It is probably a very bad idea for me to make my first post in reply to something that is blatantly political, on a site which quite actively discourages it, but I’m not very rational. You see, I would probably consider myself more of a liberal than a conservative. I have even attended meetings of feminist organizations, which means that I am a very irrational type of bumbling fool. Nevertheless, I assure you that I would indeed question the ethics of putting kittens in blenders. I would also question the effectiveness of putting kittens in blenders as a means to solve sexism. However, I have never seen such a position proposed before and would be rather shocked to be called an “evil sexist”, even by radical feminists who I do not tend to agree with, for opposing the practice.
Perhaps everything you say is true. Perhaps there is something in liberals that makes us more tribal than the average human being. I would freely admit to being more irrational than rational most of the time. When someone not of my tribe says something I find horrific, my emotions tend to make me go “damn their entire tribe for only they would think such things”, rather than “I disagree with the point this individual is making, though I am sure it is not held by everyone else in his tribe and I am sure there are converse examples of people who have reached the same conclusion in my tribe”.
I see that the inferences you have drawn from your experience at a large number of liberal events and a large number of conservative events have led you to the conclusion that “ONLY liberals and those that think like them seem prone to thinking “everyone is full of evil prejudice except my tribe”. I would have thought that a statement of such strength, particularly since it uses the word ONLY, would require much more than the anecdotal experiences of one individual in order to justifiably reject the null hypothesis. Perhaps you have done many statistical studies on this that I am unaware of. Perhaps you have assumed knowledge of your studies is common among Less Wrong contributors (and I would admit that the average LW contributor is smarter than me, so it’s not too much of a stretch). Indeed, you may have constructed your priors in a completely impartial manner and may indeed be completely justified in assuming the truth of your alternative hypothesis. Nevertheless, I am a little skeptical of the reliability of the methods you used for arriving at the conclusion of attributing this quality to “ONLY liberals and those who think like them”,as opposed to “MOSTLY liberals and those who think like them”
Unsurprisingly, I have a number of issues with that sentence which are not just political. The set which includes “liberals and those who think like them” is not very well defined. I imagine a liberal thinks more like a conservative than a dog thinks like a liberal or a conservative. Consequently, your set could be defined to include everything within the set “conscious human beings”, as conscious human beings are certainly things which tend to think like other human beings. However, it is very clear from context that this is not what you mean. Do libertarians think like liberals? I imagine many libertarians would say “yes, on a lot of things, but not on many other things. On other things, I tend to think like a conservative”. but, clearly, your additional qualifier of “those who think like them” was included specify that you were not talking about only liberals. Do socialists think like liberals? I imagine a conservative would often say “yes, they do. They both tend to want more government intervention”. Conversely, I think a socialist might say “no, liberals believe in private ownership of the means of production. I believe that system is inherently unjust”. The vast majority of anarchists, as the forms of anarchism which have their origins in the labour movement, i.e. those advocating social anarchism are still the most common form of anarchism from a worldwide perspective. These anarchists would in fact see themselves as thinking more like orthodox Marxists than US conservatives. They would differ very strongly over the “statist” notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but would have similar long term ends. This puts the conservative who defines his conservatism as an ideology of “less government” in contrast to liberals and socialists in an odd position. You see, if he is not of a very extreme persuasion and is a believer in western democracy in its current form, it would probably be safe to say that he thinks more like liberals and democratic socialists than he thinks like a revolutionary social anarchist. So, defining who exactly thinks like a liberal, but is not actually a liberal is not an easy task. I believe there is a great deal of literature in linguistics and the philosophy of language dealing with the concept of “like” how difficult it actually is to categorize one thing as beinglike another thing. Trying to define an agent whichthinks like another agent seems, if anything, even more difficult.
Did you perhaps come up with a technical definition of for the set of people defined as “liberal or thinks like a liberal”. Did you create questionnaires with a number of propositions associated with the ideology “liberalism” and give them to people in the circles you mentioned, so that you could, to some extent, identify those who were of the set “think like liberals” in non-liberal groups. Perhaps you used a ratio of 13 positive answers to 20 negative answers as a minimum benchmark for those who “think like[ liberals]”. Were there questions on these sheets which were similar in form to “if you could stop sexism by putting kittens in a blender, would you put kittens in a blender?” and “in such circumstances, would you treat anyone stopping you from putting kittens in a blender as the enemy?”. If people in the “liberals and those who think like them group” did answer positively to both of those questions, I would be fairly surprised.
