Why I don't discuss politics with friends

As someone said in this thread, in the US two-party system, coalitions are formed before the vote vs after in other countries

The whole purpose of this piece is to precisely encourage pointed discussion about values directly and skip the proxying

There are clearly some (many?) shared average axiomatic values that seem to be common between very different cultures/religions (although individuals vary much more significantly), but it's much easier to obsess on the places we differ.

Where I strongly disagree is the idea that groups with different fundamental values can't necessarily find common policy ground. A good example is Basic Income, where you can find agreement between groups on opposite sides that both embrace the idea, but for very different value-driven reasons. In many cases, you can also agree to disagree, and just keep your collective hands out of it (eg. separation of religion and state).

Only if you ascertain the (inverse of the) mapping of values -> vote correctly, and it's definitively not what the parties or the tribes themselves profess.

For myself [0], I sympathize with many of the issues Trump ran on while finding most of the Democratic platform cloying and hollow. But I value effective policy, being accountable to intellectual criticism, and a generally open society far far more. (And at this point in my life, a healthy dose of straight up actual conservatism, too!)

[0] and while it might seem needlessly inflammatory to include this here, I think it's unavoidable that people are going to be trying to read partisan implications from abstract comments regardless.

A person's values are not a dichotomy (i.e. republican or democrat). You simply cannot put people into two buckets that define their overarching moral compass.

A person can be transphobic but support abortion so they have always voted Democrat...or hate everything about Republican values except they got burned by Obamacare so they vote Republican. There is virtually an infinite level of nuance that can be a deciding factor in why someone votes for someone.

"The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt is another, more nuanced (and complicated), but extremely interesting take on the subject of how values drive political affiliation.

People generally haven't formed strong opinions on most issues, and defer to party or a leader they like for the remaining. They'll still happily argue about it for the post part, unfortunately.

You can see this effect after some elections where people "fall in line" with their party's new presidential candidate on some issue.

You should test this hypothesis by talking to someone for 10 minutes, then guessing who they voted for.

My hypothesis is you wouldn't do better than 50/50.

I'd say they invest in messaging around the values they want voters to believe they represent.

i.e., marketing and ensuing reality diverge regularly with politicians, regardless of affiliation.

Except that the "values" each promotes are often inconsistent with other "values" they promote, sometimes to the point of absurd irrationality, e.g. marijuana vs tobacco or alcohol.

And other "values" are completely independent, but correlate so highly that "tribalism" is a much better explainer, e.g. abortion and guns.

> and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.

That's not new.

On a very high level, the two major parties do want everyone to be healthy, wealthy and wise -- the issue is that they disagree on what those words mean, and what should be sacrificed (and by whom) to achieve it, which means the two major parties have always had very different visions of the future.

> If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values.

And that right there is a call to tribalism: Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us.

Further, the Democratic party has a 27% approval rating and the Republican party had like 47% and I bet its falling. So even within your narrow framework this is a bad proxy because both are clearly unpopular.

Personally, I find it hard to fully identify with either the left or the right. I share beliefs and values from both sides, depending on the issue. This makes it difficult to adopt a clear-cut political label, and I think that's true for many people.

Politics today often feels more like a battle of narratives than a clash of core principles / values.

p.s. my perspective is non-US one.

What difference do the parties have? They are both the 'corporate party' maximizing shareholder profit at all costs including killing brown people overseas or murdering Americans at home if they cant pay for healthcare.

The largest two U.S. parties have been heavily minmaxing the propaganda they release to divide districts on the most effective issues they can convert into election wins. Their values are "get elected to office" but the propaganda can't be so straightforward because there aren't a lot of voters who are easily converted by that directness.

Voters have values; political parties and candidates have propaganda. Game theoretically the winning move is to compete on comparative advantage of an issue within a voting district; because (for example) Democratic voters are split on the death penalty it's a very useless propaganda point for the party as a whole [0]; sticking to one side or the other would lose more elections than it would win. Note that this is very different from ranking the importance of values and focusing on the most impactful to real people; the (implicit) hope is that by focusing on effective propaganda issues then some values may be preserved through the election process. In practice politicians also horse-trade for future party political capital in preference to espoused values.

One fundamental problem is that without a parliamentary style of government where coalitions are required to form a functioning legislature the usefulness of values in elections is greatly diminished. If I may say, the Republican party has done the best at shedding the illusion and explicitly transferring power to the party itself to enforce the values held by one man, which is the ultimate game-theoretically strong position for a political party. Disconnecting the ultimate value-judged outcomes of elections from the political machinations that win them has been incredibly damaging to democracy.

[0] https://www.salon.com/2024/08/31/the-end-of-the-abolition-er...

I strongly disagree. In this duopoly of a political system, most people on both sides are just picking the lesser of two evils. Meanwhile, we are creating an alarmingly decisive political society by choosing not to associate with those who vote differently than us. Perhaps most importantly, we lose the opportunity to actually shift the political positions of others (and ourselves) by not engaging in healthy and non-judgmental political discussions with our friends and neighbors, ultimately increasing polarization even further.

Not everyone is voting based on their values—some are simply voting their wallets or the special interests they align with. Someone who is pro-choice, pro-LGBT, and pro-immigration may very well vote Republican because they work in the US Automotive industry, and so do their friends and families and people who they care most about. It doesn’t necessarily mean their core values are different than yours, but instead maybe simply just their priorities.

