I think a lot of the disagreement between the left and the right boils down to disagreement about the appropriate form of the social welfare function. I think this applies not just to economic issues but also issues of gender and race.
I’ll be honest, it was really difficult for me to understand the linked wiki page. (I need to learn economics...) It sounds like what you’re saying is maybe leftists tend to inherently value socioeconomic equality more than rightists do? But… I don’t understand how this applies to race and gender.
(This is of interest to me because I’m currently politically agnostic and I plan on someday doing an unbiased inquiry in order to figure out what my views should be. Knowing what the disagreement between the left and the right stems from would be very useful.)
As for your last point, I can definitely see why privileged people would need emotional arguments to understand how marginalized people suffer. I think here on LW we have a perhaps deserved mistrust of emotional appeals in moral tradeoffs—we all know about scope insensitivity and how one dying child feels more painful than seven. The logical brain really does better than the emotional brain on this kind of stuff a lot of the time. But on the other hand, I can see how maybe I, a man, value sexual harassment as −5 utilons, whereas if I take the time to read an article explaining how sexual harassment feels from a female perspective I will realize that it should be more like −15 utilons. So my utilitarian math will be off unless I re-calibrate.
I disagree though that it’s necessarily a difficult thing to do on LessWrong. Well, perhaps difficult, but definitely not impossible. I remember a blog post by Yvain where he was talking about unemployment, and at the beginning he linked to an article of some woman’s experience in a terrible job, saying “read this first to get an emotional calibration for just how terrible minimum wage jobs can be”. I don’t see why we can’t do the same here. It’s not that hard to find stories of marginalized people’s experiences on the Internet now that Tumblr SJ is becoming such a thing.
I’ll be honest, it was really difficult for me to understand the linked wiki page. (I need to learn economics...) It sounds like what you’re saying is maybe leftists tend to inherently value socioeconomic equality more than rightists do? But… I don’t understand how this applies to race and gender.
(This is of interest to me because I’m currently politically agnostic and I plan on someday doing an unbiased inquiry in order to figure out what my views should be. Knowing what the disagreement between the left and the right stems from would be very useful.)
As for your last point, I can definitely see why privileged people would need emotional arguments to understand how marginalized people suffer. I think here on LW we have a perhaps deserved mistrust of emotional appeals in moral tradeoffs—we all know about scope insensitivity and how one dying child feels more painful than seven. The logical brain really does better than the emotional brain on this kind of stuff a lot of the time. But on the other hand, I can see how maybe I, a man, value sexual harassment as −5 utilons, whereas if I take the time to read an article explaining how sexual harassment feels from a female perspective I will realize that it should be more like −15 utilons. So my utilitarian math will be off unless I re-calibrate.
I disagree though that it’s necessarily a difficult thing to do on LessWrong. Well, perhaps difficult, but definitely not impossible. I remember a blog post by Yvain where he was talking about unemployment, and at the beginning he linked to an article of some woman’s experience in a terrible job, saying “read this first to get an emotional calibration for just how terrible minimum wage jobs can be”. I don’t see why we can’t do the same here. It’s not that hard to find stories of marginalized people’s experiences on the Internet now that Tumblr SJ is becoming such a thing.