The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
blog.andymasley.com
blog.andymasley.com
I think the advice for who to listen to is very bad, though. He calls it being "slightly elitist", but his bar is beneath the ground. The example for discussing politics is knowing what the three branches of government are - I knew that when I was 8 and I don't think I had anything interesting to say about politics back then. I definitely couldn't have given a meaningful critique on the latest policy debate, and neither can anyone possessing merely the most basic knowledge of rudimentary facts on the topic.
The bar I like to use is pretty simple: do you know who represents you in Congress (I am American so this is my bias, but substitute your country's equivalent if there is one)? As in, your state's two Senators and your district's Representative? If not, you probably don't vote or don't pay attention when you do, and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes, so you probably don't really care that much about whatever it is you say you care about, since you haven't done the easiest thing you can do to make a change.
It's not perfect, and no criteria will be, but there are tons of people who can rattle off "executive, legislative, judiciary" who nevertheless don't know ball.
Or, you know, you haven't lived at the same address for twenty years. In your imagined world where every single citizen either has something so pressing to call their representatives about or is just ignorant, you're still basically filtering out everybody who moved for a job/college/SO/whatever recently. I guess in your mind it's only fitting that they're disqualified from having an opinion? For reference about 12% of Americans change residence each year.
That is not due to age or illness, it is due to enshittification. Not by the admin but by the populace.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I’d throw in for free that when you’re done at a party… say goodbye to your friends and leave. The party in general doesn’t need an announcement of your dissatisfaction and departure. Safe travels.
I've never called anyone about anything political, and I also haven't lived at the same address (or even in the same state) for 20 years but I still know at least who my senators are and some of my representatives. State elections are every two years; you have to almost actively not pay attention to not know anything about yours.
Feels disingenuous to ignore the fact that what I said applies to the rest of the comment too, don't you think? If it isn't obvious: typically the first year after a move - likely more, at least until House elections - most people will have zero reason to know their representatives' names, let alone keep remembering it for years. Who ever forgets a name they learned during a campaign a couple years ago, right?
For starters, something like almost ~half of students move away from their families to attend college. And then look at moves for jobs and retirement and everything else. And then when an incumbent leaves, all of their constituents end up in a similar boat as someone who just moved. And I'm not even beginning to touch the fact that a lot of people's unawareness of politics is (spoiler, I know) due to them not having the luxury to be able to devote as much bandwidth to it as HNers do. All these people shouldn't have any political opinions whatsoever until they figure out their representatives because... some wise guy on HN thinks knowing your representative's name is a good litmus test for whether you can tell good from bad? Do you expect any other response than "screw you"?
> I've never called anyone about anything political
Quite a confession given the side you're standing on. You'd think such a model citizen would've at least cared to contact their rep one damn time to suggest something about such a serious issue. Like maybe helping educate people about the government and politics better so they become as enlightened as the others.
If you (and/or parent, whoever feels this way) genuinely want a good outcome for something so serious instead of standing on a high horse and looking down on the uneducated, maybe actually go campaign to put your lovely literacy tests in the constitution, or whatever else would advance your cause forward. If you have some integrity, perhaps also campaign to fund the education system better and make it easier for citizens to vote in the same amendment, so that you're actually helping the people you presumably care about. Until you actually do something meaningful about this, I hope you can understand that your opinions about who should have opinions really won't come across the way you'd presumably hope they do.
Then quote the whole thing your responding to, otherwise your response seems disproportionately overreacting.
> For starters, something like almost ~half of students move away from their families to attend college. And then look at moves for jobs and retirement and everything else. And then when an incumbent leaves, all of their constituents end up in a similar boat as someone who just moved. And I'm not even beginning to touch the fact that a lot of people's unawareness of politics is (spoiler, I know) due to them not having the luxury to be able to devote as much bandwidth to it as HNers do.
I am very aware of that situation. I moved away from my home town and state for school, I moved cities post college three times, and I am now quite literally in the middle of a move to another state. While I won't pretend that I'll immediately get into the weeds of local city politics, I've still participated in local politics and I will participate in politics in my new city/state come this fall.
>All these people shouldn't have any political opinions whatsoever until they figure out their representatives because... some wise guy on HN thinks knowing your representative's name is a good litmus test for whether you can tell good from bad? Do you expect any other response than "screw you"?
Consider the context of the comment: "do you know who represents you in Congress [...]. If not, you probably don't vote or don't pay attention when you do, and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes, so you probably don't really care that much about whatever it is you say you care about, since you haven't done the easiest thing you can do to make a change."
If you don't know the names of your representatives you can't vote for them. Seems pretty straight forward to me. I think it's pretty fair to say if you're complaining about a political situation but haven't even voted about it you probably haven't tried that hard.
> Quite a confession given the side you're standing on. You'd think such a model citizen would've at least cared to contact their rep one damn time to suggest something about such a serious issue. Like maybe helping educate people about the government and politics better so they become as enlightened as the others.
To be clear, I've contacted my representatives plenty of times, I just haven't called them. I hate phone calls. But I have written emails, physical letters, and on several occasions spoke to them in person at events to express my issues.
> If you (and/or parent, whoever feels this way) genuinely want a good outcome for something so serious instead of standing on a high horse and looking down on the uneducated, maybe actually go campaign to put your lovely literacy tests in the constitution, or whatever else would advance your cause forward. If you have some integrity, perhaps also campaign to fund the education system better and make it easier for citizens to vote in the same amendment, so that you're actually helping the people you presumably care about.
1. I have campaigned for better education funding; I used to work in higher education.
2. No one mentioned literacy tests, so I have a suspicion there's a lot of background context in your head that you're imposing here. Either way, I have no interest in them.
The names are printed on the ballot, along with party affiliation. No memorization needed. In a primary there may be a bit of research needed, but even then you get a sample ballot beforehand so you can research the alternatives, but when the final election happens you generally only have two choices in the US per position and you simply vote for your party of choice.
