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Comment by brainchild-adam | Hacker News Reader

Tied to this topic seems to be the ability to tolerate unpleasant emotions.

My impression is that avoiding negative emotions is something we all impulsively attempt, and it takes practice to increase one's ability to tolerate them. This, in turn, seems necessary to tolerate positions so different to our own that they cause us to feel threatened, which can, if the fear is intense enough, lead to outright hatred.

I assume quite some intolerance can be linked to this principle.

It seems our earlier evolutionary impulses (fight, flight in this case) can easily take over unless we not only learn to become aware of them but also to tolerate them.

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I don't know that it's necessarily so much unpleasant emotions

Let me paint a picture:

My maternal grandparents are country folk, from Kentucky. My grandfather was an electrical engineer and a sort of whizz kid type. Architected/drafted and built his own house, made youngest highest-ranking naval officer in Coast Guard history, stuff of that sort.

Having lived their entire lives together, they are on very different sides of the political spectrum. My grandmother is... unfortunately, a somewhat stereotypical Kentucky old white lady. You can guess her stance on things like immigrants and who she voted for. I love her but I have to try to blank out some of the things she says.

My grandfather on the other hand will just say things like "Well, you have to try to see it from their side.", and "Don't you think that's a bit of a generalization?"

But God help you if you cross the old man. I've done it once in my life and rarely seen a scarier thing.

So (IME), you can have political tolerance separate of your emotional tolerance and emotional experiences.

Political tolerance (for me) really boils down to: "Treat others how you want to be treated; Live and let live" which seems to me the most logical/reasonable way to go about it.

> "... Live and let live" which seems to me the most logical/reasonable way to go about it.

Only if you assume we're not a society, and that there's no social benefits to enforcing socially desirable behaviors and suppress socially undesirable ones.

You assume that there is and of a right aught to be enforcement. Others view that social evolution as up to god. We all cooperate and the least rigid will adopt the best and we’ll all copy one another.

We have 3000+ years of very detailed data on how well that works, and all the “cooperation” that can be achieved…

Prisoners dilema. We have 3 billion more to get it right.

Remove the law, and all that remains is a jungle, where the strong domineer the weak.

So! Now you would give the Devil the benefit of law?

For my own safety's sake.

"Live and let live" is based on the hope that everyone adopts that philosophy.

Obviously with humans this can never be the case, until we modify our own brains/neurochemistry.

IMO, adhere to it so long as the "Non-aggression Principle" holds, once that's breached, do whatever it is you have to do.

"Leave me alone and I leave you alone. Poke me with a stick, and..."

Partly, yes, but it also assumes that "leaving each other alone" results in societally beneficial outcomes. That's not necessarily true. For example, in many Asian countries it's common to call out family and friends on their weight. It's not a "live and let live" approach, but it might explain why Asians tend to be skinny. (I'm reminded of the line from "Everything, Everywhere All at Once," where the mom goes "Wait. You are getting fat. And you never call me even though we have a family plan. And it's free. You only visit when you need something. And you got a tattoo and I don't care if it's supposed to represent our family. You know I hate tattoos.")

Fair point and great anecdote. Though when I think "interference of my 'let-live'" my mind jumps to things a decent bit worse than family who make some well-meaning remarks that sting.

I don't want to turn this into a big political/philosophical thing, but it feels like the line is between suggestions or commentary and forcible policing.

“live and let live” has traditionally described the more tolerant end of the spectrum of possible “social enforcement”, not the absence of such enforcement - the problem is that the group that wants religious rights for society doesn’t want marriage rights for others in society, and the group that wants abortion rights in society doesn’t want gun rights for others in society. And so on.

So the question is whether to have a society where we generally allow people to do things we don’t like, as the price of being allowed to do the things we do like, or a society that prevents us doing what we want as the price of preventing others doing things we don’t like. Or, you know, each side trying to get freedom for the things they care about but trying to ban the things they dislike?

There is an obvious analogy with religion and religious freedom that I think the US constitution and bill of rights handled very effectively (compared to most other countries) at the “live and let live” end of the spectrum, maybe as a society we might want to see if the same principles might work more broadly?

