Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

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I liked your point about tribalism up until you said one tribe is rational and the other not. The distribution of rational behavior does not change much tribe to tribe, it's the values that change. As soon as you say one tribe is more rational than another you're just feeding into more tribalism by insulting a whole group's intelligence.

I think the real problem is that zero friction global communication and social media has dramatically decreased the incentive to be thoughtful about anything. The winning strategy for anyone in the public eye is just to use narratives that resonate with people's existing worldview, because there is so much information out there and our civilization has become so complex that it's overwhelming to think about anything from first principles. Combine that with the dilution of local power as more and more things have gone online and global, a lot of the incentives for people to be truthful and have integrity are gone or at least dramatically diminished compared to the entirety of human history prior to the internet.

I’ll push back - the term is rational as in logical.

Rational in the sense that it flows from what emotional choices resonate ? That’s more in terms of faithful to their beliefs. I wouldn’t call that rational per se.

And being scared of tribalism is not necessary, because tribalism is what is currently being highly effective at creating political power.

So some degree of tribalism, is simply matching the competition.

>I liked your point about tribalism up until you said one tribe is rational and the other not. The distribution of rational behavior does not change much tribe to tribe, it's the values that change. As soon as you say one tribe is more rational than another you're just feeding into more tribalism by insulting a whole group's intelligence.

That was largely the case until these most recent electoral cycle, where the Great Crank Realignment, driven by the COVID response, pushed conspiracy theorists, health and wellness grifters, supplement hawkers, and many others to the right.

Umm, the COVID response itself was just as much a religion as it was science. There were people walking nature trails with nobody around with their masks securely on their faces. There were requirements for people whose job was to sit in a truck's cab by themselves all day to vaccinate or lose said job. There were unnecessarily draconian shutdowns. There was uncontrolled and unaudited spending on saving nonexistent businesses and buying enough vaccines for several more years of COVID (but with expiry dates within a year).

If the harsh response to COVID had been necessary, the places that didn't do it should have died out. They did not. You simply don't hear about the Great Depopulation of Africa.

And yet you will read the above, label me a crank, and downvote this. Meaning that you are just as tribal as the people you look down upon.

> There were people walking nature trails with nobody around with their masks securely on their faces.

Rogan got really worried about masks and health and at the same time was for instance having a guy on who does underwater weight lifting for training NBA players and gave him the highest praise and started advertising his tumeric coffee. Were masks during that kind of activity really harmful to people but underwater weight lifting and extreme in-sauna exercize good?

If California had held their restrictions a month or two longer until the vaccine they would have had many less deaths.

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