I want to discourage voting blindingly by party affiliation. Personally I think you should at least know the general ideas and policies of the candidate(s) you're choosing, even though given the current political state the US it's foolish to vote for one of the parties, but even besides that how hard is it to remember their name so you can check if they actually follow through with anything? I'm not expecting perfection, but for example I know my senators names so whenever there's a big vote I can at least scan the list of supporters and see if I should be pissed at them or not. That lets me have at least a general vibe towards them come primaries and election season and whether I vote for their re-election.
> In a primary there may be a bit of research needed, but even then you get a sample ballot beforehand so you can research the alternatives,
Technically out of scope from OP's original point, but there's also a variety of local elections that can have multiple candidates per party. But either way, that "bit of research" with a sample ballot is all I'm really asking for out of people. These days they're tons of great voters guides out there too that include short Q&A's with each candidate for each hot topic issue, policy standpoints, etc. Because so many people just vote by party affiliation arguably the primaries and local elections are the most impactful votes you can do.
This seemed wise thirty years ago. I'm in a blue state that never had much of a problem electing republican officials up to and including the governor, and that worked well for us because every politician clearly and obviously put the state ahead of their party.
> given the current political state the US it's foolish to vote for one of the parties
It worked well for us until now. Today your call for ignoring party affiliation asks us to also ignore insurrection and child rape. That's asking too much, and I'm surprised you had the gametes to even float the idea.
> It worked well for us until now. Today your call for ignoring party affiliation asks us to also ignore insurrection and child rape. That's asking too much, and I'm surprised you had the gametes to even float the idea.
You know, I really debated on including that line because I suspected someone would misinterpret it, but I figured it would be a sorta of subtle reference to show I wasn't trying to "both sides are equally bad" type of situation. I guess I was too subtle.
To put it clearly, the party it's foolish to vote for is the Republicans. I thought that was obvious given that broad state of things. However, I also think that people don't pay attention to the primaries or local elections just Vote Blue No Matter Who on election day, then get surprised we've end up with a bunch of milquetoast centralist Democrats instead of people willing to make changes like Mamdani or El-Sayed.
This one for me. I have my own viewpoints and when elections come around I look up the candidates to see who best matches, then once the election is over forget pretty quickly. Unless politics is your entertainment it seems completely normal to not keep their names in mind.
I agree with you on governors and senators but it's very easy not to learn who your other representatives are, because it requires close attention to detailed street by street maps that change every census.
I'm willing to take a softer stance than OP's start and be okay with just knowing basically any of your representatives i.e. some combination of your two senators and one or more representatives.
The general point being that simplistic rules can be great heuristics, but turning them into strict logical conditions is doomed to failure. Even about simple "fizzbuzz" style things.
Imagine a Marxist who refuses to discuss economics with anyone who can't explain dialectic materialism or enclosure.
One simply does not have infinite time and resource to engage with everybody.
Aware what you have filtered and don't treat them like idiot
Turning ideologically crazy sounds like something that would also happen if you only talk to people who have the same extreme beliefs.
This is likely quite a large group.
Note that when I say "talk politics" I really mean "discuss things controlled by politicians", not "discuss politicians". If you mean the latter it is a super fair bar to set!
It's the fizzbuzz of political debate.
I see what you're getting at, but I think you need to refine your test a bit. I don't know who my representatives are off the top of my head, and I actually have contacted them within the last 6 months! It's just not information that has stuck in my brain. Likewise, I both vote and pay attention when I vote - I do some research on candidates' policy positions and (if applicable) their track records on issues that matter to me. But if you asked me to name them, I would still be helpless without looking that info up.
I think what you're trying to get at is "does this person actually engage with representatives and pay attention when voting", but memorizing the names of your representatives is not 1:1 with that. Some people will be engaged and not have the names memorized, and others will have the names memorized but be disengaged.
Just because liberals tend to end up in the in-group doesn’t mean the test is bad. It means liberals are doing better (in this one specific regard, civics knowledge).
And no one will ever agree with you on everything. Anyone who agrees with you on everything is lying to you a priori or you're hallucinating them.
Even ol' BG - he may be a billionaire but I think he's in general a very reasonable, liberal, secular, and fairly moderate guy. I guess he believed Windows Metro was a good idea... :)
Obviously we hear the stories about Musk, Zuck, Ellison etc. but I think there are plenty of grounded billionaires out there.
That leaves about 81m Americans who cannot. I'm sure you were a very clever 8yo, many of the people here spent a lot of their childhood being told they were clever. That said, suggesting that the other 30% of the country less clever than 8yo you should be excluded from political discussions is somewhat illiberal in my mind. Perhaps the notion we're creeping toward is that people less educated don't deserve a political voice or to take part in political exchange, which is a tenet I wouldn't agree with.
[1] https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/americans-knowled...
This is a false dichotomy. There's a huge gap between "permitted to choose between the presented options in a democracy" and "able to make a wide audience care about one's political opinions".
I agree. In general you're pointing out one failing of this post, but I think there are a whole host of things that are missing from it to be anywhere near a substantial guide.
Don't fall into the trap of "an idiot disagrees with me, so I must be right" is a great observation/rule! But it's like the first level of the reasoning game (if the game even has linear levels).
There is value in that, and trying to provide even more observations would likely make the post fall flatter when readers disagreed with at least some (and/or the author didn't do a good job on some in favor of his primary point).
But "If you can’t find those people in the real world, turn to the internet and find them there" is especially fraught, as this subjects you to much different memetic hazards that the article doesn't touch upon at all. Meaning if you seek out online discussion communities and find their more-reasoned arguments refreshing, you're right back at the entrances to rabbit holes of extremism [author's usage] that are emotionally attractive rather than rationally considered.
How do you figure?
Gödel's first theorem says that a logical system can either be incomplete or contradictory. The comprehensiveness of natural language (our primary tool for communicating), especially with the prevailing over-reliance on Boolean logic, points to the results from our use of them being readily contradictory.
So with Internet forums (especially when you're first exposed to them), you switch from getting half-baked reasoning in meatspace interactions (the focus of this article, and easy to spot!) to long chains of fully-baked reasoning that are logically consistent. But yet they ultimately still lead to some pretty terrible places - due to what they've left out of their starting assumptions, and then tacitly reject by closed-world-optimizing for the assumptions they did make.
