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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

> What if a pill can change your politics or religious beliefs?

I would generally trust it if it persists after the actual pill wears off. This would suggest the pill has just helped you reveal something by stimulating the brain areas which had not enough power to understand that in their normal state.

By the way, I have noticed multiple occasions when alcoholic intoxication temporarily made generally liberal people far-right. I have even experienced that myself a couple of times when I was younger.

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>>"By the way, I have noticed multiple occasions when alcoholic intoxication temporarily made generally liberal people far-right. I have even experienced that myself a couple of times when I was younger. "

That's interesting. I have to think about that, never realized before, but makes kind of sense to me. I read that one big effect of alcohol is due to deactivating inhibitions.

I'm quite lefty, and one main difference with people in the right of the political spectrum (I hope I'm not offending anyone with this) is that they want things to be clear. It's like they deeply dislike feelings of incertitude.

For instance: do I feel a nice feelings inside by displays of patriotism? Sure. But do I trust those feelings? Not at all. I will inhibit them because I don't see them as an accurate description of reality. Maybe with a few more beers I would be more patriotic.

Nah, this is just you projecting your perception of 'simpleness' onto the beliefs of others. Very classic self-serving biased perspective. "They want certitude, but we can, in our superior way, handle the true complexity of reality."

Lots of people believe this in every side of every ideological conflict, and it's easy to do so since very few people understand others' beliefs really; they just understand simplified caricatures of those beliefs.

It could be self-serving (most opinions are), I'm willing to doubt myself about this too.

Anyway I'm not saying anything about "simpleness" but about feelings of certitude and answering the observation of the grandparent post.

Following this theory: It seems to me that we avoid incertitude when we have to act. We can not being subtle if we are in a crisis, so, maybe, it's the level of perceived thread what helps to determine your position in the political spectrum. I don't know, just thinking out loud.

> Lots of people believe this in every side of every ideological conflict, and it's easy to do so since very few people understand others' beliefs really; they just understand simplified caricatures of those beliefs.

Surely this is true. However, at the same time, many people's beliefs actually are simplified caricatures of what the doctrine they associate themselves with actually meant them to believe.

Being neither left or right leaning I disagree with that assessment. Both sides are filled with inconsistent hogwash, but at least in US politics the right is much more focused on staying on message. Deep down the modern right was formed from multiple independent groups so unity is what ties it all together. The left is far more fragmented and therefore more willing to bend.

What’s interesting is both the left and right are actually forming a unified belief system in younger people. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens over the next 50 years as demographic forces shift the political landscape. Politicians know how to be ideology flexible, the general public adds some real friction.

Are you kidding me?

The right leaning parts of the internet are chock full of people making the exact same complaint about the left. Everyone always assumes the other side is one block when they're not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity

Each side very much has outliers, but I am referring to the mainstream politics. Read up on how the modern Republican party was reformed and various reactionary movements within the party. It’s fascinating from a strategic and political standpoint.

A striking example is the libertarian party acts like a third axis drawing from both the republican and democratic voters, where the Green Party attracts almost exclusively from the Democrats. That represents a fundamental split in the left and a more fluid political makeup. The Green Party is tiny but actually had a significant impact on several elections.

Though this is mostly looking back, I don’t really follow recent politics that much.

PS: Personally, I vote more for the candidate than the party. A young and living George H. W. Bush for example would have easily gotten by vote last election over Hillary, but was never going to vote for Trump. It’s like both sides looked at their primary and thought, what’s the worst option?

> I would generally trust it if it persists after the actual pill wears off.

The problem I see with that is that the thing that you are using to "trust it" may have been altered by the pill itself, to make you "trust" whatever changes it made. It could be like Ken Thompson's Hack[1], but for brains.

On the other hand, that's how our brains work, regularly. We experience reality and our brains' chemistry changes.

A similar situation I can think of is: I have an accident and and I lose part of my brain mass as a result. The present me would definitively not "trust" whatever person results from that. But "me without those brain parts" might, or even like it. It has been observed that brain injuries can produce severe personality changes[2]

I must point out that a brain injury might feel more "drastic"; more similar to a "hardware change" in a computer than the pill one, which could feel like a "software update", of sorts. But a pill could very well kill a huge part of a brain (consider that cyanide could kill 100% of it).

[1] http://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage

You would trust something that permanently alters your opinion of the world, that could be forcibly administered to you? Nothing about this question suggests it simply "helped you reveal something". To me it has connotations of mind control where your fundamental beliefs are altered through the use of biochem.

> You would trust something that permanently alters your opinion of the world, that could be forcibly administered to you?

The second part is the problematic one, not the first, right? After all, reading or watching videos could also permanently alter your opinion of the world.

>>"To me it has connotations of mind control where your fundamental beliefs are altered through the use of biochem."

Of course, it has the terrifying possibility of mind control, but, from a philosophical point of view, it expose that our beliefs are biochem.

Maybe that insight would make us to take them less seriously. That could be a good thing, I think. Taking some edge of the political discussion.

You can alter a book by changing the ink on the page. Does that make the book's contents no more than ink?

If I can write a different text in the process, then yes, I suppose the important content of the book is the ink.

Lots of things permanently alters your opinion of the world. Much of this is forced on you. If your parents brought you up in religion, it alters you. Tragedy tends to alter people. War does this. Your parents dying might do this: The current pandemic has done this for some people. Jail does this to folks, too. Travel can do it, and relocating to another country definitely can do it too.

In general, folks aren't going to forcibly administer this stuff to you. IF they do, they are generally either 1) bad friends or 2) The sorts of folks that have the power to torture you. Realistically, you choose to take it yourself. If I*m going to fundamentally change, I'd rather it be because of a positive thing I've chosen for myself, which includes hallucinogens.

>I would generally trust it if it persists after the actual pill wears off. This would suggest the pill has just helped you reveal something by stimulating the brain areas which had not enough power to understand that in their normal state.

Possibly. Or maybe it just damaged the brain in an anosognosic irremediable fashion. How would you make the difference?

> By the way, I have noticed multiple occasions when alcoholic intoxication temporarily made generally liberal people far-right. I have even experienced that myself a couple of times when I was younger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

More likely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vino_veritas

It can be both.

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