That's a false equivalence. "Pro-life" advocates use a topic that some people find emotive purely for political ends.

Gun control advocates object tto avoidable gun massacres in schools, malls, and other public places.

They're not remotely comparable.

The obvious difference is that if a woman has an abortion it's fundamentally a private matter. The outcome affects a single person. Or two people at most.

The outcome is not a line of ambulances and coffins and a traumatised community of teachers, parents, and neighbours.

Of course they're framed as if they're equivalent freedoms, because in the US "freedom" is a master-frame that can be used to justify almost anything.

And that's the real problem. One group consistently uses deceptive single-issue appeals to emotion to gain and hold political power. If there are no real issues to appeal to, they'll quite happily invent some. They fundamentally don't care what the issue is as long as it's politically useful.

The other group actually cares about outcomes - not just in a negative sense of wanting certain things not to happen, but in the positive sense of expanding political access to everyone in the community for the benefit of the entire community.

What's missing - in the US particularly - is a political system which makes this fundamental distinction clear and explicit. Democracies have few defences against deceptive framing used for political grift.

And that's not a good way to build a better future.

Wow, you just provided a positive data point for the article.

You completely dismissed the idea that anyone pro-life or pro-2A might have any good faith reason for their beliefs.

Thanks for validating the premise of the original article.

Someone else in the thread pointed out this happens when political abstractions fall apart and this is a pretty good example of that haha

> That's a false equivalence. "Pro-life" advocates use a topic that some people find emotive purely for political ends.

No, we think killing innocent human beings is gross and wrong in principle.

There’s nothing emotional or religious about it. If you accept the premises that a fetus is an innocent human being and that intentionally killing innocent human beings is wrong, then if you have any respect for logic you must conclude that abortion is wrong.

Biology tells us that at the moment of conception that single diploid cell is a human being. Therefore, in that model, in order to justify killing a fetus it must either be unintentional or the fetus must not be innocent. The intentional case can apply to procedures that are intended to help the mother that unfortunately harm the fetus. For the other case I can’t see how a fetus could be guilty of anything deserving death. However, as an counter-example, I’m given to understand that’s the case in Jewish law at least some of the time.

Anyhow as you can see there is no deception, in framing or otherwise. It’s just simple premises and sound logic from them. On the other hand I rarely see logical moral reasoning with generally acceptable premises from the pro-Choice side, so you're correct that the subject is, for some people, primarily an emotional one.

Anyhow I've kept this to just a simple explanation of why we're pro-Life, because I don't think HN is the right place to debate political issues, but it is the right place to correct erroneous statements.

> Biology tells us that at the moment of conception that single diploid cell is a human being.

Ah yes the deification. When was the last time you spoke with Biology? Because when I speak to it it says no such thing.

There's nothing metaphysical about that. Scientifically, "a human" is an alive organism of the species "Homo sapiens." A blastocyst, embryo, or fetus is undisputedly alive, and undisputedly has human DNA. It is "a human." Now, it's a human at an early stage of human development--and that might have various ethical and moral implications--but it's scientifically unsupportable to say that it's not a human.

For example, the OED defines "tadpole" as "the tailed aquatic larva of an amphibian (frog, toad, newt, or salamander) breathing through gills and lacking legs until the later stages of its development." There is nothing metaphysical about saying that a tadpole is "a frog."

> Scientifically, "a human" is an alive organism of the species "Homo sapiens."

You seem to be conflating linguistics with biology. If we agree to change the definition of a word "human", this isn't going to make pro-lifers happy, because their problem is not with words.

Also, I don't think "human" means alive Homo Sapiens. Human and Homo Sapiens are synonyms.

> A blastocyst, embryo, or fetus is undisputedly alive

But that's exactly what is being disputed. For example a braindead person is "undisputedly" dead, yet an embryo has even less brain activity.

> For example a braindead person is "undisputedly" dead

No, they’re not. If they were indisputably dead we’d just say dead. The qualifier means it’s something other than actually dead.

