Hacker News Reader

>I've expressed this in nonpartisan terms, but I'm willing to bet that everybody knows who I'm talking about

Honestly, I have no idea. Reading the first two paragraphs my first thought was that it's scary that I have no idea what side of the political divide this might more fully describe. Then I came to this sentence and realized that you did have a side you were thinking of.

Imagine if every time a nerdy news site got popular and influential, a whole group of astroturfers descended on it. At first it would be companies with commercial interests (and sometimes the nerdy news site would even be formed by a company as a kind of place to express and maybe influence opinions). As the nerdy news site became more and more popular, the news stories would shift from highly technical issues, to more political ones. Over time, the comments section would start to become more polarised as people rallied to support their chosen points of view. Conversations and ideas would carefully be stoked or extinguished by people wishing to push the concensus view in one direction or the other.

At some point it becomes really obvious what is happening. Anybody who lived through the rise and fall of Slashdot has already seen it. However, before it becomes really obvious, is it actually clear what's going on? Does one really understand one is being manipulated? When one jumps into a conversation and pushes an important point, is it obvious that the point originated at this very nerdy news site? Are we all clear on how we formed our ideas, who influenced us and where we got the supporting evidence to convince ourselves that we've got it right? Or do we rely on our gut feelings and participate in the echo chamber?

I don't believe anybody really understands the extent to which they are manipulated. That's the nature of manipulation.

>that there is a very large segment of the US who really ought to know better

My take is not so optimistic. Intelligence is roughly normally distributed, and the fat middle, 100±1 stddev or so, simply does not know better, and does not have the requisite brainpower to think past social conditioning, whether from friends or propaganda. Particularly when the average person has a life to live and won't spend much or any of that time verifying anything. At the very least the capable among us are better able to prioritize which facts to take time to verify, while the average person probably doesn't verify anything rigorously at all.

Again, this isn't just some necessary aspect of human nature. This is something that very powerful people actively want to be the case, because when people behave in this manner it's easier to manipulate their behavior on a broad scale. This is the explicit purpose of modern marketing.

I don't honestly think it has anything to do with being "capable", I think it has to do with having the time and resources to learn how or even why they should want to in the first place. Most people don't. Most people have to work to eat and if they're not too exhausted to do anything than passively absorb entertainment when they get home that just means their boss isn't getting their full value out of them.

If 45% of your population "ought to know better" that's not just a moral failure of a handful of people, that's a systemic problem. The solution isn't "they just need to figure it out", something very fundamental needs to change.

Yeah, though I'm afraid I can't tell you what. I think it's really fundamental, something that will require a serious reconsideration of the entire social contract.

Are you really that sure you're right, and not the victim of propaganda yourself?

Well... yes and no.

I'll just go ahead and be less coy about it: they were so far off base when it came to same-sex marriage that it casts doubt on every bit of reasoning they claim. The arguments were absurd. They lost the fight and none of the evils they claimed came to pass.

It's not the most important issue, but it's one in which they were so obviously and overwhelmingly wrong that I think it justifies my claim that they may be similarly off-base on many other issues. I am, of course, wrong about many things myself, but nothing so egregiously and demonstrably incorrect as that. There are other issues that aren't as massively a slam-dunk, but I've seen enough egregious propaganda repeatedly refuted that it's clear to me that they're not listening.

That said, no, I can't be certain that I'm not just the victim of propaganda. That's why I put it as I did: if I'm wrong, then I'm very wrong, and it will be impossible to convince me otherwise.

Our moral intuitions are almost entirely determined by the society we live in. 30 years ago, 30% of people in the US supported gay marriage, and now it’s over 60%. Do you believe the number of good people doubled during that time?

I’m gay, and to me the animal farming industry is obviously more wrong than banning same-sex marriage. Yet almost everyone in both of the political tribes eats meat.

My values fall in line with the left in most areas, so I generally associate and agree with left-wingers. This means I get exposed to a lot of left-wing perspectives and media, so to me, it appears that the Republicans are constantly being evil. But then again, everyone on both sides is eating meat, so how different can they possibly be?

Yes, GP's argument seems to rest on the assumption that people who reach the right conclusion do so for the right reasons. But opposing discrimination against gay people didn't become more obviously right over the course of a few decades; it gained social momentum until it was the path of least resistance for the majority.

Hopefully a similar thing will happen with respect to our treatment of animals: as humane alternatives become easier and more appealing, there will be less incentive to avoid thinking about the suffering inflicted, and this will kick-start the social process whereby factory farming eventually becomes obviously indefensible to most people.

Really, my argument was that people who reach the wrong conclusion for the wrong reasons, and stick to them, are suspect. We're all guilty of that at times, of course, but it's rare to have it quite so prominently and comprehensively refuted. And it makes it hard for me to believe that anything I say will make a difference on a topic that isn't obvious.

I hope you're right about animals. It's a case where I know I'm being inconsistent. But at least I'm aware of it and trying to do better, rather than twist the rationale why my existing behavior (and misbehavior) must be correct.

I don't need people to do the right things for the right reasons. But I need them to be open to reasons.

If you feel like it shouldn't be this hard, it's because there's a massive force pushing against you. Our situation isn't an accident; the status quo actively seeks to maintain itself, and incentives become structured in such a way as to reinforce it. You can't change people's minds without changing the structures that have forced them into that configuration.