But maybe you have just let political hyperbole get in the way of presenting a potentially more persuasive argument. There is probably a good case to be made for comparatively stronger tribal sentiments in liberals. After all, individualism is a fundamental part of modern day conservatism, but is no longer considered a key component of liberalism. Now liberals are associated with more collectivist values. Consequently, it would not be surprising if studies showed that liberals had emotionally stronger collectivist tendencies than conservatives. Indeed, I think one could be justified in assuming a prior probability of greater than .5 that more collectivist tendencies would be found in liberals than in conservatives if we use the US definition of those terms.
In conclusion, if you had just said something along the lines of “In my own experience, individuals of a liberal political persuasion tend to have stronger views concerning moral judgment of their opponents. Has anyone else noticed this or am I the only one? If not, are there probable cognitive causes behind this”? At least that would have seemed more rational. It would have seemed more like something that belongs on Less Wrong. Presenting your argument in that form might have spared you some of that negative karma. If emotions were not getting in your way, maybe you would have noticed that your argument would seem out of place on this website, particularly when you decided to capitalize EVIL PREJUDICE. You might also have realized that when your accusation levied at a political group was questioned, you merely resorted to stronger hyperbole involving kittens in blenders. Your argument had become a soldier and you decided that you should try to save it by resorting to an argument that was even more absurd and hyperbolic.
I’ve looked at some of your previous contributions and you are clearly intelligent, so I don’t doubt that you probably had a valid point to make. You just could have made it better. You must have noticed that some of your statements just don’t fit the accepted rules of discourse on this site.
I never interpreted MixedNuts’ statement as entailing that liberals have stronger tribal sentiments. Rather, I interpreted it as being that accusing others of prejudice, and jumping on people who oppose proposed solutions to combat prejudice even if the solutions aren’t very good, are distinctly liberal tribal phenomena. A comparable tribal behavior that you would be likely to see among conservatives, but unlikely to see among liberals, would be accusing people of being “unpatriotic.”
Point taken. In hindsight I also seem to have gotten a bit carried away with the above post. I would, however, hold that there are many social/political/religious groups that have a remarkable tendency to see everyone except themselves as remarkably prejudiced because their worldview is not shared. Nevertheless, continuing down this road is not likely to be very productive.
I vote that we abandon ship and shift our attentions back to topics like rationality techniques, game theory, friendly AI and meta-ethics, where we can think more clearly.
It is probably a very bad idea for me to make my first post in reply to something that is blatantly political, on a site which quite actively discourages it, but I’m not very rational. You see, I would probably consider myself more of a liberal than a conservative. I have even attended meetings of feminist organizations, which means that I am a very irrational type of bumbling fool. Nevertheless, I assure you that I would indeed question the ethics of putting kittens in blenders. I would also question the effectiveness of putting kittens in blenders as a means to solve sexism. However, I have never seen such a position proposed before and would be rather shocked to be called an “evil sexist”, even by radical feminists who I do not tend to agree with, for opposing the practice.
Perhaps everything you say is true. Perhaps there is something in liberals that makes us more tribal than the average human being. I would freely admit to being more irrational than rational most of the time. When someone not of my tribe says something I find horrific, my emotions tend to make me go “damn their entire tribe for only they would think such things”, rather than “I disagree with the point this individual is making, though I am sure it is not held by everyone else in his tribe and I am sure there are converse examples of people who have reached the same conclusion in my tribe”.