You could quibble that after medical death biological processes continue in various cells and organs for a while though. And of course there’s the old first responder’s adage that the patient isn’t dead until he’s warm and dead. Cold and dead, as in fished out of ice water, isn’t necessary dead dead.

They do not have agency and so are functionally dead.

This is a good example of a premise that isn’t generally acceptable. If we agree that persons who lack agency have no right to not be killed then we can kill infants, the severely mentally ill, involuntarily commited persons, and arguably severely physically disabled persons.

Not to mention, determining who does and doesn’t have agency and thus a right to not be killed strikes me as considerably trickier than the basic medical definition of dead, which is basically no heartbeat. Hence the observation that cold and dead might not really be dead. Severe hypothermia can make the pulse undetectable.

> basic medical definition of dead, which is basically no heartbeat

This is an extremely reductive statement. There is no unified medical definition of death, precisely because it's a highly controversial topic.

Closest to what you're trying to say is UDDA (which, ironically, is currently being revised), and it explicitly mentions brain death: "An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead."

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

See how casually throwing in the word "undisputable" in a discussion of a controversial topic triggers a dispute?

A simpler argument is “why is killing children in a classroom with a gun wrong, but killing children in the womb with a scalpel ok?”

> I can’t see how a fetus could be guilty of anything deserving death

Paradoxically the Catholics do (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin) I’m sure there’s finicky nuance that the current devout could counter with—apparently they recently decided they were just kidding about limbo being a thing—but that was the mindset drilled into me during my formative years.

You use an abrahamic notion of human being defined as a soulless meatbag. Diploid cell, lol. If your body except for one diploid cell was pulverized, you won't consider it death? Stoics redefined human being to be primarily mind, and body being secondary to mind. Mind is the difference between a fetus and a human.

> You use an abrahamic notion of human being defined as a soulless meatbag.

I use the Christian notion of a human being defined as a human body and a human soul unified in one creature. I believe both human body and soul are created at the same time, namely conception. While most Muslims agree with that assessment, most Jews do not[1]. Therefore it's not an Abrahamic notion.

In fact, the very concept of a soul, or anima in Latin, is that which animates a body. By definition, every animate creature has a soul because it is the name for the animating principle. And so death then is the transition from being a living animated body with a soul to being an inanimate dead body without a soul.

[1] The Talmud says that the soul enters the body with the first breath.

This reads to me as a perhaps unwitting but excellent demonstration of political intolerance.

Is it possible that the pro-lifers have a genuine belief that a fetus is worthy of protection equal to (or similar to) a human life? If that's their initial belief, it seems reasonable that they'd conclude that 40-50x as many abortions as firearm homicides per year represents a greater problem in the former than the latter.

I don't think your proposed "fundamental distinction" is anywhere near as fundamental as you seem to believe.

that’s a very long and eloquent way of saying “the thing I want is right and the thing you want is wrong” - unless you think you can persuade the people who disagree with you to support your position, my earlier point about “live and let live” still stands, and in fact, you’re making my point for me, that many people feel that the freedoms I believe in with should be available to everyone, while the freedoms I disagree with must be forbidden.

> There is an obvious analogy with religion and religious freedom that I think the US constitution and bill of rights handled very effectively (compared to most other countries) at the “live and let live” end of the spectrum

While the post civil war amendments were ruled to have changed it, at the time of ratification the establishment clause did not apply to the individual states. And many of the first thirteen had some official religion or other. So while it was live and let live at the federal level, at the local level it wasn’t so much.

Yes, the original design of the U.S. is something more like live and let live at the community level rather than the individual level. The idea was that you could have different groups of religious nuts living alongside each other, not to eviscerate the ability of each group to enforce rules within their own communities.

There's a line where you should intervene when others are not letting others live and let live. That's the overall human societal obligation that everyone has to each other.

Then there's another line where you build the type of society you want, but only within your own circle of culture or geography or whatever.

Live and let live requires assuring the first part, while also not imposing your own version of the second part on people who are not within your circle. The expression has always had nuance. Until now, I had never heard such a simplistic interpretation.