This is an incorrect and cynical statement. I understand why you feel this way (for one thing, it's the exact type of language coming out of many of each party's idealists) but it's simply false.

One party supports gun rights while the other supports gun control. Those aren't values. Democrats want to pursue safety from guns. Republicans want to pursue safety from tyranny. Both sides care about personal safety.

Abortion rights is about personal liberty. Gun rights are also about personal liberty. Both sides care about personal liberty.

The competing talking points aren't always conveniently about the same issue though. For Democrats their border policies are about compassion and human rights. For Republicans their border policies are about domestic prosperity.

Do Republicans care about human rights? Yes. Do Democrats care about domestic prosperity? Yes. To pretend otherwise is to willfully push apart the tribes in your own mind, and to trivialize the perspective of the opposition.

The real problem is the one you are contributing to: the unwillingness to empathize. Empathy is the only way to come to a compromise. With a little empathy you might even find that you have to compromise less because you might actually convince someone of your argument, for once.

I think your use of the word "world" is telling.

Trump, the Republicans, and the global right are focused on their citizens.

The Democrats and the global left are more focused on the world and their role in it.

It's no longer just two approaches on how we can have the strongest economy. Each party has a weighting for how much to consider every issue across the world.

For example, there are people who would be happy with less growth, lower income, but more action on climate change.

If you are going to focus on values, apply them to a rigorous analysis of what works.

But I agree with parent that it's perfectly justifiable to draw lines that limit potential relationships. You're not obligated to welcome everyone or tolerate views in others that have unbearable consequences for yourself. Vote with your feet.

I’m pretty sure that they weren’t voting for those candidates for the express purpose of stripping away those rights and there were other policies and values that they were voting for.

I’ll be honest that I’m Jewish and certain posts about Palestine where friends or non Jewish family have specifically expressed values that I find anti-myself I have completely cut out of my life. (not all beliefs about pro Palestine are anti-semetic, but most are) But I believe that most views at the party level are just different priorities or different view points and tolerance is necessary, because they are not directly in conflict.

But what I'm arguing is that most people do not actually come to these values by way of thinking, but rather by blindly adopting them en masse from their chosen tribe.

And when they choose not to be open to the possibility they might be wrong, then they have a religion, not a intellectually-driven view.

This is okay if acknowledged imo, as per this sentence in the piece:

"If someone is self-aware enough to consciously acknowledge their choice to remain in the bubble, that’s totally fair. I respect it like I’d respect anyone who chooses to participate in a more traditional religion. My issue is when this view is falsely passed off as an intellectually-driven one."

I don't see how cutting them out creates a positive. It's like "Javy thinks men can become women", now I have one less person to play disc golf with.

What's the point of that? People can have different opinions, it's not their only character trait.

It's like spycraft during the cold war. A double agent must pass as being in both tribes for the good of their country. They literally isolate themselves from their homelands tribe to embed themselves in another. They are forever changed. They can't go back. In other words: to change another changes oneself too. It weakens ones own group identity.

Almost all people would never want to risk their identity to change another person for the good of their group. It's very risky and very painful.

Another way that the article suggests is to let people change themselves.

> Until we can live in a world where fundamental rights are protected and respected

It wasn't hiding from uncomfortable things, opinions and people, that created the world where you can even think about women or minority rights, or even know how to write to express your opnions. So this approach will not create the world you described.

It wasn't just that she voted for him, but the fact that she actively supported all of his policies around immigration, including mass deportations that would have included my wife (who was on DACA at the time). She has also said some extremely disturbing stuff about what should happen to gay people that I don't even know that I can post without breaking some form of TOS, which would be horrible already, but slightly worse to me because my sister is gay.

It's easy to say "just be neutral and don't talk about politics around her", but there are some issues with that.

First, you don't know my grandmother; no matter how much I try and avoid any political subject she will keep bringing it up. She will divert a conversation about my job as a software engineer to somehow a rant about how Mexicans are stealing American jobs (this actually happened). I could just roll my eyes and bite my tongue, but this brings me to my next point:

Second, neutrality isn't neutral. I don't really know who started this myth that somehow avoiding the subject is "not taking a side", it's just a lazy way to endorse the status quo. If I keep trying to be amicable with people who actively want my wife to be deported, then that's sort of signaling to my wife that I don't give a shit about what happens to her. I don't want to signal that, because it's not true. At that point, my only option is to either stop talking to my grandmother or talk to her and constantly push back she says something racist or horrible, which isn't productive.

Before you give me shit over this, all of you do this. You all draw the line somewhere. You probably all draw it at different points than I do, but you absolutely do draw the line. If your best friend suddenly joined the Klan and became the Grand Wizard, you probably wouldn't continue being friends with them, even if you could avoid talking politics, because that would signal that you're ok with their racism. You also probably wouldn't be friends with Jeffrey Dahmer even if you could avoid the whole "killing and eating people" topic.

As it stands, I don't really feel bad for cutting her off. I absolutely do not make a concession for age on this. If you're going to live as a grownup in 2025 then it's not wrong to judge someone by 2025 standards. I don't give a fuck what the world was like when you grew up, you have to live in the world as it is now.

"Should common American citizens" ... is a question.

