Actually, upon reconsideration you were right all along: the characterization of conservatives was uncharitably strawmannish. My apologies for both this, and for not admitting it earlier: your original comment was so aggressively hostile that I was automatically put on the defensive, without giving your criticism the proper consideration.
I’ve gotten comments on my tone before, and in this case I’d say there’s more justification than usual—more justification for some hostility, and more justification for noting it.
Yes, I was feeling hostile. But it wasn’t really as much about what you said as the general reaction to it. You were unfairly casting your political opponents not just as wrong, but as morally reprehensible. But that really isn’t that big a deal. Obviously, it’s uncalled for, but who doesn’t take a cheap shot at the Enemy every now and again?
What was disappointing, and frustrating, is to see no one call you on it. I looked before I posted. To the contrary, you were upvoted to the moon and applauded on all sides. That’s no longer an oopsie, a slip up—that’s a pattern. And when I get karma hammered when I call you on it, that’s a pattern too. And when people rush to defend the indefensible, that’s a pattern too.
I’ve seen the pattern before on this list. I’ve seen the pattern before in the world. EY had Harry expound on the patterns in Slytherin—the pattern of people desperate to hate. I don’t see that in liberals. But I see something similar—a pattern of people desperate for someone to look down on, someone to sneer at, and that there is any justification for that sneering is simply beside the point.
You don’t strike me as someone desperate to sneer. Some liberals seem desperate to sneer, and some don’t. But get enough of them together, and even those who don’t, say these kinds of things, and everyone goes along. Similar kinds of Group Sneer may exist on the right, but I’ve never really come across it up close and personal.
Where ever it comes from, I’m not digging it. I think it’s particular shameful on this list, with airs to overcoming bias. People here should know better and do better.
You were casting unfairly casting your political opponents not just as wrong, but as morally reprehensible.
Right—and the interesting thing is, I had no idea that I was doing it, and in fact was trying to do the opposite. I did my best to take extreme viewpoints like “eating meat is like committing genocide” and “everyone should be converted or they’ll go to hell” and attempted to portray them as psychologically no different from any other belief. But although I think I did okay with that, an uncharitable and exaggerated strawman still managed to slip in earlier on.
For the most part, I think it’s just about the general ingroup-outgroup tendency in humans, and the desire to look down on any outgroups. But as for that bias slipping into my writing, even when I was explicitly trying to avoid it—that seems to have more to do with the way that most of our thought and behavior is built on subconscious systems, with conscious thought only playing a small role. Or to use Jonathan Haidt’s analogy, the conscious mind is the rider of an elephant:
’m holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I’m no match for him.
...The controlled system [can be] seen as an advisor. It’s a rider placed on the elephant’s back to help the elephant make better choices. The rider can see farther into the future, and the rider can learn valuable information by talking to other riders or by reading maps, but the rider cannot order the elephant around against its will...
...The elephant, in contrast, is everything else. The elephant includes gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions, and intuitions that comprise much of the automatic system. The elephant and the rider each have their own intelligence, and when they work together well they enable the unique brilliance of human beings. But they don’t always work together well.
That elephant is very eager to pick up on all sorts of connotations and biases from its social environment, and if we spend a lot of time in an environment where a specific group (conservatives, say) frequently gets bashed, then we’ll start to imitate that behavior ourselves—automatically and almost as a reflex, and sometimes even when we think that we’re doing the exact opposite.
It is a pity that this kind of a bias hasn’t really been discussed much on LW. Probably because the original sequences drew most heavily upon cognitive psychology and math, whereas this kind of bias has been mostly explored in social psychology and the humanities.
I remember coming across this paper during my PhD, and it provides a somewhat game theoretic analysis of in-group out-group bias, which is still fairly easy to follow. The paper is mainly about the implications for conflict resolution, as the authors are lecturers in business an law, so it should be of interest to those seeking to improve their rationality (particularly where keeping ones cool in arguments is involved), which is why we are here after all.
I’ve been thinking about doing my first mainspace post for LessWrong soon. Perhaps I could use it to address this. Unfortunately I’ve forgotten a very famous social psychology experiment wherein one group (group A) was allowed to dictate their preferred wage difference between their group and and another group (group B). They chose the option which gave them the least in an absolute sense because the option gave them more than group B by comparison. They were divided according to profession. It’s a very famous experiment, so I’m sure someone here will know it.