> There's a line where you should intervene when others are not letting others live and let live.

But why should that be the line? Why shouldn't we police each other's behavior to ensure everyone is making better decisions that serve larger societal ends while preserving social peace?

Maybe I wasn't clear, but that's the second line I described in the second paragraph that I wrote.

You can build whatever society you want. But there are also different societies. Some by choice, some not. People can be part of multiple societies at the same time. The trick is to manage the interfaces between societies without imposing yourself on a society you don't belong to. Live and let live.

Because authoritarianism is bad.

The Counterpoint is that individuals should serve their own ends as long as it preserves social peace.

Many object to the idea that Society should extract as much utility value from individuals as possible up until they're breaking point is reached.

Furthermore, the breaking point for social peace can be modified and delayed by harsh repression and subjugation, so I don't think it is a suitable limit on suppressing the desires of individuals

> no social benefits to enforcing socially desirable behaviors and suppress socially undesirable ones

What universally-agreed-upon moral standard do you think you can base that determination on?

> Live and let live

This isn't possible when one major political party refuses to allow that to happen. Many conservatives claim to just want to be left alone and then turn around and try to legislate who can marry who, how people live their lives, who is "worthy" of being part of our country, what books are available in libraries. You can't live and let live when you're constantly being attacked for intrinsic traits and being disenfranchised.

   > Many conservatives claim to just want to be left alone and then turn around and try to legislate who can marry who, how people live their lives, who is "worthy" of being part of our country, what books are available in libraries.

That's not very let-live at all, is it?

I don't like to get into politics, but in my very unread and not-up-to-date opinion (I didn't even know some kind of election was happening recently, I care that little) neither end of the political spectrum is a good place to sit.

Sitting on an end means you have an agenda and a strong set of ideals. I have my own morals/ethics, but they sort of start and end at the boundaries of my own being.

As long as you have people who think that other people ought to behave/think more like them, you'll have conflict.

I hold out hope for biohacking advanced enough that we mod ourselves out of this in a few hundred years.

Thank you for sharing.

I might be reading this wrong, but it seems to me from your description that your grandfather simply did not get "ticked off" by the same things as your grandmother. Those topics do not seem to have generated strong emotions in him. But they seem to have done so in your grandmother.

What raises strong emotions in people seems to be highly subjective. To what extent you are able to have those stronger emotional responses while at the same time not succumbing to the impulses that go along with them, is what I would argue determines your ability to tolerate the stimuli that generate these emotional responses.

Since these responses are physiological, rooted in our survival instincts, they greatly affect our ability to be rational, open, and contextualize. Instead, they move us into increasing levels of black-and-white thinking and fight or flight, first mentally, then physically.

Whenever I explore topics that stir up strong (negative) emotions in myself, I find that they are usually tied to this, if I can get deep enough in my exploration.

After all, we're just animals trying to survive and procreate, even though we have become very elaborate and ornamental in our pursuit of these goals.

You are dismissing a level you are apparently incurious about — that of why certain seemingly irrational responses happen.

Using “highly subjective” for something that is much better understood than you are implying is only an indicator of where you’ve chosen to draw your own boundary in pursuit of a constrained cognitive ability.

It’s also an indicator of this limit that the two things you’re inaccurately taking as given are intimately linked: emotionality and reproduction. When things get too complex you conversationally reduce humans to emotional animals and end of.

I am sorry, but your comment is so terse that I find it quite difficult to really understand.

I am very interested in learning and growing, though, so maybe you can help me understand what you were trying to say.

This is what I got and my associated comments and questions:

> You are dismissing a level you are apparently incurious about — that of why certain seemingly irrational responses happen.

You seem to be saying: There's something (a) you think I'm incurious about (b) that also is relevant to this discussion.

My thoughts: What exactly is this "level" you are referring to? I do have thoughts on "why certain seemingly irrational responses happen", but I'd first be curious to know what you are referring to.

> Using “highly subjective” for something that is much better understood than you are implying is only an indicator of where you’ve chosen to draw your own boundary in pursuit of a constrained cognitive ability.