This already implies a country's citizens having access to health care without financial barriers is a good idea already :)

[Note that I'm in the EU, I have access to affordable health care by default and I like it that way. But I don't think everyone in the US thinks like that. Or even understands what it means.]

What an easy answer when you not part of the disadvantaged demographic. Some problems apply almost exclusively to a single demographic. Not asking the cultural questions is like thinking that segregation was perfectly okay because everyone had access to everything you'd need. Just not in the small space.

Urban problems are not rural problems even when they look like the same problem. Why there is a food desert in Nowhere, SomeState is not going to be anything like the reason there is a good desert in Urbanville, Somestate. So while everyone definitely deserves the ability to acquire food pretending that subgroups don't exist means you can't actually solve their struggle. If you apply a blanket solution it doesn't help everyone.

It is beyond disingenuous to pretend that different kinds of people don't feel the impact of culture and regulation differently and in ways they either can't themselves or can't at all change. To take that stance, shows that one is on the default demographic that is always considered before anyone else.

When people talk about privilege, this is it - being able to dictate which issues are ‘politics,’ and being able to dismiss my rights as ‘not politics.’

Do I have a right to work? To live? To own property? To marry the one I love? To have sex with the people I’m attracted to? To raise a child with my partner? To choose my own identity and to live my own life?

A white cishet man takes all those rights for granted - why shouldn’t I? Why should my struggle to obtain those same rights be dismissed as ‘inflammatory issues about sex or gender or political correctness’ and therefore ‘not politics?’

Are you married? Would you like to be? Do you ever worry about how you’ll be treated when you go to work, or make a purchase at the store? What’s it like to go grocery shopping, or car shopping, or touring places to live? What’s it like apply to and interview for jobs? Does you boss look like you? How do your parents feel about you? How do your neighbors greet you when they see you? What’s your relationship like with your landlord?

You’re really telling me that none of that is worth ‘politicking’ over?

that attitude is exactly why things are not going well right now - because we are pretending that of we look away, equality and justice will take care of itself.

In a good society you would know and have a favorable view of our wealthiest (kings in all but name) people. They wouldn’t be afraid and hide their wealth (Bezos, musk, etc are not the top) because there wouldn’t be an immoral wealth gap.

There's other issues that are much less clear and, in my experience, more likely to shift from discussions and debates into strife and arguments:

- Should private citizens be allowed to own firearms? Should they be allowed to carry them on the streets?

- What do we do about meth and opiates on our streets? What do we do about the associated property and violent interpersonal crime?

- Should we start building more nuclear power plants to cut down on our greenhouse gas emissions?

And locally:

- The city is expanding to the west. What should this neighbourhood look like?

These, I believe, are squarely in the realm of "politics" and unless you're having the discussion in an ideological bubble are likely to be much hotter-button issues.

Every group of people is a political unit and anything that affects decision making is political. Your office is a political unit, your family is a political unit, etc.

So if a racial issue is affecting the decisions we make then yes it’s political.

I start talking about my wife’s work. That’s just personal family stuff, right? Not if there’s someone there who’s a hardcore women-should-stay-home sort.

Or maybe everyone is ok with women having jobs, but my wife’s work has been substantially impacted by the recent DOGE nonsense. Something as simple as “she has to go to the office on Monday” becomes political if there’s a Trump supporter present.

Let’s just talk shit about our cars. Oops, what brand of car you own is now political.

“My parents are going to come visit” sorry, turns out that the ability of foreigners to enter the country without fear of being detained for weeks for no good reason is political.

So when someone else decides which topics are politicized and you want to avoid political discussions — congrats you just let others decide about which topics you are willing to discuss.

My opinion is that most topics have a political dimension anyways, also because most topics have a economic dimension. Or phrased differently: Everything is political.

When discussing politics with friends the "how" is probably much more important than the "if". Most people do not have a vetted political opinion, they just have a strong vibe that they can't really reason about. They aligned with some sources and read/watch news they like to hear and that forms their image of the world. They never really tried to form a logically coherent worldview that is backed by facts instead of pre-filtered annecdotes that may or may not have happened in that way.

With this as the starting point a healthy political discourse isn't possible. You can't argue against someones vibes.

But that doesn't mean good/interesting political discourse isn't possible. It just means that if someone lets the politicians turn them into a vibe-based party-before-issue follower that uncritically believes most of what politicians say, they can no longer think or discuss the topics that impact them with others on a reasonable level. And this is why topics get politicized in the first way.

And no-one is immune to this, especially not you guys over there with that two-party system. But we all need to remember that towing the line of a political party means they no longer represent us, but we represent them. Mental flexibility translates to voter agency and our democracies hinge on voters being well informed and not throwing their agency away.

TL;DR: Not discussing politics and blindly towing the party line is like throwing your own agency away.

Having recently been completely railroaded and betrayed by the court system I can tell you. No. I literally had all my evidence thrown out with no explanation from the Judge other than "I don't think this is relevant" in regards to several different topics that I had made an organized report on. Meanwhile the corporate defense provided unorganized meaningless piles of documentation that would takes months to go over and it was left as "evidence" I do mean meaningless, several hundred pages were literally blank white pages submitted as evidence. I guess the crappy software they use to do discovery generated lots of white space in between snippits of info.

The court had decided before the trial that by default a person is wrong and a corporation is right.