Unfortunately I’ve forgotten a very famous social psychology experiment wherein one group (group A) was allowed to dictate their preferred wage difference between their group and and another group (group B). They chose the option which gave them the least in an absolute sense because the option gave them more than group B by comparison. They were divided according to profession. It’s a very famous experiment, so I’m sure someone here will know it.
In Irrationality, Sutherland cites Brown (1978, “Divided we fall: An analysis of relations between sections of a factory workforce”) and states:
In real life, the rivalry between groups may be so irrational that each may try to do the other down even at its own expense. In an aircraft factory in Britain the toolroom workers received a weekly wage very slightly higher than that of the production workers. In wage negotiations the toolroom shop stewards tried to preserve this differential, even when by so doing they would receive a smaller wage themselves. They preferred a settlement that gave them £67.30 a week and the production workers a pound less, to one that gave them an extra two pounds (£69.30) but gave the production workers more (£70.30).
An intriguing aspect of the early data on minimal categorization was the importance of the strategy maximizing the difference between the awards made to the ingroup and the outgroup even at the cost of giving thereby less to members of the ingroup. This finding was replicated in a field study (Brown 1978) in which shop stewards representing different trades unions in a large factory filled distribution matrices which specified their preferred structure of comparative wages for members of the unions involved. It was not, however, replicated in another field study in Britain (Bourhis & Hill 1982) in which similar matrices were completed by polytechnic and university teachers.
A brief look at recent studies seems to suggest a more nuanced relation, but I’m not familiar with the literature. See, e.g., Card et al. (2010).
Right—and the interesting thing is, I had no idea that I was doing it, and in fact was trying to do the opposite.
I didn’t think you were particularly trying to do it—it just came out.
I did my best to take extreme viewpoints like “eating meat is like committing genocide” and “everyone should be converted or they’ll go to hell” and attempted to portray them as psychologically no different from any other belief.
People keep saying that this is what you were trying to do. I think that misses the punchline, which is something else:
My point isn’t that we should accept the conservative argument. Of course we should reject it—my liberal moral intuitions say so. But we can’t in all honestly claim an objective moral high ground. If we are to be honest to ourselves, we will accept that yes, we are pushing our moral beliefs on them—just as they are pushing their moral beliefs on us. And we will hope that our moral beliefs win.
Basically, you’re encouraging liberals to enforce their moral beliefs on others. And in that argument, even if you hadn’t slipped into unfair characterizations, choosing the most extreme beliefs of your opponents gives the implicit options of liberals force their morals on others, or these crazies do. That false alternative clearly serves the quoted thesis.
And while you paint your opponents in the worst light, you inaccurately paint liberals in a rosier than life hue:
But it would be more honest to admit that we actually want to let everyone live the way they want to, as long as they don’t things we consider “really wrong”
In a previous comment, I pointed out that it’s just not true that liberals limit use of coercive force to what is “seriously wrong”. Force will be used for the most minor and trifling issues. Half of New York Democrats were in favor of a ban on sugary drinks over 16 ounces, while the vast majority of other New Yorkers were against it.
It is a pity that this kind of a bias hasn’t really been discussed much on LW.
Perhaps the general avoidance of politics (though no one complained when you did it) likewise puts a damper on metapolitical talk, barring the real world data points from which one could generalize.
People keep saying that this is what you were trying to do. I think that misses the punchline, which is something else:
That was mostly just intended to make clear that, well, I didn’t think that we should accept conservative arguments as being just as good as liberal ones. Since most of the post was (intended to be) quite sympathetic towards conservatives, it would have been easy for people to get the wrong impression.
In a previous comment, I pointed out that it’s just not true that liberals limit use of coercive force to what is “seriously wrong”.
True, though liberals do think that they do. But yes, that could probably have been worded more accurately. Which really just strenghtens the thesis of the post—that even though the liberals claim to only want to restrict things that they consider really wrong, most of them want to impose just as much control on the lives of others as the conservatives do...
that even though the liberals claim to only want to restrict things that they consider really wrong, most of them want to impose just as much control on the lives of others as the conservatives do...
Notice how this statement sidesteps another alternative—that liberals want to impose more control than conservatives do?
That has always been my perception as a libertarian in the US, and I think it is shared by most US libertarians, who tend to lean right because of it.
An even more unfavorable comparison that you don’t discuss is the obvious one—that liberals certainly want to impose more control than libertarians do.
The essay was not using the framing of “wishing to impose control”, but “wishing to push one’s morality on others”. These are somewhat related, but different. E.g. libertarians are pushing their morality on others when they say that everyone should be as free as possible, when both liberals and conservatives are likely to say that everyone shouldn’t be as free as possible.