Some folks talk like the lowest of the lowlife trolling forum goers are even remotely approaching logically consistent philosophical systems that eventually run into eventual and inevitable paradoxes, and I don't buy it. Heck, we should be that lucky to have forums like that instead of rabid identity wars.
Have you ever chatted with a libertarian for instance? In english? Half your terms need to receive new definitions lol
My point is that they hinder compromise. If we disagree on a fundamental value but are upfront about our values, we can realize there are a whole bunch of other values we do agree on. We can also likely see that there are merits to each others' values, even if we prioritize our own values higher.
But when we go from values to long baked-out logical justifications of specific actions, the values get obscured and lost - even to the people who claim to hold them. The long justifications go towards rationalizing and buttressing what is the groupthink, but anything that goes against that groupthink is not afforded the same "let's follow the reasoning here" that would demonstrate the contradictions.
> I don't see any attempt from the powers in charge to lean toward "fully-baked reasoning"
Because the lowest common denominator soundbites still resonate. Where the "fully-baked reasoning" chains come is people justifying supporting the crass soundbites to themselves back in their larger personal context.
> lowest of the lowlife trolling forum goers are even remotely approaching logically consistent philosophical systems
This is the exact same dynamic - simplistic group identity soundbites for popular rallying cries, but they are backed by up reasoned arguments from a larger intellectual community. For any throwaway troll comment, you can find well-written long-form essays backing up the fundamental idea - if you look in the right communities.
> Have you ever chatted with a libertarian for instance?
So this is kind of funny, because I consider myself a libertarian but I also agree with where you're coming from here. So-called right-libertarianism is exactly one of these patterns of long chains of logical justifications working to obscure values. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49136085 for my specific critique, with a slightly different framing.
I agree, but it’s so much harder, you have to evaluate every argument, you can’t outright filter out idiots. I admire you, but I can’t manage this, it’s exhausting.
A) Onset of schizophrenia or other serious mental illness, followed by psychosis. This is actually the most common I've seen. But it is also the easiest to spot.
B) Some crisis event in life, followed by finding / joining a community. Some were hit hard by this during COVID.
I've yet to personally see people that have their, well, shit together and live busy lives turn into ideological crazies or extremists - where there is no mental illness. Of course, it could be that they just hide it better. Don't use their public accounts, etc.
I also think it is much easier to become radicalized today. Once you search for any extremist views on say social media, you'll be bombarded with it. Just belonging to a certain demographic could trigger a non-stop barrage of extreme wing influencer content in your feed.
Right wing extremism is like, that lady from the UK who made a tweet asking everyone to burn down a hotel full of migrants.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-antifa-cell-members-no...
Fighting back against people who straight up murder civilians in broad daylight is not something you can classify as extremism with any good faith.
And before I get piled on for saying "smaller budget", think about what calls to "fund the police" would mean (a bigger budget), and think about why it's called "defund the police" and not "abolish the police".
Arguable another example is the guy who killed the United Healthcare CEO.
But that said, most people who have drunk the kool-aid of one party or another are not nearly this extremist. Most of them just post nonsense on social media or even keep their views to themselves but still hold extremist views.
Allegedly. Neither have been convicted.
I'm pretty confident that I know who killed both of those people. I'm pretty confident that both did it for ideological reasons. I'm pretty confident that both of those ideological reasons would be seen as "left leaning" in the American political spectrum.
As you say, neither has been convicted, but fortunately I'm not a court of law so I don't have to wait until they are convicted to draw inferences from what I see in the world.
Leave aside the shooters themselves for a moment. The other thing I find interesting is how those events are discussed and understood by other people, especially in contrast to right-leaning violence (like the people who killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good, or the person who killed Melissa Hortman and her husband and also shot John Hoffman and his wife, or even the guy who killed Jonathan Joss). Generally I find it to be a mark of extremism if you feel that political violence is justified as long as it is done against the other side. I've spoken to a lot of people who I would characterize as left-leaning extremists because they outright support the killings of Charlie Kirk and Brian Thompson, even if they wouldn't do it themselves.
This is different from understanding how they could happen, or sympathizing with the killers. I'm talking about people who outright cheer for this to happen more frequently. IMO they do not understand what kind of world they are asking for, but that doesn't stop them from cheerfully asking for it.
And similarly, I've seen people who dismiss the killing of Renee Good or Alex Pretti as justified because she "weaponized their vehicle" (no she didn't - watch the video) or because he brought a firearm to a protest (so what - that's legal ... and what about Kyle Rittenhouse?)
So basically, lots of words to say ... violence against people for ideological reasons sucks and isn't justified. Don't do it.
One can easily say with as much certainty that it was from fascist infighting, something fascists are well known for. Fuentes was saying some rather incendiary things about Kirk prior to the shooting, after all.
Someone hating UHC and the health care system in this country doesn't mean they are left leaning either. The base level that you can assume is they are sick and driven to extremes by a corrupt and cruel system.
> Generally I find it to be a mark of extremism if you feel that political violence is justified as long as it is done against the other side.
Is it extreme to approve of violence on those who further an agenda of committing violence on a societal level?
> IMO they do not understand what kind of world they are asking for
That is the world we have lived in forever.
> violence against people for ideological reasons sucks and isn't justified. Don't do it.
You might want to get on the line with the government and let them know this. A lot of problems would be solved.
I'd be willing to take this bet if you want. The prosecution just released some text messages purportedly including a confession from the mainstream suspect in the Charlie Kirk killing. Of course, all of this could be a snow job ... but I am relatively confident it was not.
>Is it extreme to approve of violence on those who further an agenda of committing violence on a societal level?
I suppose that depends on your definition of "violence on a societal level" and gets into some pretty heavy ethical questions. In general though, I'd say that approving of violence against people who act deplorably but do not intentionally and knowingly kill others is pretty extreme.