You seem to be saying: There is "something" (a) that I qualified as "highly subjective" in my comment ("What raises strong emotions in people"), and (b) that me qualifying it as such is an indicator of a "boundary" (c) which I have drawn (d) in order to "constrain" my "cognitive ability".

My thoughts: I am not sure where your argument against my statement is. How is "What raises strong emotions in people" "much better understood" "than you are implying"? What am I implying in your opinion?

> It’s also an indicator of this limit that the two things you’re inaccurately taking as given are intimately linked: emotionality and reproduction. When things get too complex you conversationally reduce humans to emotional animals and end of

You seem to be saying: (a) I am limited in my cognitive ability, (b) as evidenced by my inability to realize how emotionality and reproduction are linked, (c) the two of which I also "inaccurately tak[e] as given". I also (d) flee from complexity by referring to the fact that we are animals.

My thoughts:

How am I taking emotionality and reproduction as given, and how so inaccurately?

Where do I dispute a link between the two?

What are we in your opinion if not animals?

Also, I read an undertone of both "you are stupid" and "you are evil" in your comment. Was that intentional or am I misunderstanding you here?

The level I was referring to includes the emotional and embodied level of being.

You seem to be parroting a Dawkins view of humanity which is a reductionist, incomplete view that people are fond of stating as fact because it supports their worldview (and often an escape from a religious upbringing).

Apologies for the tone — it was a rushed response. I do not think you are evil or stupid. I do think that by stating your own learned limits of exploration as absolute facts you are making a common mistake of assuming that entire realities can be reduced to something that doesn’t need to be considered.

There are some fairly clear classes of emotional response that are probably rooted in evolutionary function, however their evolutionary function is probably substantially altered from the animal roots (if each function has any) due to our recent and unique evolution.

Behaviors that appear irrational in a modern synthetic evolutionary view are probably under selection at a different level of abstraction, or they may be evolutionary hybrids or merged palimpsests, but to refer to humans as animals in such a way is almost always done to condemn the behavior of others, excuse ones own poor behavior, and/or end the conversation.

I had a thought the other day if the current intolerance is due to the growing infantilism that's been occurring since the 90s. This whole notion that interactions must be positive, pursue good feelings, people need protection from "harmful" content, etc. is the root of the current climate. If everything you've been told up to now is "be positive, be happy!" then it follows that unpleasant emotions are to be avoided.

I seem to find the opposite, that people appear to be admired and build audiences based on how much they can troll or generally how nasty they can be to whichever rival group. People aren’t avoiding each other to stay in safe, happy and positive bubbles, it’s more like rival football club ultras out to kill each other.

Those views can go together, can't they? If you've never learned to accept the existence of things you don't like, and feel entitled to have everything done your way, you'll love people who are fighting for your side. If you also believe that "the others" aren't doing it because they are different from you but because they are evil and know better but hate you and all things that are good, then you'll especially enjoy the vicious and nasty attacks on them.

I don't think they could avoid each other, given that they're trapped within the same reality. If anyone manages to fork the simulation into multiple branches strictly divided by tribe, will they be happy places? Or will new factions form, and the process repeat?

As someone who grew up watching the media of that era, I have trouble agreeing with that characterization.

Most of what I saw wasn’t encouraging Stepford/Disney saccharine positivity nearly as much as it was encouraging basic decency and politeness in day to day interactions, including those with groups that traditionally hadn’t enjoyed that. It didn’t even discourage arguments but rather emphasized being productive with them — in other words, argue to find solutions, not to stoke each others’ emotional bonfires.

If anything based on the steep decline in basic decency in the past couple of decades, I think it could be argued that the messaging of the 90s was unfortunately a failure.

> I had a thought the other day if the current intolerance is due to the growing infantilism that's been occurring since the 90s. This whole notion that interactions must be positive, pursue good feelings, people need protection from "harmful" content, etc. is the root of the current climate

This is one of the core ideas behind prof. Jonathan Haidt's book "Coddling of the American Mind". There's probably something to it.

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