I don't personally agree with how quick you are able to write those things off as not being political. Would you mind providing a bit more explanation of how you are able to arrive at such confident No's?

Perhaps you consider political to be an intrinsic quality of a thing rather than a descriptor of how a thing is used/intended? I fall into the latter camp, and thus am very open to consider almost anything and everything political. Much like art.

Either a Constitutional Convention 2.0 needs to happen to undo the damage like the repeal of the Tillman Act and the disastrous Citizens' United, or Americans needs to voluntarily do away with popularity contests by instead picking public administrators with limited power by sortition from amongst professional societies for a limited term of say 4 years once.

Common man democracy just lowers the decision making process to majority of idiots of the country that are easily manipulated. Worse yet, in its current form, it essentially causes the flip flopping mess because of the lack of long term vision and focus, something the common man doesn't want to deal with.

One man one vote in general makes no sense either. Why should a homeless or fresh immigrant's vote have the same impact as someone that has lived and paid taxes in a country for decades? How about...you get a vote weight equal to the amount of investment/taxes you have made in that country over the course of your life. Provide more for the community, have more to lose, get more say on policy.

Give incentive to the society value providers to remain and society detractors to leave.

Add to this that the current Democracy system is fundamentally flawed, most of those systems are exploitable anyway, it makes zero sense to change things up when a great leader is doing well. Having an arbitrary rule that they must step down because they can only serve for x time makes no sense. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Same goes the other way, where bad leaders can remain in power using war mechanisms.

The core problems today with society is not the left right or whatever, it's that people are lazy, selfish, manipulative, different, it's hard to find a system that works that can make everyone happy.

Are you willing to risk personal death or decrease your value for the greater good of the nation as a leader or citizen? That's the standard that all citizens and especially politicians should be held to. There are examples of this in the past, usually when a revolution happens. One might say it's happening in the US right now.

For certain one solution would be to remove people as much as possible from the equation, remove all incentive to abuse the system. The dictatorship and laws of a country should provide negative motivation for someone to cheat and should reward people providing value to society.

It's not easy, no matter how well a system is designed, people will find a way to cheat it, Bitcoin is a great example of this, not accounting for the banking industry buying the ecosystem and shitcoins diluting the entire system.

AI is not there yet, I don't think it ever could be, it's been trained on existing flawed ideas which have been further gimped in the interest of 'security'. It has no original thought, can't even draw a full glass of wine.

If common American citizens can't afford health care, do other American citizens have an obligation to provide it? There is a word for a system where people are obligated to provide their labor to others. Does that word apply to a system where everyone gets free healthcare?

Do common Americans provide enough value to earn the wages they make now, especially the ones making a legislatively mandated minimum wage? How many fewer can actually earn an arbitrary increased number? Do people deserve things they didn't earn? What's the non-mystical explanation for that, if so?

Why aren't we having children? They can't have a productive life without having a life.

Is the difference between earnings and expenditures growing larger because Americans are unwilling to pay one another? If we are, why is that? (Actually I'll cheat a little on this one and provide a correct answer: the entire increased gap here is explained by housing. So the questions becomes: why aren't Americans willing to let strangers live closer to them? Might there be some risk or self-interest there? Are people obligated to act against their interests? Why, how, and by whom are they obligated?)

Which is better, democracy or a stable and prosperous society? Might they be mutually exclusive? What's holy about the popular vote, especially for morons? Even if we keep democracy, does a functional democracy require some form of IQ tests as a condition of the franchise?

Is the purpose of courts to write wrongs or interpret the law? Does separation of powers require courts to refrain from writing wrongs if the legislature has passed laws that are wrong? If not, does the lack of separation of powers place any limit at all on the courts' ability to right wrongs? How about when the courts are controlled by people whose concept of wrong is different than yours? Doesn't a functioning democracy require the concept of right and wrong to be decided by what are literally called the political branches, the legislative and executive?

Are the news media obligated to produce content in the interests of the people? Are you then obligated to produce content in the interests of the people? What's the difference between you writing in a public forum and a journalist? If there is a difference, should you therefore not enjoy freedom of the press? What if you, say, advocate for the courts to ignore separation of powers to do what is right? What if we the people decide that is not in our interests? How will you be punished for this transgression?

In actuality, I would probably give the same answers to many of these questions that you would. But the point is that there is no "just asking questions, man". Questions have premises and assumptions. If you, like me, don't like the ones in this question set, don't assume people will be comfortable if you're just askin' yours. I wouldn't be. And if people are all comfortable with you just askin' yours, ask yourself whether you have friends or conformation bias with echo chamber.

(Assuming one marries for "love")

1) show the situations in which politics can't be discussed productively (dogmatic ideologies)

2) show how to avoid being dogmatic yourself

I absolutely encourage people to discuss politics productively

I am friend with someone because I like that someone and I enjoy meeting him and talking to him, doing things together.

That doesn't mean agreeing on everything. And doesn't mean being afraid of speaking.

If someone quits, being my friend because we have different opinions on X, so be it. I am not like that. I won't break a friendship because someone thinks differently.

I read the article quickly so maybe I'm misreading it but if that graph is serious it really undermines his position as a thoughtful moderate to me. But maybe he really does believe that everyone on the left and the right only has groupthink. I agree with you that it's definitely not all tribalism

This becomes even more obvious when you look at how these collections of beliefs have changed over time, which to me just shows how they aren’t based on any fundamental intrinsic personality traits but are trendy and groupthink-based. Ditto for geographic differences.

