractured and distrustful for whatever reason (one can summarize this as "social decay", "decadence" or "dissipation of long-term social capital"), deliberation becomes a lot harder and radicalization has a chance to prevail once again. The proper answer is not authoritarianism of course, but a renewed focus on stable, long-term, social-capital-generating institutions.

- The Study[1]: 400 people from Amazon's Mechanical Turk were given an online poll, where they were asked to guess how many dots were in a given picture. They were then given some information about dot density to see if they changed their mind. While there was some correlation between radicalism and dogmatism(more heavily tilted when it comes right-wing radicalism, according to the study), there were still a significant portion of political radicals who were just as open minded, or even less dogmatic than moderates, implying that there could be a subsection of "radicals" who are skewing the whole group slightly towards more dogmatism.

- The Headline: "Political radicals don’t evaluate their own errors– about anything". "Moderates are much better at figuring out when they're likely to be mistaken."

I find articles like this a disgrace to both journalism and science, but unfortunately you need clicks and shares to progress in both.

[1] (https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)...)

I'm rather confused as to how this fits in with the strong radicalism we see many academics take - academia is all about (or supposed to be all about) critical investigation. For instance, Adorno and Horkheimer had very radical views yet they were more than happy to evaluate their own errors, and criticise the positions they once held. Marx held radical views but re-examined them significantly during the course of his life time. Many Marxists have decided to re-work significant portions of Marx's theory they once held dear. John Roemer has been very critical of the orthodox Marxism he used to profess and has been more than happy to admit a limitation people have pointed out in some of his theories. Radical feminists such as Kate McGowan and Rae Langton have been happy to admit errors in their previous work on pornography and speech act theory. Contemporary psychoanalysts have moved beyond Freud's "experiments".

I'm also skeptical of what the implications for this study are in a broader sense. Radicals seem to me to be needing to confront a barrage of controversy, as if the whole world has the deck stacked against them. To maintain a radical opinion it's usually the case (or we'd like to believe it's the case) that they have at some point confronted the status quo. I think this is more than most non-radicals do: non-radicals don't get many chances to experience this contradiction with the world, nor contradiction within their minds. Is the result a sign of stubbornness, or ignorance? I can think of some things which I'd be very glad to be stubborn about defending - in which case at best the study shows that this stubbornness carries over to places where it is inappropriate (evaluating the number of dots). As the saying goes, we want to be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains fall out.

Today I see the establishment, mainstream media, Republican moderates and Democratic leadership foaming at the mouth with conspiracies about how Trump is a Russian spy, and how Russia controls US elections and other wild conspiracies.

Meanwhile the "radicals" - Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Glenn Greenwald - as well as diehard Trump MAGA supporters, think all of these Russisn conspiracies are overblown, if they have any basis at all.

In science questioning the mainstream, establishment narrative is what leads to progress. That the establishment stigmatizes those questioning mainstream, establishment political thinking is not surprising. Of course they would be found "in error".

Political radicals are also at home on both wings at the same time. Radical right by day, radical left by night.

On its face, your comment is absurd, equating two concepts universally defined as exclusively complementary.

...unless you see the political spectrum as a circle where the opposites meet at the top. There is a lot to be said for this given the resemblance between authoritarian-left and authoritarian-right regimes. While they might sound different on paper and on the barricades they somehow seen to end up with largely identical - and largely dysfunctional - societies.

Authoritarian regimes will drape themselves in whatever flag serves their interest, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, there's no saying it's indistinguishable from its alternatives.

You're getting downvotes for reasons that are probably obvious, but in fact you see this happen often enough for it to be notable as an occasional phenomenon - although currently it's far more likely to happen left -> right than right -> left.

Some radicals aren't radical at all. They're actually authoritarian malcontents who will jump on any bandwagon that allows them some publicity, attention, and power.

These people infect and distort public politics.

They're often malignant narcissists, which can make them shockingly hypocritical, especially when they appear on the left - not to mention potentially violent.

A lot of the left/right rhetoric is really about people accusing other people of being this kind of person. IMO if they were kept well away from power, politics as a whole would be far saner.

Also IMO at this point in time they're far more of a problem on the right than the left. That hasn't always been true in the past, but right now it's a lot easier to find the odd person who started out as (say...) a student Marxist suddenly fervently supporting xenophobic anti-immigration policies than vice versa.

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