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Comment by bordercases | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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