So I don’t think being a centrist implies one is not tribal, rather that the degree to which your beliefs on a variety of issues align with the “default” of a group implies how tribal you are.

In other words, a politically thoughtful and independent person probably has a basket of opinions that don’t fit into neat left or right, liberal or conservative, etc. categories.

Since you are left leaning, presumably American, a good example is the Republicans. The current policies and values of the Republicans seem to be very different than let's say those of 20 years ago. But you don't see a lot of movement, i.e. you don't really see people saying because your actions of policies changed I'm going to re-evaluate my support for you. Maybe the other team is now closer to my world views. It's a lot more common that people just keep voting for their camp or team. I'm sure there are studies, this is very anecdotal. There are also many e.g. single issue voters, they only care about a single issue and nothing else.

Independent thinkers, who dive deep into issues, who challenge beliefs, who weigh multiple issues and considerations, who potentially shift their position when the goal posts have moved or they've evaluated new information, are rare. It's much easier to stay in an echo chamber/team/tribe. We see this all the time, another example is the pandemic. It's lack of nuance.

You see this in the political discourse. Instead of debating things of substance it's more of a rally around the team approach. You're never going to see in-depth discussion/analysis on tax policies, or security policies. Anything that doesn't meet your world view is automatically discredited whether it has merit or not, It's going to be they bad we good/polarizing/conspiracies etc. This pushes people farther apart and I think it also pushes policies farther apart. Maybe sometimes it is that simple but plenty of times it's not.

Like if you were to say consider yourself a progressive. I would consider you a progressive, unless you for instance, supported something incredibly conservative that was performed by a "Good Guy" politician on your team.

For instance, we used to have this chap Daniel Andrews. Who was for better or worse, a mild progressive. He took a very hard stance on Covid related issues. Progressives, backed the man regardless. Conservatives criticised his every move. However, his own human rights review, found that he had violated the human rights of citizens in certain circumstances.

If you mention this to his critics, it reinforces their team. But if you mention this (incredibly obvious good faith criticism) to his supporters, not only does it reinforce their team, but they immediately seek to identify you as someone on the other team. A "crazy anti lockdown conservative" or similar. - That for me is the essence of tribalism.

To be fair I think this is a symptom of social media rather than just political awareness.

> I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice

It's not about where you are on the spectrum. I know neoliberal moderate Democrats, people who would have voted for George H.W. Bush in 1988, who are more tribal about current U.S. politics than any socialist I've met. What makes it unpleasant to talk politics with them is a combination of two things: the narrow set of answers they're willing to accept on every topic, and the anger and suspicion they broadcast at anyone who says anything else. For example, they have an acceptable set of answers for why Trump won in 2024 (racism and sexism) and if you suggest any other contributing factors (like arrogance, elitism, and various screw-ups in the Democratic party) then you must be on the other side, blaming the victims and making excuses for Trump supporters. You can say a dozen things morally condemning Trump and the Republican Party and then make one strategic criticism of the Democrats, and they'll look at you like maybe they can't ever trust you anymore. They'll parade their emotional distress and look at you sideways if you don't have the energy to mirror it. All this without being especially politically informed, politically engaged, or politically radical, or caring if anybody else is informed, engaged, or radical -- they judge themselves and others purely by fervor and narrowness.

I feel like those that are more in the middle - in addition to be “accidentally in the middle” as pg says — they’re open to hearing the other side, and even open to being wrong.

Those that I know that I might define as “tribal” — and that goes for either side — are certainly not open to being wrong, and not even really open to listening to the other side — even a rational discussion.

Some may pretend to listen and maybe even engage in a discussion, but only out of being polite, not out of genuine, open curiosity.

If you swap “group” for “religion,” this is how I feel about Catholicism. Make of that what you will.

Media in the US, especially now via incessant social media feeds, fuels this. It showers us with information showing how the "other side" is bad. So you can have a correct opinion that the other tribe is bad without any quantitative metrics to compare how bad it is compared to your tribe, which is also very bad.

Btw, regarding the basic personality traits thing. I found this paper very interesting [0]. Sort of refutes the "conservatives lack empathy and fear change" angle. On average, I suspect most liberals and conservatives have very similar averages across most personality traits and are mostly just a product of their environment.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34429211/#:~:text=Our%20meta...

Sometimes this is easier to see from the outside. For example, if the conservative right all independently arrived at the same conclusion based on personality, isnt it strange how the consensus all moves together and changes over time

When social scientists say something is socially constructed that's approaching this.

It's hard to see oneself apart from the group one belongs to. In fact to separate oneself causes real pain. In the article it says that people don't want to look outside their tribe; I would say that people shouldn't even think about looking outside as it will cause trauma. It would literally cause psychological identity wounds.

One aspect of politics is this pain avoidance.

So you get people who think taxation is theft allied with people who Back The Blue. You get people who think life is so sacred abortion should be banned allied with people who'd like to see an AR-15 under every pillow. You get people who think nazi flags and the N word are free speech, allied with people who think books with gay and trans characters should be banned.