I see that the inferences you have drawn from your experience at a large number of liberal events and a large number of conservative events have led you to the conclusion that “ONLY liberals and those that think like them seem prone to thinking “everyone is full of evil prejudice except my tribe”. I would have thought that a statement of such strength, particularly since it uses the word ONLY, would require much more than the anecdotal experiences of one individual in order to justifiably reject the null hypothesis. Perhaps you have done many statistical studies on this that I am unaware of. Perhaps you have assumed knowledge of your studies is common among Less Wrong contributors (and I would admit that the average LW contributor is smarter than me, so it’s not too much of a stretch). Indeed, you may have constructed your priors in a completely impartial manner and may indeed be completely justified in assuming the truth of your alternative hypothesis. Nevertheless, I am a little skeptical of the reliability of the methods you used for arriving at the conclusion of attributing this quality to “ONLY liberals and those who think like them”,as opposed to “MOSTLY liberals and those who think like them”
Unsurprisingly, I have a number of issues with that sentence which are not just political. The set which includes “liberals and those who think like them” is not very well defined. I imagine a liberal thinks more like a conservative than a dog thinks like a liberal or a conservative. Consequently, your set could be defined to include everything within the set “conscious human beings”, as conscious human beings are certainly things which tend to think like other human beings. However, it is very clear from context that this is not what you mean. Do libertarians think like liberals? I imagine many libertarians would say “yes, on a lot of things, but not on many other things. On other things, I tend to think like a conservative”. but, clearly, your additional qualifier of “those who think like them” was included specify that you were not talking about only liberals. Do socialists think like liberals? I imagine a conservative would often say “yes, they do. They both tend to want more government intervention”. Conversely, I think a socialist might say “no, liberals believe in private ownership of the means of production. I believe that system is inherently unjust”. The vast majority of anarchists, as the forms of anarchism which have their origins in the labour movement, i.e. those advocating social anarchism are still the most common form of anarchism from a worldwide perspective. These anarchists would in fact see themselves as thinking more like orthodox Marxists than US conservatives. They would differ very strongly over the “statist” notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but would have similar long term ends. This puts the conservative who defines his conservatism as an ideology of “less government” in contrast to liberals and socialists in an odd position. You see, if he is not of a very extreme persuasion and is a believer in western democracy in its current form, it would probably be safe to say that he thinks more like liberals and democratic socialists than he thinks like a revolutionary social anarchist. So, defining who exactly thinks like a liberal, but is not actually a liberal is not an easy task. I believe there is a great deal of literature in linguistics and the philosophy of language dealing with the concept of “like” how difficult it actually is to categorize one thing as beinglike another thing. Trying to define an agent whichthinks like another agent seems, if anything, even more difficult.
Did you perhaps come up with a technical definition of for the set of people defined as “liberal or thinks like a liberal”. Did you create questionnaires with a number of propositions associated with the ideology “liberalism” and give them to people in the circles you mentioned, so that you could, to some extent, identify those who were of the set “think like liberals” in non-liberal groups. Perhaps you used a ratio of 13 positive answers to 20 negative answers as a minimum benchmark for those who “think like[ liberals]”. Were there questions on these sheets which were similar in form to “if you could stop sexism by putting kittens in a blender, would you put kittens in a blender?” and “in such circumstances, would you treat anyone stopping you from putting kittens in a blender as the enemy?”. If people in the “liberals and those who think like them group” did answer positively to both of those questions, I would be fairly surprised.
But maybe you have just let political hyperbole get in the way of presenting a potentially more persuasive argument. There is probably a good case to be made for comparatively stronger tribal sentiments in liberals. After all, individualism is a fundamental part of modern day conservatism, but is no longer considered a key component of liberalism. Now liberals are associated with more collectivist values. Consequently, it would not be surprising if studies showed that liberals had emotionally stronger collectivist tendencies than conservatives. Indeed, I think one could be justified in assuming a prior probability of greater than .5 that more collectivist tendencies would be found in liberals than in conservatives if we use the US definition of those terms.
In conclusion, if you had just said something along the lines of “In my own experience, individuals of a liberal political persuasion tend to have stronger views concerning moral judgment of their opponents. Has anyone else noticed this or am I the only one? If not, are there probable cognitive causes behind this”? At least that would have seemed more rational. It would have seemed more like something that belongs on Less Wrong. Presenting your argument in that form might have spared you some of that negative karma. If emotions were not getting in your way, maybe you would have noticed that your argument would seem out of place on this website, particularly when you decided to capitalize EVIL PREJUDICE. You might also have realized that when your accusation levied at a political group was questioned, you merely resorted to stronger hyperbole involving kittens in blenders. Your argument had become a soldier and you decided that you should try to save it by resorting to an argument that was even more absurd and hyperbolic.
I’ve looked at some of your previous contributions and you are clearly intelligent, so I don’t doubt that you probably had a valid point to make. You just could have made it better. You must have noticed that some of your statements just don’t fit the accepted rules of discourse on this site.
I never interpreted MixedNuts’ statement as entailing that liberals have stronger tribal sentiments. Rather, I interpreted it as being that accusing others of prejudice, and jumping on people who oppose proposed solutions to combat prejudice even if the solutions aren’t very good, are distinctly liberal tribal phenomena. A comparable tribal behavior that you would be likely to see among conservatives, but unlikely to see among liberals, would be accusing people of being “unpatriotic.”
Point taken. In hindsight I also seem to have gotten a bit carried away with the above post. I would, however, hold that there are many social/political/religious groups that have a remarkable tendency to see everyone except themselves as remarkably prejudiced because their worldview is not shared. Nevertheless, continuing down this road is not likely to be very productive.
I vote that we abandon ship and shift our attentions back to topics like rationality techniques, game theory, friendly AI and meta-ethics, where we can think more clearly.
Yeah, it was probably a bad idea, but damn I enjoyed reading it.