As human beings, we're predisposed to think socially; when we see an issue, we look for the individual person who is the proximal cause of that issue. We have a much harder time seeing when the issue was caused by a broader system. That's why we're constantly frustrated and thwarted by issues where it seems the problem will never go away: we dealt with the person who was at fault, why has the issue reappeared? It must be hopeless, there must be nothing to do but accept that every bad person will be replaced with another bad person. But why aren't we asking what mechanism it is that keeps replacing these "bad" people with new ones? We're stricken with learned helplessness because we can't see the structure of the system or realize the fact that we have the ability to manipulate and change it, because the problem doesn't lie in any one person but in the shape of society itself.

>They lost the fight and none of the evils they claimed came to pass.

You sure about that?

Christian bakers being hounded for years because they don't want to make a cake which artistically expresses support for gay marriage. It's worth looking at the masterpiece cakeshop case, because you realize that they've been targeted for legal harassment in a premeditated way, not simply because someone couldn't find cake.

You can look up some of the statistics on political and religious discrimination in academia and some job fields, and try to think how that would look to you if you were a conservative or a Christian.you understand that you would have to live your life in a kind of hiding, while listening to people flagrantly insult your beliefs on a regular basis to guffaws and applause.

I'd also point to how we now see little boys performing sexual dances in front of groups of adult men or offering money. Stripping, blowing kisses, and so on.

Trans kids. Hormone replacement for 12 year olds.

Then there's education. Children being taught that women are men, men or women, and so on. Your children.

If you love all these things then you wouldn't think anything was wrong, however you have to acknowledge that they're not the same as gay marriage but if gay marriage had not happened they would not have happened either. Ultimately it comes down to what do you think a healthy society should look like. If your personal values take sexual freedom has the highest value, then yes you want this direction. Others believe that society should mold individuals into healthier forms as a way of helping them and strengthening the group. These are moral intuitions, axiomatic.

EDIT: I think from this comment it looks like you just failed the ideological turing test (google it); you haven't been consuming the other side's propaganda/opinions straight from source, you've been consuming your side's propaganda/opinions about the other side. So fundamentally you don't know what the other side is thinking. (This is common; it's been demonstrated empirically that conservatives can predict leftists' response to political questions better than the other way around, probably because leftists control education and media so rightists are forced to consume their messages in volume, but not the other way around.)

A good test question each person can ask for themselves is, "Do you take joy in the suffering of others?" If you do, you are likely on the wrong side.

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but the problem with that test (aside from the likelihood of self-deception) is that there are people on every side of every issue who would fail it.

edit: I actually think this is a serious point, because it speaks to the difficulty of short-cutting your way to a correct opinion by looking at the character and motives of people participating in the debate.

For any political or moral position with a non-trivial number of supporters, I could find examples of proponents being cruel, irrational, intellectually inconsistent, plainly dishonest, and so on. Not necessarily an equal number of examples -- often one side of an issue really does attract worse/dumber people -- but always enough to give you a pretty dim view of that group, and by extension that side of the debate.

And unfortunately I think this plays a big role in how we actually make up our minds. It's unsurprising, and probably necessary, that we cluster issues together and apply some social heuristics rather than independently investigating every topic in depth. 'Do the people who support this set of policies seem smart and benevolent?' is a reasonable heuristic when applied to a fair sample. But unfortunately it's also a really easy heuristic to hack, simply by cherry-picking the best/worst examples. This can be done deliberately by others, lazily by ourselves, randomly by circumstance, or blindly by social media algorithms, but in each case the effect is similar.

(Of course, the extra complication is that this heuristic can easily fail even when applied perfectly. Maybe a position is attractive to many people for bad reasons, while also being attractive to open-minded experts because the facts ultimately back it up. The experts will usually be outnumbered, so a random sample will show the majority of people with the correct opinion holding it for bad reasons.)

> I actually think this is a serious point, because it speaks to the difficulty of short-cutting your way to a correct opinion by looking at the character and motives of people participating in the debate.

An awful lot of evil has been done by people who firmly believed they were doing the right thing. I'd even go further and suggest that most evil has been done by people who thought they were in the right.

Consider also that the notions of what is right and wrong have changed considerably over time.

I wouldn't fully judge a position based on other people's motivations. It's more the difference between, do I want politician X to be brought up on charges because I take glee in him suffering and going to jail? Or do I want him to be brought up on charges because I have identified the actual moral/legal/ethical standards that I believe all politicians should subscribe to, and do I believe that failure to meet those standards is justification for prosecution (in all cases) in order to protect society?

Someone else might enjoy that politician's suffering if they are brought up on charges, but it's definitely not a necessary feeling if it's a just outcome.

So I wouldn't argue that "enjoying someone else's suffering" is sufficient to guarantee you're on the wrong side, but I would say that it's not necessary - and therefore, if any just outcome can be found without feeling satisfaction in the person's suffering, then we should individually seek to be free of enjoying the suffering of others. And encourage other people of that as well. It's simply not necessary. And I would argue that if enjoying the suffering of others becomes a larger part of your motivation, you are definitely more susceptible to be in favor of actions that are otherwise unsupported or wrong.

So, new heuristic - if the chief reason for visiting some justice on someone is because it would make them suffer, be suspicious and don't join in unless you can find an independent justification for that justice.