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On Political Belief

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When I'm trying to solve reasoning problems with other people, and each of us has a different concept of what constitutes then desired en state, the arguments tend to become very similar to political disagreements, in both the observable interactions and in the subjective way my brain 'feels' during the conversation.

The author of the article believes that political discourse is a process that's intended to "come up with a solution to a problem". This is itself an ideological position: not everyone holds this technocratic viewpoint. If we construe the purpose of the political process as one that's intended to reconcile people who hold competing value systems but who must productively coexist in proximity to each other, then recognizing ideology as the appropriate basis of political discourse is the most rational first step.

Very good point. Still, politics is not (only) a philosophical discussion - policy must be made, and it's reasonable to try for an effective policy with minimal bad side effects.

Consider the US' Prohibition. Even taking it as a given that the majority of the voters wanted to see alcohol banned [1], it's hard to see it as anything but a disaster.

I'd say there are more modern examples, too.

[1] Yes, this is debatable. Not the point, though.

But in order to try for an effective policy, we have to have a consensus on what that policy is meant to achieve. If there's a persistent disagreement here, we're at an impasse.

Sure we can look at the unintended consequences of policies like prohibition (which is still a very current example, with its disastrous effects still readily evident), but when the disputes extend to the intended consequences, or when people resolve the tradeoff of primary result vs. deleterious side effects in opposing ways, the debate is irresolvable.

I think the highly polarized political climate is itself a deleterious side effect of the meta-policy of political centralization: the more people you try to cover under a single policy, the more conflict and 'gridlock' there will inevitably be. This, of course, is a strong argument for addressing policy questions as the smallest appropriate level; perhaps those who want to create economies of scale for their political projects are creating disproportionate diseconomies of scale.

> In fact, neuroscientists have recently discovered that the part of our brains we use when making decisions about politics is totally different from the part we use when trying to solve reasoning problems.

It's called caching. Just like it makes no sense for your server to constantly re-generate the same thing over and over again, it makes no sense for your brain to re-evaluate the same thing over and over again. That's what ideology is. The article gets to it, but only at the very end.

> After all, the biggest problem with democracies tends to be the voters.

No, the biggest problem with democracies tend to be a select number of people who think they know better than the voters and start making decisions for them. That's when democracies turn into bureaucracies.

> It makes no sense for your brain to re-evaluate the same thing over and over again

But we don't ever get the result of our query - we never know the true answer to the problems facing society. So I don't think caching is a good metaphor. It's more like we just give up thinking because it's uncomfortable and it's easier to be like everybody else and make up our minds.

> But we don't ever get the result of our query - we never know the true answer to the problems facing society.

Our brains aren't designed to solve societal problems. Why should they be? They are designed to solve our own problems. The answers our brains give us are meant to benefit us. They may benefit society at large tangentially, but that is not the intent, nor should it be.

I totally agree. That's why democracy is so hard.

Also: For ~5 minutes the reply button wasn't showing up. I guess PG coded in a little feature to make people take some time to calm down before getting into arguments. Beautiful.

That's been in place for a few years now, IIRC. The delay gets longer as you get deeper into a thread, to deter flamewars.

Can you please explain how you jump to an understanding of how our brains our wired for 'private' issues and not 'public' ones? I know plenty of individuals whose minds operate in the context of society. Language isn't private. It's shared.

> Can you please explain how you jump to an understanding

Please read Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Unlike his recent work, that one is really good.

I'd submit that it's less like caching than it is rooting for your favorite sport team.

In the current context, how else to explain liberals justifying Obama's policies WRT the financial sector, or Republicans vilifying his healthcare bill? Ask both groups of people about those policies 4 years ago, in the absence of names and faces, and you'd get very different answers. And don't even get me started on "I'm either ok with or stridently oppose deficit spending".

That's the opposite of caching, it's tribe-based fist-pumping.

That's why Tim Russert's Red States/Blue States map (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states) is so significant -- it exacerbated the us vs. them mentality and created a deeper visual divide throughout the country. It is so effective because sports has already conditioned us to think this way.

The us vs. them mentality enables parties to get away with bundling "good" policies with "bad" because Republican voters will go along with the Republican party line even though they may not agree with all of the positions, likewise with Democrats.

The parties cycle every few years so the "good" stuff that doesn't pass and the "bad" stuff that gets pushed through is blamed on the other side. This wouldn't be so pervasive if we would focus on individual issues and not parties.

We are already conditioned to think that way, tribal unity means you beat the other tribe.

I'd say that the networks certainly exacerbate it by treating it as a sport, though. There's room for honest disagreement within a tribe, but we shouldn't be two tribes.

>I'd submit that it's less like caching than it is rooting for your favorite sport team.

Does anyone know how political views correlate with how much one likes sports?

In some cases, the link between politics and sports isn't just metaphorical. The rivalry between Barcelona and Real Madrid in Spanish soccer, for instance, pits Catalan nationalism, the Republican factions of the Spanish civil war, and anti-Franco sentiment against Spanish nationalism, the monarchist factions of the Spanish civil war, and pro-Franco sentiment. Likewise, in Scotland, the rivalry between Rangers and Celtic maps onto the conflict between Protestant, British unionism and Catholic separatism. This extends as far as Ireland. And, of course, countries that actually are angry at each other for political reasons develop passionate rivalries in the World Cup, like Argentina and England in the 1986 World Cup after the Falklands war.

Groups using simple majority vote cannot hold logically consistent positions, so it is an absolute necessity that those elected for office contradict a majority of the voters.

Specifically, logical conjunction does not hold for voting groups. Imagine three people, X, Y and Z; and some proposition P which is true if A and B are true. Suppose X believes in A, Y believes in B, and Z believes in A and B. So vote on A: does a majority believe in A? Yes, both X and Z do. Does a majority believe in B: Yes, both Y and Z. But does a majority believe in P (which is necessarily true if both A and B are true)? No, only Z believes in P. So conjunction (i.e. the AND operator) does not hold for groups; and without conjunction, consistent logic is impossible.

Somewhat tangential, but there is a relatively influential theory in evolutionary biology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavellian_intelligence) which states that high intelligence in primates and specifically humans arose as a direct consequence of living in large groups where reproductive fitness was strongly linked to social status. Living in such groups necessitated political maneuvering and caused an "arms race" of increasingly sophisticated tactics used by the group members to gain status. This theory also claims that living in such groups had a far bigger impact on the development of intelligence than toolmaking did and resulted in each of us possessing a theory of mind and being capable of introspection.

What I thought was interesting is that if political decision-making is performed by an area in the brain that is completely separate from, for example, problem-solving, then this fact doesn't play very well with the above theory.

> What I thought was interesting is that if political decision-making is performed by an area in the brain that is completely separate from, for example, problem-solving, then this fact doesn't play very well with the above theory.

It's meaningless to perform a study on adults. By the time we're adults, our views are more or less set. At that point, your brain is simply retrieving an already established pattern and there's no need to store it in the same place where it was constructed. Doing a study on adolescents would be more meaningful. Or perhaps confronting people with an issue they have never encountered before and forcing them to pick a side.

Maybe after you read this, technical problem and political ones will start to feel the same.

"After all, the biggest problem with democracies tends to be the voters."

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. - Winston Churchill

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