>You might want to get on the line with the government and let them know this. A lot of problems would be solved.
If they'd take my calls, I'd happily tell them this too. I have been disgusted at the violence done in the name of the people of my country by its current government, against people who were either totally innocent or at least not deserving of death for their crimes IMO. The cruelty of the state is unmatched in both its scale and temper.
And yet, one of the fundamental "rights" of a state, if you will accept that framing, is the monopoly on legitimate violence. I don't like that, and I hope we find a better point of stability for society some day, but this is what we've got to work with today.
What kind of issues though.
"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation"
I think we need decent third places back, because the post-internet replacements are sub-par.
Why wouldn't the world be crazy, though? What reason do we have to assume that the world is not crazy? Most reasons are tautological when you really unpack them.
This world is a messy complicated place and I tend to think in percentages about everything. Guarantees are rare, I usually think of events as probabilistic, and likewise what other people say.
Now, these probabilities can change based on who's saying what. Theoretically someone who specialized in that topic has a higher chance of "getting it right", or sussing it better than people who aren't as versed in that subject. That's what academia is, and if it wouldn't work we wouldn't do it.
So, for me it does matter who's saying what, but only to some extent. That means even the most educated, smart and focused individual can get it wrong, and some nobody with no training on the subject can get it right, for various reasons, even pure chance.
So I'm never discarding someone's opinion based on who the are or their training, but I do consider the chances of them being right or wrong. There was a recent discussion about Nobelitis.
Exactly so. The qualifications are a heuristic, not a rule. That said - There are billions of ill-informed halfwits on earth and all or most have opinions.
People need some way to filter all of those opinions, especially now that the media doesn't do it for us. A lossy heuristic that only works most of the time beats the heck out of drowning in an endless sea of babble.
On the other, you shouldn't assume "the rest of the world is filled exclusively with incompetent people who lack basic truth-finding skills and that's why they don't agree with me" which is what people usually mean when they say the rest of the world is crazy.
Competence (let alone extreme competence) is kind of rare actually, and accepting that that is “fine” is part.
That’s why you engineer a car to be driven by a dumb and abusive driver; airplanes are designed to be flown by pilots on their worst days; houses are built with large safety factors; code should be written to handle bugs gracefully. It’s not that anyone is being intentionally malicious, it’s that even competent people sometimes make mistakes so the rest of us should expect to screw up.
For awhile in my life, I was highly competent at what I did. It was awesome - but the altered reality this can engender - the idea that “since I am competent everyone else should be too, I’m just average” has it’s own dangers.
Maybe, being exceptionally generous, you could posit that any given individual only is informed enough about some small subset of things that they hold opinions about. But in my experience, "believing you should have good reasons for the beliefs you hold" is a pretty all-or-nothing affair. Some people will have well-thought out justifications for pretty much any belief they hold, more will have no justification for any belief the hold. It's pretty well-correlated with intelligence, which is backed up by studies that have found that more intelligent people are better at coming up with justifications for their actions. It's not unreasonable to assume that carries over to beliefs.
The core takeaway is to ignore the drooling masses that disagree with you (or agree with you!). Their beliefs have no correlation with truth, and thus do not provide additional evidence for nor against a given belief. You should only adjust your priors based on interactions with people who actually know what they're talking about.
> most people are in fact “asleep” about most things most of the time, not super thoughtful in how they develop beliefs
Which is later echoed, but differently, as:
> the average person just doesn’t know much about your hyper specific thing
This is skirting around whether they have a duty to know about your thing. The first phrasing suggests they do, the second suggests not.
Given that your thing is probably stupid and wrong, and life's too short, it seems reasonable to me that most people can't give you good arguments about it unless you invite them to take a pleasant and entertaining walk around your reasoning and maybe sleep on it and come back later. If the subject can't be made pleasant and entertaining, you're probably out of luck. This unfortunately still applies even when your thing is genuinely a great insight.
Civics is the main one that is being catastrophically neglected as pointed out by some other comments here. A majority of the discourse in every political space completely fumbles this(USA). Conservatives openly desire a king above the constitution. Centrists believe that a highly lopsided balance of power can somehow be fixed with moderate responses. And leftists are nearly 24/7 frothing at the mouth with “why WONT THE DEMOCRATS DO SOMETHING” without any apparent understanding of how majorities and pluralities dictate action in our government.
I wouldn’t guess higher than 5% of our political dialogue reflects anything higher than a grade schooler understanding of civics, history, or politics. Which is damn near the only thing we MUST know about to keep the ship upright here thanks to technology and abundance. And we still fuck it more and more every year.
Flipping that over: aspire to be correct in your beliefs, not in "being right".
Karl Popper (the man behind the Intolerance of Intolerance "paradox) identified it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
The other kind of beliefs are "Symbolic beliefs." Symbolic beliefs are not held because they are true, or because they are useful on their own. They're held because they signal that you belong to the tribe. They are similar to the "Alief", which is an automatic unequestioned belief. Most Symbolic beliefs are aliefs, but not all.
Since learning about this I've been trying to identify my own aliefs and symbolic beliefs and question them. It turns out I have more than I'd realized. We probably all do.
I think this greatly underestimates the number of completely mundane, innocuous factual beliefs that everyone, or at least everyone who is able to get through their lives without serious mishap for any length of time, has to have. For anyone in that position, most of their beliefs have to be factual beliefs, and have to be true at least to a good enough approximation to allow them to function. We tend to ignore such beliefs in discussions like this, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.
For example, when I walk on my kitchen floor, I don't have to tell myself: "the floor is structurally sound, it's safe to walk on it." I just walk.
The fact that I just walk can be used to infer an infinite number of implied bleiefs that I've never verbalized until this moment. For example, I believe that:
1. The floor can support my weight.
2. The tiles aren't made of toxic materials.
3. I don't pay $$ by the step.
4. Walking on the floor doesn't cause my wife pain.
5. The floor isn't lava.
To refine my definition: a belief is that which systematically and implicitly guides my expectations, reactions, choices, etc.