I got the language of imposing control from you in the quote I gave:
most of them want to impose just as much control
One of the issues that I never got to was how you used “pushing morality” in two fundamentally different senses: 1) persuading others to adopt your moral values (as immediately above) and 2) using coercive force to impose your moral values on others, and you do when referring to numerous cases of using the force of law to impose moral values on other people.
But I wasn’t as clear as I should have been. It’s not just that liberals want to impose more control, it’s that they attempt to impose more control, and are too often successful at it.
Comparisons of exactly which group seeks to control others the most would be going beyond the scope of the essay. Especially since part of the whole point of the essay was that there isn’t any objective criteria of “control” that everyone would agree upon, essentially making any such comparisons meaningless. Also, coarse terms like “liberals” and “conservatives” (as well as “libertarians”) work fine if we’re only making general statements, but in reality they’re all heterogeneous groups. Figuring out exactly which proposals can be fairly attributed to the whole of the group would be as much work as comparing those proposals in the first place.
You’re right that saying something about libertarianism would probably have been a good idea, though. It doesn’t seem to me like they would be immune to the “want to control others” charge, though—the essence of having a political agenda is that you want to influence how others behave. In particular, libertarians seem excessively focused on negative liberties, and one could probably make the argument that they’re seeking to control others by effectively reducing the positive liberties that most people would want to have. But I don’t really know that movement well enough to make a fair commentary about them, so I left that out.
Actually, upon reconsideration you were right all along: the characterization of conservatives was uncharitably strawmannish. My apologies for both this, and for not admitting it earlier: your original comment was so aggressively hostile that I was automatically put on the defensive, without giving your criticism the proper consideration.
I’ve gotten comments on my tone before, and in this case I’d say there’s more justification than usual—more justification for some hostility, and more justification for noting it.
Yes, I was feeling hostile. But it wasn’t really as much about what you said as the general reaction to it. You were unfairly casting your political opponents not just as wrong, but as morally reprehensible. But that really isn’t that big a deal. Obviously, it’s uncalled for, but who doesn’t take a cheap shot at the Enemy every now and again?
What was disappointing, and frustrating, is to see no one call you on it. I looked before I posted. To the contrary, you were upvoted to the moon and applauded on all sides. That’s no longer an oopsie, a slip up—that’s a pattern. And when I get karma hammered when I call you on it, that’s a pattern too. And when people rush to defend the indefensible, that’s a pattern too.
I’ve seen the pattern before on this list. I’ve seen the pattern before in the world. EY had Harry expound on the patterns in Slytherin—the pattern of people desperate to hate. I don’t see that in liberals. But I see something similar—a pattern of people desperate for someone to look down on, someone to sneer at, and that there is any justification for that sneering is simply beside the point.
You don’t strike me as someone desperate to sneer. Some liberals seem desperate to sneer, and some don’t. But get enough of them together, and even those who don’t, say these kinds of things, and everyone goes along. Similar kinds of Group Sneer may exist on the right, but I’ve never really come across it up close and personal.
Where ever it comes from, I’m not digging it. I think it’s particular shameful on this list, with airs to overcoming bias. People here should know better and do better.
Right—and the interesting thing is, I had no idea that I was doing it, and in fact was trying to do the opposite. I did my best to take extreme viewpoints like “eating meat is like committing genocide” and “everyone should be converted or they’ll go to hell” and attempted to portray them as psychologically no different from any other belief. But although I think I did okay with that, an uncharitable and exaggerated strawman still managed to slip in earlier on.
For the most part, I think it’s just about the general ingroup-outgroup tendency in humans, and the desire to look down on any outgroups. But as for that bias slipping into my writing, even when I was explicitly trying to avoid it—that seems to have more to do with the way that most of our thought and behavior is built on subconscious systems, with conscious thought only playing a small role. Or to use Jonathan Haidt’s analogy, the conscious mind is the rider of an elephant:
That elephant is very eager to pick up on all sorts of connotations and biases from its social environment, and if we spend a lot of time in an environment where a specific group (conservatives, say) frequently gets bashed, then we’ll start to imitate that behavior ourselves—automatically and almost as a reflex, and sometimes even when we think that we’re doing the exact opposite.
It is a pity that this kind of a bias hasn’t really been discussed much on LW. Probably because the original sequences drew most heavily upon cognitive psychology and math, whereas this kind of bias has been mostly explored in social psychology and the humanities.