And personally I'm pro-environment and think nuclear power has a part to play; I think we should help the homeless by increasing the housing supply and letting builders do their thing; that the police should exist but need substantial reform to stamp out corruption and brutality; and that women's issues like abortion and trans women in abuse shelters should be decided by women, not men like me. But I'm in a political coalition with people who think nuclear power is bad, that we need rent control, that we should defund the police, and so on.

In an electoral system with proportional representation, largely unrelated views would all be different parties, no party would have a majority, and after the election they'd form alliances to build a ruling coalition.

But because of America's electoral system, someone has to take all those views, duct-tape them together and call it a consistent political ideology.

An average person has a lot more in common with you than with the imaginary protagonist of this blogpost, who is really smart and wants to show that everyone else is really dumb.

Like other normal people, I discuss politics with friends; both with the ones I mostly agree with and the ones I mostly disagree with. We need to understand game theory and military strategy to have a useful conversation.

But tribalism is absolutely an issue in the modern age with huge swathes of population falling into social media echo chambers. People first find their tribe, and then they define their own personality by the views of that tribe, not the other way around.

Just look at all the people spewing "own the libs" or "maga fucktards". A significant portion of the population doesn't vote based on rational analysis, but by being part of a crowd. They don't even care or know what they vote for, as long as they are sticking it to people they perceive as enemies.

I think this is basically the terminal/minimum of the modern social network algo optimization. Everything is maximally polarized, nobody is willing to engage in good faith discussion with people who hold different views. Everyone has a known enemy and known allies and they can be fed what they like to hear and thus continue being addicted.

I don't know how to get out of this :(

Is this not borne out in your own life experience? Because it sure is in mine.

We have parents posting that they are glad their child is dead instead of getting the measles vaccine, an entire pandemic that was ignored and downplayed, an election denied.

These are all simple examples of tribalism - choosing the tribe over ones own self interest and well being. Most sane people don't offer their children up to Baal.

Cooperation and scalability are two objectively good principles that our species can apply effectively... if and only if there is a genuine desire for cooperative, scalable, positive outcomes.

If social/political discourse has degraded to the point that cooperative, scalable, positive outcomes are off the table, look to those who have taken control of the discourse. Propaganda undermines language itself.

The difference between destructive behavior and constructive behaviour... has a bias.

As it happens, if I personally looks to what is important to me, I find that from the extremest left to the extremest right, the best political party get 60% support and the worst get 40% support. They all have some policies that I strongly support, and some policies that are terrible, and the middle of the gang is exactly the same.

To take an example. I am in strong support of the green party when it comes to train and bike infrastructure, fishing policies, eliminating lead in hunting ammunition, getting rid of invasive species, and banning heavy fuel oil in shipping. I strongly disagree with their support of using natural gas as a transactional fuel in the energy grid in hopes of green hydrogen (a pipe dream), and their dismantling of nuclear power. I also strongly disagree with their political attempts to mix in the war in Gaza with environmentalism, as if taking up the flag for either side in that war has any relevance in nation/local politics on what is almost the other side of the world. That is one political party out of 8 that my country has, and the story is similar with all the rest.

The actual problems of “tribalism” are exactly those of cults: worship of a leader or ideology, zero tolerance for criticism, cutting you off from other support networks, conspiracies, narratives of doom, promises of salvation, framing enemies as degenerates and deplorables, claiming exclusive ownership of truth and morality…

Red and blue alike have cult wings.

This occurs clear across the political spectrum, but a standout example is record-breaking levels of immigration in European countries like Sweden and Germany. Instead of realizing the policy failure and acting to fix it, the line becomes "it was the right thing to do, it was just done poorly."

And MAGA goes beyond being tribal: by any objective measure, it's a cult.

Plus you see an awful lot of people who will criticize one side for doing one thing while supporting the other side for doing the exact same thing. Obama, for example, was the Deporter-in-Chief (~3 million deported), Biden continued the Trump policy of using Title 42 to deny asylum claims and Kamala proposed building the very same border wall that all Democrats protested when Trump proposed it in 2020.

I'm a leftist and any leftist will have seen so many liberals who love progressive aesthetics but turn into a jack-booted fascist the second you want to address any of the underlying economic issues. For example, tell people "house prices need to come down" to solve any number of issues such as homelessness and see how they react.

> The implication instead seems to be that unless you are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum you must be "tribal". That feels dismissive.

On this, I 100% agree. There are several reasons why:

1. Intellectual laziness. People think they're "above the fray" by bothsidesing everything;

2. Ignorance. This is particularly an issue for Democratic voters in the US. Both Democrats and Republicans are neoliberals. US foreign policy is bipartisan. Full-throated support for capitalism is bipartisan. But a large segment of Democrats tell themselves they're good people for wearing a pride pin while at the same time thinking homeless people should die in the stree; or

3. Deception. This is particularly the case for Republicans who will try and center their positions by appealing to "common sense" and label Democrats, who are a center-right party, as "the far Left" or "the radical Left".

So, yes, people do use "tribalism" as an epithet to silence legitimate criticisim but there is also tribalism.

People also change. Until 25 maybe 30,I was left leaning in many issues.

Now I am mostly right aligned.

You don't like a team for an ideological reason, usually physical closeness or some other arbitrary connection.