In her glass skywalk example, Gendler lays out the definitions roughly so:
1. "I know this skywalk is sturdy and safe" = Belief
2. The hesitancy to cross the skywalk = Alief
But to me:
1. "I know this skywalk is sturdy and safe" = knowledge
2. Hesitancy to cross it = actual belief.
That's why in my vocavbulary it's perfectly fine to say: "I know it. But I don't believe it."
Similarly, if someone says, "I totally believe that planes are safe, but I'm terrified of flying", then I will think to myself: "nope; you totally don't believe that planes are safe."
Regardless of the mechanisms, I think we're agreed that it's important not just to examine your priors, but to be aware that there ARE priors in the first place.
Yes, absolutely.
And I think there's a practical extension to my framing that goes beyond semantics.
When there's a seemingly irresolvable conflict between knowledge and belief, i.e. reason says “yes" while the heart says “no”, simply doing the thing a few times will often resolve the tension.
That's the practical advantage I see in my framing:
1) In Gendler's framing, the cerebral and emotional aspects are presented as two different modes of cognition. Belief is thinking, while Alief is just another type of thinking about some other stuff. Taken too far or misinterpreted, this can encourage overanalysis.
2) In my framing, belief is fundamentally about how I operate. So when my reason has exhausted its arguments but I'm still not convinced, as long as my knowledge seems reliable, I know that forcing a behavioral change could be all that's needed to turn me into a believer.
There's no such thing as "Common Sense", and every single niche, culture, demographic, etc has their own set of things that "Everyone knows"
* Economic crises (recessions, depressions) would continue, and becone worse over time (example: subprime crisis of 2008)
* profitability rates would go down over time
* wealth would concentrate more over time
* middle class would be slowly shrunk - say, doctor's losing their own offices and made to see people in 15 minute appointment blocks
* real hourly wages would fall
* proletariat will revolt and displace the bourgeoisie, in the manner the bourgeoisie overthrew the feudal order
These predictions are all falsifiable
"wealth would concentrate more over time", which it in fact did and keeps doing, on some measures such as the absolute GINI.
As stated on Wikipedia:
> Falsifiability is a standard of evaluation of scientific statements, including theories and hypotheses. A statement is falsifiable if it belongs to a language or logical structure capable of describing an empirical observation that contradicts it.
A bigger issue with string theory is that we don't fully know how to make it describe reality, but it still describes some general principles we can test and learn from and I think it's the most successful quantum theory with gravity so far, even if it's not the right quantum mechanics and the right gravity.
Any property like super symmetry that could in theory be tested would prove parts of it. We lack a way of doing so, especially in a controlled manner, but particles have been identified from a single convenient photograph.
This is a very agreeable statement, but I'd add that politics is not about finding the Kantian truth of what's best for everyone (inside the country? globally? also immigrants? lazy and ugly natives?).
It's about balancing interests. Of course, the idea of free market democracy was/is that both goals eventually converge.
I'm thinking you're meaning like "politics is about trying to understand/impact what could plausibly occur", whereas the "truth" you mention is inherantly unconcerned with that, but I think there's also value in finding and debating it.
What's implementation without a target? Is politics concerned with improving conditions for people, or is it just balancing enough interests that we don't start killing eachother?
It's shades of both I think, and there's fierce disagreement about both the global optimum and how to or if it's worth getting there
And of course this begs the question who has power and who should have power.
The will to improve living conditions comes from the interests of those who have political power, in my view. You can say because of democracy if you like. Or, more cynically, dependence on labor and consumption (Fordism), or, more idealistically, ethical values in powerful people themselves, and all of that are nuances and not absolutes I guess.
But I wouldn't say that my definition was precise.
I just wanted to point out that it is not a given for politics to have the goal of optimizing utilitarian interests, maximizing wellbeing or long-term goals such as protecting people.
In other words, participants in politics do not only discuss how things should be achieved, but also what should be achieved.
If that makes sense: this is what I meant by "balancing powers". I'm not sure right now how to map it to the two poles you describe.
I care when they start arguing with me and trying to jam their belief down my throat. I didn’t even ask, you brought it up and you’re mad at me because I disagree.
I think this is the more interesting point to consider. Having a belief, any belief, is probably just fine. It’s the second part that’s the issue.
As to your question, there are a lot of extreme beliefs that sometimes end up becoming true. IIRC the person who first advocated for washing hands because of tiny "things" that could make people sick, he was laughed out of the room, and he was right. It was an extreme belief at the time.
I basically reject the whole premise that "no belief is extreme" because there are countless examples throughout history of extreme beliefs that the world considered extreme, and they turned out to be true. Didn't make the belief any less extreme at the time.
One of the most depressing things about exploring the conspiracy world is that all roads tend to get co-opted into hateful rhetoric - I miss the days when I believed that one could hold a rather silly belief and have it just be benign.
Once you accept a premise that majority consensus of well informed people can be drastically wrong, it's not hard to then transfer that horizontally from one domain to another. So if you accept the possibility that scientists made up climate change - why wouldn't they also make up COVID? or falsify risks associated with vaccines? or any other number of things.
Underpinning all of this is some basic elements of humility and empathy - willingness to accede to a greater authority of others, and to weigh others experience that is different to yours as important in informing your views. Cutting those tethers gives your own belief system a new degree of freedom.
I've unfortunately lost a few friends to this process (why I felt compelled to comment). There's definitely a "rabbit hole" effect where there's a chain of beliefs that lead you further into extremism. A, B, and C may be "extreme" but benign, and then at some juncture, D comes along and that's the 'thing' that confirms their extremism is a correct response to the world.
I had this happen with an online friend who forgot he was talking to a mixed-race black man and started sending me what was effectively racist content (under religious pretenses), completely doe-eyed, almost leaning in as to see whether I was just as excited to "get on board" (I wasn't). That shift happened rather quickly and I later stitched together how he'd gotten there in his head (in effect online religious content on YT/Twitter).
That's the danger with entertaining extremism: one day, they won't be "just talking about stuff," they'll be strapping up the proverbial vest and you'll be thinking "but we just had a normal conversation..."
