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Comment by maxbond | Hacker News Reader

It's my experience that when you find yourself thinking, "I can understand this person's entire worldview from a short statement, and I can use that to dismiss what they're saying," it's a sort of self-inflicted strawman to protect yourself from ideas that make you uncomfortable to the point where you refuse to believe they originated from a reasonable human being. It's simpler and safer to imagine they came from a caricature. (Not throwing shade, I'm describing my conclusions from observing this behavior in myself.)

That doesn't mean the idea is good, maybe it's a terrible idea, but you should seek to challenge your thinking on the subject, not protect it and keep it precious.

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I'm not sure how under your view you could ever disagree with anyone at all then. To not fall into the same trap you articulate, could you explain what holding a viewpoint against another where you disagree with it for good reasons looks like? Maybe with an example that works here?

Great question. You disagree with them, but you don't expand the scope of your disagreement past the matter in dispute (eg, you don't go from "we disagree" to "this person's worldview is hopelessly flawed"). You don't tell yourselves narratives about why they came to that conclusion. Narratives about how they will always think in a certain way are especially dangerous. In practice, for myself, this means more recognizing that these things are happening & terminating that line of thinking, and reminding myself how little I know about people on the other end of a screen. Oftentimes these can be restated as constructive questions, like instead of saying, "you are a fatalist," you can ask, "this seems fatalistic, this doesn't match my own experience, can you help me understand?" Remember that most strong disagreements are a mild disagreement wrapped in a misunderstanding.

To give a concrete example, maybe you see someone say something you find deeply objectionable, like "I support affirmative action in college admissions" or "I support the right to bear arms." You could say to yourself, here is my political adversary, they're a snowflake or a nut job or a useful idiot, they are buying into this or that media narrative, I can discount them. And that could all be true, but you don't actually know any of that at this point. So you say to yourself, "the world is a big strange place, there are many paths to form this opinion and I don't know which one this person took, but if I ask questions and keep an open mind we both might learn something." That doesn't mean you have to agree with them, you're just not derailing yourself with narratives that only serve to reinforce your biases.

And to be honest a lot of people are nut jobs and a lot of people will bite your head off no matter how politely or open mindedly you disagree with them. Which makes it difficult to maintain this, and I won't pretend that I'm not a hypocrite who regularly fails in this respect. But it's important to maintain a headspace where it is possible to change your mind, as often as you are able.

> But it's important to maintain a headspace where it is possible to change your mind, as often as you are able.

Every single time I look at myself 5 years prior I always think that my opinions and ideas were stupid and how much more cult and evolved and smarter I am. And then I realize 5 years from now I'll think the same thing about today.

Best remedy to keep yourself from judging other's opinions too harshly and thinking too highly about whatever positions you hold. Big +1 to your whole sentiment.

You just skipped down the levels of abstractions in a way that does not address the OP's point.

> you see someone say something you find deeply objectionable, like "I support affirmative action in college admissions"

I have no idea why that person thinks that, and can form no opinions about them. Even more specifically, outside a US context they are meaningless.

Contrast that to the OP example:

> "Constantly ask yourself why are you working so hard on this damn thing. If the answer is: 'so I can get ahead,' remind yourself that it’s a treadmill and you’ll always stay at the same place, no matter how fast you run."

This is not a statement of opinion about a thing. This is not a "policy is X is good" statement. This is the framework for how this person forms ALL their opinions. This statement could be made by almost any human anywhere in the world.

There are, without doubt, things people can say that give you "a pretty good bead on someone's worldview from even a short excerpt". These are NOT "I support the right to bear arms." They are vey much "I am a strict and devoted Mormon and follow all the churches teachings", or "hard work is all that matters" or "no matter how hard you try, life is out to get you".

If someone can't deduce things about a person from those sorts of first principle short sentences, that is a bit of a worry to me.

My apologies to those for whom US politics isn't salient. Thank you for that feedback, I'll try to speak to a broader audience in the future.

There's a world of difference between a statement giving you a clue about someone's worldview and assuming you understand it's entirety. In not saying you shouldn't infer anything from anything, I'm saying you should be honest with yourself about what is knowledge and what is supposition.

Knowledge is justified, true belief. I can come to believe something as strongly as I may from scant information, and that thing could be true - and it still wouldn't have been justified. Alternatively, you could take those reactions and interpret them as untested hypothesis, and test them by asking followup questions.

I don't agree that this statement represents a broad assertion that life is out to get you, as much as that the author has made a decision about how to allocate their efforts because they observe rapidly diminishing returns in certain areas. I don't have a fatalistic attitude towards life broadly, but there are aspects of my life that are treadmills which I try not to step on to.

That was a good comment for me to read. I like to think about myself that I am of a similar mindset to you but now that I think of it I very often discount others' opinions because of how I view them and don't catch myself often enough. Here's hoping I remember this comment next time it happens :)

Yes! I feel like a good fraction of the content on Reddit and Twitter are people extrapolating on the world view and psychology of other people on the platform, and comparatively little on the actual content of what was said.

Or you've seen the same ideas over and over and once you spot the pattern you save yourself the time. Your approach sounds good if you're young or have infinite energy/time.

Dumpster diving is not a good way to find value even if you occasionally find gold.

I certainly feel this way regularly and choose not to engage with people when I don't believe it will be worthwhile. The nuance is that, if you tell yourself you have the power to see into people's hearts and understand what makes them tick - rather than you've simply chosen not to engage with this particular person at this particular time - you may exercise bad judgment in circumstances that require you to understand other people.

For instance, one that causes me problems personally is that I'm prone to doubting that people will change their mind no matter what evidence you present to them. And that's not a bad heuristic when you think someone is wrong on the internet and don't think that you'll be able to disabuse them of it. But I've had to learn to suppress this instinct when I get into conflicts with people, because I can't resolve a conflict if I'm convinced that it's impossible to come to an understanding. But this isn't just an irrational idea I've picked up, I have had conflicts that couldn't be resolved because the other party wouldn't give me a fair hearing. But I can't allow myself to believe that no one will ever change their mind, even if I see all the hallmarks of it.

And indeed I've had the experience more than once where I see someone dig in their heels, fully anticipate this matter is irresolvable, and when encouraged by mutual friends to try anyway (or, later, when I tried to be optimistic because I was aware of this pattern), I've gone on to be surprised for the better.

> The nuance is that, if you tell yourself you have the power to see into people's hearts and understand what makes them tick - rather than you've simply chosen not to engage with this particular person at this particular time - you may exercise bad judgment in circumstances that require you to understand other people.

That's a good point and easy to forget.

eh. If someone says, and says it seriously so you know that they mean it, "I really love being a serial killer, it gives me a great feeling of freedom and relief."

I don't know about you, but I kinda am getting their entire worldview from that short statement. What else am I supposed to ask? If they like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain? If they're not into yoga, or if they have half a brain? If they like making love at midnight In the dunes on the cape?

I'll leave it to you to go to their house some some dark and stormy night and strip nude, lie down on their table, and put a cleaver across your chest, waiting to hear his story about his other thoughts.

I'm not trying to caricature. I'm just saying that you can go hang out with a serial murderers. I admit that you are a better person than I am because you are ready to hang out with serial murderers and I'm not. I'll judge the serial killer on just the one statement, thank you very much.

Not a strawman, I don't think. More like reducto ad absurdum. But in whatever case, I think what I wrote was kinda humorous, too, so I'll go with humor as an additional failsafe.

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