Insightful. Why do you think most people seem to be like that?.. Is there a particular challenge in imagining something that hasn’t been experienced before? Is there a hard wiring of reacting to immediate feelings to seek pleasure or avoid pain (i.e., do humans have a baked-in preference for acting based on the localized “delta” that will be generated)?
Hey pa, thanks. You and I have talked a bit before about hedonic treadmill/renormalization stuff. I think a lot of this arises from that. If you were a progressive in the 90s, you had a lot of things to be upset about, and then when concrete policy changes happened, it was easier just to remember being upset than to remember what exactly your complaints were. People vote with their gut, and their gut can only speak in degrees of "more" or "less," not "the tax rate for my bracket should be exactly 24.3%" or anything like that.
Very much appreciate you adding this perspective. When I ran this post through ChatGPT and asked "am I making sense here?" it said something along the lines of "you're being pretty uncharitable, the parties do have real goals, even if they're a bit diffuse." And I said, "wow, it'd be so much work to address that, fuck you," and hit publish.
But now you've done like three-quarters of that work for me! So here's my fill-in of the last quarter:
Yes, I think the root of my anger comes from the two-party system. Whatever modal ideologies people do have all get jumbled together and lost. The bigger problem, though, is that we give the jumble one name and then put that name in our Twitter bios and say "I'm on Team Blue", when Team Blue actually points at fifteen different semi-conflicting modal ideologies.
Sure, theoretically, most people are actually doing the extra work of deciding which modal ideologies under Team Blue's banner they believe in behind the scenes. Theoretically! But the feeling I get when I argue with people is that they just haven't done that.
Someone caused this problem when they called "progressivism" an ideology and said that was the one they adhered to. Because I'm now often talking to Team Blue people who only believe in "more" and Team Red people who only believe in "less." (And then most independents say they don't believe in either, but actually just oscillate between the two based on vibes, what Joe Rogan says, or how much eggs cost.)
I don't know what the solution is on the social scale—probably any time that you try to collect enough people to be a political force under one banner, this is bound to happen. But on the individual level, it sure seems worth encouraging people to think more modally.
Insightful. Why do you think most people seem to be like that?.. Is there a particular challenge in imagining something that hasn’t been experienced before? Is there a hard wiring of reacting to immediate feelings to seek pleasure or avoid pain (i.e., do humans have a baked-in preference for acting based on the localized “delta” that will be generated)?
Hey pa, thanks. You and I have talked a bit before about hedonic treadmill/renormalization stuff. I think a lot of this arises from that. If you were a progressive in the 90s, you had a lot of things to be upset about, and then when concrete policy changes happened, it was easier just to remember being upset than to remember what exactly your complaints were. People vote with their gut, and their gut can only speak in degrees of "more" or "less," not "the tax rate for my bracket should be exactly 24.3%" or anything like that.
Vitalik Buterin wrote some interesting stuff on more nuanced classifications. For example: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/12/19/bullveto.html
Very much appreciate you adding this perspective. When I ran this post through ChatGPT and asked "am I making sense here?" it said something along the lines of "you're being pretty uncharitable, the parties do have real goals, even if they're a bit diffuse." And I said, "wow, it'd be so much work to address that, fuck you," and hit publish.
But now you've done like three-quarters of that work for me! So here's my fill-in of the last quarter:
Yes, I think the root of my anger comes from the two-party system. Whatever modal ideologies people do have all get jumbled together and lost. The bigger problem, though, is that we give the jumble one name and then put that name in our Twitter bios and say "I'm on Team Blue", when Team Blue actually points at fifteen different semi-conflicting modal ideologies.
Sure, theoretically, most people are actually doing the extra work of deciding which modal ideologies under Team Blue's banner they believe in behind the scenes. Theoretically! But the feeling I get when I argue with people is that they just haven't done that.
Someone caused this problem when they called "progressivism" an ideology and said that was the one they adhered to. Because I'm now often talking to Team Blue people who only believe in "more" and Team Red people who only believe in "less." (And then most independents say they don't believe in either, but actually just oscillate between the two based on vibes, what Joe Rogan says, or how much eggs cost.)
I don't know what the solution is on the social scale—probably any time that you try to collect enough people to be a political force under one banner, this is bound to happen. But on the individual level, it sure seems worth encouraging people to think more modally.