At the risk of sounding AI pilled, I find LLM's are fairly good sparring partners if you instruct them well. At least they're more capable of giving you the best arguments against your position than the average bar patron.
Almost all of my non-professional prompts are of that nature.
"AI Advice Suppresses People’s Willingness To Say “I Don’t Know”, Even When The Advice Is Wrong And Accuracy Is Incentivized" https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5y6m4_v1
Better than a bar patron, no doubt. Still nothing compared to any normal well educated human being
Two problems:
1. There are beliefs people hold approximately as strongly as they hold "the Sun will rise tomorrow", so "updating" is kinda irrelevant.
2. How many people actually think any of their beliefs are "extremist"? And if they don't, they won't consider the warning to apply.
And after digging in further:
3. Many people reasonably believe that their discussion circles already filter out a lot of "average people" and thus expect a higher standard of discourse from their ideological opponents. When that still doesn't happen, it naturally seems like stronger evidence.
4. (Insert generic annoyance at veganism discourse here.)
It's hard to imagine a reason why someone is vegan, that wouldn't logically entail such a self-image.
> they think the atheists think that they are superior (whether or not they really do).
Atheists do not present atheism as an abstention from religion, and generally describe religion as irrational or illogical, not immoral.
Of course everyone who consciously makes a socially difficult choice has a well thought-out reason for it (although atheism is not particularly socially difficult in my environment). But they aren't all directly comparable.
> It's hard to imagine a reason why someone is vegan, that wouldn't logically entail such a self-image.
I know a guy that’s vegan because he shit himself after going to an Outback Steakhouse
As for "feasibility", that is clearly not the same experience for everyone.
I haven't met anyone like this.
I have met people who don't like exposure to pro-vegan propaganda (which comes across as moral scolding). Also, one time I was taken to a vegan restaurant and I felt like I was being gaslit about the taste of the food.
I have also met (or at least encountered on the Internet) vegans who conflate the two.
That's precisely how crazy ideologies form.
This pulled me into a tangential thought:
Has anyone else noticed that a lot of people just CAN'T be wrong? They might be contrarian, cynical, narcissists, experts in their field, experiencing PTSD or other emotional disregulation, extremely online, ... Then the team-based things: political entrenchment, [colour]-pilled, conspiracy theorists, religious, Collingwood supporters (kidding) ...
Finding people who are genuinely interested in learning about things that might change their views in substantial ways is very hard. Even when you find people genuinely interested in learning, it's so common to see evidence take a back seat to political or religious views. It makes you feel crazy sometimes.
More intelligent human beings can do a better impression of rationality but in most situations they’re still using their intelligence to post-rationalise some existing feeling.
Once you recognise that you’ll see that it’s true even in yourself
IE, you should never ever ever treat an average of online discourse as a representative average of humanity. It is already a niche cohort before you get into specific groups.
That alone means you will see more of people who strongly believe their opinions, see more of people who like to hear themselves talk, see more of people who unironically state that "I am never wrong", etc. The comment format of the internet is also pretty much perfectly designed to support the absolute wrong kind of discussion if you want actual productive discourse.
Instead of two people going back and forth and building up that context of "Heres what I mean when I say X" and being able to ground discussion on that shared context, there is no shared context and every dumbass can leave a large drive by argument that is not in the same shared context as the rest of the conversation, leading to vacuous "point scoring" and "um akshually" and talking past each other.
Online discourse just doesn't progress, because there's nothing that drags my ass back here to respond to your point, like I would feel compelled to in reality.
What is high value; and how are you supposed to find it in this environment?
The core problem is that the only people who have any interest in teaching about those things are doing so specifically because they want to recruit others into their political camp. "Education" is conflated with agreement with someone else's conclusion.
(And even then, sometimes they disclaim responsibility, and just seek to morally bully you into agreement.)
Often, you already know about the thing, and this knowledge hasn't changed your view; and then the people who call you ignorant of the thing are just annoying. Sometimes, you conclude that the thing has been completely misrepresented anyway.
The people who agree with you are a biased sample of the population. But so are the people who are willing to openly disagree. So we have both a "bubble" and an "anti-bubble". This is especially true for people with unusual views, but it's also true for everyone.
I had a colleague who was part of an idiosyncratic religious denomination, which believes in the literal truth of the Bible etc. He was a nice guy and mostly we avoided talking about this. The one person who raised it in social conversation was the most tactless guy in the office. (To be fair he wasn't that tactless. Someone has to be last). Lots of people online are looking for a verbal fight. The decent people who know you socially or via work, but disagree with you over some political or religious issue, will usually avoid talking about it with you. That applies just as much if you have a mainstream but not universally held belief, as if you have an extreme one.
The problem here is that there's not really any incentive to seriously engage with a person with opposing views, even though our society would be a lot better if people did it. Lots of people seem to think that freedom of speech just means freedom to harangue those you disagree with, and aren't interested in the search for truth.
This is such a nuanced point. I think that's why it's difficult to get a Jewish person to admit that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
> The reason it’s so easy is that most people are in fact “asleep” about most things most of the time,
Bingo against. I first had this exact thought in the context of people losing more and more time to distractions like Instagram tiktok etc. At the time people around me thought I was crazy (it's changing now). Such an insightful post.
> Many people adopt beliefs because it seems like the people they think of as good adopted them too
And not just beliefs. Fashion and all sorts of mannerisms. What is it with a certain segment of the population using their pants at the bottom of their asses? Did they all decide to do this independently? Or do look around and see that all their favourite gangstas do it?
These groups specifically target and craft messages and strategies. You can see it if you browse their spaces and they openly talk about it. They will have threads where they pick a common argument and refine the response. They then go into the space and make the bad side of the argument on one account and pile on it with the refined arguments. Praise all the people that agree as intelligent and demean all the people that disagree. It really does not take that many people to successfully flip a space.
Because the message is crafted its always just on the edge of what can be banned for. If they are banned its a good opportunity to act like it was a massive overreach.