For many, the team is the extent at which they analyze politics. You see this when conservatives will reference historical events in terms of the name of the political party. For example, it's relatively common to see someone say "Oh the Democrats are bad because during the Civil war they were on the side of slavery". Their analysis doesn't include the actual policy or ideology at hand, it's simply the team "Democrats". It doesn't matter to them if the flavor of policies that the early 20th century dems supported are similar or even the same as the policies modern Republicans support. Only the team.

I think there exists multiple layers of "tribalism" or "team sports" in politics that effects people differently. The bottom layer is sadly "<Name of party> good, <name of other party> bad". I think at some point we must acknowledge that some people are simply stupid. If they think making an argument based on the politics of a party 100 years ago is convincing, they might just not have the facilities for critical thinking.

A lot of those people are now @-ing grok on twitter to explain even the simplest of jokes.

I don't think that's unreasonable, but if you're in the US, you should really re-evaluate if this is true just because there are several significant issues over which the parties have flipped over the past few decades (and more if you go back further).

Obviously you didn't specify a party, but as one example: In the 1990s, the left wing party was where the free speech absolutists were. If you were a big "free speech" enthusiast back then and you still are now, then great! If your views have changed, that's fine, too, but there should be alarm bells going off in your head that your views changed along with the tribe.

Tribal politics happen when we take these various tribes in our society and essentially blind them to their biases to the point where they can’t imagine at all why someone would even be in that other tribe. A complete loss of critical thinking ability emerges once it becomes us and them and not some of us and others of us, one species, no tribes, many ideas.

Do you actually believe all liberals are good and can do no evil? Do you actually believe all conservatives are cartoonishly evil idiots? I’d hope you could see the nuance but your description makes it seem like there is one way but the highway. And the reflexive counter argument from the liberals is “but racism” but then again, explain the phenomenon of the black or latino Trump supporter? Clearly there is more nuance going on in what is sensible to people than what we can gleam out of the black and white painted descriptions from the thought leaders in our tribe.

will check this out, thanks for reading!

Also by Jon Stewart on Crossfire in 2004: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE&t=310s

The critique about what passes for debate is as apt today as it was then.

I firmly believe that if wealth distribution today was the same as it was in the 70s-90s, the culture wars would be significantly dampened or non existent. If people could still buy homes, afford to have kids and healthcare, we would all be able to talk about religion, sex, and politics without this extreme tribalism. It’s happening because there are way more “losers” in the economic game now, it’s become a life or death issue, and people are looking for who to blame.

However in the real world and 1:1 you can still have good discussions with smart people who disagree with you. And we need to have those.

The missing ingredient is "intellectual honesty". It used to be the case that when you talked to people on the right they would

    - refer to events that actually happened and true statements about the world
    - accept them in the context of wider events (although there's always been a risk of making policy from one exeptional incident)
    - make an argument that followed logically from those

nailed it imo, thanks for reading!

This is especially true if you have a history of being somewhat cruel to people on the basis of a conclusion you're not really 100% sure you agree with anymore. Now if you question it, you have a lot of guilt to contend with.

Both of our best ways at getting to the truth - Journalism and Science - rely on entertaining and following all sorts of contradictory ideas and then comparing them with observed reality.

Universities in particular need to be physically safe spaces, where ideas of every kind can be mercilessly attacked.

We are losing what took so long to build.

yep, it's "why would i risk finding out i'm wrong when everybody around me already thinks i'm right"

For what it's worth, the odds for rationally evaluating political ideas tend to go up around folks that have gone to universities that are known for some decent level of intellectual rigor.

Still not great though, some of the most dogmatic people I've met in my life were professors and undergrads. But those that were the opposite more than made up for that.

I completely understand it could not have what we're looking for, which is why this was only one component among larger ones (family + new job)

where individual views may hit extremes, but the average of those views will be in the middle for independent thinkers

his essay explains it better, though I do agree there should be some dots on either end and up high

> The most independently minded thinkers I know frequently drift off into extremes where most tribes dare not tread.

They've found another tribe.

Yeah it seems there is less of a taboo among my friends, despite a strong tilt in one political direction.

I suspect this is because most people assume everyone shares the same opinion in our state

Like it would be easy not to ask someone's religion when there isn't a 35% chance they're going to say "extremist martyr".

But I don't ask this question if I don't think I know the answer already, and I only ask it with people I think I can have a conversation with.

I reminded the voter of the secret ballot and the ability to just lie.

"Tell them what you think they want to hear", was my advice

It’s a matter of harm.

For example, some conservatives in the state level are trying to allow insurance to not provide PrEP based on religious grounds. For context, PrEP is medicine that prevents HIV infection and is required to be covered at a low cost by insurance.

The result is more HIV or AIDS in gay male populations in those states. There’s no charitable way to interpret these conservative pushes.

I am a gay man. My friends are gay men. I cannot be friends with someone who is actively trying to harm me and my community. This is NOT subjective. This is objective fact - these policies harm me, and my friends. If you interpret that to mean “evil” then that is on you, and perhaps should spark some introspection.

The point is, me being friends with people who are voting in policies that literally, tangible, undeniably, harm me is pathetic and self-destructive.

Maybe you’re okay with being pathetic and self-destructive. Or, more likely, there exists no policies like this for you or any demographics you belong to.

Looks through thread

Tribalism and purity tests abound.

