2. Perpetual disagreement, or perpetual improvement? Whence resolution?
3. Conflict Anxiety Treadmill?
4. The interesting part of the essay
5. This essay seemed like 3 different things.
6. (or 3 again) Conflict Anxiety or The (emotional) Stake Haven’t Changed?
1. Voting System dynamics?
Each side has an incentive to shoot for something like 51% of the relevant votes. Both sides have a spread of beliefs and convictions, and neither side wants to cede more of those beliefs than what’s required to be just-barely-popular-enough-to-win. And so, elections with two major contenders tend to be close, because whenever they threaten to be notclose, there’s value in converting the excess unity into some sort of political concession.
(This is a very crude model, and of course it is obscuring a lot of other things that can actually be significant some of the time, but it’s approximately the first-order factor, as far as I can tell. It explains most of what happens, most of the time.)
This makes it sound like a n>50% rule will inevitably lead to this. (The caveat acknowledges this, but I’m still curious about if this is different with different rules.)
2. Perpetual disagreement, or perpetual improvement? Whence resolution?
However, it does not seem to me to be the case that the multiple-orders-of-magnitude increase in the ready availability of information has led to an overall reduction in the frequency of disagreement, or a meaningful decrease in the heat/intensity/urgency of that disagreement.
A cynical model would posit something like “people act on a desire to disagree, and in the moment search for a pretext to justify that desire; they used to easily find that pretext in the realm of facts but now that agreement-on-questions-of-fact is largely forced they must reach slightly farther afield. Overall, nothing has changed.”
I don’t know about that precise causal model, but it does seem to me that you get something pretty closely approximating the behavior of humans if you posit a baseline level of fighteyness, normally distributed around an average that lies somewhere in between “doormat” and “reddit troll.”
Optimistically:
People go looking for cruxes. There is not some point where we stop. (Even if this is the case for people, new generations start anew.)
(This is different in implying that people are trying to make the world better, as opposed to focusing on disagreement. Why?)
A more charitable explanation for unchanging contentiousness might look more like “people have extensive struggles and dissatisfactions, which compete for their limited time and attention. As the highest-urgency items get resolved, and people are no longer e.g. fighting for their literal survival, they turn to the next-highest items on the list with basically the same available energy. Thus, even as disagreements seem to have lower and lower actual stakes, the enthusiasm with which people prosecute those disagreements remains more or less constant, because the highest-priority disagreement is always the highest-priority disagreement, whatever its absolute magnitude, and that’s what matters.”
This contrasts with ‘basically settled’ - why are disagreements things that can be resolved in a way that works generally well enough that things can be basically settled? Why is ‘sticky stuff’* like racism that way?
*Calling it sticky just identifies the tendency, it doesn’t explain it. (Phlogistons and all that.)
3. Conflict Anxiety Treadmill?
By felt sense, it seems to me that contentiousness hasn’t changed.
A treadmill of conflict anxiety?
But it seems broken in some other sense that I can’t quite put my finger on.
Why aren’t politics better, so most people don’t have to vote because things are more settled? (Politics might not be typical of conflict, but when we’re talking about “society”, it’s one obvious place to go.)
4. The interesting part of the essay
More specifically, there will always be something which occupies the niche that Christianity et al currently occupy, because it’s a relative niche.
Relative to what?
And this is my point—it has succeeded in doing so. Were I to have been born 500 years ago, and raised in analogous circumstances, such that I occupied an analogous place in society, I would feel exactly the same unease and disdain about the objectively muchcrazier beliefs flying back and forth in the 1500′s as I do about the much tamer Christianity of today.
(Ditto Judaism and Islam, ditto Buddhism and Hinduism and Sikhism and Taoism and Shinto and astrology and animism, etc.)
I don’t know about most of those—or how they’ve evolved today.
Going beyond astrology—not the focus on stars, but trying to figure out (what are) clusters of different types of types of people, seems like something that will continue to be interesting, but also seems like it will struggle with accuracy/rigor/etc. indefinitely.
If the treadmill turns too quickly for Christianity to adapt, and it falls by the wayside, something else will take its place, and that thing will seem just as crazy to the Duncan of 2200 (relative to everything else he knows and can prove, and everything else his society takes for granted) as modern-day Christianity seems to me.
I like the parallel between ‘shouldn’t we chill out, things are getting better’ and ‘I will always adjust’.
They already exist, and are simply waiting for the circumstances to be right for their blossoming.
This part I’m not sure of.
a) It seems more like ideas are created. (Sure, processes that create ideas already exist.)
b) In order for those ‘fringe impossible ideas’ to be more different it seems like the things occupying the current niche have to go. (The reverse could happen—something else comes along and displaces them for that role—but it seems less likely.)
5. This essay seemed like 3 different things.
Questions
Comparison
Idea structure/type existence and continuation
The fit between the questions and the essay was weird. The third part wrapped back around to something about ‘crazy’, but I named the idea in that section, because while it didn’t shine as much as it could have, if it had, that would have been the third part.
6. (or 3 again) Conflict Anxiety or The (emotional) Stake Haven’t Changed?
The stakes of ideas/idea conflict feel the same even if it doesn’t involve (as much) violence?
Edited: Changed 6′s title from Misc.
1. Voting System dynamics?
2. Perpetual disagreement, or perpetual improvement? Whence resolution?
3. Conflict Anxiety Treadmill?
4. The interesting part of the essay
5. This essay seemed like 3 different things.
6. (or 3 again) Conflict Anxiety or The (emotional) Stake Haven’t Changed?
1. Voting System dynamics?
This makes it sound like a n>50% rule will inevitably lead to this. (The caveat acknowledges this, but I’m still curious about if this is different with different rules.)
2. Perpetual disagreement, or perpetual improvement? Whence resolution?
Optimistically:
People go looking for cruxes. There is not some point where we stop. (Even if this is the case for people, new generations start anew.)
(This is different in implying that people are trying to make the world better, as opposed to focusing on disagreement. Why?)
This contrasts with ‘basically settled’ - why are disagreements things that can be resolved in a way that works generally well enough that things can be basically settled? Why is ‘sticky stuff’* like racism that way?
*Calling it sticky just identifies the tendency, it doesn’t explain it. (Phlogistons and all that.)
3. Conflict Anxiety Treadmill?
A treadmill of conflict anxiety?
Why aren’t politics better, so most people don’t have to vote because things are more settled? (Politics might not be typical of conflict, but when we’re talking about “society”, it’s one obvious place to go.)
4. The interesting part of the essay
Relative to what?
I don’t know about most of those—or how they’ve evolved today.
Going beyond astrology—not the focus on stars, but trying to figure out (what are) clusters of different types of types of people, seems like something that will continue to be interesting, but also seems like it will struggle with accuracy/rigor/etc. indefinitely.
I like the parallel between ‘shouldn’t we chill out, things are getting better’ and ‘I will always adjust’.
This part I’m not sure of.
a) It seems more like ideas are created. (Sure, processes that create ideas already exist.)
b) In order for those ‘fringe impossible ideas’ to be more different it seems like the things occupying the current niche have to go. (The reverse could happen—something else comes along and displaces them for that role—but it seems less likely.)
5. This essay seemed like 3 different things.
Questions
Comparison
Idea structure/type existence and continuation
The fit between the questions and the essay was weird. The third part wrapped back around to something about ‘crazy’, but I named the idea in that section, because while it didn’t shine as much as it could have, if it had, that would have been the third part.
6. (or 3 again) Conflict Anxiety or The (emotional) Stake Haven’t Changed?
The stakes of ideas/idea conflict feel the same even if it doesn’t involve (as much) violence?