People see these tiny little seeds getting planted and eventually when they are presented with the argument they reach the extreme position and feel like it was their own work.
edited for typo
This is obviously harmful for society but also obviously the best outcome for the platform who wants to sell your attention to advertisers.
Grifters in various media markets have done a very good job on behalf of their respective backers and establishment to divide and conquer and manufacture consent of the audience into atomized disorganization with the above arbitrary elements and almost arbitrary wedge issues that that might be a first step in reevaluating a belief structure. The next might be a bit of introspection and consideration of other people's perspectives.
Stay unsure, curious, and calm.
I wish I knew how to filter that last part.
On the internet folks even smell something that SEEMS not 100% on their side, conversation is over and they just want to e-yell at you.
Be careful about what news you consume, even if it appears to agree with you. Check sources. Check facts. Try to work up to your beliefs from direct observation and basic principles whenever possible. Question your beliefs. Maybe they're wrong!
e.g. It's easy to get worked up about Trump. There's an awful lot bad press out there about him. Ask yourself, can a human being really be that vile? Maybe I'm just being misled by the media and partisan politics. Go watch some uncut speeches and press conferences. Pay attention to what the man actually does. Oh, he wants to place tariffs on my country because smoke from forest fires sometimes crosses our shared borders*? He actually said that? Yes. Yes he did. That's directly observable scumbag behaviour. If a romantic interest acted that way I'd break things off immediately. Huge red flag. Maybe the negative opinions about him check out.
---------
* It crosses both ways, BTW.
Pardoned a lot of the highest profile criminals of the past decade.
Started a war with Iran.
The Earth is on the back of a large turtle. Prove me wrong.
Most of the arguments you hear will be deeply flawed.
Therefore we are on the back of a giant turtle.
For example if i say "we're not on the back of a giant turtle, because humans went into a rock ship, went all around the planet and checked there's no turtle", is absolutely correct. But then you'll say something like "how do you know, were you yourself in the rocket ship?".
And this is how normal people see extremists: "I just addressed your point, but you choose to hold a ridiculous position"
On a side note: Suppose you become politically radicalized and become a Marxist. You get convinced that the labor theory of value is correct.
Marx did not believe in the Labor Theory of Value, although the above is a very common misconception because a lot of self-avowed Marxists do. On the contrary, Marx believed that some things had inherent value, like an oasis in the desert which provides a much-needed resource without any investment of labor. The LTV was adopted as part of the platform at the inaugural conference of the German Social Democratic Party in 1875. At the time, socialism was split between followers of Marx on one side, and followers of socialists like Ferdinand Lasalle on the other. The differences are too complex to delve into here, but you could say that Marxian socialism was more revolutionary and aspired to a general reorganization of society, while Lasallean socialism was more reformist and oriented around securing rights around pay and working conditions via collective bargaining, rather than having a general hostility to the economic order of the time.
Anyway, Marx did not attend this conference but when he was subsequently sent a copy of the program adopted there, he was so annoyed that he wrote a blistering critique, attacking the what he saw as the weak intellectual foundations of the plan and arguing that that they would fundamentally undermine the socialist project. You can read the cirique here, along with a much more comprehensive introduction that provides a lot of additional context: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index...
Marx's writing has a reputation for being turgid and difficult, which I think is somewhat undeserved. But lest people think think I'm just doing the academic or political trick of telling you what I think it means, here's the opening couple of paragraphs, in which Marx gets straight to the point:
First part of the paragraph: "Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture."
Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.
1. The number of people in the general population who will object to neoliberalism.
2. The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why neoliberalism and the trickle down theory of economics is incorrect, and can speak to your very specific concerns about government bloat and over-regulation in a way that gets across how modern social theorists and economists give a more compelling and ethically coherent account of the way the world works, and do so patiently and thoroughly.
This is great! It works with everything.
> The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect,
He's correct most people don't know about labor theory of value. Which is why it's easy for him to categorize those who believe it as "radicalized" and "Marxist" versus the minority of calm, rational, objective people who can discount it.
Marx did follow the labor theory of value - as did virtually every major economist (or as they put it probably better back then, student of political economy) before Marx, who also believed it. Marx credits another revolutionary for discovering the labor theory of value - Benjamin Franklin. There were a few proto-papers on subjective theory of value, but an alternative theory of value did not even really exist before Capital was published.
Labor theory of value was the theory of Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and all the major economists before Marx. And Marx accepted what they accepted.
Alternative theories of value were not really fleshed out until after Marx published Capital.
So consider all of this when he categorizes the idea of the labor theory of value as extremist, radical, Marxist etc.
According to this article, believing that a carpenter banging wood and nails into a table creates value is an extremist belief. Even though pretty much every major economist before Marx believed the same thing.
Ps. This was told to you by myself - from one the 1% of people who know this stuff
Pps. If you didn't read the article, you would not know I am referring to myself as part of an elite 1% of knowledge sarcastically
The geocentric model was thought to be true for literally thousands of years by every astronomer and scientist. Today if someone claimed the geocentric model was true, we would consider it an extremist belief - even though pretty much every major astronomer believed it for thousands of years.
Equating Marxism to labor theory of value is akin to maybe equating economics to a supply/demand curve.
There are unequivocally true parts of Marxism, such as surplus value of labor, and the fundamental incentive conflict between a capital owner and laborer (which Marx deems exploitation)
The labor theory of value is also I think misinterpreted by modern economists as a price-setting mechanism, which it isn't. It's a mechanism to show that there is a certain floor on value of an economic good, which is raised every time constructive labor is applied to a product.
The problem is that this argument is circular: whether the labor is "constructive" gets judged by whether it succeeded in adding value.
Smith can be forgiven for giving an unsatisfactory answer to his own water-diamond paradox, as he preceded Marx by almost a century. But the originators of the formal theory of marginalism (Jevons, Menger and Walras — you likely know the first for his paradox) were roughly contemporary with Marx; they published their work only a few years after the first volume of Das Kapital, and well before Engels could publish the rest. The roots of the theory can be traced to Italian mercantilists contemporary with Smith, and even a bit further to Bernoulli (yes, the mathematician, the actually-turns-out-to-be-wrong explanation of wing lift guy).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism
More importantly, "believing that a carpenter banging wood and nails into a table creates value" is a strawman version of LVT that none of the people you mentioned would actually espouse, including Marx; and it is extremist, as it pays no heed to issues of either quality or utility, never mind market demand.