But let me present a possibility: what if one side really is doing evil things? If you were transported to literal Nazi Germany or the Stalinist USSR, where millions of people were being murdered by one party, would it be "tribalism" to call that party's actions evil? Or would it be an accurate description of murdering millions of people?

Obviously we aren't at the point of "murdering millions of people" in the US yet, but I suspect a lot of this "enlightened centrism" which presents both sides as somehow just equally valid viewpoints would happily go all the way to watching millions get murdered and still not be willing to call evil by its name.

I agree with this take a lot, and actually tried to imagine what Religion 2.0 could be based on this premise

If people put the welfare of others first, for example, taxpayer funded universal healthcare wouldn't even be something that was debated, it would be implemented with as much fuss as we have over painting lane markers on streets. But Americans care less for their fellow American than most other countries out there it seems.

How would removing what little empathy that there is improve matters?

In reality we all have beliefs that are formed by our "in groups". People have groups beliefs formed from their religion, work, hobbies, study, and internet consumption. These all form our views and then get flattened to a 2-party system.

Unfortunately people can now form their identity solely on a political identity primarily due to social media.

yeah the religious enforcement is what always popped into my head when I watched it unfold

I'd rather be right than popular, and I usually am.

I'm bouncing back and forth on this. One thing I've learned over nearly two decades of programming, is that problems often are not separate from implementation - the one often defines or shapes the other to a large degree. Moreover, often enough it's not worth it to aim for clean separation - that's the road to becoming an "architecture astronaut".

I've also noticed this generalizes outside of programming. The key insight being, when people accuse "techies" of being "know-it-alls" and coming up with simplistic solutions (or my pet peeve of a term, "technological solutions to social problems"), what they're complaining about is generalizations - the kind you get when you focus on the abstract problem and forget about implementation details. This is particularly notable when one then tries to transfer a general solution/framework from one problem space to another, because whether or not it applies is largely determined by implementation details.

An example: understanding exponential growth and connecting it with basic virology is good. Applying that model to virological problems is okay - but the devil's in the details. Transferring that model to something else by means of analogy? Well, that very much depends on which assumptions you borrowed from virology, and it's helpful to be aware of those assumptions (implementation details) in the first place.

Seen plenty of that on every side of argument during COVID.

They want someone else to do the hard work and play Monday morning quarterback. To extend the sportsball metaphor, the football team is doing the actual work and they're just spectators rooting for their team.

No one wants to do work without being compensated, and virtually no one is being compensated to actually solve these problems. Politicians are there to get re-elected first and anything else second. Charitable organizations pay little to nothing, and get the kind of personnel that are OK with that.

At this point, there's so much tribalism wrapped around policy issues that it might be impossible to get anyone to try to objectively solve the issue. And all too often, there is no viable way to A/B test the solution and people have to hope that their solution works best, which is... Not a great way to get great results.

Well.. who go around reinforcing team allegiances, not people who talk politics. That's a pretty big distinction imo.

We do not agree on what reality is

Another example of an illustration I like that is somewhat derided is the classic equity vs equality cartoon with the boxes[1]. I say this in spite of the fact that I generally find myself identifying more with equality as a baseline, and the simple reason is it's a good illustration of the potential pitfalls of overindexing on equality.

IMO It's all in how you use them. It's hard to avoid that useful metaphors/analogies often become overused and cliche.

[1]: https://interactioninstitute.org/illustrating-equality-vs-eq...

His comedy is about playing an out of context short clip, make funny face, cheap insult, and laugh track.

But how that plays out in political discussions is that 1 side wont have discussions and just repeats cheap insults. Which results in Trump getting into power.

Better yet, this 1 side who cant discuss politics then constantly hides away. Leaving their viewpoint unexpressed and further losing position.

Prior to Trump it wasn't really a thing, because both parties were still following the law and maintaining a functioning democracy, so people could date across party lines and just agree-to-disagree about taxes or whatever.

If two people don't have some different opinions, at least one of them isn't thinking for themselves.

You're highly unlikely to grow up Protestant in Israel just like you're highly unlikely to going to grow up with liberal views in Tennessee.

Second to geography is demographic. You're unlikely to support DEI if you're surrounded by 90% white people all the time, and you're unlikely to decry globalism after you've been exposed to large cities and dense population centers for a long time.

"It’s not that truth-seeking is a requirement for friendship, far from it."

agree (and thanks for reading)

so I guess I agree to some degree

I generally keep people's political opinions at arms length, as some relationships are worth the pain or lack of depth. But it has caused unforseen pain at times, and hurts when relations from different spheres interact negatively.

They are then rendering a judgement [in good faith].

PG explains it better here: https://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html

(and possibly also a general dumbification of everything due to bad education combined with lowering social standards for who is allowed to have a public voice and be take seriously; confusingly thus was one of the points of a standard of decorum, because it served as a filter on who was intelligent enough to be a thought leader.)

1. Apolitical people are now political

2. News stations running more opinion pieces than actual newsvand being selective about said news

3. Seeing politics as an identity similar to a belief instead of a state of mind

Witch-hunts (last conviction in Europe was 1944), jews, communists, americans, non-americans, all sorts of religious groups, ... history is full of that.

One thing that changed recently is that nowadays propaganda is very organized and well funded. I also think there was a pretty calm period for a few decades (but only in certain regions of the planet). In the cold war period the tribes were very fixed and the evil was always far away, so locally not much happened.