I remember coming across this paper during my PhD, and it provides a somewhat game theoretic analysis of in-group out-group bias, which is still fairly easy to follow. The paper is mainly about the implications for conflict resolution, as the authors are lecturers in business an law, so it should be of interest to those seeking to improve their rationality (particularly where keeping ones cool in arguments is involved), which is why we are here after all.
I’ve been thinking about doing my first mainspace post for LessWrong soon. Perhaps I could use it to address this. Unfortunately I’ve forgotten a very famous social psychology experiment wherein one group (group A) was allowed to dictate their preferred wage difference between their group and and another group (group B). They chose the option which gave them the least in an absolute sense because the option gave them more than group B by comparison. They were divided according to profession. It’s a very famous experiment, so I’m sure someone here will know it.
In Irrationality, Sutherland cites Brown (1978, “Divided we fall: An analysis of relations between sections of a factory workforce”) and states:
In a highly-cited review, Tajfel (1982) states:
A brief look at recent studies seems to suggest a more nuanced relation, but I’m not familiar with the literature. See, e.g., Card et al. (2010).
Bang on! Brown (“Divided we fall”) is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you. I regret having only one up-vote to give you.
I didn’t think you were particularly trying to do it—it just came out.
People keep saying that this is what you were trying to do. I think that misses the punchline, which is something else:
Basically, you’re encouraging liberals to enforce their moral beliefs on others. And in that argument, even if you hadn’t slipped into unfair characterizations, choosing the most extreme beliefs of your opponents gives the implicit options of liberals force their morals on others, or these crazies do. That false alternative clearly serves the quoted thesis.
And while you paint your opponents in the worst light, you inaccurately paint liberals in a rosier than life hue:
In a previous comment, I pointed out that it’s just not true that liberals limit use of coercive force to what is “seriously wrong”. Force will be used for the most minor and trifling issues. Half of New York Democrats were in favor of a ban on sugary drinks over 16 ounces, while the vast majority of other New Yorkers were against it.
Perhaps the general avoidance of politics (though no one complained when you did it) likewise puts a damper on metapolitical talk, barring the real world data points from which one could generalize.
That was mostly just intended to make clear that, well, I didn’t think that we should accept conservative arguments as being just as good as liberal ones. Since most of the post was (intended to be) quite sympathetic towards conservatives, it would have been easy for people to get the wrong impression.
True, though liberals do think that they do. But yes, that could probably have been worded more accurately. Which really just strenghtens the thesis of the post—that even though the liberals claim to only want to restrict things that they consider really wrong, most of them want to impose just as much control on the lives of others as the conservatives do...
Notice how this statement sidesteps another alternative—that liberals want to impose more control than conservatives do?
That has always been my perception as a libertarian in the US, and I think it is shared by most US libertarians, who tend to lean right because of it.
An even more unfavorable comparison that you don’t discuss is the obvious one—that liberals certainly want to impose more control than libertarians do.
The essay was not using the framing of “wishing to impose control”, but “wishing to push one’s morality on others”. These are somewhat related, but different. E.g. libertarians are pushing their morality on others when they say that everyone should be as free as possible, when both liberals and conservatives are likely to say that everyone shouldn’t be as free as possible.
I got the language of imposing control from you in the quote I gave:
One of the issues that I never got to was how you used “pushing morality” in two fundamentally different senses: 1) persuading others to adopt your moral values (as immediately above) and 2) using coercive force to impose your moral values on others, and you do when referring to numerous cases of using the force of law to impose moral values on other people.
But I wasn’t as clear as I should have been. It’s not just that liberals want to impose more control, it’s that they attempt to impose more control, and are too often successful at it.
Comparisons of exactly which group seeks to control others the most would be going beyond the scope of the essay. Especially since part of the whole point of the essay was that there isn’t any objective criteria of “control” that everyone would agree upon, essentially making any such comparisons meaningless. Also, coarse terms like “liberals” and “conservatives” (as well as “libertarians”) work fine if we’re only making general statements, but in reality they’re all heterogeneous groups. Figuring out exactly which proposals can be fairly attributed to the whole of the group would be as much work as comparing those proposals in the first place.
You’re right that saying something about libertarianism would probably have been a good idea, though. It doesn’t seem to me like they would be immune to the “want to control others” charge, though—the essence of having a political agenda is that you want to influence how others behave. In particular, libertarians seem excessively focused on negative liberties, and one could probably make the argument that they’re seeking to control others by effectively reducing the positive liberties that most people would want to have. But I don’t really know that movement well enough to make a fair commentary about them, so I left that out.