I can’t think of a belief I currently hold - other than more instinctive ones like children’s welfare - and that I cannot critique or find flaws in. If I you push me, I might even find inconsistencies there.
Although I agree with the author for the inverse. E.g. I haven’t heard a non-religious or non-grifter argument about AI safety, so far. But I shouldn’t conclude it’s crazy. I haven’t heard of an argument for effective altruism that is even remotely altruistic or one that is not a legitimization of libertarian-style support for social injustice. But maybe I only heard crappy arguments.
People who benefit from a system are unlikely to look for problems with it and unlikely to notice any contradictions. Anything which appears as a contradiction gets shrugged off as "Well, there must be a good reason, I'm not an expert. I will trust the experts." These people corrupt Occam's Razor that the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. "The experts say ..." becomes the ultimate simplest explanation to everything... And the experts that they choose to listen to are those who are aligned with their existing beliefs.
Then you have people who notice the contradictions but they see so many from first-hand experience that they don't trust the experts and they don't have access to enough different information to be able to choose a good one; so they just adopt the least-bad one as their own... The one which best protects their self-image and whose (comparatively) few contradictions can be plausibly explained away by corruption, conspiracy or dishonesty.
But I think the latter group is in fact one step closer to the truth. The truth is there is no conspiracy (at least no grand, all-encompassing one), it's worse than that; systemic incentives create alignment and remove the need for intentional coordination. The coordination, the illusion of conspiracy is just a byproduct of incentives. The second group of people are wrong about the mechanism but their view of reality leads to the same outcome... So with each passing year, their views are being reinforced by more "proof."
The system which manufactures the incentives which create alignment is itself probably not the product of conspiracy; it's just a system which evolved slowly over time to subtly serve its operators and their supporters. They don't want to change it, not out of nefariousness, but out of justified fear of what havoc any change might wreck... Bureaucracy also plays a part.
It's very difficult to co-ordinate a lot of people to agree on anything, let alone act on it. This is one thing that the mainstream anti-conspiracy folks are completely right about.
I'm a global top-50-university-credentialed expert in Information Technology who majored in System Design and has worked for a wide range of companies of different sizes, in multiple industries (education, remote work platforms, social media, banking/finance), in multiple countries including in highly political areas like crypto... So the "trust the experts" folk can trust me when it comes to information flows and system design...
That's not to say my beliefs are exhaustively battle-tested and correct; maybe other people have information that I'm missing but in my role as a software engineer working across multiple industries and some politically sensitive projects, I've had access to information and first-hand experiences that most other people haven't.
The thing is; if I told the average person what I witnessed without providing any interpretation, they would doubt the basic facts because some of what I experienced doesn't make sense when measured against mainstream narratives and most people's day-to-day experiences.
For example, about the crypto/blockchain sector; when I tell people about my experiences, outsiders often say stuff like "The founders behaved this way because of hype and irrationality of the markets" but when you've been through it every day for 2 years and experienced the taboos inside the company, seen the suppression of projects and community members, following a clear, predictable, repeated pattern, it's impossible to believe that it is random or irrational.
Perhaps everyone is irrational?
How we would know otherwise if we can make irrational things rational just by thinking about them hard enough?
For most of my contrarian ideologies, they are harmful to me in most ways except "Protects my ego by redefining personal failings as system failings." Most of my contrarian ideologies have this characteristic but this point has been getting weaker over time; I don't have much pride left. I'm literally working for a bank now.
Or maybe I work for a bank just to prove to myself that I don't care about pride? Getting kind of elaborate.
Exactly.
Which is why it's so infuriating to see people dismiss ideas they don't like as "conspiracy theories" even when they clearly don't involve conspiracy.
That said,
> Rational people will pick the ideology which has the fewest contradictions. Irrational people will choose that which serves them best.
This is only first-order rationality. "Choosing what serves you best" is rational insofar as it is rational to seek the best outcome for yourself. The key definition of "rational" here is (per M-W) "Consistent with or based on reason or good judgment; logical or sensible"; but what is sensible or well-judged depends entirely on your goals.
On the general topic, most people do not have arguments and they do not know how to construct one. They cannot articulate what they believe, since they don’t really know what they believe. Most things people say are just stuff copied from whatever TV-show or meme they saw last. However, if you go around starting discussions on politics with ”what are the three branches of government” most people who actually understand the topic just walk away. I also don’t think ”hey everybody must he stupid except me” explains how people radicalise - or whatever ”idelogically crazy” means. Rather it tells more about the writer and his… problem.
I have another suggestion: just fuckin listen. A truck driver or a cleaning lady might have very original and interesting ideas about the world, if you just shut the fuck up and let them talk. Then there’s about quadrillion firebrands across the internet shouting at a video camera almost none of which are worth your time.
How do we know this? Because capitalists demonstrably and objectively behave as though they have class solidarity. Yes, they compete in the market and even through political corruption, but they are very organized and committed to basic principles that benefit all capitalists: anti-labor policies, weak anti-corruption laws and enforcement, tax breaks and loopholes, etc. They have lots of money, so they obviously support policies that make it easier to transmute money into power over others. This is not ideological, but a matter of material class interests. Musk's "makers vs takers" framing is Marxism, but from the point of view of a capitalist.
Likewise, it's totally possible to be a middle-class anti-labor Marxist. Marxism is only a lens to look at things through, and what it ultimately says is about the class position of whoever is looking through it. It's about identifying what one's interests are, not necessarily a prescription of what to do about it.
No; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value is an established term and has been for centuries.
> what is wrong about the concept of surplus value and labour power? ...what social/economic theory falsifies or even contradicts the concept of labour power and surplus value and in what way?
The theory has also been superseded for centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism